The first issue of the online journal The Dispatch is available today, and it includes my article "What Pete Buttigieg Gets Wrong About the Founding Fathers." Excerpt:
Championed primarily by the late historian Pauline Maier, this theory holds that when the Founders wrote “all men,” they didn’t think their words would include black people. Maier argued that it was the subsequent generation—particularly Lincoln—who viewed the Declaration as “a living document” and “enlist[ed]” it “on behalf” on anti-slavery arguments. In something like a Platonic noble lie, they were adapting, for laudable anti-slavery purposes, words that were not written with that intention.
But the reality is that the authors of the Declaration and the Constitution were quite clear in their understanding that slavery was “a bad thing”—so much so that it would be tedious to quote examples to prove their virtual unanimity on that point. They also understood that it was irreconcilable with the Declaration’s self-evident truth of equality. They said so at the time.... Why does Maier’s “creative reinterpretation” theory persist? One reason is that it fits snugly into prevailing Progressivist theories, which hold that the words of a law—whether the Declaration, the Constitution, or a statute—don’t actually mean anything until they’re interpreted by a judge. In a recent Twitter exchange on this subject, for example, Cornell law professor Josh Chafetz accused me of having “an implausible faith in the determinacy of complex texts”—a fancy way of saying that it’s naïve to think written words actually mean things. Instead, what happens is that competing groups fight over how to interpret words—arguments in which nobody is ever really correct, since, again, words have no “determinacy”—and one side eventually gains more adherents than the other (for reasons unrelated to the truth of the matter, which does not exist)....
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