Fight the Un-Declarers

On July 4, 1776...

It was 68^◦ F in the morning, and the afternoon high that day in Philadelphia was 76^◦. We know this because Jefferson kept a weather diary. The man who wrote most of the words in the Declaration that would alter the course of human history was keeping an eye on the thermometer as well.

As well he might. A revolution is physical as well as metaphysical. “All men are created equal”: that simple-seeming sentence builds on complex and difficult abstractions. What are “men?” Who “created” them? And how? And what is “equality?” Thousands of years of philosophical inquiry and religious insight are subsumed in these words. And it was not a settled matter in 1776 what any of them meant. Scientists at the time were hotly debating whether humans were a single species or several. If several, were they all truly “men,” and were they “equal?”

The “self-evident” truths of the Declaration were not self-evident to everyone in 1776, and are still not today, though they have become so foundational that no one can contemplate the American experience without wrestling with them. Jefferson audaciously put cutting-edge concepts from the European Enlightenment into the new nation’s conception of itself. We are to take our warrant for independence from common humanity conceived as primordially equal. Social distinctions and inequalities come after. The monarchs of Europe, including King George, would have none of this.

So too, there has been a long line of influential thinkers who rejected the Enlightenment and, with it, the American creed. We should put Marx high on that list, along with the generations of his epigones and revisionists. But there is no shortage of other theorists, left and right, who could not fit themselves into the garments of American liberty. Today, we have figures such as Nikole Hannah-Jones who mock the Declaration’s “self-evident” truths as “lies” intended to paper over the oppression of blacks and Indians. And we have political theorists such as Patrick Deneen arguing that the liberalism of the American founders betrayed God’s rightful order and gave rise to governance that isolated and alienated the people from one another.

Indeed, those intent on picking apart the Declaration as ill-suited to the realities of our nation and the world may well outnumber those who now strongly affirm the Declaration. We are fortunate that among those who do affirm it are some of our most incisive thinkers, and perhaps more importantly, a large portion of ordinary Americans who are not given to dreaming up dystopian theories.

But to value the Declaration properly, we must see it not just in the context of 1776 but in the light of its current opponents and enemies. These include many who have used American colleges and universities as platforms to disseminate their desired alienation from what Jefferson called our “unalienable Rights.” Those of our contemporaries who view the marketplace as essentially evil preach this alienation. Our founders saw the free use of capital, the freedom to harvest the fruits of one’s own labor, and the freedom to build and to create without government’s supervision as natural goods subject only to “just powers from the consent of the governed.”

In light of a newly energized socialist movement in America, these principles seem in new jeopardy—not from a far-off tyrannical king, but from elected leaders who have found a base among college mis-educated enthusiasts for state appropriation of private assets and hoards of immigrants, legal and otherwise, who see the state as a boundless source of free stuff. “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” will not long survive the use of the American government as patronage to those unwilling to care for themselves. Nor will our system of government long bear the insecurity of our elections and a blind eye to electoral fraud.

The ideologies of resentment also play their part in undermining the Declaration:

• Varieties of Third World-ism, which blame Western civilization for all the hardships that face the rest of humanity;

• The recrudescence of anti-Semitism, which singles out Jews and Israel as the deep source of exploitation and inequality in the world order;

• Settler-colonialism and other forms of “post-colonial theory” that posit that Western prosperity is founded on theft from and tyranny over indigenous people;

• The radical feminist attack on “patriarchy,” which treats society as unjustly constructed for male advantage;

• The attack on the family and biological reality as the foundation of social inequality;

• “Intersectionality,” which bundles all of the above as a mutually reinforcing “structure of oppression,” and in which one grievance rightly summons support from those who suffer any of the other grievances;

• The elevation of social panic—climate change, epidemic disease, conspiracism—as justifying the abrogation of limited government;

• The apotheosis of “diversity” as though it were one of America’s founding principles, when it is, in fact, a late 20^th-century invention, an imposter principle now encapsulated with two other suppositious claims in the triplet “diversity, equity, and inclusion” that mean the exact opposites of the concepts they invoke.

All point to a state in which our “Safety and Happiness,” as Jefferson put it, are endangered by the very institutions that properly exist to ensure our rights.

This list belongs to today’s commemoration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence as much as did Jefferson’s list of 27 grievances against King George in the Declaration itself. Our freedom and independence depend on our having clearly before us the perils we now face, which differ a bit from calling legislative bodies to meet “at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records,” having our international trade cut off, or the King inciting Native Americans to wage war against us. But the logic of the Declaration still holds. We must prepare against the present dangers and not rest merely because we have overcome ancient perils.

Jefferson also reminds us that it is our duty to suffer evils as long as they are sufferable and not to rise up on the basis of “light and transient causes.” We need to act soberly in light of real dangers—soberly but boldly.

The Declaration of Independence was formally adopted on July 4, 1776, by representatives of the 13 original colonies assembled at the Second Continental Congress. It was not easy to gain the assent of those representatives, but the war against Britain was already on. The battles of Lexington and Concord had flared more than a year earlier. General George Washington had forced the British out of Boston four months earlier, and just weeks before the Declaration was signed, Congress had appointed him Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army. What is a war for independence and a Continental Army without an explanation? As Jefferson put it, “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires” that the rebels “should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

That meant taking the temperature of the times. It was 76 ° in Philadelphia that day, but it was considerably hotter elsewhere.

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Postscript

In December 2024, the National Association of Scholars (NAS) began posting short essays on the 250^th anniversary of every significant event in the train leading up to July 4, 1776. The first of those events was the Boston Tea Party. My idea at the time was that our July 4, 2026, semi-quincentennial essay would conclude the series. But as that date approached, we realized that we might have more to say. The Revolution went on until October 19, 1781, when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, so we could presumably find more to write about. Moreover, I take pride in what the NAS has done in this 19-month-long series. My thanks especially to Keith Whitaker, David Randall, and Jared Gould for their contributions. I took pleasure in writing my own.

While other organizations with a patriotic interest in the Founding were looking for ways to celebrate the big event, NAS was patiently celebrating all the preludes to the day when quill met parchment. Initially, we called this our “advent calendar.” And we first started it as a column on Minding the Campus. Eventually, it grew into its own website—this Substack—and what remains is an excellent tool for teaching everyone the step-by-step quest for American independence.

On a personal note, this series is partly the outgrowth of my long anthropological interest in the shaping of American culture, starting with my book Diversity: The Invention of a Concept several decades ago, continuing through 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, and my inspection of the American temperament in 2021, Wrath: America Enraged.

Diversity remains perhaps the pivotal concept of our age. The contending narratives over America’s origins—slavery in Jamestown, 1619, or self-government in Plymouth, 1620—are still front and center. Indeed, a brand-new book by the historian David S. Reynolds, Two Ships: Jamestown 1619, Plymouth 1620 and the Struggle for the Soul of America, appropriates my whole theme. And wrath surrounds us in its current format of assignation attempts, violent protests against ICE, the unbridled vitriol that fills social media, the airwaves, the campus quads, the arts, and virtually anywhere an audience might be found.

I am somewhat amused that one of the forms in which protest culture has found an outlet is the anachronistic movement that styles itself “No Kings.” We settled that 250 years ago. A more timely declaration might be, “No Recidivists.”

Thank you for reading.
Peter Wood