How to use this Page

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

Americans celebrate Independence Day on July 4, the day the words of the Declaration of Independence were set on parchment. John Adams had famously predicted that this day “ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Because these celebrations have become annual rituals, we have stopped thinking about exactly what it is we are celebrating.

For a glaring fact stares at us in the face. The Declaration of Independence has absolutely no legal or constitutional status. Presidents and journalists alike appropriate the principles it articulated in their rhetorical flourishes, but for all its symbolic power, the Declaration cannot be quoted by a judge on the Supreme Court to justify an opinion.

A National Day ought to commemorate what it is to be American, and the truth is, the Declaration may well have been the necessary, though certainly not the sufficient part of what made America America. In 1776, the Continental Congress severed our ties to the British crown. That was only a negative act which did not positively define who we were. That positive definition would only come in 1789, when “We the People” would constitute the American nation.

Two hundred years after the fact, Americans commemorate the events of the 1770s and the 1780s as if they were the same decade. But (in order to understand the strive in our contemporary politics) it is important to recall that the 1770s (and the Declaration) and the 1780s (and the Constitution) represented two opposite world-views. The revolutionary generation and the Founding generation were not always on the same page.

The Declaration, ultimately, was an act to guarantee our negative liberties. (Independence = freedom from.) It was a revolutionary act by “one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.” The revolutionary generation thought, contrary to what most modern liberals believe, that government was evil. The less of it we had to endure, the better.

The Constitution, in contrast, was an act to guarantee our positive liberties or our freedom to do certain things. The American People came together “in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” The Founding generation, chastened by the inadequacies of the Continental Congress, came to see government in more benign terms. Contrary to Glenn Beck, 1789 was the culmination of a collective call for more government, not less. By 1789, memories of government as a source of evil had receded into the background, while promises of government as a force to do good hovered in the foreground.

The Declaration and Constitution are not of a piece, but are in fact the book-ends of the American ideological spectrum, presenting two competing visions of government; whether it is the so

I’m sitting here with sand on my feet, salt on my skin and the sound of the waves in my ears. Not exactly: ‘Break, break break on thy cold grey stones, oh sea!’ because I’m in the southern hemisphere with temperatures soaring in the 30’s, the sand like powder and burning hot. With the crisp sparkle of a dark London afternoon extremely far away, I'm contemplating the fact that it’s the 30th December. It brings on thoughts of past Old Years’ Eves and how I celebrated them when I was the age of the hordes of 35 year-olds staying in my house right now (11 in all!).

Countless Old Years’ Eves were celebrated on chilly beaches sprawled around a bonfire watching the sun come up. (Odd how we considered ourselves children of the 60’s… Mary Quant, marijuana and all that… yet we were in fact a conservative carry-over from the 50’s morals and modesty.) And it seems the same applies today... at least here in the southern hemisphere. The sun coming up on a new year is still celebrated on the beach with a bonfire.

What is it about watching a New Year’s sun pop over the horizon that is any different to watching the sun come up on a normal day? The wide horisons of sea and sky seem to mute the moment while at the same time the sea's energy is tangible. We convince ourselves it’s different. Fresh starts. New potentials. In a way like the unwritten page or screen staring back blankly waiting for you to make the first mark every morning. Anything is possible if you can only make the right mark. There’s a certain fragility to the moment… try too hard and you might fail. But at the same time there’s an energy to start fresh. To capture something magical. It's a moment on the cusp, when you move from the old to the new.

So when I return to London and unpack my suitcase and discover little gritty pockets of sand caught in hems and seams, and the smell of the sea still clinging damply to an old pair of jeans, hopefully I'll be galvanised by the same sense of calm energy when I face a new page. A sort of magical process.

And on the beach at 5.30 am this morning with a few dolphins surfing the waves as the sun came up, (my hordes of 35 year olds still fast asleep) everything seemed magical!