The American Mind, Opened

In a letter to Henry Lee penned a little more than a year before his death, Thomas Jefferson famously described the Declaration of Independence as “an expression of the American mind.” With great learning and insight, Paul Seaton explores the founding document that gave voice to that mind in his book, “Public Philosophy and Patriotism: Essays on the Declaration and Us.”

Seaton calls the Declaration the “first epic poem that Americans penned about themselves.” Simply describing its well-thought-out political theory is not enough. The Declaration tells a grand story of a people vying for self-government in a land offering much promise, but also plenty of peril. It speaks of the spirited character of a free people and the lengths they will go to secure liberty for themselves under God’s watchful eye.

With logos, the revolutionaries would have been able to make the right arguments. But without thumos, they wouldn’t have had the courage to rebel against King George III and the intimidating might of the British Army.

The best Americans of the revolutionary era, Seaton writes, were “principled and prudent, manly, a lover of liberty, capable of cooperation and sacrifice,” and understood themselves “within an estimable tradition of liberty.” This is similar to how Harry Jaffa, whom Seaton briefly cites, once described the American founders: they were “morally and politically wise men, the kind of characters from whom Aristotle himself drew his portraits of the moral and political virtues.”

Modeling the seriousness of the framers of the Declaration, Seaton focuses his investigation on an assortment of key topics: human nature, self-government, equality and liberty rightly understood, and political justice. Though this philosophical tour is important, it’s a mistake to think of the Declaration as solely a theoretical document. Instead, it should be viewed above all as a work of practical statesmanship: “to declare the causes that impel separation” from the British Empire.

Seaton does yeoman’s work dispelling the myths that persist in our civic rhetoric about the Declaration. Contrary to an overly libertarian reading, the Declaration is not ultimately concerned with the protection of individual rights. Rather, it’s interested in the “Safety and Happiness” of the governed, or what Seaton calls the “alpha and the omega of collective existence.”

This speaks to the Declaration’s moral horizon, which is consistent with traditional morality, or the basic agreement between Athens and Jerusalem. It is very far from confusing liberty with licentiousness. As Seaton correctly writes, it presupposes “objective moral norms, from natural right to moral virtues.”

Seaton does important work refuting the Declaration’s critics today.

On the left, Seaton dispatches Danielle Allen’s preoccupation with promoting an egalitarian vision of “democracy,” which contrasts sharply with the American founders’ many broadsides against pure democracy found in the pages of “The Federalist.” Rather than unleashing a radical form of egalitarianism, the Declaration’s conception of equality declares a truth about all human beings – not something we must constantly progress toward.

Meanwhile on the right, Seaton chides Adrian Vermeule’s concept of “common good constitutionalism.” It carelessly shoves aside the founders’ concerns with protecting individual rights, he contends, in favor of a “grandiose conception of the Common Good” that’s promoted through the aegis of the administrative state.

But the Declaration stands against arbitrary laws and despotism. In fact, it forcefully condemned Parliament for running roughshod over the American legislature, which Seaton calls the “chief misdeed” of the British. Like the administrative state today, Parliament attacked a “sovereign people in its character as self-governing,” which necessitated an unequivocal response in return.

Seaton connects this argument to the federal government overstepping its bounds during the Covid shutdowns, among other abuses of Americans’ liberties in recent years. He contrasts how the government tends to operate today with the Declaration’s teaching that “government is erected to serve a free people, not the other way around.”

The Declaration understands human beings as moral agents who have the capacity to deliberate about political things. Such beings are endowed with this capacity by God, who is mentioned four times in the Declaration – as “Creator, Legislator, Providence, and Supreme Judge.” Seaton is perhaps too harsh on the Declaration’s theology, which is of course insufficient apart from supporting the political goals of revolution and independence.

Seaton tallies off the Declaration’s most prominent modern-day opponents, including affirmative action and its cousin identity politics, which he argues strike the heart of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s idea that we should be judged not by race but “by the content of [our] character.”

And then there are the “Resisters” to the first Trump administration. They were not problematic because they disagreed with the president. Rather, they issued “mere denunciations, mere epithets” instead of reasoned speech and worked to undermine a constitutionally elected president. 

A heavy moralism is a core part of the Resistance’s “religion of humanity,” to use a term of the philosopher Pierre Manent. It is one that’s “deeply anti-philosophic, at war with the reality of human beings and the human mind,” Seaton writes. Their Manichean view divides Americans by race into oppressor versus oppressed classes, which John Fonte has called “transnational progressive ideology.” Believing in the holy trinity of race, sex, and gender, Seaton maintains that these fanatics are “marching forward to a new world order” that firmly rejects the Declaration’s teachings.

For Americans living close to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration’s signing, Seaton’s reminders of the conditions of freedom are much needed in light of the various threats to the founders’ regime. The “Declaration contains perennial wisdom – wisdom that can not only guide but also judge us Americans today,” Seaton teaches. The only way through our current political struggles starts with imitating the mind and character of the men who modeled statesmanship in 1776.

Mike Sabo is the editor of RealClear’s American Civics portal.