President Trump’s statement on Charlottesville caught my attention roughly halfway through: “We are a nation founded on the truth that all of us are created equal,” he said. Trump was invoking the Declaration of Independence, which indeed set forth that truth, and on which we were founded as a nation. Notwithstanding the institution of slavery, neither Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration, nor Abraham Lincoln, the greatest of our presidents, understood the “all of us” to mean anything less than all of mankind.
In 1858 Lincoln gave a Fourth of July speech in Chicago in which he undertook to show the relevance of the Declaration to an America that now included a number of European immigrants—German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian. They were not descended from those who wrote the Declaration, fought the Revolution, and framed the Constitution, he said. Yet they find themselves “our equals in all things.”
Lincoln explained: When they “look back through our history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.”
The logic of the Declaration is such that there can be no exceptions—some who are not created equal, some who have no right to claim “the father of all moral principle.” The Declaration is fundamentally incompatible with claims of racial supremacy, a point the president made he said that white supremacy groups—such as those in Charlottesville—are “repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”
Now we’ll see whether the president can hold to that position—or twitter it away.
