Democracy: A Most Undemocratic Document

In early 1776, the French sent the colonies a directive. “We are not paying,” it said, “to support another English civil war. We do not look forward to you reuniting with England and fighting against us next time. We demand that you sever the bonds between you, permanently.”
Our alternative, of course, was to lose the Revolutionary War immediately. Without French help, we were instantly finished. So the Second Continental Congress looked around for somebody who knew French thought—not a popular course of study in the colonies—well enough to write something that would appeal to the French.
They settled on a red headed chap from Virginia. Thomas Jefferson was one of those people who have an instinct for going left when everybody else goes right. Not violently—not like Ethan Allen, for instance. Jefferson was a very bright, studious man who did not tend to knock people down when he disagreed. He was much too subtle for that.
A committee of three was appointed—Jefferson to write, and Benjamin Franklin and John Adams to oversee WHAT he wrote. Jefferson was one of the most beautiful writers in American history—which is why his document is so seductive.
The essential difference between the Declaration and the subsequent Constitution is that the Declaration emphasizes RIGHTS, whereas the Constitution born of bloody experience emphasizes RESTRAINT and RESPONSIBILITIES.
The Declaration could have been written by children (the French Philosophes that Jefferson copied). Imagine children who had never tasted anything sweet, standing in front of a candy store and imagining what it would be like to eat some. This was precisely what the French Encyclopedists were doing when they wrote about “the rights of man”.
(The Constitution was written, on the other hand, by children who had eaten candy, gotten sick on it, thrown up because of it—and knew finally how to restrain themselves.)
The Declaration sounds wonderful. (Most things are sweeter in the imagination than in reality.) All the freedom you could want. Empowerment without restraint. Whatever you want or need to do in pursuit of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
The French in 1789 would launch themselves on this path—leading to the guillotine, twenty-five years of European—and world-wide war—tyranny, two empires, two monarchies, five republics, a few more revolutions, and even a “communistic” government(1871-73). Depending on how you count, they had at least twenty different kinds of government between 1789 and 1960.
Democracy requires restraint more than almost anything else in order to work. Without an internalized self-control, Democracy degenerates from freedom to anarchy, from anarchy to chaos. That is the path laid out before us in that most subversive of documents, The Declaration.
(Modern political liberals who see empowerment as the only proper function of government fall into the same trap. They do not acknowledge the crucial need for restraint—before there can be any real liberty. That is the potential danger of “liberalism” run rampant. It is a primary reason why the Obama administration makes me nervous.)
The Declaration did its job. French munitions kept coming. Eventually an entire French army, artillery corps and fleet would follow. The bulk of Washington’s troops at the final victory at Yorktown served under the Fleur- de- Lis. Along with the troops, the guns and gunners were French. So was the navy that pinned Cornwallis down and forced his surrender.
It was all done under the command of a French lieutenant general. “Lieutenant General, Commander in Chief of His Catholic Majesty’s Armed Forces in the New World”—so reads the surrender document at Yorktown. His name? George Washington.
The bitter British surrendered to a then current English tune called, “The World Turned Upside Down.” Many on the field must have remembered its older title: “When The King Comes Onto His Own Again.”
(When I see pictures of Dwight Eisenhower and George VI reviewing the vast depots of American equipment and manpower waiting to cross into France with their British compatriots in 1944, I often think of that title.)
We owe our independence to the Declaration. We owe the tranquility and effectiveness of our democracy to the Constitution.
Next time we will look at the Constitution.