In director Richard Linklater’s early ’90s classic Dazed and Confused, high school teacher Ms. Stroud (Kim Krizan) tells her class, right before dismissing them into the summer of 1976, that they should be skeptical of the incoming bicentennial hoopla they’re likely to encounter. She tells them that what everyone around them will really be celebrating is “the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males didn’t want to pay their taxes.”
That particular phrasing may be fictional, but it is not hard to imagine a young high school teacher, fresh out of college in the era of radical politics, delivering such a verdict to her teenage charges in the mid-1970s. And such lessons have only become more common over time. The left-wing contempt for our founding values has, by this point, acquired a long pedigree of its own, from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) to James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me (1995) and beyond.
It is often said that any work of history reveals as much about the time in which it is written as it does the period on which it is ostensibly focused. While that is true of historical works in general, it seems virtually guaranteed to be true of a new book whose topic is the semiquincentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
After 250 years of conflict and compromise, the Declaration is still considered essential US political theory and the starting point for arguments about which sort of country we have, and which sort we should have. Richard Reinsch’s new edited collection of essays — The Civitas Collection 250 — certainly fits into that tradition.
A student of US history approaching debates over the American Founding for the first time might not see this immediately. Many of the essayists spend most of their time in the eighteenth century, or before. The writings of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and John Dickinson get plenty of attention, as do familiar names like John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Montesquieu, and famous precedent documents like the Declaration of Right (1689), Petition of Right (1628), and Magna Carta (1215). But first impressions can be deceiving.
Is Kody Cooper’s essay on the sources of liberty in the Declaration of Independence, for example, just about the development of law and philosophy prior to the American founding? He certainly covers writers ranging from Cicero and Tacitus to Richard Hooker and Locke, but he also moves forward in time to contrast the founding principles of the Declaration to much later interpreters. Arguing for a universalist view of the rights proclaimed in 1776, Cooper writes “Contrary to exclusive interpretations advanced by later jurists like Justice Roger Taney and his successors among the critical race theorists, the word ‘men’ did not mean merely white men.”
In the blink of an eye, the discussion zoomed past the ancient philosophers and early modern legalists to The 1619 Project and Ibram X. Kendi. The contributors to The Civitas Collection are all serious scholars with much to say about the founding era, but it is also clear they have contemporary battles to wage with their interpretation of what our founding documents really say. With the Declaration functioning, in the famous words of the late historian Pauline Maier as “American scripture,” it seems inevitable that most combatants in US politics will want to claim the document’s mantle for their own preferred ideological strain.
Some of these conflicts are longstanding and easily recognizable ones, between political theorists of the right and the left. Cynicism about the motives and beliefs of the founding generation, for example, is not new.
Anti-hagiographies of the Revolutionary generation are so common they’ve inspired their own subgenre of anti-anti-founding fathers publishing, including books like Thomas West’s Vindicating the Founders (1997), Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen’s A Patriot’s History of the United States (2004), and Brion McClanahan’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers (2009).
Those left-versus-right debates continue to be timely and there’s plenty of scholarship in the present volume to illuminate them further. But perhaps more interesting are the fights, more often flying under the radar, that are happening within the center-right segment of the political spectrum. Not between conservatives and Marxists, but between nationalists, libertarians, classical liberals, new whigs, and whatever else the non-leftists of America are calling themselves these days.
Adam Lebowitz, for example, laments early in his essay that a “broadly libertarian reading [of the Declaration] has hardened into something like conventional wisdom.” Rather than being fearful of executive authority and a strong government because of the negative example of King George III, Lebowitz argues that our founders thought of the Declaration as “a warrant for a stronger, more energetic government, grounded in democratic sovereignty and endowed with plenary powers.”
The argument that the spirit of the Declaration was consistent with a strong executive and a federal government of essentially unbounded authority obviously has implications for how the powers of the presidency are practiced and circumscribed in the age of Donald Trump. High-profile debates over immigration and deportation, National Guard deployments, and the bombing of Iran are directly relevant to whether our nation’s founders are perceived to have been wary and concerned about dictatorial executive power or in favor of its wide exercise.
Even more pointed is the contribution of former deputy attorney general John Yoo, who writes, “We should not mistake…the colonists’ frontal attack on tyranny for a rejection of the idea of executive power,” stating plainly that “the Declaration of Independence itself is not a rejection of executive power.” Yoo documents the history of the Articles of Confederation and the rapidly evolving state constitutions of the 1780s, which initially favored a very weak (often plural) executive, but were quickly reformed to establish offices of more effective leadership. Yoo’s previous scholarship and policy advocacy for a maximalist view of the president’s war powers during the George W. Bush administration are clearly relevant here.
Beyond the specific powers of the federal government — the kind that can be parsed in a decision of the Supreme Court, for example — contributors also take on the wider cultural understanding of the Declaration. Wilfred McClay, for example, considers the contemporary divide “between creed and culture.” He asks whether being an American is defined more by embracing the universal propositions of the Declaration’s famous second paragraph (about all men being created equal) or whether our Americanness has as much, or more, to do with the unique heritage of our geographical homeland.
This question could, of course, not be more timely. One of the hottest debates in the second Trump administration has been over the birthright citizenship doctrine of the Fourteenth Amendment, and whether it is just and reasonable to gatekeep US citizenship based on racial, religious, ethnic, or other criteria. Are we all equal as Americans because of the doctrine of the Declaration, or are some Americans with longer North American lineages, so-called “Heritage Americans,” entitled to more deference and privileges? And if not formal legal privileges, some ask, are they at least able to credibly claim to be “more American” than someone who took the oath of citizenship yesterday?
Contributors to The Civitas Collection 250 also take on that other great cause of the day: tariffs and trade. Samuel Gregg, in particular, lays out how the American Revolution was an anti-mercantilist one, with much of the fervor of the patriot cause generated by infringements on the colonists’ commercial relationships, not just the rights and relationships that are usually considered to have the most sublime claim to moral seriousness.
Many popular revolts against alleged tyranny, both before and after 1776, centered on things like religious conscience and freedom of expression. Certainly, many of the violent and bloody conflicts in the West between the time of the Protestant Reformation and the Treaty of Westphalia involved both. Colonists of British North America were relatively short on complaints about burning churches, executions for heresy, smashed printing presses, and tarred-and-feathered pamphleteers. They did, however, complain most vociferously about the King “cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world” and being subjected to the British East India Company’s crown-granted monopoly on tea and other commodities.
As with the other questions about contemporary public policy, the attitude of the founders toward the freedom to trade is directly relevant to what the president and Congress are doing today. The late eighteenth century was a significantly less globally integrated place, with much of British North America consisting of smallholding farmers who rarely traded with anyone more than a day’s journey from home. If the freedom to buy and sell goods internationally was important enough to help spark the American Revolution back then, how much more important should we consider it to be in the twenty-first century of the Internet, containerized shipping, and FedEx?
American history nerds will love poring over the detailed references in the book and noticing references to events and documents that are often forgotten today, like the Continental Congress’ Olive Branch Petition (1775) or the infamous Cornerstone Speech (1861) by Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens.
Armchair political theorists will likewise thrill to the supporting roles played by a long list of distinguished thinkers, both prominent and obscure. The academic tone may be a little intimidating for regular Americans just hoping for some Independence Day fireworks, but amateur historians and bookish patriots everywhere will no doubt love the collection Reinsch has assembled.
