There are a couple of things to be said about "judging the past".

The first is that we can absolutely judge the past on its own terms and arrive at a scathing condemnation of the Founding Fathers as slavers at the terms of their own time. This is what contemporaries of Washington did in the case of Ona Judge, the runaway slave for whom Washington stayed salty all his life for not being able to get back because of actions of New Englanders who basically decided to tell him and his nephew to fuck off. Then there is of course the small issue of the Haitian Revolution and what it reveals about what was morally possible at the time.

The second thing to say is that "judging the past" is not an abstract thing, it is a thing we do today and that has political implications today. Every "originalist" fuckface is also "judging history" and accepting the founding daddies as basically fundamentally right and righteous. That is a political function of today with very real implications today. We can choose to counter the "originalist" judgements with "fuck your founding daddy issues" anti-judgement and that way create a new political reality for now.

History can be academic, in which case nationalist desires about proving these or those people noble founders of a superior system are just plain unscientific, or it can be public history in which case it is about meaning creation for the today. And such meaning creation has to judge the past with our own morals, because it is a meaning that is about us and our future.

And by the way, when I say "us and our future", I need to clarify: I'm Greek-Canadian. My interest in US history and political culture is that of the keen interest of the neighbour to the internals of the crack house. If you guys keep fucking up, that has real consequences for both Canada and Greece/Europe, so it matters.