I have always loved and supported this country and, even in the midst of all the uprising over racism as more and more people are shot, arrested, charged, or killed by officers who have sworn to protect and serve simply because of the color of their skin. And in a political battle where "Keep America Great" echoes "Make America Great Again" from four years ago, I continue to believe that America can rise from the ashes once again. After all, it is not the first time we have rebuilt from the ashes of our past mistakes.
But, I also realize we are not the only country on the planet and should stop looking at ourselves that way. Our leaders tend to be focused on locking us behind border walls that will essentially isolate us into ourselves and want to keep us looking inward instead of outward to the global economy we have spent decades creating.
Over the past 243 years, many of today's most interesting arguments about America's nature and meaning are among conservatives. One concerns the relevance of the Declaration of Independence to the contested question of how to construe the Constitution.
The crucial question is this: What did the Founders intend - what was their foundational purpose? There are some who think the Declaration is not pertinent to construing the Constitution because the Declaration is not mentioned in the Constitution. This, however, is as obvious as it is obviously irrelevant. Neither is democracy "mentioned" and the Declaration is hardly mentioned in Federalist Papers. However, the Declaration expressed - as Thomas Jefferson insisted - the broadly shared "common sense of the subject." Rather than belabor the Declaration's assertions, the Constitution's framers set about creating institutional architecture that would achieve their intention: to establish governance that accords with the common sense of their time, which was that government is properly instituted to "secure" the preexisting natural rights referenced in the Declaration.
Also obvious and irrelevant is the fact that Jefferson, the Declaration's primary author, was not at the Constitutional Convention. He was, after all, a Colonial diplomat in Paris at the time.
There is a momentous novelty in the first three words of the Constitution. "We the People." They announced a "declaration of independence from the entire European past,” a root-and-branch rejection of all prior attempts to ground the legitimacy of government in anything other than the consent of the governed. The Constitution was, however, written by men of the Enlightenment who were not confident that the rationality they practiced and espoused could be counted on to constantly characterize the republic for which they wrote.
The Declaration did not mention majority rule, which the Founders embraced because they considered it, when public opinion is properly refined and filtered, the best mechanism for protecting the natural rights affirmed in the Declaration. Those rights, not a procedure, were their foundational concern. The equilibrium of James Madison’s constitutional architecture is currently in disarray, with congressional anemia enabling presidential imperiousness. Nevertheless, the architecture was designed to “secure” - the crucial verb in the Declaration’s second paragraph - the natural rights the Declaration affirms.
The Declaration’s power comes from just a few lines: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The United States was thus the first nation in world history to found itself on a universal doctrine that placed human dignity and equality, separate from any religious doctrine, at its core.
It is true that these words were often honored in their breach in the nation’s early years. Black people were enslaved in much of the land. Women were denied the right to vote. Discrimination against religious minorities and racial minorities was widespread. Native Americans were systematically pushed out of their land and largely confined to reservations against their will. It is not surprising that these facts have led some to allege that America’s foundational principle was the supremacy of white, Protestant, property-owning men.
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s genius - he was, in a sense, the final Founder - was in understanding the “Declaration of Independence-centered view of American governance and peoplehood.” Over the years, this stance of “Declarationists” explicitly opposed Jacksonian democracy’s majoritarian celebration of a plebiscitary presidency, and the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act’s premise that majorities (“popular sovereignty”) could and should - wrong on both counts - settle the question of whether slavery should expand into the territories.
If that were true, though, our history would have been much different. The record of other nations is proof that ruling classes or groups rarely give up their status and privileges peacefully. The history of modern revolutions shows this clearly. Other than the violent struggle to end slavery, that has not been the case in the United States. Time and again Americans have liberalized themselves, extending the franchise, as well as economic and civil rights, to supposedly inferior groups. The United States has regularly interpreted its national promise so that it applies more broadly in fact as well as in idea.
This record of peaceful, yet radical, social change is rooted in the Declaration’s promise. At every step, an advocate for change could point to those words and ask how they did not apply to them. “All men” has always meant “all human beings,” and inconsistencies between that principle and the reality of American life have always been ultimately resolved in favor of finding a common humanity that unites us all. The struggle clearly took longer in some cases than in others. But the Declaration’s promise is America’s unalienable heritage, and so, once a die is cast, the outcome - greater equality and freedom in fact for all - has already been written.
Today’s disputes over racial equality are simply the latest battleground in this more-than-two-century effort to make Jefferson’s words real.
Most people understand this history, but not all. There are those who see America as unredeemable - a fatally flawed country built on stolen land and constructed by slave labor. This view grants no essential difference between an Abraham Lincoln who attacked slavery as immoral and a John C. Calhoun who defended slavery as beneficial. They tear down statues to national heroes because they are deeply conflicted about our national story.
Revolutionary movements that seek to re-found a nation from the ground up always end in misery. The French Revolution that killed a king, destroyed churches and even remade the calendar ended in the Reign of Terror. Nazism gave us the Holocaust, and the 20th century’s Communist revolutions gave us Soviet mass murder, the Chinese Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, and the death of one-quarter of all Cambodians by the wretched Pol Pot. That level of destruction will not happen here, as it is safe to say Americans will fiercely resist any serious attempt to uproot our traditions and throw them on a bonfire of vanities.
The Declaration’s principles have spoken to so many regardless of time and distance because they are universal, timeless and true. Our current crisis gives us an opportunity to reflect on the wondrous inheritance we have received.
The learned and recondite disputes currently embroiling many conservatives, disputes about various doctrines of interpretive constitutional “originalism,” are often illuminating and sometimes conclusive in constitutional controversies. But all such reasoning occurs in an unchanging context. The Declaration is the conscience because it affirms the classical liberal project of the Enlightenment and the pervasiveness of such concepts as natural rights.
Furthermore, this explains the Constitution’s use of the word “liberty,” which refers to an indefinite range of freely chosen action. Which means that the Constitution should be construed in the bright light cast by the Declaration’s statement of the founding generation’s general intention to privilege liberty.
I would dismiss as “inapt Biblical imagery” Abraham Lincoln’s elegant formulation that the Constitution is the frame of silver for the apple of gold, which is the Declaration. Lincoln’s mission was to reconnect the nation with its founding. The frame, Lincoln said, is to “adorn” and “preserve” the apple. Frames are important, and silver is precious, but what is framed is more important, and gold is more precious.
May we choose to rededicate ourselves and our nation to the simple but profound insight that “all men are created equal.”
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