The Declaration and Dinesh D’Souza’s “Revisionist History”

The expression “revisionist history” is often understood negatively and used as a pejorative. It often denotes history that is seen as highly selective, biased, and superficial. On the other hand, there is a positive side of revisionist history. On the positive side, all history involves revision to some extent because history is necessarily selective and requires interpretation with regard to significance. To totally eschew “revisionist history” would be to naively assume that all the historians got everything right and there is no room for new information or interpretation over time. That would be to effectively deny history as a discipline altogether.

There are plenty of sloppy, superficial, biased, misinformed, and non-representative attempts to retell history in a way one finds favorable. This is because history is important and control of historical narratives has political implications. Ironically, that is why all sides accuse each other of “revisionist history.”

Mainstream conservatives often view themselves as sworn enemies of “revisionist history,” being against books like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Doubtless, conservative author, commentator, and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza would also describe himself as an enemy of “revisionist history.” For example, in promotion of one of his films, D’Souza appeared on the Rush Limbaugh show where the headline read: “Rush Limbaugh Show: Dinesh D’Souza Debunks Liberal Revisionist History.” Ironically and unfortunately, when it comes to the Declaration of Independence, D’Souza is a perpetrator and promoter of bad revisionist history. In what follows, this article will critique D’Souza’s claims in a PragerU video entitled “Thomas Jefferson and Equality: Making America.”

Whenever history is invoked to justify present-day ideas or institutions, it is crucial to identify anachronistic equivocation, that is, the retrojection of a later concept into an earlier historical context while subtly redefining a familiar word as though its meaning had remained unchanged. In this way, continuity of terminology conceals discontinuity of ideas. Ultimately, such equivocation is a form of denial through redefinition; it seeks to borrow the authority of the original concept while quietly replacing it with one that is fundamentally different—and often contrary—to its original meaning.

Anachronistic equivocation allows for moral Trojan horses. In this case, this is done with the concepts of nation and equality.

The “Creating a Nation” Myth

From the very first sentence of the video, D’Souza’s statement subtly presupposes and promotes an all-too-common myth—that the Declaration of Independence created a single, consolidated nation. He claims, “In one sentence Thomas Jefferson not only laid the foundation stone for a new nation, he also set that new nation—the United States of America—on a path we still follow today.”

Viewing the Declaration of Independence as the act that created one consolidated American nation is a common historical anachronism, which retrojects a later nationalist understanding backward onto the decentralized founding era. The Declaration did not legally or politically create a singular consolidated nation-state in the later Lincolnian or post-Civil War sense nor did the Continental Congress have the power to do so.

By calling the Declaration of Independence the creation of a nation, a loaded presupposition is subtly inserted at the beginning which makes it more difficult to challenge later assertions. The crucial presupposition is not merely that Americans became a nation in some cultural or political sense, but that the Declaration created a single sovereign nation whose unity rendered subsequent secession illegitimate and whose centralized state eventually fulfilled the Declaration’s promises.

The phrase “the Declaration created a nation” is not a neutral historical description but a framing device. Before any evidence is considered, it predisposes the one to falsely identify the Declaration with national consolidation rather than secession, to equate the American people with a single nation-state rather than a plurality of self-governing political communities, and to view later centralization as the natural unfolding of America’s founding principles rather than as a contested constitutional and political development.

D’Souza’s opening conflates a people declaring independence, a union of independent states, and a consolidated nation-state. By describing the Declaration as the founding of “a new nation,” he invites viewers to read later doctrines of national sovereignty back into 1776, making centralization appear original and inevitable.

Equality, Big Government, and “Rescuing” the Declaration

In the video in question, D’Souza attempts to deal with the common charge of hypocrisy against Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence, and other revolutionaries since they proclaimed equality while slavery still existed and many of them were slaveowners. Many misunderstand the nature, authority, and scope of both the Continental Congress and the Declaration of Independence, which did not have the power or authority to end slavery. However, while a reasonable critique regarding natural rights, liberty, and equality is warranted, D’Souza focuses on creating a post-hoc nationalist moral rationale for Jefferson and the Declaration through the the phrase “all men are created equal.”

Careful definition and distinctions of equality are necessary, and an ethical-philosophical choice has to be made between two main definitions:

Equality of Liberty/Equality before the Law/Rule of Law – equal legal treatment of all individuals through protecting self-ownership and justly-acquired property and voluntary association (or disassociation), without legal castes or privileges (sometimes mistakenly called “equality of opportunity”)

Egalitarianism/“Equity”/Equality of Opportunity/Equality of Outcome – specific unequal legal treatment of individuals by which castes are created in an attempt to achieve equal opportunities and/or results

Whenever the state intervenes, castes are necessarily created, that is, there are those who are “privileged or burdened by the state.” As Rothbard wrote, “Where government intervenes, on the other hand, caste conflict is thereby created, for one man benefits at the expense of another” (italics in original). In fact, libertarianism and classical liberalism have a rich and coherent tradition of class-caste analysis (contradistinguished from Marx’s incoherent theory of “class” struggle). Classical liberalism—and the Declaration—rejected legal caste distinctions, cronyism, legal discrimination, and legal privilege.

To be consistent, to accept egalitarianism as a goal is to reject the equality of liberty and rule of law/equality before the law; likewise, to accept the equality of liberty and rule of law/equality before the law is to reject egalitarianism.

When it comes to equality, Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of meant the former classical liberal definition and modern left-liberal progressives mean the latter. Modern mainstream conservatives, like D’Souza, represent an uneasy attempt to hold aspects of both contrary positions simultaneously, especially through their alleged solution of equality of opportunity. Appealing to so-called “equality of opportunity” (if different than rule of law) will not help and, in fact, shares the foundation with egalitarianism—a government elite must create legal castes and treat people with legal partiality to guarantee an “equal starting-point” (an impossibility for any unique individuals).

Rhetorically, D’Souza would almost certainly eschew the term “egalitarianism.” He rightly criticizes equality of outcomes, quotas, affirmative action, DEI, identity politics, and redistributive policies aimed at equalizing wealth and income. Although D’Souza rejects progressive egalitarianism and equality of outcomes, he nevertheless accepts a seemingly more moderate egalitarian premise—that the Declaration proclaimed equal opportunity as a political ideal rather than equality of liberty, natural rights, and equality before the law.

Modern equal opportunity is not merely the absence of legal privilege. Once it becomes a positive governmental objective, it requires continual state intervention to identify and remove allegedly unequal starting conditions. The difficulty is that human beings, their talents, their preferences, and their circumstances are so diverse that no institution—even one endowed with immense power—can guarantee genuinely equal opportunities, much less equal results.

Once equality of opportunity is treated as a governmental end rather than the removal of legal castes, cronyism, and special privileges, persistent disparities in outcomes inevitably become evidence that opportunities were not truly equal. Conservative appeals to equality of opportunity therefore represent not simply equality before the law, but a more moderate form of egalitarianism that departs from the classical liberal principle of equal liberty.

While the prioritization of equality of opportunity over equality of liberty and natural rights is itself a legitimate subject of philosophical debate, what must be clarified is that this is not the equality proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence as claimed. The question is not whether one prefers one conception of equality to another, but whether the later egalitarian conception can legitimately be read back into the Declaration while retaining the same terminology. To do so is to commit an anachronistic equivocation—“historical revisionism,” as D’Souza and other conservatives would call it—borrowing the authority of the Declaration while substituting a fundamentally different conception of equality.

Jeffersonian equality is the equality of liberty or equality before the law, but it is often taken to mean egalitarian equality. In this way, the Declaration’s use of “equal” becomes a rhetorical password for the unlimited state. Jefferson’s equality—while not perfectly realized—promoted liberty and decentralization; the egalitarian definition promotes centralization and legal castes at the expense of individual liberty.

Equality and Slavery

Progressive egalitarians will bring up slavery to disavow and delegitimize the Declaration and the American political tradition as irrelevant or morally problematic in favor of a modern, powerful nation-state equipped with extraordinary power to achieve “equality.”

Mainstream conservatives like D’Souza—attempting to rescue the Declaration and the American tradition for their political ends—will connect the Declaration to the Constitution, then to the Civil War’s ending of slavery, then to the Civil Rights era (see image below). Within this interpretive framework, the Declaration’s moral authority ultimately legitimizes national consolidation. According to the conservatives, the Declaration proclaimed an unmet ideal—egalitarian equality of opportunity—which could only be achieved by a centralized American state, complete with a bloody war of unification and modern civil rights legislation.

Figure #1—The Declaration Undergirds the Civil War and Civil Rights

For progressive egalitarians, the central moral problem is historical injustice. The nation-state must continually rectify that injustice through public policy, that is, through continual legal discrimination. For mainstream national conservatives, the central moral problem is preserving the legitimacy of the national American political order. Therefore, the nation-state must be shown to have been the indispensable instrument by which liberty, equality, and justice were realized.

Both progressive and mainstream conservative interpretations conceal a core statist assumption that is contrary to the very spirit of the Declaration. The assumption is that human equality—as described in the Declaration of Independence—cannot be achieved except through an all-powerful, central state. In other words, the entity historically responsible for creating and enforcing castes, cronyism, legal discrimination, and legal privilege at the expense of others is portrayed as the sole entity that can save people from inequality if given enough power. Thus, the ideal in the decentralist Declaration that “all men are created equal” becomes a justification for limitless state power.

As is typical with modern national conservatives, the Declaration’s legitimacy is supposedly saved by its alleged direct connection to Lincoln’s Civil War since the war ultimately ended slavery. This promotes the assumption that—instead of institutionally supporting slavery—war, centralization, and big government are the basis of equality and were necessary for ending slavery.

In reality, national power spent most of its early history protecting and enforcing the institution of slavery. The Constitution accommodated slavery, Congress protected it, federal courts upheld it, and federal officers enforced fugitive slave laws. Only after the slaveholding states attempted to leave the Union—explicitly citing slavery as a principal cause of secession—did the federal government cease acting as one of slavery’s key protectors and begin acting as its destroyer. Under Lincoln, the American nation-state was willing to abandon its decades-long legal protections of chattel slavery in exchange for keeping the Union together by force. In the sharp assessment of Lysander Spooner, the Civil War was,

. . .a war carried on, upon one side, for chattel slavery, and on the other for political slavery; upon neither for liberty, justice, or truth. And these crimes have been committed, and this war waged, by men, and the descendants of men, who, less than a hundred years ago, said that all men were equal, and could owe neither service to individuals, nor allegiance to governments, except with their own consent.

If one accepts that the Declaration’s central promise was egalitarian “equal opportunity” rather than equality of natural rights and equality before the law, and that this ideal required a national government powerful enough to preserve the Union by force and later enforce modern civil rights legislation, then one has already accepted a premise that invites an expansive state. The disagreement between progressives and mainstream conservatives becomes less about whether the national government should secure equality than about how far it should go.

Mainstream national conservatives, such as D’Souza, reject the progressive Left’s most radical egalitarian excesses, yet they retain the same underlying conception of egalitarian “equality” as a political end. As a result, they attempt simultaneously to restrain the growth of the state while affirming an ideal that—because it can never be fully realized—continually invites further state intervention.

Additionally, as seen in the image above, not only does D’Souza make the claim that the Declaration of Independence is legitimate because of its direct connection with future expansions of a nation-state that did not yet exist, but the “Declaration” that the cartoon Jefferson is holding up in the video is not the Declaration! Looking carefully, note that the “Declaration” held by Jefferson in the image reads “We the People,” which means that the “Declaration” in the video is actually the Constitution. A simple editing mistake for sure, but it is humorously ironic that this mistake was made since modern national conservatives often conflate the Declaration and Constitution.

The Classical Liberal Praise and Critique of the Declaration

It is not necessary to be embarrassed by the Declaration of Independence, nor pretend that the values and ideals proclaimed were perfectly realized, nor anachronistically equivocate on terms by injecting a later foreign definition into a context in which it did not exist.

Slavery, for example, was an injustice, and there was an element of hypocrisy in proclaiming liberty, independence, and equality while human bondage was practiced. Contextually, it should be noted that slavery was historically normal (though unjust) and free labor was the true “peculiar institution.” We should expect inconsistencies in a period in which unique changes of thought and practice began to take place. Further, as this author has argued on numerous occasions, slavery required the legal protection of state power to privatize gains to a slave oligarchy and socialize costs.

In fact, we should not criticize the Declaration, Jefferson, and others involved for failure to embrace modern egalitarianism; rather, we should criticize them for inconsistencies regarding liberty, consent, and natural rights. By accusing or excusing the Declaration because it failed to achieve egalitarian equality, both the progressives and national conservatives presuppose the same conclusion—that the Declaration’s promise of equality required state centralization, nationalization, and continual intervention by a government large enough to attempt to guarantee equal opportunities and/or results. While often accusing others of “revisionist history,” both ironically deny the Declaration’s original conception of equality through redefinition, retaining its language while replacing its meaning.

Mainstream national conservatives like D’Souza are not conserving the legacy of the Declaration of Independence. By reading later nationalist and egalitarian concepts back into the Declaration, they replace the Declaration’s original conception of equality and liberty with a modern one while continuing to appeal to the Declaration’s authority.

D’Souza’s revisionist history would have us believe that a declaration of secession actually justified the violent suppression of secession; that a decentralist political document and movement created a single, indivisible nation; that a body with no legal authority over slavery promised a future nation-state—which did not yet exist—would wage war to abolish slavery; and that the Declaration’s equality of natural rights and liberty, free from legal castes, actually meant modern egalitarianism, which depends upon legal castes.