A Wall Street Journal op-ed sees some U.S. conservatives constituting a ‘post-liberal’ movement, that sees an undermining of objective morality “baked in” to America’s founding. Historian Robert Kagan says “large numbers of Americans have always rejected the founders’ claim that all men are created equal, with ‘unalienable rights …’” (p. 5). The 1619 project maintains that America was created out of racist motives. Scholar Mathew Spalding called 19th Century Progressive Era reforms un-American, as they vested governance in atheistic sciences rather than the Creator who endows humans with unalienable rights.
If both sides of a polarized partisan political duopoly deem the other side as rejecting our founding premise, are we renouncing that founding? In the accusations, are we respecting it?
First, our nation conceived itself in the Declaration of Independence. There was no unified entity on this continent, call it a nation or anything else, before the Declaration gave voice to a new “people,” dissolving its bonds to another. Speaking the first words of this voice, “we” identified our national self in our “holding” of certain Truths. Nowhere else, in the Declaration or subsequently, has there been a ratified statement of who this people, we, are. So long as we embody this identity, this people embodies a nation. Our holding of truths, of the creed voiced in the Declaration, defines American peoplehood, a.k.a. nationality.
The expression is abstract, which means real life will never comport with it fully. The creed, like any creed, is by its nature aspirational. The 1619 project points to deep and endemic racism in the society that declared this independence. But those leaders of that society still undersigned this expression. We can hoist them on the petard of its words. Racism may have been normal for all of them, but by the aspirational creed they subscribed, it is an abomination. Frederick Douglass knew this – speaking in 1852, he called the Declaration’s tenets “saving principles,” exhorting Americans “be true to them, on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.” The slave had those rights in truth if not in the facts of the day, racism is a sin, and the nation’s founding creed says so.
Leaders of the slave states called it a mistake to deem all persons equal – and still claimed to espouse equality. They devised elaborate formulas to reconcile this sentiment with the Declaration’s creed, many promulgating their own declarations of independence, substituting “all freeborn” or “all who have entered into society” for the nation’s “all Men.” Ultimately they did leave the union, their alternative nation was deleted from the world, and we reaffirmed America in its creed via the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. No other significant movement has opposed our creedal tenets since.
As to illiberal persons, do they reject our principles on principle – or are they simply unhappy with their treatment by the government of the day? Do they explicitly reject the Declaration’s creed? Are there explicit rejections to be found? Or do they really resent what they feel as others’ infringements on their rights, accusing progressives of dictating outcomes instead of equality in opportunity? If they say they oppose the founding tenets, have they checked what those are, or do they merely oppose whatever is cited by their nemeses?
The Progressive Era movement did bypass scriptural principles as institutional organizing guidelines. Does this put them outside the national identity named in the Declaration? Do institutions based on their science-based approach violate the Creator’s endowment of rights? Or did the Progressives see science as a rational process to carry sacred ethics better in the profane world? If they transgress principle, might that only reflect misjudgment in their use of rational method?
The Declaration’s evident commitment to personal rights is liberal in spirit. But the Declaration states no “ism,” only that all persons are equally and inherently endowed with rights, and that governments’ purpose is to secure those rights. Conservatism, even versions that see morality as based in community and identity rather than free-standing individuals, need not stand at odds with this creed. No logic says community morality must deny equality of persons in their rights, except in the practice of sects that dehumanize non-believers as infidels. In fact, most religions espouse a version of the golden rule, which equates each of us to each other.
Anyone who rejects the Declaration’s creed either confuses the creed with something else they oppose, or is un-American. Anyone who accuses another of rejecting the Declaration is likely using the founding creed as a political weapon, to claim right in an argument already joined. The object of such charges is not to carry our creedal values, but to win a dispute. Our purpose as a nation is to validate the declaration’s creed, not to use it against political adversaries. Our national purpose calls us to assume that arguments are about means, to the common ends of the Declaration’s creed. The burden to disprove another’s creedal allegiance is on the accuser. Any accuser raises doubts about their own American ethics; any rejector is un-American.
Common Conviction 