I was both honored and delighted when editor John Grove asked me to write an essay on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and I’ve been stimulated by the lively responses made to that essay, both in the pages of Law & Liberty and in my own mailbox. Let me offer my own observations about each one:
Kirstin Anderson Birkhaug’s “The Art of Remembering” addresses itself to what is surely one of the biggest problems we face today, both as individuals and as a people: our loss of a shared sense of our past, and even more generally, our loss of the capacity for rich and meaningful remembrance in our own lives. I nodded in agreement from the very start, when she emphasized that before all else, it is incumbent upon Americans “to remember the Founding at all.” We should not overthink this problem; at bottom, it is quite elementary, and its effects go deeper than any scholarly quarrels about how best to interpret the Founding.
I also sense a kindred spirit in her willingness to be (mildly but unmistakably) critical of the historical profession’s pretension that it alone possesses the capacity to render “the unadorned, objective truth” of the past, and to steer clear of the twin dangers of “nostalgia” and “nostophobia” (or what Roger Scruton called “oikophobia”). She is right to stress that the capacity for a rich and generous memory of the past, and thereby “participating in the tradition of human feeling and understanding,” is something different from any of these alternatives, and different from a mere recounting of verifiable facts.
Needless to say, too, I’m glad to have echoed her fascination with Mercy Otis Warren, whose great history was my great rediscovery of the semiquincentennial.
I’m also in complete accord with Yuval Levin’s wise counsel, that decline and declinism are perpetual temptations, especially (though not exclusively) for conservatives, and that the record suggests that there is some truth in the adage that every generation ends up finding fault with the younger generation, as we find it described in Horace’s doleful words: “Worse than our grandparents’ generation, our parents then produced us, even worse, and soon to bear still more sinful children.” Yet Levin puts an extra twist on the conventional wisdom: far from being a reason to be complacent, we should consider that in each case in the American past, the charge has been true. The older generation has generally been right. We have always fallen short, we are always on the brink of dissolution, and our social critics have erred not by being too pessimistic but “not pessimistic enough,” a view in support of which he provides a wonderful quote from John Adams. “The need for renewal,” Levin concludes, “faces every generation,” and the greatest blessing to be derived from the aspirational principles of our Founding is that they give us the means of countering our propensity for fallenness. Ask not what time it is, because it is always the same time; we are always standing in need of redemption and renewal. In a sense, Levin’s pessimism about human nature is a source of his hope for humanity. He resembles our Founders in that.
Daniel Mahoney is concerned, as I was in the opening words of my essay, about the debacle of recent years, and all the ways it represents a falling away from our older guiding ideals. He introduces a theme that I should have stressed more, and am glad that he has given it the attention it deserves: the spirit of negation and ingratitude toward the past that passes for insight in the bargain-basement Nietzscheanism common in elements of both left and right. The modern West’s abiding tendency to nihilism and self-hatred is a theme that keeps coming back again and again, and Mahoney correctly observes that it was not an option on offer to the generation of the Founders. We however must contend against it, and I agree with Mahoney that a “chastened liberalism” which is checked and countervailed by classical and Biblical wisdom—the liberalism of our Declaration, which Mahoney rightly insists is not to be understood as a charter of pure egalitarianism—offers the best and most realistic political recipe for recovery.
I have experienced no civic tradition possessing more vitality and staying power than our celebrations of the Fourth of July.
And last, I must address Bruce Frohnen’s rather perplexing response. It seemed to be written in opposition to a phantom, someone other than me, about an essay other than mine. But I will make a few comments.
First, he wonders why I should write an essay using the Declaration as a tool for “our soul-searching as a people.” Why, he asks, “use the Declaration in this way, rather than another document?” Here’s a hint: might it have something to do with the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, on July 4, 2026, an event being celebrated all over the nation and observed around the world?
He tells us that a “useful assessment” of the Declaration must begin with its being recognized as a “legal document.” But it wasn’t a legal document. The only court before which the Declaration was pleading its case was the court of public opinion, both domestic and foreign.
Frohnen wants to emphasize the Declaration’s iteration of grievances as its most “useful” aspect. It is “a determined performance on the promise of its first sentence,” which promises to itemize the causes impelling the colonists to separation. But this leads him to skip over the entire second paragraph, the heart and soul of the Preamble, the most famous words from the Declaration, the ones that many Americans know by heart, beginning with “We Hold These Truths”! But that part of the document is apparently to be seen as inimical to a “useful assessment,” and moreover a mischievous source of “rhetorical mythmaking that has undermined our understanding of the Declaration’s true nature.” So they are simply left out. (Although Frohnen does acknowledge that the Declaration “includes statements of principle regarding rights and duties that exist whether recognized by specific law or not.” He doesn’t tell us that these statements are set forth in that mischievous Preamble.)
Frohnen’s understanding of “the Declaration’s true nature” is mistaken. He wants to claim the Declaration as a charter of American federalism and subsidiarity, and a foundation for the federative institutional structure of American government, concerned with “the disciplining of political power.” Would that it were so! But consider the Declaration’s famous declarative words: “That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States … and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.”
So which was it? United or independent? The text was deliberately unclear. The fact of the matter is that the Declaration did very little to suggest the specific structure that the United States government would take. Those details would be worked out over the course of the 1780s and ‘90s.
I think Frohnen finally makes clear what troubles him so much in his penultimate paragraph. I quote: “McClay’s attempt to bridge through rhetorical generalities and ‘big questions’ that divide in political understanding between center-right ideology and traditional, cultural conservatism fails or rather refuses to engage hard questions of historical fact and professional discipline.” So that’s the phantom object of his ire, my seeming disinclination to engage in an intramural quarrel on the Right. But I wasn’t writing about that quarrel, or inside that quarrel. I was writing about the meaning of the Declaration for all Americans, as we look toward the future.
I share Frohnen’s high regard for tradition. Indeed, I have experienced no civic tradition possessing more vitality and staying power than our celebrations of the Fourth of July. Every place I have ever lived has enjoyed the full range of festivities: parades, ceremonies, flags flown, bunting displayed, wreaths laid at the tombs of fallen heroes, and of course fireworks and food galore.
Generally, a public reading of the Declaration is part of such occasions. I was privileged to be chosen to give the public reading of the Declaration to the city of Anchorage, Alaska, this past July 4, to an attentive audience made up of a wide range of Alaskans who came to the city’s Delaney Park Strip, braving threatening skies and a slight drizzle to be there. They seemed visibly uplifted by the occasion, and by the patriotic songs and recitations that accompanied the event. So was I.
It occurred to me, as I was reading the Declaration to the audience, what a truly remarkable moment this was, for me to be reading this text, in this place, at this time. No one in 1776 could have dreamed that these words, which were being read that year to cheering crowds in the streets of Boston and Philadelphia, would one day be read in the far reaches of Alaska, in a city that has become a crossroads for the world, and would inspire audiences that had no knowledge of the immediate context of the American Revolution, or of the specific grounding for the colonists’ grievances, but who knew enough to hear and thrill to those words in the Preamble’s second paragraph. For them, this event is a sacred tradition. They too take the Declaration seriously. They will be there next year too, to hear those same words declaimed once again.
