Declarationism
The constitutional doctrine, associated with West Coast Straussianism and Harry V. Jaffa, holding that the Declaration of Independence is the philosophical foundation of the Constitution and that constitutional interpretation must be grounded in the Declaration’s natural rights principles
What It Is
Declarationism holds that the Declaration of Independence is not merely a historical document announcing independence but the philosophical charter of American constitutionalism. The rights enumerated in the Constitution are grounded in — and must be interpreted in light of — the Declaration’s assertion that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
This has several constitutional implications:
- The Constitution’s text cannot be read in isolation from the Declaration’s principles
- Natural rights preexist and constrain government; constitutional law must honor them
- Lincoln’s interpretation of the founding (emphasizing equality) is authoritative
- Progressive departures from natural rights represent unconstitutional corruption of the original design
Origins in Jaffa
Harry V. Jaffa is the principal theorist of Declarationism, developed across Crisis of the House Divided (1959) and A New Birth of Freedom (2000). Jaffa argued that Lincoln was not a constitutional revisionist but the truest interpreter of the Founders’ intent: the Declaration’s equality principle was always the lodestone of American constitutionalism, and Lincoln made it explicit.
This is the positive, celebratory half of West Coast Straussianism: America is not just a contingent historical arrangement but the political embodiment of natural right. The Declaration is philosophy made constitution.
Declarationism in the New Right
In the New Right’s hands, Declarationism often functions paradoxically. The Claremonters invoke the Declaration’s natural rights language, but their political program — ethnic nationalism, demographic protectionism, anti-immigration — sits in obvious tension with the Declaration’s universalist “all men are created equal.”
Michael Anton’s use of Declarationism in The Flight 93 Election illustrates this tension: he invokes the founding to condemn progressive subversion, but his actual policy concerns (immigration, trade protection) are difficult to ground in Jeffersonian natural rights philosophy. Field notes this as one of the New Right’s central contradictions.
John Eastman’s “Coup Memos” — arguing that the 12th Amendment authorized Pence to refuse to certify the 2020 election — represent Declarationism put to deeply antidemocratic use: natural rights reasoning being deployed to justify overturning an election.
Historical Genealogy (Kersch)
Political scientist Ken Kersch’s academic study (Beyond Originalism, 2011) provides the most rigorous genealogy of Declarationism and argues it serves two simultaneous ideological functions:
Function 1 — Rehabilitating Southern conservatism: Through the early 1980s, a significant element of the Conservative Movement was neo-Confederate, defending states’ rights and attacking Lincoln. M.E. Bradford was the most prominent: he called the Declaration’s equality clause “one serious flirtation with the millennial thing” and Lincoln a Jacobin centralizer. When Reagan nominated Bradford to head the NEH, neoconservatives blocked it and William Bennett was appointed instead (1981). This was the moment neo-Confederatism lost the institutional battle. Jaffa’s Declarationism won.
By adopting Lincoln and MLK as constitutional heroes, conservatives could henceforth attack civil rights policies (affirmative action, disparate impact law) while claiming the mantle of civil rights principles. This is the constitutional basis of the “reverse racism” argument that became the Republican Party’s post-1970s racial politics.
Function 2 — Unifying the Religious Right: Declarationism’s natural law framework gives Catholics (like Robert P. George) and evangelical Protestants common constitutional ground. George’s Witherspoon Institute “Natural Law, Natural Rights, and American Constitutionalism” project deploys the Declaration (with its Jefferson/Lincoln/MLK iconography) to argue that natural law is the foundation of American constitutionalism — making religious conservatism constitutionally respectable.
The Declarationist Triptych: Lincoln, Jefferson, and Martin Luther King Jr. — invoked together as witnesses to America’s perpetual return to its founding principles. In conservative hands, this Triptych allows every political battle (against affirmative action, against “woke” progressivism, for traditional natural law) to be framed as fidelity to the civil rights tradition rather than opposition to it.
Historical note: Declarationism is not inherently conservative. The Declaration has been invoked throughout American history by feminists (Seneca Falls, 1848), Populists, anti-imperialists, and FDR. What is distinctive is its post-1980s conservative deployment.
The Bradford-Jaffa Debate
The foundational internal conservative conflict over Declarationism was between Harry V. Jaffa (champion) and M.E. Bradford (critic). Bradford called Jaffa’s equality doctrine “the Heresy of Equality”: “There is no man equal to any other, except perhaps in the special, and politically untranslatable, understanding of the Deity.” He accused Jaffa of taking the Declaration’s “all men are created equal” clause out of context and building a false constitutional theology on it. Jaffa’s Lincoln was a Jacobin; Bradford’s Lincoln was a tyrant.
Jaffa’s reply: Bradford’s constitutionalism had no “worship of the law whatsoever” — it was defense of Southern hierarchy dressed up as constitutional fidelity.
Kersch’s historical verdict: Bradford was more historically accurate (the founders generally did not intend the Declaration as a universal equality mandate), but Jaffa was more politically viable. After the Civil Rights revolution, explicit neo-Confederatism was institutionally untenable. Declarationism won because it was the constitutionalism that could survive the 1960s.
Declarationism vs. Originalism: Jaffa’s Attack on Rehnquist, Bork, Scalia
In The American Founding as the Best Regime (2002), Jaffa explicitly attacked conservative originalists — naming William Rehnquist, Robert Bork, and Antonin Scalia — as self-contradictory. His argument: “To appeal to the conception of ‘original intent’ in interpreting the Constitution while denying the ideas of natural justice which formed the ‘why’ of the Constitution, is to go to the uttermost limit of self-contradiction.” The founders’ “original intent” was natural justice. You cannot read the intent without reading the philosophy that generated it.
This makes Declarationism and Federalist Society–style originalism fundamentally incompatible positions — not merely different emphases. The Federalist Society’s dominant approach grants authority to text and historical intent, while bracketing questions of natural law. Jaffa’s approach insists that text without natural law is arbitrary will dressed up as legal procedure — which is what Rehnquist claimed to oppose when he rejected “mere expressions of will” as constitutional grounds. (Jaffa would say that stripping natural justice from constitutional interpretation is itself mere will, just historical rather than living.)
This explains the long practical tension between the Claremont Institute and the Federalist Society, who shared personnel and donors but operated from genuinely different first principles.
Contrast with Progressive and Originalist Interpretations
| Declarationism | Originalism | Progressive Living Constitution | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anchor | Declaration’s natural rights | Original text/intent | Evolving democratic norms |
| Lincoln | Completing the Founding | Complex (14th Amendment expansion) | Hero of expanded rights |
| Natural law | Central | Peripheral | Rejected |
| Courts | Interpret per Declaration | Interpret per text | Adapt to social change |
”Republic Not a Democracy” — The Contemporary Deployment
A signature talking point of the Claremont/Hillsdale media ecosystem, the MAGA New Right, and elected Republicans (Mike Lee 2020 and others) in justifying Senate malapportionment, the Electoral College, and Republican-appointed judicial majorities is the formula “we are a republic, not a democracy.” George Thomas (Atlantic, November 2020 — see America Is a Republic, Not a Democracy) argues that this formula “surreptitiously fuses republic with minority rule rather than popular government.”
The wiki’s structural reading: the “republic not democracy” deployment is internally inconsistent with classical Declarationism. Madison (Federalist 14) treated democracy and republic as variants of popular government. Hamilton (“representative democracy”) used the terms interchangeably. Lincoln — Jaffa’s hero — declared that “the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible.” Declarationism on Jaffa’s original reading affirms equality and majority rule grounded in natural right; the contemporary “republic not democracy” deployment uses Declarationist vocabulary to justify a politics (durable minority rule) that the Declaration’s first principles cannot ground. This is one of the wiki’s clearest examples of the way the New Right inherits Jaffa’s language while pursuing politics his philosophy was structured against (see also the Bradford-vs.-Jaffa tension throughout the Counterrevolution page).
Cross-References
- West Coast Straussianism — the philosophical tradition Declarationism belongs to
- Harry V. Jaffa — principal theorist; Lincoln as constitutional redeemer
- M.E. Bradford — the neo-Confederate antagonist Declarationism displaced
- The Claremonters — movement that deploys Declarationism
- Michael Anton — uses Declarationism in The Flight 93 Election
- John Eastman — uses Declarationism to justify Coup Memos
- Leo Strauss — philosophical background; natural right theory
- Robert P. George — Witherspoon Institute’s Declarationist natural law project
- Common Good Constitutionalism — Vermeule’s post-Declarationist alternative; explicitly rejects natural rights liberalism
- Beyond Originalism — Kersch’s academic genealogy (primary source for this section)
- America Is a Republic, Not a Democracy — Thomas’s rebuttal of the contemporary “republic not democracy” deployment