Attacking the Declaration of Independence Is Not Conservatism

R ecently, a friend of mine asked me to read a writing by Michael McKenna entitled “Preserve and protect U.S. Constitution from all enemies.” The author’s argument is that one becomes an enemy of the Constitution when using the Declaration of Independence, the document that initiated and explained why we sought our independence from England, as a guide to understanding “the foundation of who Americans are as a people.” According to McKenna, this understanding can come only from the Constitution. That argument, which ignores how the Declaration enhances our understanding of the legal rights that are provided in the Constitution’s amendments, is just plain wrong and is incompatible with our understanding of conservatism — a political philosophy that respects a country’s unique traditions.

McKenna begins his argument by trying to diminish the significance of the Declaration: “The Declaration was the product of one man. The [Second] Continental Congress considered it for about three days and agreed. The bulk of it was a list of mostly lawyerly grievances directed at the crown.” In sum, the Declaration should only be viewed as “an excellent bit of wartime propaganda, hastily prepared and hastily approved.”

Indeed, the draft of the document was written primarily by one man, Thomas Jefferson, it was approved quickly, and it does mainly comprise numerous grievances. However, McKenna failed to note that its writing was the responsibility of a committee composed of five prominent Founders: John Adams of Massachusetts, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Robert Livingston of New York, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia. Moreover, the Committee and Congress made 86 changes to the draft prior to its finalization, including an elimination of approximately one-quarter of Jefferson’s original draft. Most notably, 56 delegates to the Congress signed the final version of the Declaration, risking their lives and fortunes in doing so.

McKenna next objects to the Declaration’s most famous sentence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This sentence recognizes the Founders’ dearly held belief in God-given unalienable (natural) rights. McKenna says, “that’s nonsense” since we, as a society, are alienating those rights, “to the extent they can be understood as defined, meaningful rights,” all the time.

McKenna is correct in stating that our society sometimes alienates such rights, as all societies do. According to Michael W. McConnell, “Human beings enter into a social compact in which they relinquish many of their natural rights in return for more secure protection of those they retain.” However, in order for this “social contract” to be a successful negotiation, it must offer a proper balance between the rights being given up and those provided enhanced protection by government. It was the fact of giving up too much that compelled the Founders to sign the Declaration of Independence. According to the Bill of Rights Institute: “While the rights listed in the Declaration of Independence — life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness — were inalienable, the Founders understood that individuals are often stopped from exercising them. Indeed, this was the very purpose of the Declaration of Independence: to explain that King George III’s violations of the colonists’ inalienable rights justified the American Revolution.” Therefore, espousing a theory of unalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence articulated the impetus behind the Revolution.

McKenna also finds that the “Declaration is, ultimately, too narrow a conception of what a nation and its citizens are and should be.” I totally agree: That is the function of our Constitution. However, that does not mean we can dismiss the Declaration’s role in providing the intellectual foundation for how U.S. citizens are to negotiate the social contract with their government — making sure that their unalienable rights, no matter whether these are identified through a priori reasoning or the political process over time (“natural right is human custom conforming to Divine intent,” as Edmund Burke put it), are only to be given up after extensive deliberation.

As a result, for over 200 years, the U.S. has been on a path of providing its citizens the ability to live in a country with an ever-increasing number of government-protected rights. While many of these rights are promulgated and elaborated in the Bill of Rights and in our Constitution’s later amendments as “legal rights,” their initial affirmation is found in the Declaration.

The intellectual importance of the Declaration of Independence in our natural-rights tradition is most evident in Abraham Lincoln’s introductory sentence to his 1863 Gettysburg Address and its obvious link to the subsequent passage of the 13th Amendment: “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” This is an endorsement of the natural right of equality, as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, which in the Gettysburg Address is invoked as the intellectual foundation for the end of slavery.

The importance of our constitutional amendments as protectors of our natural rights cannot be overstated. According to Burke:

The rights of men, that is to say, the natural rights of mankind, are indeed sacred things; and if any public measure is proved mischievously to affect them, the objection ought to be fatal to that measure, even if no charter at all could be set up against it. If these natural rights are further affirmed and declared by express covenants, if they are clearly defined and secured against chicane, against power, and authority, by written instruments and positive engagements, they are in a still better condition: they partake not only of the sanctity of the object so secured, but of that solemn public faith itself, which secures an object of such importance. . . . The things secured by these instruments may, without any deceitful ambiguity, be very fitly called the chartered rights of men.

In sum, the historical and substantive links between the Declaration’s call for the appropriate recognition of our unalienable rights as citizens and the legal rights provided in the Constitution’s amendments are clear. For over 200 years both documents have played key roles in the development of the uniqueness of this country and who we are as a people. No principle of conservatism can deny this.