September 17 is Constitution Day, marking the 237th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
It’s not a federal holiday, and even this blogger remembered it only by happenstance. Is this an oversight of the American community, a sign of apathy, or a failing of national awareness?
The Constitution is a legal document, setting the rules, institutions, and procedures for the nation’s second governing state. The nation had conceived itself eleven years earlier, defined by this new people’s “holding” of certain truths, our creed of rights and government dedicated to securing them. At that time the Continental Congress also started debating the Articles of Confederation, which came into force in 1781 as the new nation’s first formal state.
We celebrate the Declaration, the nation’s act of self-creation, in grand style every Fourth of July. This is fully appropriate. We do virtually nothing on September 17, and need not apologize; the signing of a legal document does not normally inspire fireworks and parades.
To be sure, the Constitution, the base of America’s state, is crucial. The Declaration, in one of the truths we hold in our founding creed, endorses government to secure the unalienable rights, legitimated by consent of the governed. The Preamble of the Constitution invokes this condition precedent. It speaks for “We the People of the United States,” which is the same “we” who conceived the nation and identified ourselves as holders of the creed. It names the objectives of this new state, under this Constitution, as public order, defense, the “general Welfare,” and, in summary, to “secure the blessings of Liberty.” This is very much the government called for in our 1776 national founding. The close correlation of the language of the Preamble and that of the Declaration is no coincidence.
But the Constitution, while near-sacred in its own right, is not the nation’s founding document. The Declaration is. Just as the Constitution succeeded the Articles of Confederation, in theory it could be succeeded by another legal edifice, so long as the new state would fulfill the Declaration’s designated purpose. It should take catastrophic failure to engender any impulse in this direction. Any state that has succeeded for two hundred thirty six years carries norms and expectations that exercise a moral force for its stated aims. Further, this Constitution admits of amendment, which has allowed deep reform and adaptation to worldly conditions, while still preserving those initial intentions. Confusing its founding of our state with the Declaration’s founding of our nation is understandable in this sense. But the two are distinct.
Two observations offer an extra degree of clarity, for our reference and perspective.
First, the Constitution underpins a government to secure the unalienable rights, as specified in the Declaration. It is aimed to offer order, prosperity, and defense, which are tangible needs that must be met for people to be secure in their rights. But the nation’s indelible commitment to rights comes in the Declaration, not from the Constitution. In itself the Constitution does not commit us to any rights. Even those specified in the Bill of Rights could be amended away – the Constitution in fact prohibited the sale of alcohol through the Eighteenth Amendment, for some years. The document provides society an instrument to realize the founding creed. But the seminal, aspirational commitment comes from the Declaration’s creed.
Second, neither the Declaration nor the Constitution commit America to any ideology, “Liberalism” included. Self-conception in unalienable rights does bake in a liberal spirit. But ideology comes with doctrines, by which spirit easily ossifies into dogma, which is by definition illiberal. Today’s politics feature a polarized, dogmatic standoff between two factions. The politicians codify doctrines to contest legislation, court cases, and political structures as though the doctrines themselves are the ends. Invoking the Declaration’s creed as validation of their doctrines, they reduce founding creed to rhetorical weapon, each insinuating that the “other side” poses an existential threat to the nation.
This miscast existential fear, and the erroneously motivated conflicting factions, pose our true existential danger. A nation based on a principle of rights, rather than blood, soil, church or tongue, is a novelty even today. The idea of rights inherent in persons rather than privileges granted by higher authority remains exceptional – even today. We are an outlier, and as such an experiment. Whether a nation “so conceived and so dedicated can long endure” is a perpetual question, and every challenge to our nation is a test. Elevating legal document to ends, degrading founding purpose into rhetorical tool, risks undermining both Constitution and Declaration in their true roles. Clarity is essential; we must not put this experiment at risk.
Let’s observe Constitution Day – but our big celebration, July 4th, is the right one.
Common Conviction 