I mean, really…? Centennial is a word most folks can figure out and bicentennial is pretty close, but Semiquincentennial combines obscurity, unpronouncability, and a fetish for mathematical semantics which, despite my proclivity for obscure and multisyllabic words, makes it wholly inappropriate for a celebration of a landmark of popular democracy.
Not that this is the most inapt aspect of the upcoming commemoration. We have a set of elected leaders characterized by cravenness, corruption, and an abandonment of political sense. Not that the Founding Fathers were demigods, but the current crop is pretty pathetic. So, the nomenclature is really a secondary issue.
I saw a recent poll from the UK in which voters were asked who was to blame for their current dysfunctional political culture. Across the spectrum, just over half blamed elected officials, twenty percent blamed “the system,” and just over ten percent blamed the voters. I suspect we would have similar result here. It’s no surprise that the electorate is unwilling to look in the mirror. As the French writer of the 19C, Joseph Lemaistre said: “every country gets the government it deserves.”
So, we mark this anniversary in a pretty sorry state. Things have a sour taste. It’s a far cry from the Bicentennial in which, despite the shadows of the then-recent loss of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, there was a fair degree more optimism and pride in our country. I will have more to say about the arc of America in a broad historical context later in the year as I prepare a talk on “the Rise and Fall of America,” and regular readers of this space are familiar with my take on our current predicament, so today I just want to focus on the Declaration.
The debate on independency in the Continental Congress was coming to a head in May and June of 1776. Hotheads like John Adams faced principled and serious opposition, but the momentum of recent conflicts with the British (legal and military) pushed the process forward and Jefferson took up his pen in mid-June. The draft was revised and tweaked in Committee and the full Congress starting late in the month. The final decision was made on July 2 and the document was approved on July 4.
It's actually quite an audacious piece of work. Manifestos are necessarily rhetorical documents, they are not to be confused with philosophical treatises or pieces of legislation (although they borrow from both). We are told that it is “self-evident…that all men are created equal,” etc.; a proposition that would not have been understood, much less agreed to by more than a minute fraction of the 700 million people then in the world, much less the elites of Great Britain. Rather, I suspect that most elites and educated people in most countries in the world at the time would have thought this was nonsense. As a result, we have to read this language and the rest of the preamble as a motivational and aspirational text.
Indeed, I agree with Jack Balkin (and Abraham Lincoln) that the Declaration, or at least the Preamble, is the real Constitution of the United States, that is the document that constitutes our body politic, and the official “Constitution” is merely the charter of government intended to implement the aspirations of the Declaration.
So, since it’s worth recalling the specifics (and it’s probably been a while since you read it), here is the first half of 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….
It's a pretty challenging agenda. As a nation, of course, our progress has been uneven over the past 250 years and we have not yet achieved these aims. Their difficulty, however, does not undermine their validity and despite its current parlous state, democracy remains the only plausible route (i.e., no one has come up with a better model yet).
The second part of the Founders’ audacity was to assert that a republic—and a breakaway republic at that—should be recognized by the other countries of the world as a peer. In the late 18C, there were only a few countries that counted. These were mostly the European “Great Powers”: Britain, France, Spain, Prussia, and Austria, a few also-rans: the Russians and the Turks, and the only European country of any significance that wasn’t a monarchy: the Dutch Republic.
Assertions are one thing, even if written in grand prose; people in power rarely give it up without a fight. In essence, the War of Independence was fought to force Britain to recognize us. We eventually had the help of the French and the others followed in due course. So, the revolution was not just a reconceptualization of the nature of political society, founding it not on the divine right of kings or the inertia of dynasties, but on the individual (well, at least white male individuals); it was also about the nature of international relations.
The final point for this celebratory week is to reiterate an argument I have made previously about the nature of the US Constitution (whose own Semiquincentennial lies eleven years ahead). The Declaration is literally the foundation of the Constitution and it makes clear (also in the preamble) that the Constitution is merely a tool of the people, on which there are no legal limits. Here’s what Jefferson wrote:
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.
A Semiquincentennial seems like a good time to remember this and to carry the spirit of the Founders into the 21C.
Not that this is the most inapt aspect of the upcoming commemoration. We have a set of elected leaders characterized by cravenness, corruption, and an abandonment of political sense. Not that the Founding Fathers were demigods, but the current crop is pretty pathetic. So, the nomenclature is really a secondary issue.
I saw a recent poll from the UK in which voters were asked who was to blame for their current dysfunctional political culture. Across the spectrum, just over half blamed elected officials, twenty percent blamed “the system,” and just over ten percent blamed the voters. I suspect we would have similar result here. It’s no surprise that the electorate is unwilling to look in the mirror. As the French writer of the 19C, Joseph Lemaistre said: “every country gets the government it deserves.”
So, we mark this anniversary in a pretty sorry state. Things have a sour taste. It’s a far cry from the Bicentennial in which, despite the shadows of the then-recent loss of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, there was a fair degree more optimism and pride in our country. I will have more to say about the arc of America in a broad historical context later in the year as I prepare a talk on “the Rise and Fall of America,” and regular readers of this space are familiar with my take on our current predicament, so today I just want to focus on the Declaration.
The debate on independency in the Continental Congress was coming to a head in May and June of 1776. Hotheads like John Adams faced principled and serious opposition, but the momentum of recent conflicts with the British (legal and military) pushed the process forward and Jefferson took up his pen in mid-June. The draft was revised and tweaked in Committee and the full Congress starting late in the month. The final decision was made on July 2 and the document was approved on July 4.
It's actually quite an audacious piece of work. Manifestos are necessarily rhetorical documents, they are not to be confused with philosophical treatises or pieces of legislation (although they borrow from both). We are told that it is “self-evident…that all men are created equal,” etc.; a proposition that would not have been understood, much less agreed to by more than a minute fraction of the 700 million people then in the world, much less the elites of Great Britain. Rather, I suspect that most elites and educated people in most countries in the world at the time would have thought this was nonsense. As a result, we have to read this language and the rest of the preamble as a motivational and aspirational text.
Indeed, I agree with Jack Balkin (and Abraham Lincoln) that the Declaration, or at least the Preamble, is the real Constitution of the United States, that is the document that constitutes our body politic, and the official “Constitution” is merely the charter of government intended to implement the aspirations of the Declaration.
So, since it’s worth recalling the specifics (and it’s probably been a while since you read it), here is the first half of 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….
It's a pretty challenging agenda. As a nation, of course, our progress has been uneven over the past 250 years and we have not yet achieved these aims. Their difficulty, however, does not undermine their validity and despite its current parlous state, democracy remains the only plausible route (i.e., no one has come up with a better model yet).
The second part of the Founders’ audacity was to assert that a republic—and a breakaway republic at that—should be recognized by the other countries of the world as a peer. In the late 18C, there were only a few countries that counted. These were mostly the European “Great Powers”: Britain, France, Spain, Prussia, and Austria, a few also-rans: the Russians and the Turks, and the only European country of any significance that wasn’t a monarchy: the Dutch Republic.
Assertions are one thing, even if written in grand prose; people in power rarely give it up without a fight. In essence, the War of Independence was fought to force Britain to recognize us. We eventually had the help of the French and the others followed in due course. So, the revolution was not just a reconceptualization of the nature of political society, founding it not on the divine right of kings or the inertia of dynasties, but on the individual (well, at least white male individuals); it was also about the nature of international relations.
The final point for this celebratory week is to reiterate an argument I have made previously about the nature of the US Constitution (whose own Semiquincentennial lies eleven years ahead). The Declaration is literally the foundation of the Constitution and it makes clear (also in the preamble) that the Constitution is merely a tool of the people, on which there are no legal limits. Here’s what Jefferson wrote:
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.
A Semiquincentennial seems like a good time to remember this and to carry the spirit of the Founders into the 21C.
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