The Declaration of Independence Resolves America’s Identity Crisis

T here is endless talk of “identity” in contemporary America. It is defined by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, religion, culture, and even by generation. The one thing that seems to be absent is America itself. This cannot but weaken both the unity and the greatness of the country and its citizens. Like all birthdays, the nation’s is an origin defining that to which one belongs, and so July 4 is a befitting day to examine our national identity and identity crisis.

Perhaps no man reflected back upon the birth of the United States with more seriousness of purpose than Abraham Lincoln. He did so because of the crisis of the house divided. The country was torn apart by contradictory principles. The external threat from Great Britain was gone and could not serve to keep the North and the South together. Lincoln resolved, despite some conciliatory remarks, that the United States must be all free or all slaveholding.

Ironically, the secessionists agreed with Lincoln on one fundamental point: They thought that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were foundational. They purposely misinterpreted the Declaration to mean that equality and liberty were only to be granted to whites, and they misinterpreted the Constitution as a social contract between sovereign states. Nonetheless, they believed those documents were formative and decisive.

Like Lincoln, we too face a crisis of a house divided. Without the Soviet threat to unite us, our domestic politics has become more fractured. The conservatives who return to the original documents are at odds with the progressives, who believe that those documents are not only flawed, but are positively evil. Some of their antipathy is from confusion and some from willful distortion. Like the secessionists, they assert that the equality and rights promised in the Declaration were meant for whites only. This ignores the Declaration’s recognition of self-evident truths grounded in Nature’s Laws and Nature’s God. In other words, our inalienable rights belong to man as man regardless of race. If slavery was not immediately ended, steps were taken to do so, and it was certainly hoped for. Compromises were made for the sake of our union, but on the authority of the Declaration, a war was fought to end slavery, and the Constitution was amended to remove any stain of it. Political practice followed political thought.

The conflict between conservatives and progressives goes much further than disagreements about the meaning of the Declaration. The progressives believe that foundings are not necessary, because politics is not necessary. They believe that there is a historical movement toward ever-expanding equality and freedom, ultimately making the state unnecessary and culminating in a world society. Political origins, therefore, do not need to be revered and consulted. All authority will disappear. No small reason why the progressives are against the necessity of politics is that it limits equality, especially in regard to gender and sexuality. The progressives model society after modern science and the arts, which seem to have ever-increasing improvement and look to the limitless future, whereas politics always has a conservative element because of the need to respect law.

Lincoln believed in the necessity of politics and foundings. In particular, he believed in the American Founding as established in the Declaration. He said that every political sense he had is contained in the Declaration and that it is far more than a declaration of independence from the mother country. It is a creed that discusses the foundations and institutions of a free people. For Lincoln, progressivism is just nihilistic protest, because it can never get to the point of self-government, which is the positive meaning of freedom. The creed contained in the Declaration presupposes the necessity of politics. It is a creed for resisting tyranny and foreign domination, and also for knowing truth. Reflection and choice do what history cannot. Our unalienable rights exist regardless of history, and our free institutions are derived from them. The consent of the governed is necessary, because we are born equal and subject only to Nature’s Laws and Nature’s God. In the Declaration, Jefferson discusses the need for a representative legislative body, an independent judiciary, an executive ruled by law and the sovereignty of the nation. Self-government as distinct from progressive cosmopolitanism is its ideal.

Lincoln recognized a variety of ways in which our creed informs our lives. In his Lyceum Address, he said that our patriotic connection to the heroism of the Revolutionary War cannot be that of near instinct, because the war was already too distant for us. Ours is a reflective patriotism requiring a delicate balance of reason and law with the heroic. Instead of speaking to the youth about the past, he connected them to it through the dangers of the present. He spoke to them of national dangers stemming from vigilantism, mob rule, and anarchy. In light of those terrors, he sought to create a new reverence for law to be learned in the cradle and fortified through habit to the grave. He made clear that our origins are not only founded in the glory of defeating enemies and tyrants, but of creating a legal order that protects our rights.

There will always be new wars and new tyrants, and a need for new martyrs of liberty. Their blood will be sanctified by the truths contained in the Declaration. Our origins are a touchstone for both self-knowledge and noble action. Progressivism is like a child with an inflated opinion of its own power and independence. It destroys the fountainhead of equality and liberty from ignorance and an ignoble hope for a herd society where there is no possibility of self-knowledge and noble action. By returning to our origins in the Declaration and the memory of the wars fought to defend its truths, our imaginations are expanded, our minds are elevated, and our souls are strengthened.