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SPECIAL SERIES:America Turns 250

This is the third of a three-part series originally delivered as a lecture May 15 at a conference, “The Declaration of Independence at 250: What New Can Be Said?” hosted by the Stanford Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. The first two parts can be found here and here.

Respectable political opinion and salutary reform in the United States give concrete expression to propositions the U.S. Declaration of Independence held to be self-evidently true. In an 1825 letter, Thomas Jefferson maintained that these self-evident truths reflected “the common sense of the subject” at the time of the founding. First among them is that human beings are equally endowed with unalienable rights – an 18th-century term for the rights inherent in all human beings – beginning with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Declaration also affirms as self-evident that government’s first responsibility is to secure the people’s unalienable rights, that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, and that the people have a right to alter or abolish government that destroys the conditions that make possible the common enjoyment of their unalienable rights.

Neither American conservatives, who focus on preserving tradition and respecting order under law, nor American progressives, who concentrate on rectifying injustice by improving existing arrangements and creating new ones, routinely put matters in these terms. Yet at their most thoughtful, both embrace the equality in rights in which the United States is rooted.

Thoughtful American conservatives recognize that in a rights-protecting democracy tradition and order under law sustain citizens’ effective and responsible exercise of equal rights. Thoughtful conservatives also appreciate that in modern circumstances a system of equal individual rights creates conditions favorable to citizens’ maintaining their traditions and pursuing the good life as they understand it.

Thoughtful American progressives recognize that in a rights-protecting democracy rectifying injustice by improving inherited arrangements and creating new ones consists in significant measure in enabling the excluded to claim and enjoy the individual rights all share equally. Thoughtful progressives also appreciate that in modern circumstances a system of equal individual rights creates conditions favorable to citizens’ mobilizing democratic majorities to enact legislation that ensures fair treatment for all.

That conservatives and progressives do not always operate thoughtfully is one reason that it is useful to return regularly to the study of the propositions that the nation’s founders held to be self-evidently true.

Another reason for careful reconsideration of the Declaration’s teaching about freedom, equality, and self-government is that influential professors – both of the postmodern-progressive left and of the postliberal right – are inclined to repudiate the nation’s founding principles. Postmodern progressives deride them as a mask for allegedly systemic oppression of minorities and women. Postliberals on the right scorn them as the source of the supposed systemic moral and political evils that plague contemporary America. In the process, postmodern progressives raise serious questions about dangers hidden within America’s unwritten norms, political institutions, and laws, while postliberals on the right draw attention to the excesses to which the principles and practices of freedom can be taken. But the tendency of both to misconceive the roots and practical implications of America’s founding principles, to distort the purposes of American political institutions, and to obscure the common good at which the constitutional order aims exposes the disadvantages of derision and scorn as drivers of intellectual inquiry.

A third reason for attentively reexamining and restating the Declaration’s main ideas is the........

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