Mark Oppenheimer: Hello friends, Romans, countrymen, Americans, happy sestercentennial to you. You could call it the semi-quincentennial, you could call it the 250th, but I found an old tiny word that has fallen out of fashion that means 250th anniversary and that word is Sestercentennial. So I am here from Arc: The Podcast to wish you a happy Sestercentennial. Arc, the podcast is the audio companion to Arc: Religion,Politics, et cetera, a journal of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. But you knew all of that just as you knew that the United States of America is celebrating a birthday. In honor of that birthday, the Sestercentennial, I am bringing you a special lecture by Danielle Allen, a Harvard professor, who came to Washington University a few weeks back, back in April, to deliver a lecture entitled The Declaration of Independence Today, Why an Old Text Still Serves Us Now. Danielle Allen is a big deal. She teaches at Harvard and majored in classics at Princeton. She’s one of the great scholars of liberalism and government working in higher education. She was the Dean of the Humanities at the University of Chicago and she’s won lots and lots of awards. I always hear the rumor that they wanted to make Danielle Allen president of Harvard after Claudine Gay stepped down, but that Danielle Allen refused the job because why would any same person want that job? I don’t know if that’s true and I’ve never met Danielle Allen. If I do meet her, I’ll ask. But it tells us something that the rumor is so widespread, that there was a general sense that she is the person to return Harvard to its former glory, but that she is like Washington who apparently didn’t want to serve and that’s what made him the perfect person to serve, that she would rather be there with her books and her students than besieging donors for the big gifts for new squash courts or whatever it is that university presidents do. Danielle Allen was one of 16 scholars invited to give lectures on the topic 1776, then and now. This was a series put on by the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics in Washington University of St. Louis. And it was offered as a for – credit class to students, but also as a public lecture series for anyone interested in the relevance of the events of 1776 to the world today. Some of the scholars who gave talks were from the Danforth Center and WashU, people like Danny Bialik and Tazeen Ali and our law school colleague John Inazu. And some of them came in from outside. They were such big deals that we flew them in to enrich the St. Louis community with their talks, people like Eddie Glaude from Princeton and Danielle Allen from Harvard. Danielle Allen’s talk, The Declaration of Independence Today. Why an old text still serves us now. It was a powerful speech. It was one of the best, I think, in my opinion. And I think that it’s perfect listening for this weekend when the country turns 250. It’s thoughtful, it’s humane, it’s funny. And I think you’ll learn a lot as I did. So kick back, have a mimosa with a little red, white, and blue umbrella in it. Prepare for the fireworks and have a listen to Danielle Allen on the topic, the Declaration of Independence Today. Why an old text still serves us now.

Danielle Allen: It’s wonderful to be here, wonderful to be with the Danforth Center. I’m grateful to be here with you tonight to talk about the Declaration of Independence as a part of celebrating our 250th. I have been writing about and thinking about the Declaration for astonishingly more than 25 years. I am amazed when I reflect on that because it makes me realize that I’ve been doing this for 10% of the life of our nation. And then I realized, well, I’ve been alive for 20% of the life of our nation. And my hunch is there’s probably some folks in this room who have perhaps been alive for maybe even a third of the life of the nation getting on. And that should help us all realize how young we are as a country. In fact, we’re just sort of an unruly teenager and no wonder it’s a little complicated right now, a little pimply, a little grumpy, all those things. So I say that to start as a way of giving us a sense of hope that our best mature self is still ahead of us. I’m going to make the case as well that some of our origins, the Declaration of Independence, still offer us a good guide. Lincoln famously described the Declaration of Independence as a golden apple in a frame of silver. He was quoting Proverbs where in Proverbs there is a remark that a wise word fitly spoken as a golden apple in a picture of silver. So the Declaration of Independence was that wise word. And the Constitution, he argued, was the frame of silver. Now I said, I’ve been thinking about the Declaration of Independence for 25 years and so I have come to agree with Lincoln. I think it is the golden apple. In this semi-quincentennial year, what I really want to do for everybody is to give you the gift of the golden apple. I want you to be able to walk out of here and feel it actually to know what the golden apple is. So I’m going to share the golden apple with you and then explain a little bit of my journey in terms of coming to understand why it is the golden apple. Of course, lots of people are skeptical about that and so we’ll need to spend some time too considering what are the skepticisms and concerns about that view. So the golden apple is this. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they’re endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Now tell the truth. Did you remember it was that long? That’s the second sentence of the declaration. The famous proposition that Lincoln and the Gettysburg address is we’re dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. We have to renew our dedication to that proposition. But it’s that whole long sentence and I’ll come back to it in a minute or two so that we can think really about what is it about that sentence that Lincoln wanted to say that full sentence is the golden apple. But first, let me just share my own journey in terms of coming to understand this text. I am from a very civically engaged family. So on one level, it’s not surprising that I would be drawn to questions of the founding, drawn to some of those foundational texts. My granddad on my dad’s side helped found one of the first NAACP chapters in Northern Florida in the 40s. Lynchings were on the rise at the time, so that was exceptionally dangerous work. He was taking his life into his hands for the proposition that human thriving depends on being able to steer your own life in the private sphere, but also to steer with others together for our communities in the public sphere. That’s what democracy gives us is the chance to do that. On my mom’s side, my great-grandparents helped fight for women’s right to vote. And my great-grandmother ended up as president of the League of Women Voters in Michigan in the 30s. But I also love to elevate my great-granddad who marched with suffragettes on Boston Common in 1917. We also forget just how hard 1917 was and how hard fighting for the right to vote for women was. President Wilson had called the military out into the streets of DC in 1917. They were locking up suffragettes. The conditions were really abominable. Suffragettes were going on hunger strikes and then being quite brutally force fed. It was really chilling stuff to read about. But they too, on my mom’s side, had a conviction that empowerment is the bedrock for human thriving and wellbeing. I was lucky, in other words, to grow up in a community of people that really took the value of democracy very seriously. And in many ways as a young person, I took the value of democracy for granted. I’m from a really big extended family though and as I was coming up through my late teenage years, I came to understand that not all parts of my far-flung family had that same sense of connection to our institutions. Some of my cousins really wandered into great difficulty and trouble. One of my cousins who’s not here with us any longer got arrested at the age of 15 in Southern California and spent a long time in prison. And while he was incarcerated, I spent a lot of time trying to get him education. California was also stripping books and schooling out of the prisons at that time in the ’90s. So this became one of the things I was most deeply engaged in was trying to help Michael who was quite bright, really talented young man, access education. And in the course of doing that, I was myself becoming an academic, becoming a young assistant professor at the University of Chicago. And I began to have a hunger to connect the incredible education that we were offering at places like the University of Chicago to students who were more like my cousin Michael, people who didn’t have access to that great education. And I got really lucky. I had a chance to work with Illinois Humanities Council to found a course, a night course in humanities for low income adults. People who like my cousin had fallen off a positive pathway. They’d made mistakes, screwed up, but they were ready to get their lives together and wanted that chance to get back on an educational pathway. Our objective with this course was to give these students often working two jobs or juggling public transport and childcare and trying to find work and things like that. Our objective was to give them the same quality of education in our night classes as we were delivering in a day class at the University of Chicago to super well-prepared, often well-heeled students.That produced a puzzle. How? How? When you have a classroom of folks who may not have a high school degree, may not have a GED, how do you help them have the same caliber of education as you would give, for example, this fine University of WashU or University of Chicago? The solution to the puzzle we decided was that we would not compromise one bit on the quality of the material we shared or the quality of our instruction, but we would compromise on the length of the texts we assigned. And for that reason, and since the Declaration of Independence is 1,337 words, we just started assigning the Declaration of Independence in the history unit and in the philosophy unit and in the literature unit and in the writing unit. It was a completely instrumental tactical decision. Had nothing to do with thinking that the text was of incredible value. But then the most incredible thing happened, the most explosive and moving teaching experience of my career. I discovered that those night students who were there in my classroom because they wanted to change their lives cut to the heart of the text faster than any of my well-prepared day students. The Declaration of Independence is after all just a story of people who have decided to change their lives. It starts when in the course of human events it becomes necessary. In other words, people look around, they survey their circumstances, they diagnose them and they say it is necessary to make a change. So you walk your way through the declaration. They lay out some principles as the basis for that change, extend their diagnosis of the grievances against the king, and then commit to a change, the claim of independence, and they pledge their mutual solidarity, their lies, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to one another. That’s it in a nutshell. The Declaration of Independence is a story of human agency. And my students were electrified by it. And they gave me the gift of understanding the power of the Declaration of Independence. They immediately had views about what they wanted to do on the job with the boss who was being abusive. They went straight to diagnosing what was going on in the city of Chicago and what to do about what was then Mayor Daly and how things were proceeding in the city. This was not what I was expecting at all. And I had to take this incredibly seriously. The thing then though too that was striking to me, even shocking to me, was that none of my students had previously encountered the Declaration of Independence. It had been altogether absent from their education. So I came to understand in that moment that as a society, we had failed to give young people their inheritance. We had failed to pass on the apple of gold. An apple of gold is a very valuable thing. Even just think about it in literal terms. If you had an apple’s worth of gold and somebody could give it to you and they didn’t, that is withholding a very serious inheritance. So before I start to try to fully explicate what Lincoln meant, what I mean when I say that that long sentence that I recited is the apple of gold, I want to just pause for a moment on the reasons that people most commonly introduce to make the case that that old text is not relevant today. And you’ve all heard the case that it is not relevant. And you know that people will immediately say things like, “Well, but Thomas Jefferson held slaves, right? So how can we take seriously a text written by somebody who held human beings in bondage?” And people will say, “Well, that phrase, all men are created equal.” Well, what about women? Where did they fit into that picture? So I want to address those two themes. So for starters on Jefferson, there is a lot, a lot that we can all learn from Jefferson. And one of my favorite Jeffersonian lessons is how to get credit for something.Because his tombstone says author Declaration of Independence. So remember that. If you want credit for something, put it on your tombstone. There were five people who worked on the Declaration of Independence. Yes, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman from Connecticut, and Robert Livingston from New York. More importantly than that, in the years 1775, the fall of 75, and then the spring of 1776, the two most important people in Continental Congress in Philadelphia who were driving the politics of the period were John Adams from Massachusetts and Richard Henry Lee from Virginia. They were the ones who were on all the committees. You know those people in your church, the ones who are on all the committees or here at the university. Why is he provost? Because he was on all the committees, right? Those people, John Adams, Richard Henry Lee. And they were really driving towards independence. They were pushing everybody, John Adams’ to – do list. February 1776 when he comes back to Congress after a winter break going home to see Abigail in Boston. His to – do list is first of all, to get the different colonies drafting constitutions for themselves. It was like item number four. And then item number 14 is declaration of independency. And in fact, he drafted a version already in Massachusetts in January. It has the same structure as the current declaration. And he was the person actually who was driving the argument about happiness, the argument about happiness all year, 1775 through 1776. So when we get to June, he and Richard Henry Lee get on the floor of Congress a motion to declare independence. Congress doesn’t want to vote on this until they know they’re going to be unanimous. So they punt and say, “Okay, we’ll vote in July. We’re not ready to vote yet. We need to be unanimous if we’re going to vote on this. But while we’re waiting, let’s get somebody to write a preamble for this declaration we’re about to make.” And the way that worked was Congress always would elect a committee to write a preamble to whatever resolution they were going to pass. And whoever got the most votes when they had the election for the committee would be the chair of the committee. So John Adams, who was already on all the committees, didn’t have time to be chair of another committee. And he really liked how Thomas Jefferson wrote. So he did the political work of making sure that Jefferson would get the most votes in an election for the committee. Adams came second by one vote, then Ben Franklin, then Sherman, and then Livingston. And Adams and others gave Jefferson all their preexisting materials. Jefferson drafts something, but worked with Adams and Franklin. They made edits, et cetera. They all submitted it to Congress. Congress cut it by 25%. And then voila, the declaration. So yes, Jefferson was the chair of a committee and he was the lead drafter of the declaration, but he was not author Declaration of Independence. Now, why does that matter? That matters because John Adams, man of Massachusetts, never held humans in bondage. He always thought slavery was a bad thing. Benjamin Franklin had earlier in his career held people in bondage, but by 1776, he had repudiated slavery. He was already working on abolition. And the language in the declaration, life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, that came from Adams. By this time in the politics of the colonies, the idea of defending the right of property had already become connected to defending slavery. So pushing the word property out, replacing it with happiness was an abolitionist moment in the declaration. And indeed, the abolitionists used it immediately in Boston to submit a petition using that language for an end of slavery in Massachusetts. Didn’t go through when they submitted it in 1777. But before the end of the Revolutionary War, Adams had drafted the Massachusetts Constitution using the same language. And then that was used to abolish enslavement in Massachusetts again before the end of the Revolutionary War. Ditto Pennsylvania. Franklin’s work led to Pennsylvania also abolishing enslavement before the end of the Revolutionary War. So right from the beginning, there were multiple voices feeding into the Declaration. Yes, Thomas Jefferson held people in bondage, but Adams and Franklin didn’t. And they used the Declaration right away to crystallize the Abolitionist Movement. So it’s important to know that part of the history. So we have to walk away from thinking that Thomas Jefferson is a reason not to take the declaration seriously. But what about this language about all men were created equal and really what was the place for women in the declaration? Well, here, the draft text that the committee of five submitted to Congress can be quite helpful for our thinking because it also uses the word me. And in an important page where the committee that submitted the draft, they actually took the time to critique George III for continuing the slave trade. They critiqued him for violating the sacred rights of life and liberty of a distant people in Africa. So they used the same language about rights, applying those to Africans as much as to themselves. And then they also critiqued this continuation of the slave trade for resulting in auctions where men in all caps are bought and sold. Now, if we think about auctions where men all caps are bought and sold, we know they didn’t mean males only. And we know they didn’t mean adults only. We know that they meant auctions where men, women and children were bought and sold. So that’s how we know that they were using the word men in a universalizing way. We don’t use it that way any longer. That’s true, but they genuinely did. So when they said all men are created equal, they actually meant all people. They actually did. They were explicit giving Africans sacred rights of life and liberty. And then as I said, the other use of men. Now that doesn’t mean that they were egalitarian in how they thought about constructing society. And so you’ll be wondering, well, how do those pieces fit together? If they actually meant all people are created equal and all people have rights, then why has it taken 250 years and we’re still working on that egalitarian project? Interestingly enough, these are not questions that we are new to or newly putting on the table. Already in 1776, people were putting precisely that question to the drafters. Abigail Adams wrote to John Adams to ask questions about, well, where do women fit into this? And James Warren, another politician in Boston, wrote to John Adams to ask, where do working people who don’t have much property fit into this and where do free Negroes, the vocabulary of the time, fit into this? So the questions were being asked already about where everybody fit in. And John Adams had an interesting and subtle and I would say erroneous answer to that question. But to explain his answer, I have to ask you to listen again to the golden apple. Okay? So I want you to listen really carefully to it because we’re going to spend some time then talking about the last clause in this long sentence. All right. You ready to listen carefully? Okay. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they’re endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. That last clause gives us a definition of what it means to be a citizen of a constitutional democracy. You have the job of analyzing when have the institutions gone astray? When are they failing to secure our rights? And then you have the job of altering or in the case of the revolution abolishing. There’s a big conversation to be had there about when do you alter it? When do you abolish? But anyway, we can talk about that in questions if you want to. So the job is to diagnose, are our rights being secured? If not, you have to alter. And then the job of altering is twofold. Piece one, lay the foundation on principles. Piece two, organize the powers of government. Declaration of independence, statement of principles, constitution, how the powers of government got organized. Golden apple, dedication, human equality, frame of silver, the order and structure of the government. Okay. Now, this distinction between the principles that would motivate the work of the society, the political work of the society and the technicalities of how power would be organized, that distinction is what Adams used when he wrote back to Abigail, when he wrote back to James Warren and others. He wrote back and he said to Abigail, “Yes, the principles apply to everybody. It is about your rights. It is about your safety, your happiness. But he said when it comes to the question, how are we going to organize the powers of government?” He said, “We will retain our masculine system.” In other words, and other founders wrote this way as well. The point was Adams believed you could put power in the hands of some only and they would take responsibility of protecting the rights and wellbeing of all. It was a kind of paternalistic account of what it would take to secure wellbeing or safety and happiness for a society. Abigail is skeptical. She wrote back and she said, “Well, husbands have a history of becoming tyrants. And when you give people unbounded power, that’s what tends to happen.” So she said, “Well, we’ll give you one more chance.” But she continued, “We women will not feel ourselves bound to any laws where we have no voice or representation. We may have to foment a rebellion,” was her phrase in order to have voice and representation. In other words, what Abigail was saying at that point in time was that if you are serious about this idea that all people have rights and that we ought to organize our institutions to deliver the safety and happiness of all of us, then also everybody needs a share in power. And she put it, a share in voice and representation that you can’t actually achieve the good and protection of all if you put hands only in the power of some. So I elaborate that at some length because what I want you to take away is that A, these questions about who was included are not new to our time. They were being asked already in 1776. B, there was an answer, which is an interesting and surprising answer that yes, the principles did apply to everybody, but hey, we’re going to try to organize the powers of government in such a way that some people have power. They’re supposed to work for everybody and on behalf of everybody, but only some people will have power. And so that’s what we’ve been working on ever since, really Abigail’s insight that if you’re serious about protecting the rights of all, then everybody also has to have a share in the power used to protect those rights. So there’s lots of lessons to be learned, in other words, in the declaration itself, both about ideals that we could still hold onto and the specific kinds of mistakes that were made at the time of the founding that we continue to work to correct. So that’s why I think some of the sort of common reasons we hear about how the declaration is not relevant are not actually so pertinent. But that then gives us a chance to come back to the golden apple and to really think like, what is this golden apple? Why did Lincoln put such an emphasis on the Declaration of Independence? And so here I want to… I’m going to ask you to listen to the sentence again. If I am able to give you the golden apple, part of what will happen is that when you leave here, you’ll remember the whole thing. For real. I mean that for real. And that will be a gift and you can carry it around with you and you can chew on it. That’s what I’ve been doing for 25 years and all kinds of wonderful things will happen. You’ll have visions. Anyway, I want you to listen this time really carefully for the word happiness. Okay? Just listen for the word happiness. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they’re endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, but among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to To abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. How many times? Two. Good. Exactly. First time individual rights. Life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. And maybe you noticed that wasn’t a complete list. It’s just some examples. They say, among which are life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness? That raises a question, well, what else is on the list? There’s an invitation in that sentence to continued reflection on the question like, what are basic rights? The debate we have right now about health is a debate about what belongs on that list of basic rights. So the first time it comes up, it’s individual rights. But the second time it comes up, it’s their safety and happiness. It’s something we have together. That phrase, we have to figure out the best of their ability to judge what will effect their safety and happiness or our safety and happiness. That phrase was an 18th century translation of an ancient Roman phrase from the politician and orator Cicero who said that salus populi — the health and wellbeing of the people, let that be, he said, the supreme law, suprema lex esto. That means for any politician, any political system, the supreme law, the thing that should guide all else is whether or not you’re delivering the health and wellbeing of the people. Salus Populi. There are a lot of state capitals in this country that have that phrase, Salus Populi Suprema Lex Esto inscribed in the capital. I don’t know if Missouri is one of them. You all should check for me. Okay? But there are a lot, including in the Midwest where that is the inscription. I would love to know if it’s in Missouri. But at any rate, that’s what safety and happiness is a translation of. It’s the same phrase, the same concept in the constitution when the preamble of the constitution says that the general welfare is the object of the constitution. So in this sentence where we move from individual rights to our shared safety and happiness, we’re getting a story about self-government. Self-government is the job of connecting the 340 million different passions and interests and pursuits of happiness that we all bring to the table to a set of institutions that we can use to process those interests, synthesize them and try to achieve our shared safety and happiness. It’s about moving from I to we. It’s about understanding that we protect our freedom actually by being willing to make that move from I to we. It makes us a society that’s strong enough to protect ourselves together, but we have to be willing to make that move from I to we. There’s also a really funny and profound lesson in that sentence and the move from I to we, the idea that we institute government in order to secure our rights and everything depends on the consent of the governed. Because sometimes we talk about democracy and we talk about the will of the people. We sort of have this idea that democracy is about the will of the people, meaning my will. It’s just sort of projecting into sky the idea like what I want should be what society does. But actually the paradox of democracy is that nobody gets their way. Every single one of us is disappointed every single time. That’s what the sausage making is about. 340 million things go into the sausage making machine and something comes out the other end, but it won’t look exactly like what anybody put in. That’s the goal and core principle of this democratic process where we convert from I to we. That means a lot of work on compromising, a lot of work on negotiating. And above all, it means this focus on this concept that there is a shared project of safety and happiness, that the we part of the story matters profoundly. So there’s one more thing I want to say about this movement from individual rights to sort of shared safety and happiness and reflect again on that last clause. When a government becomes destructive of these ends of securing our rights, it’s the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government. Laying its foundation on such principle and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Did you hear that phrase most likely? The best we can do is make probabilistic judgments about what’s most likely to bring about our safety and happiness. That means if we’re thinking seriously about this democratic project, right from the beginning we have to accept that we’re going to make mistakes. We’re not going to get it right. Every single moment is one where we’re going to make our best judgment and then we’re going to have to correct it and we’re going to have to do that over and over and over again. So self-government just is perpetual activity, perpetual activity of trying together to produce a synthetic judgment about what we the people will best for us all working together secure our safety and happiness knowing we’re going to be fallible, knowing we’re going to have to correct ourselves onward. To go onward in that way over and over again depends on the relationships in the we. It depends on the idea that being that we doing this work together is worth something. So what is it worth exactly? Well, two things, freedom and equality. Why should we be committed to this project of doing this work together precisely so that none of us has to be subject to the arbitrary will of any single individual? By doing it together, that’s what we get rid of. We get rid of the experience of domination, of arbitrariness. Through our legislatures, we synthesize the many interests that we all have and put on the table together. So the reason to do that though, the reason we might each of us think freedom matters to us is because at the end of the day, coming back to the beginning of that sentence, the idea of pursuit of happiness, we are all creatures who strive to make tomorrow better than yesterday. That’s the core of our human equality. Even as we strive to make tomorrow better than yesterday, of course though, we have to recognize that there is no person in this world for any of us who can do a better job of saying what will be good for me tomorrow than I can for myself. I might make bad choices all the time, like date the wrong guy, go to the wrong school, pick the wrong job. We all make mistakes all the time. But even as we make mistakes, there is nobody else better situated than we are ourselves to make a judgment about where our wellbeing lies. Nobody else has access to all of our experiences, all of our passions, the aspects of our temperament, our hopes, our aspirations, all of those things. So only we can actually put ourselves, each of us individually on a path to wellbeing. That’s the core of our equality. And so activating that, protecting that, that’s what a free society gives us, the chance for each of us to shape the course of our own life in that way. To be dedicated to my own flourishing, to be able to develop in ways that allow me to pursue my own purposes, that dedication to my own projects actually starts from, first of all, this recognition that this is what we share together as humans. And to recognize this is what Lincoln means when he says we should dedicate ourselves to the proposition of human equality. So then what this second sentence gives us, it’s a sentence that philosophers would call a syllogism. It’s a neat logical structure. What this sentence gives us is the answer to the question of what does it actually mean concretely to be dedicated to the proposition of human equality? And what it means concretely is that we have to be dedicated to institutions that we use to negotiate our problems that are owned by and carried out for the people. Lincoln’s famous phrase, a government of the people should also be by the people and for the people. When he lined those prepositions up, he was saying something profound. He was saying that government will be for the people only when it is by the people. And I call your attention to that because right now we live in a world where our government is no longer by the people for a whole lot of reasons, lots of gamesmanship over many decades, gerrymandering, tweaks to our electoral systems and so forth. We’ve gotten into a place where most members of Congress have been elected by only five to 8% of the people in their district. That’s not governed by the people, that is governed by a minority of the people. And whenever a government is not fully by the people, it drifts away from being for the people. So that is a profound insight of Lincoln, the Gettysburg address, but it’s also a profound insight of the second sentence of the declaration. In the second sentence, the project of converting us from self-interested individuals who think only about our own rights into a we that can work together on our safety and happiness depends on that consent of the governed. The idea that our institutions fundamentally are built out of the connection of the full people to the institutions. Now this is all very abstract. I realize that. And I hope in the questions, I’m glad the cards are going round, that you’ll ask me lots of questions that will allow us also to talk about more concretely what these ideals and principles mean in our current circumstance. But what I want to do now as I close my remarks is give you this sentence one more time. And my hope is that what you will feel in it, the golden apple, is the prospect of freedom achieved by society forming a strong sense of we and a strong commitment to finding that shared idea of safety and happiness. That project of freedom is how human agency can be most richly realized. We don’t realize our agency most fully by acting like Robinson Crusoe on our own little islands. We realize agency most fully when we do work together in our common public spaces to identify that shared picture of safety and happiness, a common purpose of some kind. Now that’s the gift, the possibility that human beings can achieve that with each other that ideally we would pass from on generation to the next. That gift of the golden apple is what is in jeopardy in our current very divided circumstances. So I’m going to give you the golden apple once again. And my hope again is that you can not just take in the words, but actually feel the value of what it means to dedicate ourselves to the proposition that all people are created equal. Because when we dedicate ourselves to that proposition, we have to interact with everybody around us with respect. And when we dedicate ourselves to that proposition, we have to find ways of actually collaborating with each other despite our very different interests in our political decisions. And that ability to hold respect for each other and to collaborate is what makes for a strong, free society that can keep its people safe. But it all flows, first of all, from that recognition of equal human dignity. So here you have it one last time. Again, I just hope you can feel it and not just take the words in. You have to tell me if you do. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all people are created equal, that they’re endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among people deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as shall seem to us most likely to effect our safety and happiness. All right. I look forward to our conversation and to your questions. Thank you.

Audience member: If I were to ask my students what the driving force of democratic aspirations are, they would say freedom. But the word freedom is really not central and strong to the declaration. It feels to me like a negative concept almost. Any reflections you have on the role of freedom in the declaration?

DA: Yeah, no, thank you for that. I take the concepts of freedom and equality to be tightly linked to each other in the declaration. And the concept of freedom comes in in two ways. Of course, the first is the simple declaration of independence from Britain. That concept of independence is a freedom concept. They declare themselves free and independent states at the bottom of the declaration. That’s a concept of freedom where the whole society together as a society is free. That’s a really important point because it helps underscore that freedom depends on actually a form of collaboration. You have the strength to be free on the world stage because internally you have established a basis for action grounded in recognition of human equality. So that’s the first aspect of it. And then the second aspect of freedom in the declaration is of course this notion that basic rights include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And that gives us that puzzle right from the get go of how do we take the aspirations of liberty for 340 million people and somehow convert that into a single choice for a society at the level of policy? And the answer is in the stronghold we have on our institutions, our commitment to the institutions as the structure for solving problems. And importantly there, where you preserve freedom in that process is that again, the result of the decision making process at the end of it should not match any individual’s private will. That’s the paradox of democracy. None of us get our way. And when you get to a place where you do have a single individual will that is arbitrarily producing whiplash for people, you no longer actually have freedom. The legislature is the first branch in the constitution because the legislature has the job of synthesizing 340 million different points of view. And it’s precisely that synthetic power of the legislature when it’s functioning properly. That the true source of freedom. The founders were very focused on that and that is again why the legislature is the first branch in the constitution.

Audience member: As you think about the future of higher education, how can we ensure that the quote unquote day students you spoke about earlier think more like the night students? What needs to change about how we educate for citizenship?

DA: Thank you. That’s a great question. I appreciate it. Well, for starters, I think it would be great for higher ed to spend more time educating for citizenship. It varies from one institution to the next, but many have stepped away from that kind of education and we do need to rebuild some of the bread and butter of that. Some of the just even basics, constitutionalism, philosophical foundations of democracy and things like that. And in addition, in terms of this question of day students versus night students, the night students were there with a sense of needing to answer urgent questions in their lives. Whereas day students often feel invited to share how much they know. So the question is how to change that dynamic. I start all my classes by asking my students to… We do an anonymous survey, which I then project in the classroom, asking them to name what’s an issue of pressing concern to them about our current world. What emotion do they feel about that issue? What value that they hold motivates their interest in the issue and what would count for them as a successful sort of resolution of the issue. And even if I’m teaching a historical class, like seminar on Plato, for example, in the fall, I start out with these kinds of questions. And then I ask my students as we work through the class to write essays of the order, given the puzzle you started with, your own puzzle, your own sense of urgency, how is this text helping you think about that puzzle? How is it changing how you think about that puzzle? So trying to tether the work we’re doing even on text, even on historical things to their own responsibility for reflection on what matters to them and why. Professor Valeri, I keep looking at you because I’m acting as if you’re asking all these questions, but I realize they’re coming from the broad group. So I will try to look at everybody and not just look at you.

Audience member: I’m struck in the declaration by the phrase alter or abolish. Could you reflect on the connection between the golden apple and the tradition of abolition democracy from Du Bois to Angela Davis and beyond?

DA: Yes. So I mean, there’s a lot to say there. From the beginning, I was trying to narrate with the story of John Adams and Benjamin Franklin and their work on abolition. From the beginning, the question of how to make the ideals real in practical politics was always contested. It wasn’t just John Adams and Ben Franklin who were working on abolition in 1776. In Massachusetts, there was a free African American named Prince Hall who took the declaration and used it to draft a petition for the end of enslavement in Massachusetts. And in that regard, what really happened in 1776 was the beginning of a debate that we are living through still to this day about how those ideals of basic rights for all equal human dignity, how they can connect to concrete institutional structures and forms. And abolitionism of course became one of the most important profound drivers of transformation as that debate unfolded. So yes, and people like Frederick Douglass rightly raised questions about the structure of the founding or W.E.B. Du Bois. And an interesting thing as this conversation unfolded is that in parts of American public discourse, people began to focus on rights, sort of category of rights that are about sort of freedom from interference from government. So freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion. And interestingly, the sort of African American tradition of thought and politics always said, those rights are not enough. You also have to have rights of participation, rights of sharing and power. And unless you protect those rights as well or achieve those rights for people who don’t have them, you will never actually be able to protect basic rights for all people. And Martin Luther King at one of his last things he wrote, Testament of Hope, essay called Testament of Hope, was explicit in saying he’s trying to take folks who were in the civil rights movement and there had been the great victories, Voting Rights Act, Civil Rights Act and so forth. And they were great victories, but he didn’t want people to think that those victories, sort of formal victories were the end of the road. And what he said about it was that basically when he wrote about the goal of integration, as he put it, he didn’t just mean a kind of romantic idea of mixing of colors. What he meant was “a full sharing of power and responsibility.” And he expected that that was something that would have to be sort of worked out all the way throughout society and that that was the actual sort of hard mission and passage that the country still had ahead of it.

Audience member: If only five to 10% of the people actively choose, what is the duty of the people to think of it as a common decision and to make common decisions together when there is a problem with voting in today’s system?

DA: Good. And I appreciate that question. So I’m going to first of all, just take us to 18th century Britain for a minute, different place. And you may be surprised to know that over the course of the 18th century in Britain, the British electorate shrank. So more people had the right to vote at the beginning of the 18th century than had the right to vote by the end of the 18th century. Partly this was because of how economic dynamics were shifting in Britain. So for example, there had been rural communities of substantial population that had members of parliament. Famously, there was a village called Old Sarum, four members of Parliament. And by 1770, it had six people living there, but it still had four members of Parliament. Whereas in contrast, Manchester by then had 30,000 people and no members of Parliament. And that shrinking electorate allowed the king to control Parliament much more easily. You could easily buy the seats from Old Sarum because there were only six people. You could easily basically buy them to vote for who you wanted to have in those seats. And so reformers in England recognized that the single best way of getting that under control, checking the king’s excessive power, getting rid of corruption was to broaden the electorate. And so they began working on universal manhood suffrage in Britain in 1780. And that has been the consistent pattern in history that typically the connection to the people, you have a broadening and then you have a shrinking again because somebody’s always trying to capture the institutions in their own benefit. And so in this country, that’s sort of what we’ve had. We’ve had huge broadening. We had women getting the right to vote. Then we had the broadening of the civil rights movement. And then we’ve had 50 years of gerrymandering and so forth as the parties have tried to have control of our institutions despite having fewer and fewer people as members of the parties. Enrollments and parties have just been going down steadily. So that is what has resulted in this situation where a small percentage of the electorate actually chooses our elected officials. And then that means those elected officials in Congress only work for that five to 8% of the electorate. Of course, the folks who turn out in the primaries are the most activist bases of both parties. And so then the elected officials have no incentive to figure out compromises and make deals and the like because they only work for those five to 8% anyway. So if we want to be kind of Lincoln-esque in our politics, the number one thing we have to do is to figure out how to reconnect our institutions to the whole people. And so that makes me say abolish party primaries. Have one primary election where all candidates from all parties run on the same first ballot. Everybody votes for their favorite. And then the top two go forward to a general and then you get a real choice in the general election. And that way the person who wins the general has to get 50% of the vote plus one from that electorate in order. And that’s where the high turnout electorate is in the general, not the primary. That’s a way of reconnecting our institutions to the people.

Audience member: As a young woman, I have never been able to see myself in early American political life. How can I find the confidence to look toward the past and future when I feel marginalized in the educational process? Where is there space for someone like me? How can I truly feel free here?

DA: Well, I’m sorry I can’t speak directly to whoever asked that question. First of all, I’m sorry that you feel that way. It’s a terrible way to feel. The short answer to the question is that nobody owns ideas. Nobody ever has owned ideas. Nobody ever will own ideas. So all ideas belong to all people if you choose to make use of them. I narrated Adams’ answer to Abigail because I wanted you to see both what Adams got right and what he got wrong. When I did that, what I was doing was in some sense, exhibiting what it means to bring independent judgment to evaluating the past. So that’s the job. That’s how we all own the past. We all evaluate it using our independent judgment. Take from it what is worth our time and attention and correct its errors. And the door is wide open and you are invited. I wish I knew where you were. I hereby wholeheartedly invite you to join in that activity.

Audience member: Mean changes to the structure of the government or does it also refer to the concept of rights themselves? Great. Voting rights.

DA: Is it the principles or is it the structure? Is that sort of the question, which things get altered?

Audience member: Yes.

DA: Okay. So I said that the second sentence is a syllogism. This is a philosophical term of art for a logical structure where you have a couple of premises that yield a conclusion. So a standard example is all human beings are mortal. Jeff Bezos is a human being. Therefore, Jeff Bezos will die. All right? That’s a self-evident truth, which I just gave you. And in the 18th century, the definition of self-evidence was that logical relationship where premises necessarily yield a conclusion. So we hold these truths to be self-evident and then that has a logical structure of that kind. And I’m saying that because at its most top level, what that sentence is, is a theory of revolution. Or rather it’s an expression of the right to revolution, that people have rights. There’s some examples. We build institutions to secure our rights. If our rights aren’t doing that, we have the right to revolution. And that was how people in the 18th century really understood what that sentence was doing, was making that right of revolution real. So what do they mean by that right of revolution? What we mean by it? They didn’t take it lightly. The very next sentence says, “Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.” So they set sort of a bar for when you decide to bring about a change. Then the question is, “Okay, what do you change? Do you change the principles or do you change the structure?” Well, interestingly, in the constitutional convention, they ask exactly that question. In other words, the question is askable every single time. They ask themselves, “Should we draft a new statement of principles or are we here only to revise the organization of government, the instrument of government? They decided, “No, the statement of principles was fine. We’re just going to work on the instrument of government.” So implicitly, they kept the Declaration of Independence as a statement of principles and replaced the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution. So you could ask the question every single time and just because they gave that answer in the Constitutional Convention doesn’t mean that has to be the answer every time. So for example, I said, “Well, this list of rights of basic liberties, life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, it’s a set of examples.” So that is an invitation to reflect on what should count as basic rights. And people have been reflecting for centuries. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights that the UN put out after World War II has a much longer list of rights. And so one could say, “Well, maybe some of those were things that we should also think about naming in that basic list of rights, rights to health, for instance, being among them.” At any rate, so the short answer is the ongoing continuous work of democratic citizenship is always to ask this question about the principles and about how to organize the powers of government. And there is no predetermined answer to which thing needs change at any given point in time. That’s what makes it freedom. There is not an answer. We have to figure it out.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Related to that in a logical way, what do the founders mean by happiness and should the government be responsible for our happiness?

DA: Good. So again, that’s where we have to think about the two different concepts of happiness. First was the individual rights part, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And then there was this second phrase about our safety and happiness, which I glossed as coming from the Roman phrase salus populi. Salus means health. It’s like the Spanish word salud. So health and wellbeing of the people. And two parts to this. Well, so first of all, the individual part, pursuit of happiness, that’s clearly distinguishing between actually ensuring that every single person is happy versus making the space and possibility for people to pursue their purposes. So the best we could ever or should ever expect from our shared instruments of government is that there is space for us to figure out and then pursue our own purposes. It is not possible to deliver individual human happiness. But the safety and happiness concept, the collective concept, that they spent a lot of time thinking about and they did have a view about that and they did, yes, think that it was something that government should deliver. And what they meant by that was population should be growing just in the same way that if you’re a farmer and you want your flock to be healthy and well off, you’ll know that your flock is flourishing when it’s increasing in number. Kind of biblical idea, it increases in number is when you’re flourishing. That was one of the things they had in mind. Prosperity was a part of what it meant for a society to have safety and happiness. Freedom from depredations from external invaders is a part of what it meant for society to have safety and happiness. So basically everything that the preamble of the Constitution lists, right? I’m not going to be able to recite right now, but general welfare, defense, common security, things like that. There’s a list of things in the preamble of the Constitution. That is the concrete definition that they gave to the phrase safety and happiness. And yes, government should deliver those things.

Audience member: So given the state of intense polarization in American politics today, I wonder if we could end by you offering us some reflections on what role the Declaration of Independence can play in helping us build a sense of shared political community.

DA: I appreciate that. I’m going to invoke Lincoln again. Sorry I’m giving you so much Lincoln. I don’t always do so. This is sort of Lincoln territory around here, I guess, actually. We’re not that far from Springfield. All right, that’s good. So Lincoln also, I mean this is, I can’t remember which essay this was or speech, but it was an occasion where he was invited to reflect on what it means to be an American. Even in the middle of the 19th century, there was a significant level of immigration, German immigration, French, Irish, things like that. And people were trying to push him to say being American meant being Protestant meant being white, et cetera. And he’s like, “No, being American is about the Declaration of Independence. That is the definition of what it means to be an American, is to be able to understand those ideals and commit to them. And that’s it. And what that means,” he said, “is that anybody in the world can become an American. It requires though that commitment to the ideals.” So I think that was the last question. So maybe can I just recite it one more time? Because I want you all to remember by the time you leave. Okay, there we go. Ah, yes. Thank you. You’re indulging me. You’re so generous. Appreciate it. All right, Ingen, recite it with me if you want to. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among people deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to us shall seem most likely to effect our safety and happiness. Golden Apple, thank you.

Mark Oppenheimer: That was Harvard’s Danielle Allen giving a lecture titled The Declaration of Independence Today: Why an Old Text Still Serves Us Now. It’s a special edition of Arc: The Podcast. We’ll be back in coming weeks with more of my interviews with figures from the worlds of religion, art, and politics. I’m Mark Oppenheimer. I was assisted in the production of this podcast by my trusty deputy, David Sugarman, and by your interns Coby Rink and Rebekah Oppenheimer. At the Danforth Center, we are supported by a terrific team including our director Abram Van Engen, our director of events, Hannah Pierce, our new assistant director, Shelly Mitcham, and a welcome to Shelly, our comptroller, Jerry Pena, and many more. Thank you for listening. Subscribe to the podcast if you enjoyed it, and we’ll be back next week with more of Arc, the podcast. Happy sestercentennial to you.