by Mark Franke
Most Americans can recall the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence. “When in the Course of human events” and “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Perhaps that is as it should be, that we remember the Declaration as a philosophical document expressing our national aspirations.
But the Declaration’s purpose was not simply philosophical. It also was a political document, carefully constructed to rally a mishmash of separate colonies into a unified whole pursuing the common goal of self-governance.
A war had to be won.
George Gallup wasn’t around back then to assess public opinion so we don’t know how the populace felt about a war for independence. John Adams suggested that one-third of the colonists favored complete independence, another one-third wanted to stay loyal to Great Britain within the empire, and a final one-third didn’t know or care. Assuming Adams was even close to being right, that demographic did not bode well for what the Continental Congress had in mind.
This is where the Declaration’s middle section, at least half of the document by length, proves its value. Thomas Jefferson lists 27 abuses by King George that he refused to address. It was a political manifesto meant to get people’s attention.
My monthly Socratic discussion group considered these charges at our September meeting. Are they exaggerated for political purposes? We preferred the term “rhetorically sharpened” so as to appeal to the broad middle of the colonial population.
Appeal how? By painting King George as the common enemy, one that the majority could rally against.
It worked, at least to the extent that the representatives of all 13 colonies voted in favor of independence. The subsequent reading of the Declaration in public settings was met with enthusiasm, enough enthusiasm to carry the Continental Army through the hardships of winters like Valley Forge and a continuing series of battlefield defeats.
There is a moral question underlying this. Did it require the identification of a common enemy to achieve sufficient unity to prosecute that war? Were life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness too ephemeral to encourage sufficient sacrifice across 13 separate colonies?
Prior to the outbreak of shots being fired at Lexington and Concord, many colonists saw Parliament as the threat to their liberty while proclaiming their loyalty to the king. So long as this was a commonly held opinion, the independence lobby in Congress was not likely to generate a critical mass of public support to prosecute the war. That said, it was a stroke of political genius to redirect public outrage at the person of the king. Otherwise, the moderates could continue in their belief that the whole dispute was over representation in Parliament that could be negotiated. That may be an oversimplification but the premise holds.
The 27 charges may be overstated and partially untrue. The most egregious, such as Jefferson’s blaming King George for imposing slavery on the colonists, were eliminated on the floor of Congress before the final language was approved.
Things haven’t changed all that much. The most news-prominent political movements today are focused on enemy identification. Speak with these true believers and you will hear a litany of what is wrong in our country and who is to blame. You can ask for considered, nuanced and workable alternatives for all these wrongs, but don’t expect much.
It must be in our human nature to prefer the negative over the positive, the complaint over the solution. We are trained like Pavlov’s dogs to respond to the ringing bell of enemy identification.
There must be a gene in our makeup that prioritizes criticism over other responses. It’s not just in politics; listen to a group of Monday-morning quarterbacks and you will learn all the ways their favorite teams messed up the day before. Criticism overrides critical thinking.
My Socratic group was close to succumbing to this bias toward negativity when someone reminded us that the Declaration begins with the common good before moving to the common enemy. It ends with a clear call to positive action to address the grievances. I suspect that our greatest generation, many of whom were sitting in that stuffy room in the Pennsylvania state house, would have preferred to keep the document’s appeal at the philosophical level but there was that pesky war to fight.
The Virginia Declaration of Rights, also written in 1776, asserted that an experiment in liberty and self-government requires faithfulness to “justice, moderation, temperance, frugality and virtue.” Appealing to the false idol of a common enemy, while proven politically effective, falls quite short of this ideal.
Is a noble cause tarnished by ignoble tactics? Does the end justify the means or is it no more than a convenient fig leaf?
As much as I don’t like it, sometimes idealism gets mugged by reality.
Mark Franke, M.B.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice-chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.
