When not dueling, the political rivals brawled. In 1807 in Albany, a Federalist confronted an insulting Republican in the street, beating him bloody with a heavy cane. The fight attracted dozens of angry partisans from both sides. A witness recalled that they turned the street into “a tumultuous sea of heads, over which clattered a forest of canes; the vast body, now surging this way, now that, as the tide of combat ebbed or flowed.”

The harmonious and united founders are our myth rather than their history. But myths have their purpose. More than mere lies, myths simplify the past, smoothing away contradictions to offer reassurance to the present. Every nation seeks guiding principles from an imagined set of wiser and nobler ancestors. At their best, mythic heroes can, as Abraham Lincoln put it, help us seek “the better angels of our nature.”

But myths become dysfunctional when they cripple instead of inspire. The cult of the founding fathers has become masochistic, as we invoke them to rebuke ourselves for having such petty politicians. We put the founders on an imaginary pedestal to look down on our own politics as beneath their contempt. It is all too easy to pick on Mrs. Clinton as no Jefferson or to denigrate Mr. Trump as a sad declension from Hamilton’s lofty heights. We castigate ourselves for not risking our lives, or property, for some higher ideal.

And that’s a good thing. We don’t have to make the sacrifices demanded by a bloody revolutionary war waged against our loyalist neighbors and a mighty overseas empire. We need to preserve our free institutions and values rather than create them in the first place. We have to manage a superpower rather than struggle to endure as a third-rate country in the midst of rival empires. We cannot repeat the founders’ showy performances, for we must play less heroic political roles far downstream in the flow of time and events.

Our politics are not always worse than theirs were. The revolutionary era was no golden age. To preserve the union, the founding fathers felt compelled to preserve slavery. Today, women can vote and lead. In the founders’ era, a husband could beat his wife provided the stick was no thicker than his thumb. And despite the multiplying insults of modern politics, we have not yet resumed shooting one another in duels. We distort the past and discredit the present by inflating the founders’ virtues and denying our own.

While the mythic founders can inspire us to do better, we should be wary of inviting them to make us feel small. We are not to blame for clashing over the diverse principles that the founders invented. No generation will resolve our revolution and define our Constitution once and for all. We honor the founders best by sustaining their debates over core principles of government, rather than by pretending that they resolved everything for us.