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The Intent Of The Declaration Of Independence

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In his book The Nation That Never Was, Kermit Roosevelt lays out the standard story we are all taught about our history. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are our founding documents. They lay out our principles of freedom and equality. The Declaration teaches us that All Men Are Created Equal and entitled to certain inalienable rights. P. 8 et seq. The Constitution puts that theory into practice. It’s so engrained in our minds that it’s hard to imagine contesting it.

But people have. Roosevelt gives examples from the 19th Century. White supremacists across the nation argued that these documents justified slavery, the eradication of Native Americans, and second-class citizenship for women, among other inequalities. Black people and Abolitionists said that equality and freedom were meant for everyone in the country, not just White men of property.

This dispute continued into the Civil Rights Era in the 20th Century. In his I Have A Dream speech, Martin Luther King said that the Declaration was a guarantee of freedom and equality for all.

“I have a dream,” he said, “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’” P. 23.

Malcom X saw the Declaration as a call to action for Black people, who he said were a nation within a nation. The US had abused Black people for hundreds of years, and refused to treat them as human beings. Therefore, just as the colonists were justified in rebelling against an abusive King, Black people were justified in rebelling against White rule. For him, the Declaration was not about equality, but about the right to throw out the oppressors.

Roosevelt offers four arguments that we shouldn’t interpret the statement “all men are created equal” as a political foundation for the US government.

First, if we interpret that statement as Lincoln did in the Gettysburg Address, or King did in his I Have A Dream speech, Jefferson would have to be condemning slavery and granting the freedmen the same rights as White people. Jefferson obviously wasn’t saying that. He himself was a slaver: he enslaved his own children by Sally Hemings. This was perfectly legal in Virginia, which passed a statute in 1662 saying that citizenship of a person depends on the citizenship of the mother. This was necessary because “questions have arisen” after a Virginia court decided that the daughter of a White man with nn enslaved woman was a free woman. P. 45.

Second, the ideal of equality is irrelevant to Jefferson’s argument. There is no other mention of equality in the Declaration. There’s a long list of abuses and offenses committed by the King of England, and it’s those abuses that justify throwing off the King’s rule by force, not the equality of anyone with anyone. It wouldn’t affect Jefferson’s argument if the King were treating Englishmen equally with the Colonists by oppressing both, .

Third, Jefferson’s first draft complained that the King introduced slavery into the Colonies and then overruled the Colonist’s attempts to terminate the slave trade. That was taken out by the Signers, leaving only the complaint that the King was stirring up rebellion among the slaves. That’s the equivalent of a demand to have the king stay out of Colonial slavery.

Fourth, you wouldn’t make equality a principle and then exclude people from the definition of “all men”. That makes you look bad, especially because England had already outlawed slavery. [Adding on edit: This is an overstatement of the facts. See the comments of Michael Conforti below. I may also have overstated Roosevelt’s point. I quoted his text in a comment below.] Continuing slavery makes you look like hypocrites in the eyes of potential allies. Relatedly, freedom and equality of all citizens was not the dominant view, and calling that self-evident would look foolish.

So, what did Jefferson mean? He claims that it is self-evidently true that all men are created equal and endowed with equal rights. Then he says

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,

This is the actual principle that motivates the Declaration: government power comes from the consent of the governed, and the governed have a natural right to withdraw that consent if the government misuses its power.

Jefferson explains that the Colonists aspire “to the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them”. He’s basing his entire argument on Natural Law, not laws created by humans. He’s saying that there is no Divine Right of Kings, that the King is just a man, not a person born to rule, or ordained by the Almighty with the right to rule. This was mostly accepted by this point even in England. But it moves the argument onto solid ground, the grounds of consent. Roosevelt says that the Declaration is a document of political philosophy, not of human rights.

And how does slavery, the antithesis of freedom and equality, fit in?. Roosevelt says that Jefferson is referring to the generally accepted idea of government at that time. It comes from the likes of Jean-jacques Rousseau, as we saw in The Dawn Of Everything. It begins by imagining a society in a state of nature. Everyone is free and equal, and has certain natural rights. But they have no way to protect those rights other than their own strength, leading to a war of all against all in which life is brutish, nasty, etc., following Hobbes.

So men formed governments to protect those rights. The men who formed the government agree to defend each other against the outsiders, who have no protection from that government. The Declaration doesn’t say anything about the rights of outsiders like slaves and Indigenous Americans. It only addresses the rights of insiders, the White English colonists, as against their rulers.

Slavery is perfectly consistent with this view of nationhood. The slaves, Native Americans, and others are outsiders, beyond the protection of government and not entitled to equality or freedom, except as the government is willing to provide.

Discussion

1. Many of the books I”ve discussed here have changed my understanding of something I was taught in school. I think one reason I don’t have trouble changing my mind is that so few things seem critical to my self-understanding. For example, I was taught that there was a fixed external truth, and that our human truths are mere approximations of that truth. Now I think differently about truth. But that doesn’t change anything about my self-perception or my day-to-day interactions with other people. On the other hand, when I am accused of bad behavior towards others I feel an assault on my self-perception, and I try to change my behavior.

The standard story seems critically important to lots of right-wing partisans, as we saw in the right-wing reaction to the 1619 Project, and the hissy-fit about Critical Race Theory. It’s one thing to say: my principles include the belief that all men are crated equal and have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s another to say one of my principles is that Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders believed that and said so in the Declaration and the Constitution. The latter strikes me as akin to a religious belief, analoguous to the early Egyptians believing that the dead require leavened bread and wheat beer and changing their entire agriculture to fit that belief.

2. The Declaration may not have originally stood for the proposition that all men are created equal, but now it absolutely does. The history of that change of perception is important, because it tells us that we as a nation can change. Slavery was once widely accepted. Now it’s not. Our ancestors reversed that consensus, and we can and should be proud of that. It is as inspiration to work for a better country.

The Search For The Origins Of The State

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Related posts

Posts on The Dawn Of Everything: Link
Posts on Pierre Bourdieu and Symbolic Violence: link
Posts trying to cope with the absurd state of political discourse: link
Posts on Freedom and Equality. link

In Chapter 10 of The Dawn Of Everything the authors, David Graeber and David Wengrow, take up the search for the origins of the state. They discuss current theories of the nature of the state. They provide a different framework for understanding the term in ancient times, and even suggest that the earliest versions of these organizational structures were part-time, just as agriculture was part-time. Then they give examples of how their theory works.

Theories of the State

Today almost everyone lives under the governance of a nation-state. The generally accepted definition was suggested by Rudolph von Ihering in the late 1800s and is now associated with Max Weber: “… any institution that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within a given territory….” P. 359. But that’s not the way things worked in the earliest large groups.

Marxists suggested that states emerged to protect the power of an emerging ruling class, but the authors reject this theory.

A third theory is quite common: as the population in any area increases, you need top-down authority to coordinate and plan. But, as we’ve seen, this isn’t right, because a large number of ancient polities operated quite well without an autocratic leader endowed with the power of violence.

The authors suggest that at least for ancient societies we should consider three factors:

  • Sovereignty, meaning the control of violence directed at members of the group and the right to authorize other to inflict violence;
  • Administration, meaning control over information. This can be of two kinds. Frequently it means factual information necessary to keep things operating, for example taxes due and collected, or corvée obligations. Particularly in early societies it means esoteric or cultic knowledge, for example, explanations of the cosmos and the roles of people in it.
  • Charisma, meaning a personal power of persuasion that enables one to dominate others.

Each of these factors is a form of dominance, which the authors see as the basis of the state. The authors rephrase the search for the origins of the state from their perspective:

How did large-scale forms of domination first emerge, and what did they actually look like? What, if anything, do they have to do with arrangements that endure to this day? P. 370.

Dominance in early societies

This material takes up most of the chapter. The authors give examples of societies organized under one form of dominance, which they call First-Order Societies, then societies with two of the forms of dominance, Second-Order Societies. The material is fascinating, and the examples support the use of their categories. I’m only going to discuss one illustration, the Chavin Culture, a pre-Inca group located on the western slopes of the Andes down to the sea near what is now Lima Peru.

This culture seems to have arisen around 3000 BCE, and flowered around 1200 BCE. It lasted another 800 years before disappearing. The authors say there is little evidence of the use of violence, no evidence of a formal bureaucracy, and no evidence of a monarch with sovereign or political power.

The archaeological record is dominated by imagery, primarily carved stone. Here’s a description.

Crested eagles curl in on themselves, vanishing into a maze of ornament; human faces grow snake-like fangs, or contort into a feline grimace. No doubt other figures escape our attention altogether. Only after some study do even the most elementary forms reveal themselves to the untrained eye. With due attention, we can eventually begin to tease out recurrent images of tropical forest animals – jaguars, snakes, caimans – but just as the eye attunes to them they slip back from our field of vision, winding in and out of each other’s bodies or merging into complex patterns. P. 388.

The authors characterize these as “shamanic journeys to the world of chthonic spirits and animal familiars.” The society was held together by rituals and cultic knowledge. The people seem to have enjoyed rituals oriented to hallucinogenic substances made from local plants.

This is an example of a First-Order Society.

Discussion

1. I do like the idea of a stoner kingdom.

2. The authors possibly think that societies are held together through domination. Like power, this is a term they don’t discuss. I did a digression on power, link above. I’ve discussed Pierre Bourdieu’s work on domination, link above. And I’ve discussed some current ideas about freedom, which is the complement to the idea of both, link above.

But they give plenty of examples where that isn’t so. In fact, they seem to think we’d be better off if we lived without domination, or at least in a society where decisions are made in a more democratic system. That contradiction is confusing.

3.

Very large social units are always, in a sense, imaginary. Or, to put it in a slightly different way: there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighbourhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of the time, in our heads. P. 276.

Large social units may exist in the imagination, but they have roots in reality. I live in the Gold Coast neighborhood of Chicago. I only know a few of my neighbors, but we are bound together by a number of links. We care about local schools, local traffic, local businesses and our parks in a particular way. If these are threatened, say by a local developer trying to replace a park or increase the traffic burden, we cooperate to deal with it.

I’m bound to other Chicagoans by crucial ties: they staff my doctor’s office, my dry cleaner, and my grocery store, and everything else I need. My life is smooth and pleasant because of them. I care that they are safe and healthy. I care that they have paved streets so they can get to work, and so I care about the people who pave those streets, clear off the snow, fill the potholes, and replace the bulbs in the stoplights. I want everybody’s kids to have good schools, just like I want good schools for my grandkids.

We have other ties. We like brats and argue about pizza. We ride public transport and we talk about the best way to get around in our miserable traffic. We go to movies, theater, concerts, and restaurants together. We can always talk about something here that affects us all, the latest corruption story, property taxes, who the Bears should draft, and the weather.

As I read it, the authors think those ties are strong enough to pull us together as a group without a dominating force.

4. Each of the societies described in the book has a mental component that goes deeper than just being neighbors. They share rituals, cosmologies, stories about themselves as a people, cultic practices, and there’s a shared understanding of themselves as a group. These are taught to children and reinforced by ritual and practice throughout the lives of members. They are at least as important to the maintenance of the group as any of the forms of dominance.

The Founders rejected the idea of a state religion, and we’ve mostly abandoned cultic practices. I think we Americans share a sort of secular religion based on the founding myths of our country and a weak allegiance to what Jefferson called “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence. The latter is a formulation that originally meant Natural Law but I think now includes a science-based mental stance and values based on a vaguely Christian moral sense. The founding myths include our commitment to freedom, as “all men are created equal”; a government of laws, not of men; a form of capitalism; and representative democracy.

This, roughly, is the mental component that up til now has bound us into a nation. I think the authors miss this point.
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Photo credit: Cbrescia.

Mankiw’s Principles of Economics Part 8: A Country’s Standard of Living Depends on Its Ability to Produce Goods and Services

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The introduction to this series is here.
Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.
Part 4 is here.
Part 5 is here.
Part 6 is here.
Part 7 is here.

Mankiw’s eighth principle of economics is: a country’s standard of living depends on its ability to produce goods and services. He points out that there are vast differences between the average incomes of different countries. In the US, average income has increased about 2% per year adjusted for increases in the cost of living, he says, and doubles about every 35 years. The explanation for this change is productivity, defined as “the amount of goods and services produced from each unit of labor time.” The growth rate of a nation’s productivity determines the growth rate of its average income, he asserts. He dismisses other explanations, such as the prevalence of labor unions and minimum wage laws. He claims that US productivity dropped in the 1970s which accounts for the slow growth of average wages over that period. He concludes with this claim:

To boost living standards, policymakers need to raise productivity by ensuring that workers are well-educated, have the tools needed to produce goods and services, and have access to the best available technology.

This principle supports Philip Mirowski’s Sixth Commandment of Neoliberalism: Thou Shalt Become the Manager of Thyself. “Human beings [are reduced] to an arbitrary bundle of “investments,” skill sets, temporary alliances (family, sex, race), and fungible body parts.” The goal of the entrepreneur of you is to find some way to make yourself valuable enough to fill a slot in some corporate entity that will pay off on your investments. It also supports the Ninth Commandment, Thou Shalt Know that Inequality is Natural, because it tells the entrepreneur of you that if you fail, it’s your fault for being insufficiently productive. The problem is always the workers; and never the owners of capital for they can do no wrong. That comes from the Tenth Commandment, Thou Shalt Not Blame Corporations and Monopolies, especially for investing their capital in foreign countries so jobs are created there instead of in the US. After all, the free flow of capital is critical in Capitalism, as we learn in Mirowski’s discussion of Commandment 8: Thou Shalt Keep Thy Cronyism Cosmopolitan.

Mankiw’s explanation is intellectually dishonest. He only talks about average incomes, not median incomes, and not the incomes of the working people of the US. That enables him to paint a false picture of the economy, and of the role of productivity in increasing standards of living. The leading work on this issue was done by Larry Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute. His April 2012 paper, The Wedges Between Productivity And Median Compensation Growth is the seminal work on this issue. Here’s an updated chart showing the disparity between wages and productivity. For a discussion of the productivity measurement, see this 2014 Bureau of Labor Statistics paper. It’s important to note that Mishel is using the median wage growth for production/non-supervisory workers, not total labor compensation. With this statistic, we look at the actual experience of approximately 80% of workers.
Wage-Productivity gap 1

According to Mishel, the gap in the chart from 2000 to 2011 is the result of three factors (see Table 1):

1. Income inequality increased, with the great gains going to the top few percentiles and the rest stagnant or falling, accounting for 39% of the gap.
2. Income shifted from labor to capital, accounting for 45% of the gap.
3. Output prices diverged from consumer prices, accounting for 16% of the gap.

Dave Dayen discusses Mishel’s paper here, focusing on efforts of conservatives to discredit Mishel’s work. The only consideration that seems even questionable is 3, and Dayen’s discussion seems fair. He concludes with this:

If you believe the Lawrence/Yglesias argument, policies that raise wages are secondary to policies that raise productivity more generally. If you believe the Mishel argument, reconnecting wages to productivity becomes central. Rather than stressing the need to acquire more education and skills, you would support increasing the minimum wage and allowing for more union organizing to put leverage in the hands of labor over capital. You would support proper use of overtime laws to reduce wage theft, and paid family and medical leave to keep wages strong during times of family stress.

But if productivity gains just leak out to the wealthy through financial engineering, all the growth in the world won’t benefit the typical worker.

Mankiw doesn’t acknowledge the problems with his principle, problems which have been evident for a long time as the chart shows. The source of this principle is the neoclassical argument of William Stanley Jevons and John Bates Clark which I discuss in detail here and here. Mankiw is preaching from the Natural Law Bible without mentioning it. This is a perfect example of Keynes’ dismissive statement on these writers: “We have not read these authors; we should consider their arguments preposterous if they were to fall into our hands.“ Certainly this principle is preposterous both factually and theoretically.