The Declaration of Dispossession

“The Declaration of Independence is to be taken with a great qualification. It declares those men have an inalienable right to life; yet we hang criminals – to liberty, yet we imprison – to the pursuit of happiness, yet we must not infringe upon the rights of others. If the Declaration of Independence is taken in its fullest extent, it will warrant robbery and murder, for some may think those crimes necessary to their happiness.” – Rep. Joseph Clay of Pennsylvania on the slave trade (1806)

“I should not have noticed this strange and ridiculous vision, that the Declaration of Independence was a decree of universal emancipation, had it not issued from respectable sources, and been seriously enforced upon the credulity of the public. Instead of attempting to answer or refute these visions of a disturbed imagination, let us recur to principles and facts.” – Rep. John Holmes on the Missouri Crisis (1820)

“I cannot, in the first place, believe that Mr. Jefferson ever intended to give the meaning or force which attempted now to be applied to this language when he said, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ I hold it to be a self-evident lie…I speak what is the judgment of all men, if they dare say it, that neither morally, mentally, socially, physically, nor politically, does equality exist in any country on the earth. It cannot exist in the nature of things. God himself has not created them equal. It is not, therefore, a truism, as Jefferson put it forth, but is false in form, and false in fact.” – Sen. John Pettit of Indiana on the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1853)

“The object of that war was to disenthrall the united colonies from foreign rule, which had proved to be oppressive, and to separate them permanently from the mother country. The political result was the foundation of a federal republic of free white men of the colonies, constituted, as they were, in distinct and reciprocally independent State governments. As for the subject races, whether Indian or African, the wise and brave statesmen of that day, being engaged in no extravagant scheme of social change, left them as they were, and thus preserved themselves and their posterity from the anarchy and the ever-recurring civil wars which have prevailed in other revolutionized European colonies of America.” – Pres. Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire in the State of the Union (1855)

​John Dickinson, known as the “Penman of the Revolution” for his “Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer” essays, as well as his “Petition to the King,” “Olive Branch Petition,” and “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms,” ultimately refused to sign the Declaration of Independence. His objections had nothing to do with the ways in which the Declaration could be perverted by posterity, but were entirely pragmatic concerns about whether the American Colonies were prepared for war and whether their supposed allies in Europe would actually come to their aid. If he had any idea, however, that the Declaration – at the time, nothing more than an act of secession – would one day be cited to justify transforming his free and independent country into a “Colony of the World,” where immigration policy was conducted in the interest of alien immigrants first, economic policy was conducted in the interest of multi-national businesses first, and foreign policy was conducted in the interest of foreign states first – never “America First” – then Dickinson would not have been the only delegate who refused to sign it; not a single delegate would have signed such a suicide pact.
 
The so-called “equality clause” of the Declaration of Independence is neither about “equality” (at least not as in the equalitarian “capital-E” sense) and is not even a “clause.” Calling this phrase plucked from the second paragraph a “clause” is meant to invest it with constitutional authority – to make it a mandate, so to speak.

The Development of Neo-Conservatism in America

​It is the neo-conservatives, or “neocons,” who want to make this “equality clause” a mandate. The neocons are a clique of ideologues who have become highly influential in both parties – the Evil Party and the Stupid Party (you figure out which is which). They are not normally politicians, but rather advisers and speechwriters influencing elected officials, or appointees to powerful but unseen positions. They are journalists spinning and slanting stories, pundits supplying prepackaged opinions and fueling ready-made outrage, financiers funding campaigns and foundations, wonks ensconced in think tanks inventing policy initiatives, and so on. They infiltrate institutions, subvert their values, and appropriate their identities.
 
“Neocon” is a term that most Americans first heard during the Bush Administration, when that clique was at the height of its power. Dimwitted “Dubya” was desperate to “do something” after 9/11, and the neocons were ready and waiting with a plan, the same plan that they had been pushing on presidents since the end of the Cold War: now that the Soviet Union was no longer a rival empire, the U.S.A. and Israel could unilaterally intervene in the Middle East. Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, and David Wurmser were a few of Bush’s highest-placed neocons, though many more were crawling in and out of the administration. Most of them were members of Project for the New American Century (a think tank which advocated “a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity” and obsessively urged “the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power”) and some of them were authors of “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” (the report of an Israeli study group which recommended reestablishing the “principle of preemption” to “contain, destabilize, and roll back” Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine).
 
The neocons were the architects of “the War on Terror,” which should go down in history as the most notorious example of what the Old-Right thinker and writer Samuel T. Francis called “anarcho-tyranny” – a dystopia unforeseen even by Orwell, Huxley, and Bradbury, in which the government does not do what it should do but does do what it should not do. In other words, anarcho-tyranny is when the government, whether through mere incompetence or sheer malice, permits widespread lawlessness (“anarchy”) and commits abuses of power (“tyranny”). While the beneficiaries of anarcho-tyranny are the dysfunctional, dependent underclass and the established, elite managerial class, the victims of anarcho-tyranny are law-abiding, tax-paying, “Middle-American” citizens trapped between the anarchy from below and tyranny from above.
 
9/11 was committed by radical Sunni fundamentalists, so what did the neocons do? They declare  war on the secular powers in the Middle East who had been on the front lines fighting radical Sunni fundamentalists for years. 9/11 was committed by illegal immigrants who overstayed their visas, so what did the neocons do? Instead of establishing an entry/exit visa system to prevent such oversights, they have repeatedly undermined the enforcement of immigration laws and even tried to sneak through amnesty. 9/11 was committed by Muslims from foreign countries, so what did the neocons do? Instead of using statistical probabilities to “profile” potential terrorists, all American citizens were subjected to a regime of snooping and bullying. A real “War on Terror” would have meant forming a grand alliance between Iraq, Syria, and Iran (a triumph of statesmanship of which the jingoistic, chauvinistic neocons would certainly have been incapable) to wage a moral crusade against the two chief destabilizers of the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Israel.
 
The neocons were also the architects of the Iraq War – not just the waging of the war itself (although in many cases these eggheads and pinheads did indeed overrule the actual military brass), but more importantly, the case for the war. The fraudulent case for the Iraq War – that if Saddam Hussein, an evil dictator and state sponsor of terrorism, were overthrown, then the Middle East would become safer and freer – was the fault not only of the neocons’ arrogance and ignorance, but also of their dishonesty and disloyalty. Just recently, the political party of Moqtada al-Sadr (a radical Muslim cleric who led the insurgency against American occupation), won a plurality of seats in the Iraqi elections. The Iraq War is going to go down in history as the greatest catastrophe in the Middle East since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
 
Just recently, the neocons have been leading resistance to Donald Trump from within the Republican Party, not because they have any moral qualms about his character or his competence, but because Trump is an old-fashioned populist and nationalist who, in the course of the primaries and the general election, clearly rejected their designs of “world policing” and “nation building.”
 
The founding generation of the neocons came from two factions of the American Old Left: Communist exiles (specifically, Trotskyites who were ousted by Stalin in the power struggle after Lenin’s death) and Cold-War liberals (Democrats like Sen. Henry Jackson of Washington).
 
The proto-neocon Trotskyites were organized around Max Schachtman, a Polish-Jewish immigrant involved with the AFL-CIO and the Democratic Party. The far-left Schachtmanites, alarmed by Stalinist imperialism and “anti-Semitism,” supported the U.S.A. countering the USSR militarily and creating the State of Israel as a national home for Jews. The Schachtmanites began as Trotskyites who believed that “the maintenance of the dictatorship in one land was dependent on the extension of the proletarian revolution on a world scale,” but ended up as anti-Communists who believed that “U.S. power could be used to promote democracy in the Third World” (and thus supported the bungled invasion of Cuba and the Vietnam War). Interestingly enough, a superpower imposing its ideology on other countries is a constant throughout every phase of Schachtmanite thought, from hardcore Communism to hardcore anti-Communism.
 
The proto-neocon Cold-War liberals were organized around Leo Strauss, a German-Jewish immigrant who became a sort of rabbinical figure to “social democrats.” They were for supporting “the New Deal” at home and fighting Communism abroad, which to them meant not only militarily countering Soviet expansion, but also promoting mass-immigration to the U.S.A. in order to signal to the Third World that they were more humanitarian than the USSR. Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, both Straussians, founded the now-neocon Commentary and The Public Interest as center-left, social-democratic publications for liberals who wanted “to return to the original sources of liberal vision and liberal energy so as to correct the warped version of liberalism that is today’s orthodoxy.”
 
There were two events in the 1960s and 1970s which resulted in these different factions of the Old Left coming together to reinvent themselves as “conservatives.”
 
The first was when the USSR became officially anti-Zionist, aligning with the Arab states against Western powers and their ally, Israel. In the 1967 war, for instance, the Soviets were on the side of the Arabs, whom they had been arming and advising, and represented them in cease-fire negotiations with the U.S.A. The 1967 war – and the fear of another “Holocaust” – reinvigorated the ethno-religious roots of these proto-neocons, who realized that they cared less about their ideology than they did their identity and that the future of their ethno-state depended on the U.S.A.
 
The second was when the “New Left” displaced the “Old Left” in the Democratic Party. The New Left cared less about the “hard” economic and social doctrines that animated the Old Left, and more about “soft” cultural issues such as diversity, pluralism, and tolerance. The candidacies of the anti-war George McGovern and the race-baiting Jesse Jackson disgusted these proto-neocons, who longed for the presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. In addition, and probably most importantly, the New Left was pro-Soviet and anti-Zionist, expressing solidarity not just with the Palestinians against Israel, but with any Third-World revolutionaries against capitalist and imperialist powers.
 
Reacting to Israel’s geopolitical situation and their loss of influence in the Democratic Party, the Old Left defected, so to speak, to the Old Right, where they immediately clashed with existing conservatives (now known as “paleo-conservatives,” i.e. “old conservatives”). These “neo-conservatives” (i.e. “new conservatives”) did not want to assimilate to the Old Right, but rather to deconstruct and redefine it into a host for their preexisting center-left, social-democratic, anti-Communist, pro-Zionist ideologies. The “paleo” and “neo” prefixes should indicate which side won.
 
While paleocons were traditionalists, neocons were ideologues. Paleocons believed, in Russell Kirk’s phrase, that they had a responsibility “to preserve a particular people, living in a particular place during a particular time.” Neocons, like right-thinking Marxists, believed in carrying certain principles – or “propositions” – to their logical conclusions, no matter the human cost. Paleocons believed, again in Kirk’s phrase, in maintaining “custom, convention, and continuity.” Neocons believed in the moral abstractions devised by “classical liberals” during the Enlightenment, “free minds, free markets, and free people.” Paleocons did not have detailed “policy prescriptions,” as did the neocons. As Kirk put it, conservatism was properly an “adjective,” describing “a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the social order,” and was thus “the negation of ideology.” By contrast, the “think tank,” an industrialized ivory tower which manufactures opinions like a factory manufactures widgets, is a distinctly neocon invention. Neocons were “painfully deficient,” according to Kirk,” in the understanding of the human condition and in the apprehension of the accumulated wisdom of our civilization,” instead preferring “to engage in ideological sloganizing.”
 
The paleocons never really stood a chance against this Catilinarian conspiracy. The neocons were far shrewder and fiercer than the paleocons, who were, chiefly, scholarly and gentlemanly types unprepared for the neocons’ verbal brawls and power grabs. “Eager for place and preferment and power, skillful at intrigue, ready to exclude from office any persons who might not be counted upon as faithful to the neo-conservative ideology,” Russell Kirk summed up and put down the neocons. “Often, backstairs, they have seemed more eager to frustrate their allies than to confute those presumptive adversaries the liberals and radicals.” Indeed, this network of neocon pundits, politicos, professors, and outright plutocrats has remade the Right into something unrecognizable – a cartoonish band of free marketeers like Jack Kemp and Paul Ryan, armchair militarists like John Bolton and Dick Cheny, religious fundamentalists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, and amoral “consultants” like Karl Rove and Steve Schmidt (with the “traditionalist” paleocons blackened as “extremists.”)
 
The fate of M.E. Bradford exemplifies the neocon takeover. In 1980, President Ronald Reagan announced that he was nominating Bradford, a professor of English at the University of Dallas, to chair the National Endowment for the Humanities. The neocons, who had long-coveted the cultural influence of the NEH, organized a smear campaign against Bradford, calling him a “neo-Confederate” for identifying with his Southern heritage and criticizing Abraham Lincoln. The neocon columnist George Will was particularly snide and insincere in his attacks on Bradford. “I’m through,” Bradford told his friend and colleague, Thomas H. Landess. “If they want it that bad to do something like this, then let them have it.” Ultimately, Bill Bennett, a Democrat who was friends with Bradford’s detractors, was appointed instead.
 
Paul Gottfried, who also lost an academic position at due to neocon lobbying, described the neocons as “ideologically motivated pursuers of power” who “have never made a secret of their fear and loathing of that part of the Right which they cannot reshape or convert to their views.”

The Lincolnian Revolution and the Renegade Neo-Conservatives

Before the neocons politicized American history, the Declaration of Independence was simply a significant, symbolic historical document with a clear textual and contextual meaning, to be studied by students and scholars as the culminating point of the American Revolution and honored by the public on the Fourth of July. Now it is endlessly “interpreted” and “reinterpreted” to divine mystical new “meanings,” as if it were the Talmud. The Straussian Harry V. Jaffa, repackaging the anti-slavery rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln for post-WWII Americans, invented what has become the kosher meaning of the Declaration, and by extension, the meaning of America herself – because countries cannot simply be “givens” anymore, but must be “propositions.”
 
The neocon interpretation of the Declaration is, in fact, derivative of Lincoln’s own reinterpretation, and thus descended from what the biographer Edgar Lee Masters called “Hebraic-Puritanism” – the Manichaean, Millenarian, and “Old Testament” worldview of the Puritans. By the time of the Civil War, this Hebraic-Puritan mission had been secularized, but had (and has) lost none of its crusading zeal. Accordingly, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” quite literally sanctifies the U.S.A. and demonizes its enemies: the abolitionist author sees “the glory of the coming of the Lord” in the Union military (“burnished rows of steel” are a “fiery gospel”), which is marching forward to “trample out the grapes of wrath,” “crush the serpent,” “sift out the hearts of men,” and “die to make men free.”
 
According to Lincoln, the meaning of the Declaration is contained in the sacred words – “the Proposition” – that “all men are created equal.” From this sentence fragment, which he reinterpreted at once obtusely and abstrusely, the modern-day Lincolnites (i.e. neocons) have deduced, no less obtusely and abstrusely, what they call “the American Creed,” which proceeds as follows:

1. The U.S.A. is an “ideological” or “propositional” nation – “a city upon a hill” – founded to enlighten/evangelize the world in its self-evidently superior way of life.
2. The U.S.A. is not defined by a people or a place, but is rather “an idea,” and the American identity is not derived from ancestry or history, but rather from belief in that “idea.”
3. American “founding principles” are summed up in the god terms of “liberty,” “equality,” and “diversity,” which do not have fixed meanings, but instead are always “progressing” (“racism,” “socialism,” and “fascism” are devil terms, with corresponding Confederate, Soviet, and Nazi bogeymen).
4. What it means to be an American is not to have been born on this land and have some bond to its history, but to believe that liberty is a human right, that everyone is equal, and that diversity is our strength – to “dedicate yourself to the Proposition.”
5. Because it is a crusader state with a quasi-divine mission, the U.S.A. can not just do whatever it wants, but whatever it does is necessarily for the greater good, i.e. “American exceptionalism.”

James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay never mentioned any of the above in the Federalist. It is as if they never took any courses at Hillsdale College or PragerU!

All that matters to the doctrinaire neocons is that one sentence fragment from the second paragraph – no need to read the rest of the document, and really no need to learn about the historical context of the Colonial Crisis, the Continental Congresses, the Revolutionary War, or really to learn about any American history for that matter. Once “the Proposition” is understood, all other truths are, mystically, revealed. The neocons are always lecturing about the “lessons” and “laws” of history, like right-thinking Marxists, yet it seems that the only history they know is this sole sentence fragment from the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, the “New Colossus” poem on the Statute of Liberty, and, of course, Munich and Auschwitz.
 
The neocon reinterpretation of the Declaration of Independence is a sort of historical fundamentalism – a simplistic and sentimental civic religion (or, to use a term more familiar to these Marxists, “false consciousness”) with little to no relation to human experience or even human reason. “They repeat, as the fundamental maxim of our civil policy, that all men are born free and equal, and quote from our Declaration of Independence,” Chancellor Harper explained as early as 1838. “It is not the first time I have had occasion to observe that men may repeat with the utmost confidence, some maxim or sentimental phrase, as self-evident or admitted truth, which is palpably false, or to which, upon examination, it will be found that they attached no definite idea.”
 
It is indeed simplistic and sentimental: all men are most certainly not created equal. As individuals, human beings each have different capacities and characteristics determined by their genetic inheritance. For instance, cognitive ability, or “IQ,” has been demonstrated to be strongly predictive of life outcomes, and while not entirely heritable, still strongly heritable. Even the idea of “equality of opportunity” (as opposed to “equality of outcome”) is an illusion: just as a footrace in which some runners started ahead and some behind would not be considered “fair,” true “equal opportunity” requires an equal starting point for everyone, or “equality of outcome.” Yet in spite of the empirical untruth of the proposition “that all men are created equal,” Americans are seriously expected to live and die by it simply because Thomas Jefferson, writing under the heady influence of the Enlightenment, pronounced it so. Yet Jefferson was a member of a committee tasked with writing the first draft for a public statement of a resolution that the Continental Congress had already passed, not a Promethean lawgiver.
 
According to John C. Calhoun, “that all men are born free and equal” was “a proposition which originated in a hypothetical truism, but which, as now expressed and now understood, is the most false and dangerous of all political errors.” Calhoun continued that he was “not afraid to attack error, however deeply it may be entrenched, or however widely extended, whenever it becomes my duty to do so,” and proceeded to refute this heresy in every particular:

Taking the proposition literally (it is in that sense it is understood), there is not a word of truth in it. It begins with “all men are born,” which is utterly untrue. Men are not born. Infants are born. They grow to be men. And concludes with asserting that they are born “free and equal,” which is not less false. They are not born free. While infants they are incapable of freedom, being destitute alike of the capacity of thinking and acting, without which there can be no freedom. Besides, they are necessarily born subject to their parents, and remain so among all people, savage and civilized, until the development of the intellect and physical capacity enables them to take care of themselves. They grow to all the freedom of which the condition in which they were born permits, by growing to be men. Nor is it less false that they are born “equal.” They are not so in any sense in which it can be regarded; and thus, as I have asserted, there is not a word of truth in the whole proposition, as expressed and generally understood.
 
If we trace it back, we shall find the proposition differently expressed in the Declaration of Independence. That asserts that “all men are created equal.” The form of expression, though less dangerous, is not less erroneous. All men are not created. According to the Bible, only two, a man and a woman, ever were, and of these one was pronounced subordinate to the other. All others have come into the world by being born, and in no sense, as I have shown, either free or equal. But this form of expression being less striking and popular, has given way to the present, and under the authority of a document put forth on so great an occasion, and leading to such important consequences, has spread far and wide, and fixed itself deeply in the public mind. It was inserted in our Declaration of Independence without any necessity. It made no necessary part of our justification in separating from the parent country, and declaring ourselves independent. Breach of our chartered privileges, and lawless encroachment on our acknowledged and well-established rights by the parent country, were the real causes, and of themselves sufficient, without resorting to any other, to justify the step. Nor had it any weight in constructing the governments which were substituted in the place of the colonial. They were formed of the old materials and on practical and well-established principles, borrowed from the most part from our own experience and that of the country from which we sprang…
 
Such being the case, it follows that any, the worst form of government, is better than anarchy; and that individual liberty, or freedom, must be subordinate to whatever power may be necessary to protect society against anarchy within or destruction from without; for the safety and wellbeing of society is as paramount to individual liberty, as the safety and wellbeing of the race is to that of individuals; and in the same proportion, the power necessary for the safety of society is paramount individual liberty. On the contrary, government has no right to control individual liberty beyond what is necessary to the safety and wellbeing of society. Such is the boundary which separates the power of government and the liberty of the citizen or subject in the political state, which, as I have shown, is the natural state of man – the only one in which his race can exist, and the one in which he is born, lives, and dies…
 
So, on the contrary, just as a people rise in the scale of intelligence, virtue, and patriotism, and the more perfectly they become acquainted with the nature of government, the ends for which it was ordered, and how it ought to be administered, and the less the tendency to violence and disorder within, and danger from abroad, the power necessary for government becomes less and less, and individual liberty greater and greater. Instead, then, of all men having the same right to liberty and equality, as is claimed by those who hold that they are all born free and equal, liberty is the noble and highest reward bestowed on mental and moral development, combined with favorable circumstances. Instead, then, of liberty and equality being born with man; instead of all men and all classes and descriptions being equally entitled to them, they are high prizes to be won, and are in their most perfect state, not only the highest reward that can be bestowed on our race, but the most difficult to be won – and when won, the most difficult to be preserved.

​All of the above is indeed contrary to the American civic religion of absolute individualism and egalitarianism, as preached by the Clintons and the Bushes, or the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, or Samantha Bee and John Oliver, or Jon Meacham and Eric Foner, or “The West Wing” and “The Newsroom,” but an “appeal to authority” is a logical fallacy (especially an appeal to such pathetic authorities). In what way was Calhoun wrong? “The act was, in fact, but a formal and solemn annunciation to the world that the colonies had ceased to be dependent communities, and had become free and independent States,” Calhoun wrote in his 1850 masterpiece. Even John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, a proto-Lincolnite, quintessential Hebraic-Puritan, and one of Calhoun’s nemeses, did not disagree with the South Carolinian on this question. “The Declaration of Independence, in its primary import, was merely an occasional state paper,” Adams said on July 4th, 1821. “It was a solemn exposition to the world, of the causes which had compelled the people of a small portion of the British Empire, to cast off their allegiance and renounce the protection of the British king, and to dissolve their social connection with the British people.”
 
This politicization of the Declaration of Independence can be traced back to the Missouri Crisis. When Southerners pointed out that the Congress had no constitutional authority to prohibit slavery in a new State, Northerners like Sen. Jonathan Roberts of Pennsylvania and Sen. David L. Morril of New Hampshire pointed out that slavery itself seemed to violate the so-called “equality clause” in the Declaration.
 
Sen. Rufus King of New York, in particular, incensed Southerners with a forceful speech arguing that slavery was a violation of “the law of nature” and “the law of God,” which were, as he put it, one and the same. According to King, this law was “established by the Creator, which has existed from the beginning, extends over the whole globe, is everywhere, and at all times binding upon mankind: a law which applies to nations, because their members are still men; a law which is the foundation of all constitutional, conventional, and civil laws, none of which are valid if contrary to the law of nature; that according to this law all men are born free.” In his Second Inaugural Address (written by the neocon Michael Gerson, in consultation with other neocons and even the Israeli official Nathan Sharansky), Dubya took this same ideology and extended it globally – a perfect example of what Burke, in reference to the Jacobins, called an “armed doctrine.”
 
Rep. John Tyler of Virginia (who would be President in 1841) argued that the phrase “all men are created equal” was a fallacy:

Gentlemen have exultingly read to us the Declaration of Independence. From it they have gathered that which, as an abstract truth, I am not disposed to deny: “That all men are, by nature, equally free, sovereign, and independent.” Can this proposition admit of application to a state of society? Does not this fallacy meet you in every walk of life? Distinctions will exist. Virtue and vice, wealth and poverty, industry and idleness, constitute so many barriers, which human power cannot break down, and which will ever prevent us from carrying into operation, in extenso, this great principle. Take this principle and preach it up to the monarchs of the world; will they descend from their lofty eminences, or raise mankind to a level with themselves? No, sir, the principle, although lovely and beautiful, cannot obliterate those distinctions in society which society itself engenders and gives birth to. Liberty and equality are often captivating sounds; but they often captivate to destroy. England had her Jack Cades and Levelers. Look, I pray you, to revolutionary France. These were the principles of that day. Mark the consequences! Murder and rapine stalked over the land, and the guillotine, the work, too, of a philanthropist of that day, was the sad monument of this fallacy. Liberty and equality was proclaimed by Robespierre and his associates, at the very moment that they were enriching the fields of France with the blood of her citizens. Nor was the doctrine confined to political institutions, but, advancing with a daring step, fought even with the Creator, and mocked at the immutable truth of religion. Turn your eyes also to South America. The throne of the Incas was washed from under them by the tide which flowed in from Spain. The native of the forest was deprived of his freedom, and made to toil for his new master. Then, too, sprung up a philanthropist, who claimed for the Indian an equal rank in creation with the inhabitants of Spain. His claim was admitted, and Africa mourned over the mistake, and her deepest curses may still be uttered against the memory of Las Casas.

“Although I do not believe that this principle of equality can be applied to man in extenso, yet I love it, and admire it as an abstract truth, and will carry it into operation whensover I can,” explained Tyler. “If we cannot raise the black man up to the level with the white – and that we have not the constitutional power to do so none here have denied – let us raise, at least, the white man up to this level,” he concluded. “Extend an equality of rights to the people of Missouri.”
 
Sen. William Pinkney of Maryland argued that it was self-evident that the phrase “all men are created equal” was never meant to be taken so literally:

Of the Declaration of Independence, which has also been quoted in support of the perilous doctrines now urged upon us, I need not now speak at large. The self-evident truths announced in the Declaration of Independence are not truths at all, if taken literally; and the practical conclusions contained in the same passage of that declaration prove that they were never to be so received

According to Pinkney, “the infinite perfectibility of man and his institutions, and the resolution of everything into a state of nature,” as preached by King, were “sentiments the most destructive, which, if not borrowed from, are identical with, the worst visions of the political philosophy of France when all the elements of discord and misrule were let loose upon that devoted nation.”
 
Sen. William Smith of South Carolina condemned King’s near-religious belief in natural law and natural rights, or “the religion of nature,” as a recipe for a revolution:

This religion of nature, and the application of it, which the gentleman has recommended for your consideration, is the very system which gave rise to that state of things which so lately convulsed Europe to its center. This was the religion preached up in the French Convention in the days of Robespierre. They, like the gentleman from New York, were not bound by written systems. They were too limited for the great projects of revolution. They presented in their gallery the Goddess of Liberty, draped in transparencies… declared the laws of nature to be the laws of God and of religion, by which all men were born free and equal. This theory intoxicated the nation, and the reform in their government, which was their great object, was lost in the designs of aspiring ambition; and the fairest portion of that nation was sacrificed on its altar. Robespierre paved his way with blood, until the nation sickened at the sight. In the midst of those scenes of horror and dismay, Napoleon, for the pious purpose of securing the liberty, and promoting the tranquility of the nation, assumed the reins of government, and in his career would have prostrated all Europe, if all Europe had not combined to prostrate him.

​After describing how King had “struggled with himself, and paused long before he could give vent to principles so repugnant to the peace, the harmony, and the future happiness of this nation,” Smith commented, “Would he had paused longer still.”
 
Rep. John Randolph of Roanoke, as usual, could scarcely contain himself.

My only objection is, that these principles, pushed to their extreme consequences – that all men are born free and equal – I can never assent to, for the best of all reasons, because it is not true [and I cannot] agree to a falsehood, and a most pernicious falsehood, even though I find it in the Declaration of Independence, which has been set up, on the Missouri and other questions, as paramount to the Constitution. I say pernicious falsehood – it must be, if true, self-evident; for it is incapable of demonstration; and there are thousands and thousands of them that mislead the great vulgar as well as the small…All these great positions, that men are born equally free, and faith without works, are in a certain sense, in which they are hardly ever received by the multitude, true; but in another sense, in which they are almost invariable received by nineteen out of twenty, they are false and pernicious…In regard to this principle, that all men are not born free and equal, if there is an animal on earth to which it does not apply – that is not born free, it is man – he is born in a state of the most abject want, and in a state of perfect helplessness and ignorance, which is the foundation of the connubial tie.

​As Rep. William Darlington of Pennsylvania later recollected, Randolph “indulged in the most pungent ridicule of the Declaration of Independence and pronounced its doctrine of equal rights to be an absurd, ‘fanfaronade of metaphysical abstractions’”
 
Indeed, from 1819 to 1821, Southerners reiterated what the Declaration of Independence (specifically the so-called “equality clause”) really meant. To them, the simplest explanation was the best explanation: national independence, not individual liberty and equality.
 
Sen. Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky put the phrase “all men are created equal” into context:

A solemn appeal has been made to the Declaration of Independence, as if that instrument had a bearing upon this question; though, at that day, and long since, slavery existed in every State of the Union. That sentiment has been quoted, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain equal, inalienable rights; among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This sacred truth should be engraven upon every heart, for it is the foundation of all civil rights, and the palladium of our liberties. The meaning of this sentence is defined in its application; that all communities stand upon an equality; that Americans are equal with Englishmen, and have the right to organize such government for themselves as they shall choose, whenever it is their pleasure to dissolve the bonds which unite them to another people. The same principle applied to Missouri will defeat the object of gentlemen who advocate this restriction. Could this principle be reduced to practice in relation to every human being, it would be happy; but such is the character, and such the condition of man, that it is perpetually violated by every individual, and by every body politic…However unfortunate it may be, this great principle of equality, so delightful in theory, is but very partially regarded in practice; and I will not deny the allegation, when it is asserted that necessity often justifies the measure. Then, sir, let imperious necessity, in this case, also, prefer its claim to consideration.
​

​Rep. Benjamin Hardin of Kentucky asked whether the phrase “all men are created equal” had anything to do with declaring independence:

It is alleged by some that the Declaration of Independence, as soon as it was adopted by the Congress of 1776, emancipated and manumitted all the slaves in the then United States. This is certainly a very late discovery, and the people of the North, heretofore so fruitful in inventions, as the Patent Office can well testify, may rightly claim to be the authors of it. I would be glad that gentlemen would point out what part of the Declaration of Independence they rely on. At that time was not slavery tolerated in a number of the States? Whose representatives were the members of the Congress who framed and adopted that declaration? Were they not the representatives, exclusively, of the then free population of the United States? Who is meant in the declaration by the expression of, “We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in general Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these colonies”? Must not everyone answer that none but the then free population was alluded to? What are the efficient parts of the Declaration of Independence? The answer is, those parts only which declare our dependence upon Great Britain to be at an end, and assume a stand and character of a sovereign people among the nations of the earth. The balance of the declaration is nothing but a manifesto to the world, assigning and setting forth the causes which led to and brought about that mighty event. But is it not strange indeed that the framers and adopters of that declaration should have been ignorant of its import, because a number of them held slaves – some do so yet, and others did until their death.

​​Rep. Alexander Smyth of Virginia argued that, even if the Continental Congress had intended to declare emancipation as well as independence, it did not have the authority for the former:

Suppose that the Congress of 1776 had declared their religious creed; would that have established a religion for the United States? I presume not. It would have been said that they had nothing to do with that subject. They were charged with the exterior relations of the colonies, and had no power to emancipate a single slave. They asserted that man cannot alienate his liberty, nor by compact deprive his posterity of liberty. Slaves are not held as having alienated their liberty by compact. They are held under the law and usage of nations, from the remotest times of which we have any historical knowledge, and by the municipal laws of the States, over which the Congress of 1776 had not, and this Congress have not, any control. We agree with the Congress of 1776, that men, on entering into society, cannot alienate their right to liberty and property, and that they cannot, by compact, bind their posterity. And, therefore, we contend that the people of Missouri cannot alienate their rights, or bind their posterity by a compact with Congress. We are to understand this declaration of the opinion of Congress as they intended it to be understood. They certainly did not mean to say that such are the natural rights of man that they cannot be abridged by civil laws. They meant that an oppressed people may, if they are able, resist, and assert their freedom. They asserted the independence of the States against parliamentary usurpation; and that independence we maintain, except so far as it has been freely surrendered by the Constitution.

​Rep. Louis McClane of Delaware asserted that the phrase “all men are created equal” applied only to the actual polity (i.e. “the white freemen of this country”):

But the truth is that the Declaration of Independence had no reference to those persons who were at that time held in slavery. It was pronounced by the freemen of the country, and not by slaves. No one pretended that they acquired any claim to freedom on this account; on the contrary, the Revolution found them in a state of servitude, the acknowledgement of our actual independence left them so, and the Constitution of the United States perpetuated their condition. The Declaration of Independence was the act of open resistance on the part of the white freemen of the colonies, against the pretensions of the mother country to govern them without their consent; to assert their inalienable right of self-government, and to alter or abolish it whenever it should be necessary to affect their safety and happiness. It was the resistance of freemen to the assumption of a power on the part of Great Britain, precisely similar to that which we are now endeavoring to impose upon the people of Missouri…It is unreasonable to assert the contrary, when everyone knows that while the freemen of this country were openly resisting the usurpations of the British Crown, the did not relax in the slightest degree their hold upon the negro slave; and to him it was a matter of entire unconcern who should govern his master, as in all conditions his master would continue to govern him.

“Is it not wonderful,” observed Sen. Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina, “that, if the Declaration of Independence gave authority to emancipate, that the patriots who made it never proposed any plan to carry it into execution?” Macon further stressed that the Declaration, however its abstractions were to be construed, was not actually law, and certainly not the supreme law of the land. “That they are no part of it is as true as that they are no part of any other book,” he quipped. The Declaration made public an act of secession and meant no more than what its antecedent, the “Lee Resolution,” meant: “Resolved, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.” The Declaration was never, ever meant to be “Dr.” Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “promissory note,” continually revolutionizing American life.
 
Thomas Jefferson, the author of the document which King and other Northerners were invoking to bolster their anti-slavery arguments, was troubled by the Missouri Crisis. Specifically, he feared that the politicization of slavery, sectionalization of politics, and consolidation of power that was taking place would end in disunion. He was no doubt aware of King’s controversial speech, for he closely followed the debates and directly corresponded with the participants. Yet what did Jefferson think of Northerners like King? “King is ready to risk the Union for any chance of restoring his party to power and wriggling himself to the head of it,” he told President James Monroe. “I hope I shall be spared the pain of witnessing it either by the good sense of the people, or by the more certain reliance, the hand of death.” Neocons have written whole books to explain away what the Founding Fathers obviously believed, such as Garry Wills’ classics Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America.
 
A few years after writing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote a book, Notes on the State of Virginia, in which he responded to numerous and diverse foreign inquiries about the Old Dominion. On the question of whether it was advisable to increase Virginia’s population by immigration, Jefferson answered that non-British immigrants would probably be incompatible with Anglo-American political culture. After all, Virginia and the other American States were founded as British colonies, populated by British colonists, and still under a British-derived system of government. On the question of slavery, Jefferson answered that while it was true that slavery was an evil to both races, it was also true that both races were not equal, and thus blacks could not be free and equal with whites at the same time. In other words, emancipation, however desirable, would require the physical removal of the black race. What Jefferson, one of the most Enlightenment-influenced Founders, wrote about immigration and race in Notes completely contradicts everything that the neocons claim he meant in the Declaration. If only the bigoted, benighted Jefferson had true scholars like Jonah Goldberg, Dinesh D’Souza, and David Barton as editors, then he would not have lapsed into such nativism and racism!
 
The neocons’ interpretation of the Declaration of Independence is a heresy against the actual beliefs of the Founding Fathers, who most certainly did not believe in equality and democracy. The neocons’ belief that they have unlocked secret knowledge which foretells a utopian future is not all that different from other gnostic, chiliastic heresies throughout human history.
 
Inasmuch as the neocons derive their ideology from Lincoln’s own revolutionary rhetoric, it was no less of a heresy then than it is now (which is why Sen. Stephen Douglas beat Lincoln in 1858 and why 60% of Americans voted for an anti-Lincoln candidate in 1860). Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky (Lincoln’s political exemplar), Sen. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, and of course Sen. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina rejected any anti-slavery interpretation or application of the Declaration of Independence. When Clay, in 1842, was petitioned to emancipate his slaves because “all men are created equal,” he responded no differently from how Douglas would to Lincoln. “Do you believe that, in making that Declaration the States that concurred in it intended that it should be tortured into a virtual emancipation of all the slaves within their limits?” asked Clay. “To impute such a secret and unavowed prupose, would be to charge a political fraud upon the noblest band of patriots that ever assembled in council – a fraud upon the Confederacy of the Revolution, a fraud upon the Union of those States whose Constitution not only recognized the lawfulness of slavery, but permitted the importation of slaves from Africa until the year 1808.” In Webster’s historic eulogy to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, delivered at Boston’s Faneuil Hall just days after their deaths in 1826, he made no mention whatsoever of “all men are created equal,” but addressed the obvious: national independence. Calhoun, discussing the belief “that all men are born and equal” in his 1850 masterwork, got right down to the point. “Nothing can be more unfounded and false,” he wrote. “It rests upon the assumption of a fact, which is contrary to universal observation, in whatever light in may be regarded.” What was “the Great Triumvirate,” however, next to the statesmen Lindsey Graham, Ben Sasse, and Evan McMullin?
 
The neocons’ attempt to tell all of American history in terms of the Declaration of Independence (a recent popular history is literally called These Truths and is all about whether “the American experiment” has lived up to its own so-called “truths”) is not just stupid, but downright absurd. They are trying to reduce hundreds of years of eventful history to a single phrase. How is it even possible to reconcile American history – to be honest, a rather violent story of the conquest of a continent and the creation of a new country, involving the enslavement of one race, the displacement of another, and the exclusion of many others – with their Sunday-School story about “the idea of America,” or whatever? To take just one of countless examples, what in Theodore Roosevelt’s epic history, The Winning of the West, his tribute to the onward march of “civilization” over “savagery,” is compatible with the neocons’ Sunday-School stories? “American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tatar, New Zealander and Maori – in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people,” argued Roosevelt. “It is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of dominant world races.” Neocons have not just “retconned” the Declaration (“retcon,” short for “retroactive continuity,” is a literary device in which preexisting facts of a story are rewritten to be “continuous” with newer contradictory facts), but are constantly retconning all of American history so that it seems to support their ideology, which all comes down to a single sentence fragment taken out of context.
 
Nevertheless, the force of the Union victory in the Civil War made authoritative not only the disingenuous Hamiltonian construction of the Constitution, but also the insidious Lincolnian interpretation of the Declaration of Independence. The neocons insist on Americans remembering the Civil War as a morality play (as told by “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”) because they any positive memory of the Southern Confederates and the Northern Copperheads poses a threat to their brittle authority and flimsy ideology.
 
If not universal human equality and inalienable individual liberty, as the neocons have reinterpreted Lincoln’s reinterpretation of the Declaration of Independence, then what did the Founding Fathers truly mean by “all men are created equal,” after all? The meaning of the Declaration is, in fact, self-evident: to declare the independence of the Thirteen Colonies from the British Empire, for the reasons listed in detail. The Thirteen Colonies were fed up with being treated as second-class citizens and for being bullied whenever they stood up for themselves. Starting in 1763, there had been a vicious cycle of colonial backlashes and imperial crackdowns, superficially against “taxation without representation” but substantially about “home rule.” The breaking point occurred in 1774, when the Parliament made an example of Massachusetts, stripping the colony itself of self-government, stripping the people themselves of individual rights, and even closing the port of Boston. The Thirteen Colonies, populated by loyal British subjects and pious Christians, had relied on their mother country’s constitution, as well as their own colonial charters and compacts, to make the case for their rights, and believed firmly that God expected obedience to legitimate governments. When, in 1775, in the response to the resistance in Massachusetts, the Crown proclaimed the treason and rebellion of the Thirteen Colonies and prepared to make war on them, they had no choice but revolution – hence the apologetic prologue which has been the source of so much confusion and deception.
 
The Declaration of Independence painstakingly explained not only why the Thirteen Colonies had the right to secede (in that over-interpreted prologue), but also why they were seceding (in that “bill of particulars” that the speechwriters and columnists always seem to skip). Aside from the manifold grievances relating to colonial self-government (none of which, curiously, had anything to do with individual liberty and equality), their grievances included betrayals of “common blood,” such as inciting slave revolts, allying with the Indians, and hiring mercenaries. “He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy of the head of a civilized nation,” charged the Continental Congress. “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known role of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.” Much is made of the fact that Thomas Jefferson’s first draft included a stricken clause charging the Crown with the slave trade. “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither,” wrote Jefferson. “This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain.” Indeed, the Crown had repeatedly overruled Southern Colonies in their efforts to abolish the slave trade – or, as Jefferson put it, “he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.” Yet little is made of why the Thirteen Colonies wanted to abolish the slave trade: “he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them.” Grievances such as these prove that the Declaration was not about “human rights,” or whatever, and does not mean what the neocons believe. If “all men are created equal,” then why was it so insulting to compare a Christian ruler to a Muslim ruler, and what made it so barbaric for the British King to incite slave revolts, ally with the Indians, and hire mercenaries against his British subjects?
 
Dallas’ Willmoore Kendall and Georgetown’s George W. Carey, in The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (criticized by neocons like Harry Jaffa and praised by paleocons like M.E. Bradford), expertly demonstrate that the Declaration of Independence, far from an unprecedented proposition somehow simultaneously inventing and remaking “America” à la Garry Wills, was in keeping with every other American document from the early 1600s, such as the Mayflower Compact, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the Body of Liberties of Massachusetts Bay, and the Virginia Declaration of Rights. Kendall and Carey further demonstrate that these documents – the Declaration included – have little to do with individual rights, but rather with the corporate rights of polities to which individuals owed allegiance.
 
Kendall and Carey conclude that Lincoln’s revolutionary, revelatory reinterpretation of the Declaration of Independence was a “derailment” of the continuous progression of the American political tradition:

We are far from believing that the equality clause of the Declaration of Independence is meaningless. What does it mean? Our best guess is that the clause simply asserts the proposition that all peoples who identify themselves as one – that is, those who identify themselves as a society, nation, or state for action in history – are equal to others who have likewise identified themselves. This interpretation seems quite plausible in light of the first paragraph of the Declaration and the passages which immediately follow the equality clause.
 
We can put our point still another way. The Declaration asserts that Americans are equal to, say, the British and French. If the British and the French can claim equality among the sovereign states of the world, so, too, can Americans. This interpretation takes on added force in light of the major purpose of the Declaration. Specifically, the drafters of the Declaration are maintaining that the Americans are equal to the British and are, therefore, as free as the British to establish a form of government which “shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.” We think it important to note that equality is not listed among the ends to be secured by government. Equality, in the sense we have just described, is a value employed to justify the separation.

“All men are created equal,” in other words, meant that Americans were equal to Britons, that the colonies were equal to the mother country, that all of the Crown’s subjects had equal rights, but that since this constitutional equality had been refused, Americans would “assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s god entitle them.” That was the meaning of “equality” in the Declaration of Independence.
 
(To my Southern compatriots, yes, I am aware that Kendall and Carey slighted the Old Dominion, whose charter predated Plymouth’s by 14 years and was no less notable. In Kendall and Carey’s defense, they are using Eric Voeglin’s canon and acknowledge that it is somewhat incomplete.)
 
Contemporary historians of the American Revolution, such as David Ramsay of South Carolina and Mercy Otis Warren of Massachusetts, included nothing on the supposed secrets of the “equality clause” in their books. Ramsay described the Declaration of Independence as “the act of the united colonies for separating themselves from the government of Great Britain” and “the act of congress, for disserving the colonies from their parent state.” Warren described the Declaration as “the instrument which announced the final separation of the American colonies from Great Britain,” and traced its inspiration to “the rights of men, the privileges of Englishmen, and the claim of Americans…the principles of the Saxon ancestry of the British Empire, and of all the free nations of Europe…the opinions of [Edmund] Ludlow and [Algernon] Sydney, of [John] Milton and [James] Harrington…defended by the pen of the learned, enlightened, and renowned Locke…even Judge Blackstone, in his excellent commentaries on the laws of England.”
 
“The celebrated proposition contained in the Declaration of Independence is not to be understood literally,” argued James Fenimore Cooper of New York in 1838, identifying all the natural inequalities among mankind as well as the civil inequalities among Americans. “All that the great American proposition, therefore, can mean,” Cooper continued, “is to set up new and juster notions of natural rights than those which existed previously, by asserting, in substance, that God has not instituted political inequalities, as was pretended by the advocates of the jus divinium, and that men possessed a full and natural authority to form such social institutions as best suited their necessities.” According to Cooper, “equality,” like “liberty,” was “a word more used than understood.”
 
“We are not to subject such a performance as the Declaration of Independence to a too critical scrutiny, in respect to its generalizations,” William Gilmore Simms of South Carolina argued in 1837. Simms was certain that the Founding Fathers did not actually believe in equality or inalienable rights, at least not the “unlimited and qualified meaning” of the abolitionists – for if they did, then they either would have done something about it (if not abolishing slavery, then at least as abolishing property as a requirement to vote and hold office) or said something about what they meant. “The doubtful matter did not then provoke a question, since nobody gave it, then, any construction more authoritative than that which I have here assigned it,” Simms noted. “That such were the definitions of democracy, in the days of the Declaration, is fairly inferable from the fact, that they left the condition of their social world precisely as they found it.” Indeed, inequality, to Simms, was a manifest fact of nature, and inalienable rights, to Simms, were patently incompatible with a state of society, whatever the “finely sounding” and “sentimental” phrases of the Declaration. “Our excellent forefathers, when they pronounced this truth to be self-evident, were not in the best mood to become philosophers, however well calculated to approve themselves the best of patriots,” explained Simms. “They were much excited, nay, rather angry, in the days of the Declaration, and hence it is that what they alleged to be self-evident then, is, at this time, when we are comparatively cool, a source of very great doubt and disputation.”

For good measure, Simms provided a decidedly de-romanticized paraphrase of the Declaration of Independence:

But, be sure that our good fathers, in the revolution, never contemplated so wide a survey of the subject, when they insisted upon the perfect equality of the sons of men. They made the assertion in a more limited sense, evidently thinking not so much of the accouchement of Eve, as of the delivery of the American people. Their assertion meant no more than this: “You, George the Third, whom we think a tyrant, have presumed to call us, John  Hancock, Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, etc., traitors and rebels. Now, look you, George, we owe you no allegiance. We are as good men as you, any day. We are your equals. God created, or made, us so. Stand up and compare with us, if you dare. Compare us with your best men – your Norths, your Butes, and Germaines – and let us see where your superiority lies. Physically, we are as fully your match; morally and intellectually, your superiors. And so will our people compare with yours, and with the whole world. God has endowed them, equally with your people, with the capacity to govern and control themselves.”
​

​Of course, Cooper and Simms never read the columns of Jamie Kirchick, Noah Millman, and Reihan Salam, so what do they know?
 
To be honest, H.L. Mencken of Baltimore’s satirical “translation” of the Declaration of Independence into 1920s-era American vernacular expressed the original intention of “all men are created equal” much more accurately than any of the neocons’ disquisitions and divinations: “All we got to say on this proposition is this: first, me and you is as good as everybody else, and maybe a damn sight better.”

Globalism, the Highest Stage of Neo-Conservatism

​The neocons would love for the American Revolution to have been a Jacobin or Bolshevik revolution, complete with fiery manifestoes overthrowing all authority, smoking ruins of thrones and altars, and bloody executions of the privileged classes, but the fact is that it was a quintessentially “British” argument about constitutional authority which was settled by European realpolitik as much as American arms. John Dickinson’s “revolutionary” writings, learned in British law rather than pulsing with “the rights of man,” are not exactly “Ça Ira” or “Varchavianka,” and the imperial forces of the House of Bourbon are not exactly the sans-culottes or the Chernoe Znamia, either.
 
The neocons would love for the Declaration of Independence to have been a prototype of the United Nations’ “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” It is not addressed to all mankind, however, but to the British people, whom the Americans described as “consanguine” (i.e. “common blood”), “kindred,” and “brethren.” The Declaration is not a manifesto of abstract, universal truths, and only makes sense in an intra-Anglo context – as members of the same in-group talking to each other, one side holding another to account for violating the rules of the in-group. As an English-born South Carolinian put it in 1821, “The American Revolution was a family quarrel among equals.”
 
The neocons, who hate the Europe where many of their ancestors were pogromed (they exploit every ugly caricature of Europeans as snooty, lazy socialists to gin up American jingoism and chauvinism), have twisted a declaration of political independence from the British Empire into a declaration of civilizational independence from Europe as a whole. True, Americans bragged that their republican form of government was freer and fairer than that of European monarchs and aristocrats, that their dynamic capitalist economy offered more opportunity and prosperity than that of European feudalism and mercantilism, and that their geographic isolation from Europe kept them out of wars without end. In no way, however, have Americans ever denied that their nation and state were “European” in origin – that they were “Europe transplanted,” as the early South-Carolinian historian David Ramsay put it.
 
A typical neocon trick is to cite past periods of immigration to justify present immigration, despite massive quantitative and qualitative differences between the two. So, because Irish and Italians, therefore Mexicans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, and Nicaraguans. Because Greeks and Poles, therefore Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Vietnamese, and Indonesian. Because Jews and Armenians, therefore Afghanis, Eritreans, Somalians, Libyans, and other so-called “Syrian refugees.” In other words, because of a limited number of relatively assimilable Europeans over short periods of time, therefore masses of alien Third Worlders into perpetuity.
 
America’s European ancestry is obvious from its demographics. In the 1790 census, the country’s first, over 80% of the population were British in origin, with over 60% specifically English, the rest Scottish and Irish, as well as German, Dutch, and French. In other words, 80% of Americans were descended from the British Isles and 20% from the European Continent. “Where was there ever a confederacy of republics, in such territory, united as these states are to be, by the proposed Constitution?” asked John Dickinson in 1788. “Or, in which the people were so drawn together by religion, blood, language, manners, and customs, undisturbed by former feuds and prejudices?” Indians and Africans, though large in number and in some places outnumbering these European-Americans, were not counted as part of the polity, nor any other “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Indeed, the U.S. Constitution was written by “we the people of the United States of America,” addressed “to ourselves and our posterity,” and required its highest elected officials to be “natural-born citizens.”
 
In the Naturalization Act of 1790, the country’s first, citizenship was limited to “free white persons of good character.” James Madison and Benjamin Franklin, as framers at the Constitutional Convention, spoke of immigrants in terms of “great numbers of respectable Europeans” and “our good friends in England and other parts of Europe,” respectively. By contrast, during the first Congress, Rep. James Jackson of Georgia and Rep. Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts, although from opposing parties and sections, were “against the indiscriminate admission of foreigners to the highest rights of human nature, upon terms so incompetent to secure the society from being overrun with the outcasts of Europe” and argued that “rather than have the common class of vagrants, paupers, and other outcasts of Europe, that we had better be as we are, and trust to the natural increase of our population for inhabitants,” respectively. Those were the terms of the immigration debate, if it can even be called a debate: what should the term of naturalization be for Europeans? Was George Washington violating “the idea of America” when he signed that act into law? Were John Adams and Thomas Jefferson when they renewed the act in the years that followed? If only these xenophobic Presidents had been advised by true patriots like Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz, and David Frum!
 
There was plenty of humanitarian rhetoric from the Founding Fathers about the U.S.A. as an “asylum for mankind,” which neocons, who thrive on disinformation, continually cite out of context, pretending that the Founding Fathers’ idealistic notions about the trickle of European émigrés is at all applicable to today’s torrent of Latinos bum-rushing the border to protest “Anglos” or “gringos.” Even Thomas Paine (one of the most radical of the Founders and thus a favorite of the neocons) had what can only be called a “pan-European” view of American identity. According to Paine, “This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe.” Paine boasted that “we claim brotherhood with every European Christian” and that “all Europeans meeting in America, or any other quarter of the globe, are countrymen.” Sounds like Paine should be reported to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League for hate speech!
 
In the 1960 census, the country’s last before the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, the population (now counting the previously excluded non-white minorities) was still 90% white, though with the Southern-, Central-, and Eastern-European immigration wave from 1890 to 1920, significantly less “Anglo-American” than in 1790. It was John F. Kennedy who spearheaded “immigration reform” (that is, repealing the selective and restrictive system established in 1924 and 1952), but he assured Americans that his proposal would have “little effect on the number of immigrants admitted annually” and “does not seek to make over the face of America.” After JFK’s assassination, his brothers, Edward (“Teddy”) and Robert (“Bobby”), took up the cause, and they too tried, in the latter’s words, to “set to rest any fears that this bill will change the ethnic, political, or economic makeup of the United States.”
 
Of course, the Kennedys were wrong. The Census Bureau now projects that by the middle of the 21st century, the U.S.A. (due to the combination of high immigration levels and birthrate differentials between immigrants and natives) will become a “majority-minority” country, meaning that non-white minorities will make up a new majority over whites. If you have anything to say about these demographic changes that is not overtly celebratory, then you are a Nazi (at least according to the neocons, who seem to see Nazis under their beds at night).
 
“America” is – or was? – not just “European” in origin, however, but “Anglo-European.” Alexis de Tocqueville, the French gentleman-scholar who toured America in the 1830s, described Americans as “Anglo-Americans,” the U.S.A. as “the Anglo-American Union,” and, contrasting the Anglo-Americans with Mexicans and South Americans, concluded that the former’s political culture was “the peculiar cause which renders that people the only one of the American nations that is able to support a democratic government.” There are simply too many ways to count how American culture and society is influenced by British culture and society, because the former is quite literally descended from the latter. Language, perhaps, is the most obvious: Americans speak English (or at least they used to) because America was originally populated by the English.
 
The American system of government itself, despite American hubris, is English in origin. “Limited government,” “representative government,” and “mixed government” were all originally English ideas and institutions. They are political traditions that Americans inherited from their mother country and adapted to their new country.
 
The U.S. Constitution, for one, was patterned after the English constitution (two of the only countries at the time which even had a concept of a “constitution”), which also divided power between separate executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. The U.S. Bill of Rights, for another, is essentially a restatement of the English Bill of Rights, which had been adopted over a hundred years earlier. Those are just two of the grandest examples, but there are many more. Remember earlier this year, when the corporate media was having conniption fits over Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ speech at the National Sheriffs’ Convention, in which he described “the office of the sheriff” as “a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement”? Well, the word “sheriff” is a combination of the old Anglo-Saxon words “shire” (i.e. “county”) and “reeve” (i.e. “guardian”).
 
In 1774, at the First Continental Congress, John Adams of Massachusetts recorded an enlightening exchange on the Committee for Stating Rights, Grievances, and Means of Redress. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia opened the debate by declaring, “The rights are built on a fourfold foundation; on nature, on the British constitution, on charters, and on immemorial usage.” John Jay of New York agreed with Lee. “It is necessary to recur to the law of nature, and the British constitution, to ascertain our rights,” replied Jay. “The constitution of Great Britain will not apply to some of our charter rights.” At that point, John Rutledge of South Carolina objected to all of the idle philosophizing. “Our claims, I think, are well-founded on the British constitution, and not on the law of nature,” argued Rutledge, adding that the British-American colonists were never in the theoretical “state of nature” and therefore could not “set up what constitution they please.” James Duane of New York agreed with Rutledge, explaining that he was “for grounding our rights on the laws and constitutions of the country from which we sprung, and charters, without recurring to the law of nature, because this will be a feeble support.” Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania attacked the very idea of natural law:

I never could find the rights of Americans in the distinction between taxation and legislation, nor in the distinction between laws for revenue and for the regulation of trade. I have looked for our rights in the law of nature, but could not find them in a state of nature, but always in a state of political society…I have looked for them in the constitution of the English government, and there found them. We may draw them from this source securely

Adams, for his part, took a pragmatic position, arguing that natural law should not be asserted idly in the place of the constitution, but that it may soon be “as a resource to which we might by driven by Parliament much sooner than we are aware.” The committee compromised and agreed “to found our rights upon the laws of nature, the principles of the English constitution, and charters and compacts.”
 
M.E. Bradford wrote extensively on the English origins of American government (Bill Bennett, the neocon who got the NEH job instead of Bradford, extensively wrote children’s books). In Original Intentions, Bradford quotes Carter Braxton of Virginia in May of 1776:

The testimony of the learned Montesquieu is very respectable. “There is,” says he, “one nation in the world, that has for the direct end of its constitution political liberty.” This constitution and these laws have also been those of Virginia, and let it be remembered that under them she flourished and was happy. The same principles which led the English to greatness, animates us. To that principle our laws, our customs, and our manners are adapted, and it would be perverting all order, to oblige us, by a novel government, to give up our laws, our customs, and our manners. However necessary it may be to shake off the authority of arbitrary British dictators, we ought nevertheless to adopt and perfect that system, which England has suffered to be so grossly abused, and the experience of ages has taught us to venerate.

​(As a side note, the romantic portrayal of Americans groaning under British tyranny is itself a “retcon,” though the neocons are not to blame for this one – it has been a myth since the American Revolution itself. The truth is that on the eve of the Revolution, thanks to the liberal political culture which they had inherited from its mother country, their remoteness from any sort of central government, and their wide open frontier, Americans were already the freest people on earth. The Revolution established American self-government, but it did not really invent any new American freedoms, except for those which had already developed over time as a result of the absence of a noble class and established church. As the South-Carolinian historian David Ramsay put it, after the Revolution the American people “scarcely perceived” any change in their form of government.)
 
The neocons would love for the Philadelphia Convention to have been a gigantic Parisian-style salon of classical liberals philosophizing about the role of government, but the truth is that was the historical example of the English Constitution, not the theoretical systems of Locke or Rousseau, which had the greatest influence on the framing and ratifying process.
 
Like all beliefs, neo-conservatism is not a purely intellectual or ideological phenomenon; there are no immaculately conceived ideas. For instance, King Henry VIII broke with Rome and established his own church not out of theological convictions, but to gratify his own lusts for pleasure and power. Likewise, despite its disinterested pretensions, there is a partisan agenda behind the neocon ideology. Believe it or not, but Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, and John Kasich are not deep thinkers who came to their conclusions on their own, but rather politicians carrying out an agenda. What the neocons really want can be summed up in the memorable phrase of VDare.com’s Steve Sailer, “Invade the World, Invite the World, In Hock to the World.” The American Conservative’s Daniel Larison describes the neocon agenda similarly: “Imperialism, Immigration, and Insolvency.”
 
The perversions of the Declaration of Independence are in the news narratives every day. “All men are created equal,” so we must repeal our restrictive, selective immigration laws and open up our country to mass-immigration from the Third World. “All men are created equal,” so we must repeal our protective tariffs and open up our economy to competition with the Third World. “All men are created equal,” so we must lock down our schools, militarize our police, and abandon our cities in the name of desegregation and integration. “All men are created equal,” so we must practice racial discrimination in colleges and careers (even for recent immigrants who have no history of discrimination here to be overcome). “All men are created equal,” so we must bomb Serbia, Libya, and Syria to solve their ethno-religious conflicts, and, in fact, bomb anywhere anything bad is happening or anyone bad is in charge. “All men are created equal,” so we cannot do anything about illegal immigration and the crime, poverty, and disease it spreads. “All men are created equal,” so we must dispatch our military around the world to guard the untouched borders of other countries, but cannot guard our own trampled border. “All men are created equal,” so we cannot do anything about the cheap labor subverting American prosperity or the cheap votes subverting American democracy. “All men are created equal,” so we must destruct and reconstruct Afghanistan and Iraq to be modern pluralistic states. “All men are created equal,” so we must fight Muslim terrorism by fighting Iran anti-terrorist states in the Middle East. “All men are created equal,” so we must mass-resettle refugees from our Middle-Eastern and African wars, (although because “all men are created equal,” we cannot vet them, either). “All men are created equal,” so we must push our military up to Russia’s border in the Baltic, stage “regime change” on Russia’s border in the Caucasus, and fight proxy wars against Russia in the Near East.
 
In a 1996 article from Foreign Affairs magazine, “Toward A Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” the neocons Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol take Lincoln’s revolutionary rhetoric father than he ever imagined to argue why the Declaration of Independence requires the U.S.A. to impose its “principles” abroad:

The remoralization of America at home ultimately requires the remoralization of American foreign policy. For both follow from Americans’ belief that the principles of the Declaration of Independence are not merely the voices of a particular culture but are universal, enduring, “self-evident” truths…For conservatives to preach the importance of upholding the core elements of the Western tradition at home, but to profess indifference to the fate of American principles abroad, is an inconsistency that cannot help but gnaw at the heart of conservatism…A true conservatism of the heart ought to emphasize both personal and national responsibility, relish the opportunity for national engagement, embrace the possibility of national greatness, and restore a sense of the heroic, which has been sorely lacking in recent years…Deprived of the support of an elevated patriotism, bereft of the ability to appeal to national honor, conservatives will ultimately fail in their effort to govern America. And Americans will fail in their responsibility to lead the world.

Yes, the Founding Fathers were “preaching” to the world, which Americans now have a duty to “lead.” That is why American foreign policy for nearly a century and half after American independence was, as Kagan and Kristol would say, “isolationist,” “nativist,” and “protectionist.”
 
In Kagan and Kristol’s formulation, “Western traditions” have nothing to do with “the West” – nothing to do with the pre-Christian world of tribes and clans, solstices and equinoxes, chieftains and shamans – nothing to do with the Graeco-Roman world of democratic city-states and republican empires, philosophy and poetry, classical art and architecture – nothing to do with the thrones and altars, law and theology, and cathedrals and crusades of Christendom – nothing to do with the proliferation of knowledge during the Renaissance, Reformation, or Scientific Revolution – but begin and end with the Enlightenment (Given the neocons’ religious reverence for this period, a better term may be “the Revelation.”) Yet the neocons are not interested in the thought of David Hume and Immanuel Kant, however: to them, “the Enlightenment” means “democracy” and “capitalism,” or “classical liberalism,” and that is where their interest ends.
 
“The West,” redefined by Kagan and Kristol as Enlightenment-inspired classical-liberal values, rather than the identity and heritage of the European peoples, is good and must be upheld, but actual Western cultures and nations have no value (unless they interfere with “Western values,” in which case they are bad and must be destroyed). In this upside-down neocon world, the Russian punk-rock band “Pussy Riot” (self-described Trotskyites who protest Vladimir Putin by pleasuring themselves with frozen chickens in a supermarket, having an orgy at the Moscow Zoological Museum, vandalizing St. Petersburg’s Liteinyi Bridge so that it resembles a phallus, and disrupting services in the Church of Christ the Savior to film a music video) represents “Western values,” but when Donald Trump spoke in Warsaw about “Western civilization,” that posed a dire threat to “Western values.” (Seriously, Pussy Riot has been funded by the U.S. State Department, hosted by American think tanks like “Students for Liberty,” and even had a cameo on the popular show “House of Cards.”)
 
Last, but not least, the fervent language which Kagan and Kristol use – “remoralization,” “belief,” “principles,” “preach,” “fate,” “gnaw at the heart,” “embrace,” “elevated,” and so on – is, frankly, more religious than political. Secularists who have no time for any such “superstitions” will speak of the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, and “The New Colossus” as if Moses brought them down from Mount Sinai. What happens to “separation of church and state” when the state becomes a sort of church?

The-Neocons-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named

If you do not mind, I would like to end with a story from my own life. My wife is a big fan of the “Harry Potter” book series, and when I was a boy, I enjoyed them, too. She recently convinced me to try re-reading them, insisting that they did not just hold up, but actually improved with age. I was skeptical – I only read serious fiction, you see! – but I love her, so I tried. She was right, by the way, as wives usually are.
 
After finishing each book, we would watch the corresponding movie, too. There is a scene in the last movie that really stuck out to me. Before the hero can finally face the villain, he has to destroy what are called “horcruxes.” A horcrux is dark-magical object into which someone splits his soul. A horcrux gives you power over life and death, because even if your body is killed, a fragment of your soul remains, and using other dark magic, you can restore your body. Creating a horcrux requires the taking of a life – a sort of human sacrifice. Horcruxes are considered to be an unforgivable evil. “Harry Potter” is set in a boarding school, and among other things, the villain turned three out of the four heirlooms of the school’s founders into horcruxes.
 
To find one of the missing horcruxes – a lady’s diadem – he talks to the ghost of her daughter, played by Kelly MacDonald. She is reluctant to help the hero, because years ago she was deceived by the villain, who was also looking for her mother’s diadem. The hero tries to comfort her. “He’s lied to many people,” he starts. The ghost, sad and serene until this point, suddenly swoops up to the hero and screams in his face, “I know what he’s done! I know who he is! He defiled it…with dark magic!”
 
The point of that digression is that the neocons have defiled the heirlooms of our own Founding Fathers with their own dark magic, too. They stole the Declaration of Independence, one of our most significant historical documents, and twisted it to their own evil ends. Now the Declaration is no longer about thirteen high-spirited colonies separating from a heavy-handed mother country. Now it is about the U.S.A. placing itself at the vanguard of a world revolution, levelling traditions and institutions, nations and states, peoples and places, all in the name of “the Proposition.”

What is to be Done?

The good news is that the neocons have been on the way out since they busted their public credibility on the Iraq War. Neocons have gone from holding positions of hard power in the Bush Administration to serving as forgettable talking heads. Do Jennifer Rubin and Max Boot at the Washington Post, or Bari Weiss and Bret Stephens at the New York Times, have any real political influence? No, they write to reassure left-wing liberals whenever right-wingers run off the plantation. As Slate reported of the neocon boy-wonder Ben Shapiro, he is “a conservative liberals can count on.” Does Paul Ryan really speak for the U.S. House and represent the people of the 1st District of Wisconsin? Did John McCain and Jeff Flake really represent the State of Arizona? No, they mouth platitudes from our fundamentalist civic religion at think-tank fundraisers while loyally serving party donors over their hometown voters. Donald Trump, for all his personal sleaziness and oafishness, represented a popular rejection of the neocons on the American Right, and that is something worth fighting for.
 
The bad news is that the neocons are not going to go down without a fight. Neocons may be hated by the people whenever they are honest about what they believe, but they are highly intelligent, highly, organized, and still control a great deal of money and power. For example, despite doing everything they could to stop Trump in 2015 and 2016 – including voting for Hillary Clinton – by 2017 they managed to worm their way into Trump’s administration. Worst of all is Nimrata Randhawa (or “Nikki Haley”), a proud Sikh-American whose claim to fame has been tearing down the Confederate flag in South Carolina, and now daily accuses Iran and Russia of war crimes from her perch at the United Nations.
 
 The Declaration of Independence is not, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “the father of all moral principle” and “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.” Rather, the Declaration, as Jefferson Davis said, “is to be construed by the circumstances and purposes for which it was made.” It was made to declare the Thirteen Colonies independent from the British Empire, not to declare that the U.S.A. must impose its brand of democratic capitalism and managerial liberalism on the rest of the world, and must, at the same time, welcome the rest of the world, no matter how burdensome or destructive that becomes.
 
Forgive me for saying that that the Declaration of Independence is just not as big of a deal as we have been taught to believe. The Declaration is indeed an important part of our history which should be studied and celebrated, but it was never supposed to be the fountainhead of a national (or, if the neocons had their way, international) revolutionary doctrine. Thomas Jefferson would be utterly baffled by the disquisitions and divinations on the Declaration’s arcane meanings that are commonplace among newspaper columnists and political speechwriters.
 
When Sen. Benjamin Wade of Ohio, in the debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, asked what was the “principle” of the American Revolution, if not universal human equality, Sen. John Pettit of Indiana correctly replied, “They declared and asserted the right, the principle that we had the right, to be a free and independent nation, and to fix our domestic and home institutions as we pleased.” That is the only legitimate way to interpret the Declaration; everything else is some form of ideological projection.
 
The neocons know that if they can rewrite our past, then they can write our future. That is the only reason that they even pretend to care about history (which aside from whatever factoids and quotations they can mine from it to support their international agenda, means nothing to them). Yet our history means everything to us. It is our story: the story of who we are, where we came from, and what we believe. We cannot allow anyone else to tell that story for us or take that story from us.