The Declaration of Independence and current threats to liberal democracy

The French Catholic poet, dramatist, and diplomat Paul Claudel once wrote that sometimes we need to look at our watches and ask, “What time is it?” He did not mean this literally. He meant something like “reading the signs of the time.” Certain times demand to be read and read well. Ours is one of those times.

To be sure, reading what time it is really is difficult and demanding. It requires sound criteria of analysis and evaluation and an adequate factual basis on which to deploy them. Most of us are partial on both these scores (present company included). In such circumstances, we need help. It is my belief that the Declaration of Independence still provides invaluable guidance in this regard; indeed, I think it is especially helpful in today’s circumstances.

Why? Because it confronted, analyzed, and indicted encroaching “tyranny” or “despotism”–which is our situation today. To be sure, our would-be tyrants are more varied and ideological than George III, more ubiquitous and nefarious.¹ But the principles of ordered liberty, of a government that is the expression of a free and self-governing people, that are articulated in the document continue to be valid and therefore relevant today.

They also have advantages in a pluralistic society that should not be underestimated. The Declaration is all Americans’ patrimony, one that provides a vision and source of civic unity. While acknowledging the divine source of the natural and moral order, as well as the legitimacy of appeals to divine providence and judgment, its exercise of reason in detecting and decrying tyranny is accessible to believers and non-believers alike.

Concomitantly, it gives us what we urgently require today: a shared vocabulary for naming and describing tyranny. Cast in clear and direct language, it speaks the American citizen’s natural language when he confronts the fundamental political alternative: tyranny or freedom.

Contemporary would-be tyrannies

Such, at least, is what I argue in my new book, Public Philosophy and Patriotism: Essays on the Declaration and Us (St. Augustine Press, 2024). There I identify three distinct but oft-conspiring versions of tyranny that we free men and women, we citizens of the flagship liberal democracy, confront today: identity politics; a techno-scientistic mentality that aspires to global hegemony; and an ersatz religion, the religion of Humanity. While my formulations focus on the intellectual content of these would-be tyrannies, all have their proponents, power-centers, and networks that need to be identified and combatted as well.

The first would-be tyranny, identity politics, also known as “wokeness” or “cultural Marxism,” demonizes a particular race, a particular sex, and a particular religion in a decidedly Manichean rendering of American (and world) history. In truth, however, it would institutionalize permanent racial division and injustice; indeed, it (along with abortion) is the real “systematic injustice” today. The Declaration’s affirmation of human equality and natural rights regardless of race, color, creed, or sex is America’s aboriginal antidote to this civic poison. It powerfully reminds us that justice principally is a matter of due treatment of individuals, not privileges for ideologically preferred groups.

The techno-scientistic mentalité and its aspiration to global hegemony was revealed during the COVID episode, embodied in such nefarious agents as Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, and Klaus Schwab, with institutional power centers in the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum, and our own military-pharmaceutical-alphabet agencies (NIAID, CDC, FDA) complex.² Aaron Kheriaty analyzed this ideology and unmasked many of its networks in his tour de force, The New Abnormal. Pursuing an old dream of the complete control of humanity with updated means and doomsday arguments, its adherents conceive of humanity as a great mass of bodies—not souls nor individuals with consciences to be respected and rights to be protected. Their scientific expertise and “humanitarian” ideals justify them as they work tirelessly (and insidiously) to circumvent moral limits and national sovereignties. Indeed, the modern nation-state in its liberal democratic form is the great obstacle to meeting the challenges of late modernity. Its pesky populaces and constitutional limits on government activity inhibit the averting of Doom and the pursuit of a “sustainable” Future. Democratia liberalis delenda est.

Its humanitarian ally, the religion of Humanity, in itself is less overtly tyrannical than the other two, but that makes it even more seductive. Predicated on a vision of, and promising, a humanity unified by solely human means, it delegitimizes all significant human differences, starting with political ones, that would separate human beings. While its main institutional home is the current European Union of open borders (and hatred of Hungary), it has made significant inroads into the current regime in Rome, informing its watering down of specifically Catholic elements in its teaching and prompting it to badger beleaguered western nations to “build bridges not walls”. The ersatz humanitarian “fraternity” it extols falsifies both the Christian religion and what the French political philosopher Pierre Manent has called “the political condition of mankind”. It underlies the current pontificate’s insouciance about the political health and sovereignty of western nations.

Together, these ideologies are so comprehensive, so thoroughgoing, so “anti-“ (anti-human liberty and anti-liberal democracy), that they deserve an appellation greater than “totalitarian.” One might call them an “omnigatherum” of modern political heresies–with technological mastery aping the Creator and Redeemer, historical immanentism and invidious binaries aping the City of God, and an ersatz religion of human similarity, unity, and compassion aping the Church and charity.

Whatever the nomenclature, these are the forces arrayed against human liberty and American liberal democracy in our day. God help us!

The Declaration’s example and lessons

We, however, are not the first to face daunting foes. One thinks of Churchill and England in 1940, and de Gaulle in London leading the Resistance, and before them, the founding generation of Americans who brought the fight to the greatest armed force of the day. This last antecedent brings us back to the Declaration, where our founding fathers declared why they were fighting and what they were fighting for. The issue was uncertain, but they acted en connaissance de cause and wanted to world to know. An inspiring example, the Declaration contains important lessons for us in our own day and battles. The short list runs as follows:

In a time when inherited points of political reference have become blurred or misleading, the document can help sharpen our eyesight in discerning the advancing despotism. And in a time of doublespeak and obfuscating abstractions, it can help restore our native political language as Americans, including the ability to speak of the political evil of tyranny. More positively, it reminds us of what is threatened and what needs to be defended: ordered liberty under God.

Human liberty is mankind’s birthright by nature and the Creator. This birthright, however, has to be properly developed and exercised. The norms governing liberty likewise come proximately from nature and ultimately from the divine. Having invoked them, the Declaration applies them in its critique of a “design” of despotism, and keeps them ready for the future establishment of independent self-government. Facing a redoubtable foe, and aiming to do what “duty” requires in defense of liberty, individual and collective, the signers of the Declaration tellingly look up to the divine, confiding in a trustworthy Providence and acknowledging a Supreme Judge of human intentions. One could call this America’s founding expression of liberty under God.

“An expression of the American Mind”

Admittedly, here these are but claims and snippets. The proof is in the pudding, in my explicatio et applicatio of the document. To whet the reader’s appetite, let me end with two citations from the book.

The first chapter is entitled “The Declaration and Thoughtful Citizenship”. It takes its clue from Jefferson’s famous statement that the Declaration is “an expression of the American mind”. Following that clue, the chapter analyzes the mind expressing itself in the document. In it, one reads:

Perhaps most remarkable is the confidence it shows in the power of reasoning. Subjects not always deemed to be amenable to rational analysis and determination— political right order, tyranny, and revolution—find themselves directly and coherently dealt with. To be sure, doing so requires a variety of reason’s activities: the articulation of principles, the discernment of relevant facts, inferring causes from effects, knitting together ends and means.

The Declaration does all this and more despite the highly fraught and even belligerent situation that brought it about. Its confidence in the ability of reason to understand and guide politics, including revolutionary activity, is so remarkable that one could raise it up as a model of capacious political reflection, effective rhetoric, and deliberate action. The Framers of the Constitution and Abraham Lincoln certainly did. Why not Americans today?

In its concluding chapter entitled “Government Under Judgment,” one reads an encapsulation of the work and its aim:

In this series of essays, I try to honor the day [the 4^th of July] by taking the document seriously. From the start of the series … , I have taken my bearings from Jefferson’s famous phrase (in a letter to Richard Henry Lee) that the Declaration is “an expression of the American mind.” My guiding questions have been: How did that mind look at the world? How would that mind look at our world?

This year is no different. What is different is the topic. How can we discern grave political evil? For as it happens, the American mind expressed in the Declaration is neither an ostrich nor a Pollyanna. Quite the contrary, it is on the lookout for political “evils.” Specifically, it would have us be on the alert for “injuries and usurpations” on the part of government, or for their close cousins, “abuses and usurpations.” Most ominously, it would have us be on the lookout for “designs” on the part of government agents and their allies to subject a free People to the greatest political evil, “absolute Despotism.” As the founding document of the United States of America, the Declaration stands as a warning to subsequent American governments that they exist under judgment.

“Governments under judgment”: that phrase can serve to sum up the book. Or as chapter 2 ends: libertas semper vigilans, semper judicans.³

Endnotes: