Friday on the RCP Podcast, RCP columnist Peter Berkowitz spoke with Carl Cannon about his piece defending the Declaration of Independence from critiques on both the left and the right. Berkowitz wrote this weekend: “Rescuing the Declaration From Left- and Right-Wing Polemics” “The authors of the 1619 Project contend that the truest fact about the United States is slavery,” he said. “They say 1776, the Declaration, the self-evident truths, were all window-dressing whose real purpose was to obscure and perpetuate slavery. And slavery, they argue, continues to survive through what is called systemic racism today. That’s the left-wing critique of the Declaration.” “It’s not only that Douglass, King, Lincoln, and others invoked the Declaration to demand reform. Actually, implicitly within the 1619 Project is an affirmation of the Declaration’s principles. They abhor slavery-and rightly so-but on the basis of what idea? At the end of the day, for them too, they must agree that human beings are by nature free and equal. They even suppress their own dependence on the Declaration of Independence.” “You would think it’s the task of a conservative to preserve what’s precious in our tradition. Hardly anything more precious than the principles of the Declaration,” Berkowitz said. “But a new movement has arisen. They’re called the New Right. They argue that almost all of the ills of contemporary America can be traced back to the classical principles of freedom on which the country is based,” he said on the other side. “In other words, they hear ‘natural freedom and equality’ and think ‘absolute freedom,’ emancipation from all things, including the obligations of duty, transcendent imperatives, the requirements of character, and so on.” “They blame all of America’s contemporary problems on the demand for absolute freedom,” he explained. “They don’t even pause to say it is a radicalization or misunderstanding of John Locke. They argue that this is what Locke always intended.”
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