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Hello again all. It is once again the week of July 4th and so, as is customary here, I am going to use this week’s post to talk about the United States. This is going to be a bit more of an open musing than an argument as compared to previous years (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025) because my attention has been turned this way and that over the past few weeks and then just when I thought I’d be able to focus on this, one of home ownership’s many annoyances (a busted pipe) cropped up to consume much of the week.
Nevertheless, the Declaration of Independence turns 250 this year – ratified on July 4, published on July 6, read aloud in public on July 8, 1776 – and I want to muse on it a bit, with some focus to the actual text. Americans revere our founding documents (the Declaration and the Constitution) but I fear we do not read them very often. I was a ‘pocket-constitution’ kind of fellow in college, but one is regularly shocked by how little the average American citizen understands about how their government functioned or what the ideals of the framers were and one is regularly disappointed, but very much not shocked, by the endless parade of political entrepreneurs looking to exploit that gap in knowledge.
I will also note, for my international readers, that I think the exercise of looking at these documents is valuable, for the same reason I’ve made my students read Magna Carta or the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: these are documents of world-historic significance (hardly the only ones, of course, but they make ready examples). At some point, particularly in leftish circles, it became trendy to dismiss the American founding as a mere ‘bourgeois’ revolution in favor of later revolutions in Europe and I think this is a mistake. There quite possibly is no French Revolution without the American one; the cross-pollination of ideas is obvious. The American Revolution (and thus the Declaration) therefore must also play a role in 1848 and it very obvious plays a role in the advance of democracy in Europe after 1945 and again after 1989.
The Declaration of Independence was recognized as a radical, potentially explosive document at the time of its issuance, as we’ll see. And it was explosive: the world of 1775 was one dominated by monarchies with just a tiny handful of traditional republics (which we should not ignore!). It took a long time for the seeds of the declaration to spread, but the world it helped create is one where liberal democracies, while hardly universal (more people have always lived in unfree societies than free ones) represent the most economically and culturally dominant bloc in world affairs – something that had never happened before. The Declaration, in its way, remade not just the Thirteen Colonies, but slowly, surely, as water seeps through the cracks of rocks (or my floorboards, alas), it remade the whole world.
So if you haven’t, go read the text of the Declaration. It isn’t long (but don’t skip!). My thoughts at present don’t necessarily fit together neatly, so we’ll break them down under a few major headings.
A Decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind
When I was growing up, one of the things it was fashionable to argue was that the American Revolution was a ‘conservative’ revolution, in that it did not overturn the social structure of the Thirteen Colonies. Conservatives said this about the revolution to claim it for their own and to distinguish it as the ‘good’ revolution in contrast to those ‘bad’ revolutions in Europe and Latin America. Leftists sometimes did the opposite, terming the revolution ‘conservative,’ unlike ‘real’ revolutions which upended social and economic patterns more completely. And there’s not nothing to this: the revolution did not immediately challenge the socio-economic systems of the Thirteen Colonies (though the notion that the revolution was fundamentally pro-slavery is, at best, quite overstated; it was certainly not an anti-slavery revolution, either, of course).
I think both positions however, are fundamentally wrong, however, in that they miss the inherent radicalism of the principles of the Declaration. Indeed, the framers themselves seem to have only imperfectly understood the course of the rock they were about to set rolling. But they very well understood the momentousness of it.
Now there’s a tendency at this point to jump right to, “We hold these truths…” but let’s start at the beginning.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
The introduction of the Declaration doesn’t begin with self-evident truths, but rather an assertion that the action of the Declaration demands explanation, that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes.” The framing speaks to the radicalism of what the authors (we tend to think of Jefferson as the sole author, but the finished Declaration was very much a creature of committee) are about to do, so radical that decency and respect requires them to explain themselves, not merely to the colonies or to the British Empire but to “mankind.”
The contrast with many similar documents is striking to me. Of course a lot of national declarations declare causes and aims of an action, but in my own – admittedly incomplete – survey, it is quite rare that any imagines that all of mankind needs to be informed. To jump back to the previous examples, Magna Carta calls to witness only John, his subjects and God. The Declaration of the Rights of Man makes its declaration before the “supreme being.” And that makes sense – there is, on some level, no need to inform mankind about those documents, because they pertain only to the people of specific countries (although the Declaration of the Rights of Man clearly has universalist aims).
By contrast, the authors of the Declaration seem very clear-eyed that they are about to make some claims with global, universal significance, that the collection of apple carts they are about to upset is rather larger than just their own. As we’re going to see, they’re right – because they’re not asserting the peculiar rights of Englishmen or British subjects, but rather making an argument about a set of universal rights and principles which might shake thrones and crack crowns the world over. That warning and assumption of responsibility – that the authors understand that the magnitude of their claims here require an explanation – is what leads into the bombshells of the preamble, though the introduction has already tipped its hand to one of them (that a “people” are entitled to a “separate and equal station” and thus able, on their own, to rightly dissolve the bonds that tie them with another).
The Radicalism of the Preamble
That stage-setting swiftly leads us into the Preamble.
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.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security
In the United States, at least, I think we hear these words so often as kids that we lose the sense of their importance and radicalism or even of their plain meaning, the way that if you speak any word enough times over again in a row it starts to feel like gibberish. So what is the preamble saying and why?
Fundamentally, it is building to an argument for the validity of independence in four consecutive points. Notably, whereas today, national independence movements often take it as a granted principle that a people ought to be free to make its own government, ought to be free of the domination of another people (the principle of self-determination), the Declaration assumes its reader thinks the opposite. It assumes a reader who accepts that monarchy and empire are both just and natural, for whom the idea of self-determination is at best dangerous nonsense. And that makes sense – almost none of the peoples in the world the framers knew were self governing (notable exceptions for the Dutch and Swiss). Instead, even when a people had their own country, they were ruled, rather than self-governing – by a king or a closed oligarchy (often a hereditary aristocracy), which often felt little if any cultural commonality with their own commoners.
That system was normal and indeed had been normal since antiquity: self-governing polities are very rare in the pre-modern period. It was not only normal, but normalized: centuries of literature and tradition supported the idea that the right and normal way to organize a society was through authority rather than self-governance. So the Declaration has to go to exceptional lengths to show why this monarchy and this empire have ceded any just claim to govern the colonies. In the process, however, it lays down the argument that leads to that modern assumption of self-determination.
The argument begins with two assertions. The first is a natural law assertion of an equality of rights among men, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” It is a claim of striking magnitude and remarkable finality – indeed, a claim of such magnitude that it very obviously conflicted with the practice of slavery in the colonies, something some of the framers recognized and then most shamefully did almost nothing about. The Declaration could have asserted those unalienable rights are being particular – to British subjects or Englishmen or Christians, perhaps – but it does not. Instead it insists upon their universality through an argument to natural law, a sensible choice for Thirteen Colonies that already had a multiplicity of faiths and ethnicity in them. Again, if that seems normal to us, it was not normal at the time and indeed is not normal now: most countries are not operated with the notion that anyone has unalienable rights (a reminder that at no point in human history have a majority of countries been anywhere remotely close to free).
We should also note that what the Declaration asserts are not collective rights, but rather individual rights, an important component of liberalism, but an enormous break with most pre-modern social assumptions, which tend to be communal, rather than individual. Compare for instance the ancient Greek notions of autonomia and eleutheria – autonomy and freedom – which in a political sense were really collective rights, possessed by the polis. An individual Athenian did not really have any rights that the Athenian demos – the people at large – were bound to respect. By contrast, the Declaration is asserting that all men individually possess key rights, including the ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ which is rather an expansion of Locke’s original “life, liberty and property” formulation – to me it includes not just a right to property but also a right to make one’s own decisions, to pursue one’s own goals, to not be a tool of the community. Again, this is a really radical rejection of the way most societies had been organized – as Patrician Crone notes, in pre-industrial societies, “the individual existed for the benefit of the overall group, not the other way around.” The Declaration asserts the opposite: the group (governments) exist for the individual.
It seems relevant in this context to note that the United States remains, culturally, an extremely individualistic society (arguably the most so) and it is hard not to see that as both cause and effect of the Declaration’s position here.
The second assertion then follows on the first – drawing from John Locke’s theory of the social contract, the Declaration asserts that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This is, as we’ve discussed many times, untrue as a matter of historical fact – states emerge as violence-machines, not as machines for the protection of rights. But as an aspirational statement, that governments and states ought to have the protection of rights as their primary purpose, ought to derive their powers from the consent of the governed, it is a powerful statement.
It was also really radical in 1776, at a point when most states on Earth justified their power not from the consent of the governed but rather by divine right: the ruler was chosen by God, or had the Mandate of Heaven, or was of a divine lineage, and so on. The idea that government was by divine sanction was hardly new – we find it in some of the earliest governing documents that still survive. It seems to have been the governing principle of the earliest states, that the social order – with the king on top – was divinely ordained and thus any attempt to challenge it was a rebellion against God or the gods. One sees strains of this in certain forms of Christian nationalism in the United States, which regard either the American form of government or specific American leaders as divinely ordained, but the irony is that the Declaration is quite directly rejecting this vision. “Their Creator” who is also “Nature’s God” does not ordain rulers, rather he endows rights which earthly rulers may not in justice abridge and which humans cannot alienate – which is to say the rights can never be lost, only violated.
The next two points then serve as conclusions which follow these two initial assertions: if individuals have unalienable rights and if governments exist to protect those rights then (this is the third point) a government which fails to protect those rights loses its legitimacy and may be disestablished and therefore (the fourth point) a “long train of abuses and usurpations” can justify revolution.
In short, a government – and it is striking here that the Declaration uses the king as synecdoche (part-for-the-whole) for the whole British government – which greatly fails in its duty of protecting rights loses its legitimacy. Once again, the authors seem to sense how radical that claim is and so they qualify it, making clear that such a decision isn’t to be taken lightly (and it isn’t likely to be taken lightly). The failure of the government in question to protect rights must be extreme to justify the radical cure of revolution, a position which will set up the bill of grievances that make up the actual bulk of the Declaration’s text (but which everyone skips – we shall not).
But before we move to the bill of grievances, I want to take one more chance to push back against the idea that the Declaration is just something ‘small ball’ or something that only mattered for the United States.
The Declaration was recognized as an incendiary, radical, dangerous document at the time. It was banned or suppressed in some European monarchies – not appearing in translation, for instance, in Russia until 1863 or in Spain until 1868; it was outright banned in Spain’s overseas colonies. And it isn’t hard to see why – the language and ideas of the Declaration, building on European political philosophy that had been ‘in the air,’ so to speak, for some time clearly played a role in the cultural foment that culminated in the French Revolution. A European monarch who worried that the publication of the Declaration might endanger their crown was right to worry.
The Bill of Grievances
Which at last brings us to the bill of grievances. Given the above build-up, you can see why the list of grievances are necessary: the Declaration has tried to establish that if a government is sufficiently injurious to the natural rights of its people, it becomes permissible – even required by duty – for those people to abolish and replace it. But of course then they have to show that the government of King George III was, in fact, so injurious. It is an interesting and clearly deliberate choice to frame the grievances as an indictment against George III in particular, even though the framers knew as well as anyone that many of these injuries were the product of policy set by Parliament. On the one hand, George III could stand in for his government symbolically here, but at the same time, I suspect that part of what the authors of the Declaration are trying to summon rhetorically is the notion of ancient tyranny (thus their use of the word). Of course a tyranny could be of Thirty Men as easily as just one, but the designation of a singular tyrant-king lends the whole list a rhetorical punch. “He has…” is just a lot clearer and more effective than, “the King in consultation with his government and the full support of Parliament has…”
Some of the particular grievances have less relevance today (particularly the incitement of war with American Indians), but many of them remain relevant – it isn’t hard in many cases to see specific parts of the Constitution designed to forbid particular grievances from the list.
There’s a tendency to skip over the bill of grievances when reading the Declaration in dramatic readings or classroom contexts and one understands why: compared to the philosophical firebombs of the preamble or the emotional punch of the conclusion, the bill of grievances is rather long and less exciting. But I think it is important because it provides a sense of what kind of government the framers thought might constitute tyranny.
And I must admit it was in this sense that I have been thinking about this document for the past year, because, as I have argued before, I think we are facing a government not merely that I disagree with – that’s not at all new and democracy must mean losing elections as well as winning them – but rather a government, particularly an executive branch, which does aim for “the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States,” in a way that is peculiar to any administration, democratic or republican, that I can think of.
So I provide below an annotated copy of the bill of grievances, with links to note where our current government is doing many of the very things for which we declared, 250 years ago, that it was not merely right, but a duty to throw off British governance. Of course today we have no need of revolution, because we have elections and so may freely change our leaders or even alter the form of our government without violence.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
As the Declaration itself says, “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
What is the Fourth of July For?
The Fourth of July (for Americans) is more than just a day to shoot off fireworks, have parades and cookouts. It is also more than just a day to reflect on the United States’ achievements, which are considerable.
It is also, importantly, a day to reflect on the United States, a country of ideas and values – not a nation of blood and soil. It is a day to think about what those ideals are and what we owe them, not in the fuzzy, gauzy, vague sense of flag waving and patriotic music (though those are fun), but in the hard, specific way of articulating what our country is for. And it can be hard: it is obvious to anyone studying American history that the United States did not at its inception live up to the notion that all men were created equal – the founders kept slaves and often behaved cruelly towards Native Americans. Their ideals were better than they were. And where the men failed, the ideals succeeded: the framers failed to abolish slavery, but their ideals eventually – fitfully, with too much delay and bloodshed – succeeded. Their ideals animated the movement for women’s suffrage – even when the Declaration was new, Abigail Adams could note that its principles must logically extend to all women, as well as all men – and the movement for civil rights.
The Declaration is a document that declares, after all, that “all men are created equal.” It does not admit caveats. It does not say “all men, except for the immigrants” – indeed, the opposite, it charges George III with the abuse of “obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners.” Someone seeking to defend the Declaration against all immigration or the extension of natural rights to foreigners is trying to defend the Declaration against itself, against its own values; they are actually at war with the Declaration (just as the Confederates were), though they might not admit it.
It does not say, “all men, except for that religion I don’t like.” Indeed, no less than George Washington makes this point clear in the nature of the Constitution – the ‘user’s manual’ for achieving the aims of the Declaration – that it “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” One cannot help but notice that its formulations, “their Creator” and “Nature’s God” are expressly ecumenical – of course quite a few of the framers were deists or otherwise not very religious and it is worth noting that the founders also had no problem respecting Muslims.
Indeed, it is striking to me that while the Declaration in its ideals warmly embraces the immigrant, the fellow with an unfamiliar religion, the families with different lifeways, what is truly foreign to it is the notion that the United States is just some other blood-and-soil nation, that there are ‘heritage Americans’ or that the unalienable rights it asserts do not extend to some people. The authors and signers of the Declaration were brave enough, confident enough in their ideals to say all men; let us be at least half as brave to keep saying all men.
It is a document that demands of us, that demands us to be better, to strive to fulfill its lofty ambitions, to demand our government so strive. To pledge, as the signers did, “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” to its principles and the preservation and expansion of the liberties that and subsequent generations won.
The Fourth of July is a day for us to remember what kind of people we are supposed to be and to rededicate ourselves to coming a little closer, inch by inch, to the grand vision on which our country was founded and in so doing perhaps function as a lighthouse guiding other countries as well to a freer future.
Happy Fourth of July. It has been 250 remarkable years. That tremendous legacy is now bequeathed to us and we are duty bound to see these ideals carried forward for another 250 years. Let us, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, pledge our sacred Honor to that.
