There They Go Again, and Here I Go

With apologies to Ronald Reagan and Dolly Parton.

Gordon S. Wood, eminence grise and award-winning scholar of the American Founding, now 92 years of age, published an essay recently on the Wall Street Journal editorial page calling America a "creedal nation."

This is a recurring trope of American public life, seemingly never to be retired or corrected.

It is wrong.

Prof. Gordon is correct that America is a unique nation, but not because it is a creedal one. He fundamentally misunderstands the Declaration of Independence and its relation to the Constitution that followed the war and a failed confederation.

But this misunderstanding of the Founding is common to most.

Prof. Gordon is correct in my view to assert that America has all of the advantages that he describes in his essay. But it is not because of a creed. The ideas expressed in the Declaration are decidedly NOT a creed, although the elegance of the prose has the ring of such. But Professor Gordon, like, it seems, everyone else, misses the key words found in the single correction Ben Franklin made to Jefferson's penultimate draft.

What is the correction Franklin made? He changed the words "sacred and undeniable" to "self-evident." And that makes all the difference. So instead of reading: We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal, (and, etc), the Declaration reads: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal....

What difference do these words make? The five statements, that 1) all men are created equal; that 2) they are endowed by their creator with rights; that 3) among those rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that 4) governments are to protect those rights, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; and that 5) when governments fail in that task, it is the right and duty of the people to revise such government, become not creedal statements but AXIOMS. Postulates. Definitely not Propositions, which are theorems to be proven from the axioms.

America is not a creedal nation. It is an axiomatic nation. All of the characteristics Professor Wood attributes to the result of being a creedal nation hold, except that the basis of the nation is even more valid as a statement of reason, as opposed to only a creed.

Yes, Lincoln got it wrong at Gettysburg. The nation is not dedicated to the Proposition that all men are created equal, but to the postulate that all men are created equal.

Coolidge also got it wrong in his 150th Anniversary address, although he was on the verge of being correct. He, too, used the term proposition as did Lincoln, and in that he was wrong. But what he described were postulates, axioms.

"If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with unalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions."

Coolidge calls these "propositions" truths. And so they are--truths. Self-evident Truths. Postulates. Axioms. Not theorems. Not propositions. Not creeds. The Declaration's second paragraph is a statement of axioms.

This is not to diminish Coolidge. In my view, he possessed a better grasp of the development of the American Founding than any other president. Read his entire speech. It is a history lesson par excellence, the like of which has never been equaled among presidential speeches. He surpassed every other president in his understanding of the historical events contributing to the American Founding, including his familiarity with the Founding's emergence from the context of Christianity. I am no scholar, but I find no error in his historical analysis, which, although brief and necessarily short on some details, is essentially correct and complete. Would that our current politicians had such an understanding. Virtually none give the impression that they do.

And Coolidge linked the Declaration and the Constitution into a unity. A complete exposition on self-government. A statement of axioms in the Declaration, and a working out of those axioms in the structure of the Constitution. Like Euclid's geometry, with its axioms and theorems.

Euclid's Elements was the bible of the Age of Reason, of the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment. Its logic is complete and consistent, in all ways correct. Perfect reason. It took over two thousand years for mathematicians to accept that, but they have. And Euclid's axioms produce the most structurally sound foundation for the theorems that follow. Many of Euclid's theorems existed long before Euclid. (Quite a few are presumed to have been promulgated by the Pythagoreans, many more than the best-known Pythagorean Theorem; the first known theorem to be advanced was Thales' theorem, that two lines connecting any point on a circle with the point of a diameter line are right angles.) But it was Euclid who selected the axioms and demonstrated the proofs of the theorems.

It is not remarkable that the Founders chose to model their axioms and Constitution after the form of Euclid. And they chose their axioms of governance as finely as Euclid chose his axioms of plane geometry. They then applied those axioms about as correctly as is humanly possible to arrive at the structure of the Constitution. The one glaring error that they were unable to eliminate at the time was slavery — political realities forced them to settle for containment. Thus, the form of Constitutional government established by the Founders is the ultimate basis for establishing legitimate government. In fact, it is the only such basis.

Purists may argue that Euclid is passe, that far more interesting and useful mathematics has developed since. However, such mathematics that enter the arena of second-order logic are inherently flawed. Euclid is not. Neither are the non-Euclidean geometries developed in the 19th Century. Those also are logically perfect as they remain reliant on first-order logic only. When Hilbert tried to extend Euclid to multiple dimensions, to axiomatize multidimensional geometries, he perforce required second-order logic. This introduces paradox, and, as Godel proved, contains theorems that ultimately contradict each other. This is unavoidable. The message of Euclid and beyond: the axioms of government should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

What difference does any of this make? Am I just being too literal, or espousing irrelevant ideas?

I don't think so.

I assert that we have lost the representative, federalist Constitution that the Founders gave us. The reason is that Franklin's insight into the nature of the Declaration and the Constitution has been shared by so few since the Founding. (Even Coolidge, the closest exception to the rule, comes up short.)

Consider the federal income tax. This was enshrined as a constitutional amendment in 1913, a supposedly progressive advancement to the original. In fact, it destroyed the federalist constitution that had banned a direct tax by the federal government on citizens. In the 19th Century, the meaning of a direct tax was argued thoroughly. It wasn't until the end of the 19th Century that the Supreme Court clearly enunciated that an income tax was a direct tax (which it is, never mind Brett Kavanaugh and the Supreme Court's failure to understand that in the Moore decision). We have that amendment to thank for our Leviathan, and the severe limitation of our freedom has resulted.

Consider that a direct tax on citizens by the federal government makes us direct subjects. Such a tax was expressly banned by the Founders (who had enough problems fending off the arguments of such anti-Federalists as George Mason, who argued vehemently against direct taxation by the federal government. The best the Federalist could achieve was the power of the federal government to tax states with a per capita set tax, to be collected from the states, not directly from individuals. Mason argued correctly that a federal direct tax would vitiate the power of states and was inimical to the federalist system that the Founders sought to establish. He was right.

From the Progressive Era to the present (peak Progressivism?) the states have ceded power to the federal government, such that we have innumerable federal entities that dictate almost everything states can or cannot do. They often bypass states altogether and apply a multitude of laws directly on the populace (see Neal Gorsuch's recent book, Over Ruled, making that case). Our current governing system would be unrecognizable to the Founders, nor would it be approved by them. That the federal government would run most of healthcare, retirement programs, welfare, education, banking, environmental laws, workplace safety (and on and on), would be more alien to them than the technologies that have emerged since their passing.

Socialism is now raising its ugly head again. Socialism is slavery for all except the ruling elites. Hayek used the term "serfdom." Same thing. Feudalism reborn. Regressive. Inimical to human freedom and prosperity. But increasingly popular. As with all things progressive (Eric Vogelin correctly points out that Progressivism is no different than Socialism or Fascism or Communism), it is antithetical to our Constitution. Yet the great American city of commerce, of economic liberty and prosperity, now wants to become subject to Socialism. Anyone with a minimal understanding of the American Founding would be appalled. But America is no longer the nation of the Founding.

Consider that, as we celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the Founding. Ponder how we might recoup the freedoms that we have sold, as it were, for a mess of pottage (e.g., such ideas as "affordability"). Lack of affordability exists because of the Leviathan created by progressive governance. Are we supposed to accept that more government will solve the problem created by too much government? If so, we are fools, indeed. And ingrates to boot. We are kicking the Founders in the teeth and, in essence, blaming them for our own shortcomings. Overturning the Founding, which we have been attempting to do piecemeal for well over a century, is the cause of our problems, not the solution for them.