"The British were white, English, and Protestant, just as we were. They had to have some other basis on which to justify independence, and happily they were able to formulate the inalienable truths set forth in the Declaration"
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Huntington isn’t praising the Declaration so much as demoting it. With a few clipped identifiers - white, English, Protestant - he reduces the Revolution to a family quarrel among near-identicals, then treats Enlightenment language as convenient window dressing. The sly pivot is “had to”: independence becomes a problem of marketing, not morality. If the colonists couldn’t plausibly claim difference by blood or creed, Huntington implies, they needed a different kind of difference: an ideology portable enough to turn sameness into legitimacy.
The subtext is both deflationary and strategic. Deflationary because it frames “inalienable truths” not as discovered principles but as an invention produced under pressure, the kind of moral rhetoric a would-be nation crafts when it can’t lean on ethnic distinction. Strategic because the word “happily” carries a cool, almost managerial satisfaction: ideology does useful work. It solves a political dilemma. It gives the break with Britain an elevated alibi.
Context matters: Huntington’s larger project fixates on civilizational boundaries and cultural cohesion. Read inside that worldview, the line subtly re-centers America’s founding around Anglo-Protestant continuity, while casting universal rights as a secondary, instrumental layer - powerful, yes, but contingent. The provocation is that America’s most revered text becomes less a birth certificate of egalitarianism than a brilliant piece of argumentative engineering: a universal creed forged to justify a particular revolt by people who, on paper, looked too much like the empire they were rejecting.
The subtext is both deflationary and strategic. Deflationary because it frames “inalienable truths” not as discovered principles but as an invention produced under pressure, the kind of moral rhetoric a would-be nation crafts when it can’t lean on ethnic distinction. Strategic because the word “happily” carries a cool, almost managerial satisfaction: ideology does useful work. It solves a political dilemma. It gives the break with Britain an elevated alibi.
Context matters: Huntington’s larger project fixates on civilizational boundaries and cultural cohesion. Read inside that worldview, the line subtly re-centers America’s founding around Anglo-Protestant continuity, while casting universal rights as a secondary, instrumental layer - powerful, yes, but contingent. The provocation is that America’s most revered text becomes less a birth certificate of egalitarianism than a brilliant piece of argumentative engineering: a universal creed forged to justify a particular revolt by people who, on paper, looked too much like the empire they were rejecting.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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