The Founding Fathers have devised the spectacular game that the United States Constitution describes. This game has multiple equilibria. The singular accomplishment of George Washington was to coordinate his contemporaries and successors alike on a particularly beneficent equilibrium, the equilibrium that he thought it wise for future generations to play.
The character of the Founding Fathers affected the character of the country. Individuals and their character matter.
The American colonies rebelled when Britain betrayed its British values and stopped treating equals equally. A system that does not treat equals equally does not survive. The system that treats equals equally is a meritocracy.
Chernow is obsessed with Washington's sex life and slaveholding. The former obsession is particularly odd, for Washington's sex life is poorly documented. So, avocationally, Chernow resorts to armchair psychoanalysis.
Chernow's interest in slavery is understandable, but his analysis is economically illiterate. For instance, there is nothing odd about Washington's desire to restrict the importation of slaves in order to drive up their prices and then profit from the sale of his own slaves. (Restrictive building codes serve the same purpose.) Washington may have entertained multiple contradictory ideas on slavery (thereby passing F. Scott Fitzgerald's test for first-rate intelligence), but restricting the slave trade while hoping to sell his own slaves were not among them.
