Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America.

By Thomas G. West. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 218 pages, $22.95

Reviewed by William A. Donohue

We've heard it all before. The Founders were racists, sexists, classists, elitists - men who wrote some pretty clever documents that camouflaged their rich white male agenda. We know this because the Founders have been thoroughly deconstructed by today's mandarins of knowledge. Indeed, no one but an ignoramus, apologist or bigot would believe otherwise.

Reality checks come in small doses these days, and that is exactly why we are indebted to Thomas G. West. A political scientist at the University of Dallas, West has given us a book that challenges the reigning orthodoxy as expressed by the high priests of multiculturalism. Those who reflexively reject his thesis - the nation's founding is the source of our greatness - have a moral and intellectual duty to refute him.

Though it is more than intellectual dishonesty - it is self-righteousness born of arrogance - to judge the past by the standards of the present, those in the academy who have not succumbed to this temptation are in the minority. Count West among them. More than that, count West among those who believe that the burden is on those who seek to discredit the Founders, not on those …