American founders include the righteous Pilgrims with their near perfect compact form of government, the philanthropic William Penn, the Roanoke colony which vanishes in heroic mystery, and the Jamestown Colony with its dashing John Smith, for whom Princess Pocahontas sacrifices her own nationality to insure his nationality survives. The American nation becomes a nation-state at the hands of the great revolutionary Founding Fathers, described as heroic, extraordinary, and visionary. The Free Nation will construct its own myths of founding, focusing on the already enshrined Ayn Rand who provides the moral justification for the Free Nation, the visionary Rich Hammer who facilitates the social and political framework for the Free Nation, and that one entrepreneurial libertarian who eventually secures the geographic territory for the home of the Free Nation. The current rulers of the state are legitimized by their connection to the founders through dynastic succession, nobility, social class, political party affiliation, or some other shared cohort status. The entire current generation of citizens is linked to the dead heroes of the past and to the yet unborn.
Antiquity provides many examples.
There are divine or partially divine ancestors for the royal ruling regimes of ancient Germany, the Inca Empire, and modern Rwanda, Zaire, Sudan, and most other royal families of the world. American myths of dynasty include claims the original Founding Fathers also fathered America's great political parties, claims current public policies are an incremental extension of the ideas of those Founding Fathers, and personal claims by budding politicians to connections with the leadership dynasties of the American past the Roosevelts, Byrds, and Bushes. Continuity from the past is maintained by organizations like the Daughters of the American Revolution and by the national preoccupation with genealogy. Successive generations of leaders of the Free Nation will legitimize their claim to leadership by associating themselves with the founding personalities. Those opposing the founders use immoral means in their opposition, but the founders use only moral means rooted in the highest human values of fair play, self-sacrifice, and humanitarianism to overcome that opposition.