Paul Seaton is a patient, methodical, and incredibly enlightening political thinker. By day, he teaches Catholic seminarians metaphysics, philosophy, and political thought, cutting against the braindead soft progressivism that has too often undermined Catholic seminary studies. One of his former students told me that Seaton unlocked philosophy for him by handing him Walker Percy’s essays and helping him understand that the life of the mind is as essential as prayer for any cleric. Seaton performs other works. To his efforts, we owe many excellent English translations of the works of French political theorist Pierre Manent, often accompanied by keen analysis from Seaton himself. In short, he brings gifts, and he should be properly thanked for them.

He has again come bearing gifts, this time in the form of essays published annually at Law & Liberty on the Fourth of July, reflecting on the Declaration of Independence’s “perennial wisdom.” Seaton wrote these essays over the course of a decade, and they have now been collected and republished by St. Augustine Press in the book titled Public Philosophy and Patriotism: Essays on the Declaration and Us. The title provides the four coordinating elements of the essays. The Declaration “combines public philosophy and patriotism. That is, it presents a mind formed by political philosophy (and theology), acting quite thoughtfully and dramatically on the basis of those ideas and on their behalf.” 

A Holistic Reading

Seaton’s analysis engages the Declaration in a distinctive way. He does cite well-known and enduring works, but Seaton as philosopher, theologian, and political thinker reads the document as a whole, discoursing on its striking comprehensiveness that touches on God, Nature, Man, and History while also formulating an appeal to the opinion of mankind. Inveighing against historicism, Seaton argues that the “Declaration contains perennial wisdom—wisdom that can not only guide but also judge us Americans today.” This claim “echoes” the Declaration’s “bold claim to revolutionary independence on the basis of permanent principles.” The crucial distinction between tyranny and free government is accessible via principles, and these don’t change. Built around this core conviction, the document can “judge us,” providing intimations and rumors of how we as a people are departing from our birthright of freedom.

Much of our thinking about the Declaration focuses on the celebrated second paragraph. And deservedly so, for it permanently places the self-evident truths of equality, life, liberty, happiness, the consent of the governed, and the right of revolution in our constitutional foundation. We also place these truths “as a detached ‘theoretical’ affirmation.” In this, we inadvertently lose the full Declaration. The Second Continental Congress that was responsible for drafting, approving, and signing the Declaration never saw discord between or downplayed the rest of the document, relegating it to a junior role. To read the Declaration as a whole doesn’t mean that we are engaged in traditionalism or that we are downplaying natural rights. It makes us honest readers and practitioners of its principles. 

Seaton notes that the second paragraph provides “a good starting point for what the Declaration has to say about man.” We should, though, adhere to “an old interpretive principle” and read the self-evident truths “in the light of the nature and purpose of the document as a whole. This allows us to see new dimensions of meaning in the familiar words, dimensions of which we are in particular need today.” Rather than take the second paragraph as a statement of belief, Seaton counsels us that “the Declaration is not a theoretical document; it is very much a practical document, and it employs the phrases cited above in an account of its deliberation and decision to act a certain way” (emphasis original).

When we do this, we find something of significance: the Declaration believes that the human person is an agent, one who makes judgments and decisions based on principles and facts. Seaton establishes that the Declaration contains a civic anthropology that supports a fixed human nature enabling citizens to think and reflect on the good, the bad, and the worst. Such capacity is implied by “the pursuit of Happiness,” and the consent of the governed, both self-evident truths that are inconceivable if we reject human nature’s ability to identify, articulate, and act prudentially in making worthy choices and actions. To conclude that the human person bears unalienable rights necessarily entails a constant human nature. A human nature in flux would not bear such rights, and could not bring a sempiternal wisdom to bear on political things. What matters most is what we think right now—“We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for,” intoned presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008. But such progressivism merely ensures that the government uses power according to the most pressing ideology and interests. What else could guide the government?

The Declaration gives “the principles of political right” in its tremendous “display of logical thinking,” evincing the “confidence it shows in the power of reasoning.” Such ordered thinking makes “Subjects not always deemed to be amenable to rational analysis and determination—political right order, tyranny, and revolution—find themselves directly and coherently dealt with.” The Declaration’s insistence on reason is displayed throughout the document as natural right principles are elegantly asserted, facts are listed and weighed, villains are called out, and consequences are adduced from causes. Seaton concludes that:

Its confidence in the ability of reason to understand and guide politics, including revolutionary activity, is so remarkable that one could raise it up as a model of capacious political reflection, effective rhetoric, and deliberate action. The Framers of the Constitution and Abraham Lincoln certainly did. Why not Americans today?

To this public philosophy of reason ordering revolutionary politics, we can also add a “spirited love of liberty,” which ultimately is what the Declaration is in the service of advancing.

A Manly Firmness

One of those dimensions of reason that the Declaration upholds is the capacity to make valid political judgments about legitimate forms and operations of government. In this vein, Seaton ushers in the 27 grievances that establish with facts the “abuses” and “usurpations” of the King and Parliament. This list, he states, “draws our attention to specifics, which in turn imply or refer to principles. That combination is itself a lesson for political judgment.” The grievances contain principles essential to lawful government: representative government, judicial independence, executive power confined by law, and civilian control of the military, among others. We should also note that each grievance finds a remedy for it in the written Constitution. 

To these qualities of reason and judgment, the Declaration bids us to consider the “manly Firmness” of those colonists who have resisted past incursions of their rights. Seaton instructs us to locate the Declaration’s “stout individual” and the “We,” who not only reason about good and evil government but resist with actions the government that violates their inalienable rights. The fixed view of human nature is again called upon “in the Declaration’s narrative of the contest over liberty and self-government and these are starkly contrasted in both moral (‘Justice and Magnanimity,’ ‘Cruelty,’ ‘Perfidy’) and political terms (‘free People,’ ‘Tyrant’).” How to find the courage to act in these ways? Seaton concludes that the Declaration gives us two poles: manly Firmness and trust in God. We must have pride in our judgments about tyranny afoot and trust that the God of battles is on the side of those who vindicate the political right that he brought forth in creation.

What should be evident, Seaton adds, is that the Declaration’s implied understanding of human nature is not that of the self-creating, self-defining autonomous individual. Those deriving from the Declaration this categorization of the individual ignore “the created rational substance that undergirds freedom and equality” while failing to see “the moral categories rooted in it that the Declaration freely employs.”

A substantial contribution these essays make is the application of the Declaration’s truths about human nature, law, and government to progressivism’s project that insists on the endless expansion of government power on behalf of egalitarian ideology. Seaton cites the work of James Davison Hunter, who suggested that progressivism locates truth in humanity guided by an evolving science of history whereby scientific rationality and individualist autonomy lead us to higher realms of being. Denizens of this view find it almost impossible to accept dissenters. Seaton offers that this is the source of the Resistance to President Donald Trump during his first term and the continued attempts to remove dissenting voices from public conversation on an array of issues ranging from public health to sexuality. 

A Principled Constitutionalism

Seaton also looks to identity politics’ binary of oppressed vs. oppressor and its replacement of individual rights with group rights. How does the Declaration’s articulation of individual rights, and its inherent appeal to the rule of law, deliberation, limited government, representation, and a people united under God for its support of liberty against oppression stand against the binary of identity politics, with its insistence that limitless government is needed to serve diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) or what is the same: racial and gender socialism? Identity politics brings tremendous passion in the service of justice but does so in the complete dismissal of every institution in American life that it confronts, promising the transvaluation of every cardinal and civic virtue to achieve group justice for the oppressed. It promises to unleash tremendous injustice on individuals in the service of its future promises. 

Who does identity politics speak for, Seaton asks? While identity politics claims to rectify past injustices it revels in present injustice by subsuming the human person into racial and gender characteristics, removing man from his highest feature: reason. Those drafting and approving the Declaration were sent by rebellious public authorities to promulgate a verdict of separation on behalf of the colonies, a judgment accepted by the people. They spoke comprehensively on behalf of the persons in the colonies who were being denied the protections of the law, preventing them from flourishing as individuals in community with others. It was precisely because individuals as moral creatures, made to pursue happiness freely, were being denied this right by arbitrary government, that the colonists rebelled. Contrast this with the understanding of power and speech displayed by identity politics leaders, who state that only the designated victim groups should speak on behalf of their justice. Thus, they are permitted to cast impossible demands for justice on those whose word is officially devalued because of their group trait as historical oppressors. Nothing could be further from the deliberation and argumentation in the Declaration.

The voices of progressivism and identity politics violate the principles of our Declaration. The author judges identity politics and the policies of DEI that have been implemented across the government under the Biden administration to be tyrannical. Why? They have the inevitable consequence of turning Americans against one another. Is this not what the colonists alleged against King George in the fifth and final section of the Declaration’s indictments? In one charge, we read “he has compelled citizens captured at sea to bear arms against their country and their civic brethren.” As Seaton concludes, “Classical wisdom long ago recognized that sowing discord among citizens and pitting them against one another is a characteristic modus operandi of the tyrant. King George confirms this ancient wisdom.” And so increasingly does progressive government in its attempt to remake the American people into its fitting group-defined servants. Seaton does not counsel revolution, but notes that prudence and vigilance should be in the forefront as we watch federal policy increasingly depart from the Declaration’s founding.

Those who would form a true resistance must engage in the work of the Declaration by using reason and logic to reinvigorate the American people, urging them to understand and to love passionately the spirit of liberty and law that founded them as a constitutional people. Relatedly, this reason and its support for liberty must also marshal facts, evidence, and rhetorical skills to make the case for why their government violates the terms of republican constitutionalism. MAGA-ism can’t do this, but the principles living in our Declaration certainly can. Seaton’s essays—much like the Declaration he is recovering—range over the political terrain on behalf of God, Man, Nature, and History to appeal to our countrymen for why they must again recover their inheritance and disposition of liberty.