Harry Litman - Towards a More Perfect Union
250 years ago today, the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia, launching an experiment in self-governance that has advanced in fits and starts, progress and retrenchment, ever since.
The Declaration is a fundamentally different document from the Constitution, which came in 1787, eleven years later, and the distinction matters more than most anniversary coverage will acknowledge—and more than most of our current leaders seem to understand or care about.
The Constitution is a blueprint for governance, speaking in the register of political architecture, including a few brute operational accommodations among different constituencies that continue to plague us to this day. The Declaration speaks in the register of moral aspiration—universal claims about human equality and dignity, not yet reduced to the operational necessities and blunt political trade-offs between competing interests.
The distinction was thrown into sharp relief just days ago, when Anne Applebaum noted in The Atlantic that J.D. Vance, in his Republican National Convention speech two years ago, explicitly dismissed the Declaration’s “abstractions”—all men are created equal, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness—in favor of what he called the pull of home, clan, and ancestral graveyards. “People will not fight for abstractions,” Vance said, “but they will fight for their home.” Blood and soil, in other words, not ideas and principles. It is difficult to imagine a more direct repudiation of what we are supposed to be celebrating this week.
https://harrylitman.substack.com/p/towards-a-more-perfect-union
Seig Heil couchfucker.