Pun Salad

I got into reading (in cheapskate non-subscriber mode) C. Bradley Thompson's substack, The Redneck Intellectual a few months ago. That, and his articles I've noticed at other sites, encouraged me to grab this book via the Interlibrary Loan service of the University Near Here. It is a detailed analysis of the first part of the Declaration of Independence, discussing the origins of its political and moral assertions.

It's a scholarly work (Professor Thompson may be a redneck, but he's also a professor at Clemson), but also a straightforward piece of advocacy for the "self-evident" truths claimed in the DoI.

Chapters examine, in minute detail, each revolutionary claim: the source of our rights in our human nature; what it means for a truth to be "self-evident"; what it meant for men to be "created equal", and how that could be reconciled with slaveholding (spoiler: poorly); what's meant by the triad of natural rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"; why governments exist; what "consent of the governed" means.

And, of course, why it's a people's right and duty to "throw off" a government that runs roughshod over those principles.

Thompson set me straight on one issue: for years, I thought claiming that a truth was "self-evident" meant that trying to argue against such a proposition unavoidably led to self-contradiction. There's no support for that bright idea in this book.

The book is long, and dense. Along the way, I got the impression of repetitiousness: didn't he already say this a few times before? Well, yes: I think I was kind of missing the point. The DoI was not simply a dashed-off Jeffersonian diatribe; Thompson's main effort is to show that its underlying philosophy was ubiquitous throughout the American colonies in the 1760s and 1770s. This involves going through a lot of essays and pamphlets of the era. And, yup, the DoI sentiments, were indeed widely promulgated and advocated by a wide range of American thought leaders. And, bless them, that involved saying a lot of things over and over again.

A final section deals with the post-Revolution challenges to the DoI's philosophy of individualism, liberty, equality, limited government, etc. The first coming from apologists for slavery; Thompson deftly details their Hegel-inspired arguments, drawing fair comparison with developing arguments made for socialism and Marxism around the same time.

Hegel?! Who knew?

After the pro-slavery argument was defeated via violence, the next challenge (still being promulgated today) was that of progressivism, the denial of the DoI's timeless and universal truths. Advocates included William James, John Dewey, Herbert Croly, Carl Becker, and (boooo) Woodrow Wilson.