Streetwise Professor

When writing my post on the Progressive interpretation of the Declaration of Independence, I was curious at what, if anything, Obama would say on the 4th of July.  He spoke, and he didn’t disappoint.  By not disappoint, I mean that he made remarks that effectively confirmed what I’d written, not that I concur with what he said.

Speaking casually dressed from the White House balcony, here’s what Obama said:

“We celebrate the principles that are timeless, tenets first declared by men of property and wealth but which gave rise to what Lincoln called a new birth of freedom in America — civil rights and voting rights, workers’ rights and women’s rights, and the rights of every American,” he said. “And on this day that is uniquely American we are reminded that our Declaration, our example, made us a beacon to the world.”

The remarks are revealing, and contradictory; indeed, they are revealing because they are contradictory.  They are contradictory because the last sentence is directly at odds with the first statement that the Founders’ principles as set out in the Declaration are “timeless.”  Indeed, the “but” in that sentence makes it clear that Obama distances himself from the Declaration as originally written and understood, while he embraces various social rights that would have been alien to the Founders.

Let’s break it down.  First, Obama takes a typical Progressive swipe at the Founders: “men of property and wealth.” They wrote down some principles (unstated), but these were defective because they reflected the interests of the wealthy. But Lincoln corrected these deficiencies:  in a “new birth of freedom,” he gave life to the Progressive rights that are really important.

The conscription of Lincoln into the Progressive cause was quite common in the 1930s.  Leftists routinely claimed Lincoln as a proto-Progressive: perhaps the most memorable example is naming of a group of leftist–and largely Communist–Americans who fought for the Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War the “Abraham Lincoln Brigades.”  The leftists mischaracterized Lincoln then, as Obama does today.  It is ahistorical, and extremely so, to view Lincoln as a devotee of the kinds of social and economic rights that Obama praises.

The contradiction in Obama’s formulation deserves emphasis.  Those voting for a break from the King, and for the Declaration of Independence, had a conception of liberty and freedom that was primarily negative: they wanted freedom from tyrannical government action.  What Obama praises–the alleged product of Lincoln’s midwifery–is quite the opposite.   It is a justification for the intrusion of the state into every nook and cranny of people’s lives.  The allegedly “timeless” principles of the Founders have been discarded–properly so, in Obama’s view–and replaced by something quite different.  Arguably something quite the opposite; so much for timeless.  The contrast between what Obama praises and what the Founders endeavored to achieve is best characterized by what the British musicians played during their surrender at Yorktown: The World Turned Upside Down.

Looking at Obama’s speech, and the broader political debate, it is clear that your view of what happened 1776-1789 is highly correlated with your current political stance.  Obama and other Progressives are not well-disposed, to say the least, towards the ideals of the Founding.  In stark contrast, Obama’s most intense political opponents repeatedly invoke an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, and conspicuously wrap themselves in Revolutionary symbolism–such as the Gasden (“Don’t Tread on Me”) Flag.

If the Civil War was the Second American Revolution, we may be on the brink of the Third.  Not that it will break out into armed conflict, but there is a yawning philosophical and political gap that will spark intense and ugly political strife.  And on either side of that gap stand people with diametrically opposed interpretations of the Founding and its meaning.