Imagining Liberty - Module 5 Competition and Discord

Imagining Liberty - Module 5 Competition and Discord Undergirding the Revolution

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Module Overview

• Building on Module 1’s exploration of the Enlightenment, republicanism, and contested equality this module unpacks deeper tensions.
• Competing viewpoints in conflict with trying to forge unity (E Pluribus Unum)

• Explore how the Founders navigated disagreement in creating a nation

Learning Objectives:

• How is the Declaration full of tension and synthesis, not just ideals?
• How does the Declaration’s historical complexity relate to ongoing ambiguities in U.S. debates?

• Why does the Declaration still matter for nationhood, citizenship, and education?

Declaration’s Justifications

• Usurpations
• King overreached, it’s only right to revolt
• John Locke’s ideas
• The Declaration’s Core
• Laws of Nature and Nature’s God
• Natural law + divine authority = we should naturally be free
• Allows secular and religious readings

“To secure these rights, Governments…deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed…whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it” -The Declaration of Independence

Declaration’s Justifications

• Separate and equal station
• Claim to be a nation-state on the world stage
• Says U.S. is equal to Britain and France for alliance, trade

• Supreme Judge of the world
• Using the divine as evidence that independence is justice
• Moral rhetoric for rebellion

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume anong the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Natuer and of Nature’s God entitle them” -The Declaration of Independence

Declaration’s Justifications

• Public good/welfare
• Government should promote people’s well-being
• Taxes/regulations should be for prosperity, not oppression

“He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good…he has forbidden his governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance” -The Declaration of Independence

Key Ideas from the Declaration’s Discord

• Good government is better than no government
• Despite the actions of the British, they note how government is necessary, even in its active form
• Major difference from French Revolution that was inspired by American one

• Activity 1: Underline places in the Declaration that it says require government. How does this challenge the idea that the revolution was anti-government?

Declaration Transcript

Waldstreicher Weighs In:

“It is unambiguous in the Declaration that it is the people’s welfare that should be the measure of whether government is oppressive or, in fact, liberating”

“The Declaration can be considered a call for active government, not just less of it”

Key Ideas from the Declaration’s Discord

• The U.S. is announcing itself on the international stage
• Activity 2: Consider how the Declaration resembles and differs from later anti-colonial declarations?

Declaration Transcript

Waldstreicher Weighs In:

“Even as they asked for recognition abroad, with the Declaration the U.S. invents decolonization as something taken by a people, rather than given by an empire”

“The governmental focus of the Declaration faced outward as well as inward. The audience for it was meant to be international”

Key Ideas from the Declaration’s Discord

• Religiously ambiguous document (God referenced, but not specified) that establishes no state religion, leaving the door open to all religions
• Activity 3: Find the four references to God in the Declaration and reflect on what it might mean in context.

Declaration Transcript

Waldstreicher Weighs In:

“God appears four times in the Declaration of Independence. It’s enough to allow some to believe that He is central to the whole project, yet little enough for others to assume that the almighty is merely being invoked”

Key Ideas from the Declaration’s Discord

• Tradition of American protesting and complaining tracing back to this period
• Activity 4: Consider various social movements today. Brainstorm what similarities you see to the Founders when writing the Declaration.

Declaration Transcript

Waldstreicher Weighs In:

“The Declaration is a foundational text of American conspiratorial thinking about politics. Its most consistent theme is ‘usurpations’ and whodunit”

Key Ideas from the Declaration’s Discord

• Declaration creates Unity, establishing nation from confederation
• John Quincy Adams argued the Declartion created “one people,” not just states

• Many of these core debates still persist today
• Activity: How united were they really then? How does it compare to today?

Declaration Transcript

Waldstreicher Weighs In:

“It’s important, though, that the Declaration doesn’t claim to create that community: instead, it presumes its existence” “That Adams could make the argument, and that he had to make the argument, shows that the Declration has been a bedrock of American nationality–and that nationalism has had limits in a union of states.”