(chiming music) - [Announcer] The School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership presents "The Civic Discourse Project: Civics, Patriotism, and America's Prospects."

This week: - The most striking formulation, or rather reformulation of Lincoln's reading of the Declaration is the claim that the new nation is dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

- [Announcer] "The Civic Discourse Project" is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership.

And now, Steven B. Smith, the Alfred Cowles professor of political science at Yale University, discusses how Abraham Lincoln invented American democracy.

- Democratic theory, like democracy itself, comes in various shapes and sizes.

There are, today, two leading theories about democratic legitimacy.

There are what are often called realist theories that are been developed by thinkers like Joseph Schumpeter and my own former colleague, Robert Dahl, who focus on the actual institutions of democratic life, things like voting, competitive elections, and political parties.

They regard these as not only the necessary but also the sufficient condition for democratic societies.

And then there are what can be called idealist theories of democracy that typically draw inspiration from Jean Jacque Rousseau, who focused on ways of enhancing citizen participation in deliberation and decision-making.

A fully engaged citizenry, Rousseau believed, was a requirement for any theory of democratic legitimacy.

Each of these theories captures a part, but, I want to argue, only a part, of the truth.

Realists correctly draw on actual practices of democratic societies, but they are often indifferent to the way that these societies are preserved and maintained over time.

Institutions are not self-sustaining.

Democratic institutions require democratic citizens who are trained and educated in the practices of a democratic way of life.

Without the proper inculcation of democratic values, things like tolerance, fair play, a willingness to compromise, open-mindedness, a concern for truth, without those values, democracies are prone to degeneration and decay over time.

And furthermore, we have seen the way, in places like Turkey or Hungary, how, with the rise of what are sometimes called illiberal democracies, how they are able to maintain a patina of embracing competitive elections and political parties, but the fact, tilted the playing field in such a way that the outcomes are generally predetermined.

Idealist theories are prone to the opposite deficiency.

Drawing on experiments and preference aggregation largely taken from economics, such theories display a naive faith in what is sometimes called the wisdom of the crowd as a means for arriving at the common good.

Deliberative democrats often ignore the darker passions, like envy, resentment, hatred, and other negative dispositions that motivate human behavior.

They treat politics as if it were a debate society, or a college seminar, where the force of the unforced argument, in the words of Jurgen Habermas, is supposed to win the day, but fail to recognize that what is deemed a better argument by some may equally be a cause of further contestation and debate by others.

What's more, such theories are often indifferent to the needs for leadership and authority.

To be sure, democracy is about deliberation and debate, but it is also about command, authority, and habituation.

Neither of these views pays sufficient attention to the actual founding of democratic societies, and how regimes are founded, I believe, will determine, at least in part, whether they will survive.

There have been many foundings in history, but relatively few have stood the test of time.

This is because successful foundings require far-seeing statesmen possessed of qualities like vision, strength, wisdom, courage, and magnanimity.

These qualities define the greatest statesmen, the fathers of the Constitution, as it were, that helped to establish the permanent framework within which the right handling of changing situations can take place by their successors.

But just as important is institution building.

The statesman's art consists in the creation of language and the deployment of ideals by which people understand themselves.

If Shelley was right when he said that the poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, it is the statesmen who are the legislators of particular peoples.

Statecraft requires the gift of rhetoric, an art that is largely neglected by modern political science and remains a singular cause for the debasement of contemporary political discourse.

The statesman must be, above all, a great communicator, to use a term that was once applied to Ronald Reagan, a great communicator, capable of educating the public mind through the selective use of symbols and stories.

In his recent book, "Leadership," Henry Kissinger has commented on the importance of what he has called "deep literacy" as a background condition for successful statecraft, and this only comes with the experience of careful reading.

Now let me get into Lincoln.

Nowhere was this example of deep reading given more profound expression than in Lincoln's Gettysburg address.

Lincoln understood that language alone has the power to confer immortality.

It is a people's collective memory that make a people and a nation.

There is scarcely a word about the actual battle in the Gettysburg Address.

It is a speech about the meaning of equality and the purpose for which the war has been waged.

In just 272 words, Lincoln, I want to argue, created American democracy.

So how did he do that?

The Gettysburg Address begins with what is the most famous sentence in American oratory: "Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

What was Lincoln doing in that sentence?

The outset of the speech concerns the moment of political founding.

Do the math.

Lincoln fixes the date at 1776, 87 years before, the year of the Declaration of Independence, not 1787, the year of the ratification of the Constitution.

This is a point he had made on several occasions, but most memorably, on the occasion of the centennial of Jefferson's birth in 1859.

Let me just read Lincoln on Jefferson.

"All honor to Jefferson," he says, "to the man who, in the concrete pressure of the struggle for national independence by a single people had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression."

But at Gettysburg, Lincoln sought to endow what he had called a merely revolutionary document, a merely revolutionary document, an expression clearly intended to shock, he endows it with a sacred history.

His language, "Four score and seven years ago," is deliberately biblical and archaic; it is drawn from Psalm 90, "The days of our years are three score years and 10."

This attempt to endow the founding with a sacred beginning indicates Lincoln's departure from Jefferson.

The declaration was Lockean and Whiggish in tone, in its doctrines of natural rights, government by consent, and the right of rebellion.

It presupposed an enlightenment psychology that peoples, like individuals, act rationally in pursuit of their goals, which are power, status, and economic goods.

Governments are created to defend these rights, and may be overthrown when they fail to do so.

But Lincoln's language is less Whiggish and contractual than it is organicist and developmental.

The biological images of birth, growth, and maturation suffuse the speech.

The nation was brought forth and conceived.

The image of conception is an obstetric metaphor suggesting not the language of the social contract that requires a reflection and choice, but of something that grows and develops out of its own imminent principles.

Lincoln does not call the country a union, suggesting, again, a social contract based on freely consenting agents, but uses the more organic term, nation, to suggest a collective enterprise.

A nation is not something that can be created by an act of will, but is something that needs to grow over time.

His reference to "this continent," that is to say, the land and the soil, further suggests the organic quality of the nation.

The same holds true for what follows.

The Declaration had made its case for independence by appealing, you might remember, to the laws of nature, and nature's God.

There is something impersonal and deistic in this formula, and references to God, or the Almighty, are used sparingly throughout the Declaration.

In the second paragraph, Jefferson refers to the Creator as the author of our unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but it is not until the very end of the text that Jefferson again calls on the protection of divine Providence under whose guidance the signatories are said to pledge to each other their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.

All of these references, I would suggest, are, in fact, fairly boilerplate.

Lincoln's language could not have been more different.

He refers not to the impersonal laws of nature and nature's God, but to our fathers, reminding us of the biblical patriarchs who brought forth and conceived a new nation.

The image of Moses and Jesus immediately come to mind.

The language of conception, birth, and new birth runs throughout the speech.

It is to this nation to which we must be dedicated, and the words dedicate or dedicated, are used five times, the words consecrate or consecrated, twice, and the word devotion, twice.

The speech makes no formal recognition of theology.

It mentions once, near the end, this nation under God, but Lincoln's cadence is biblical and is intended to endow the founding with a new and sacred beginning.

Perhaps, though, the most striking formulation, or rather reformulation, of Lincoln's reading of the Declaration is the claim that the new nation is dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now, what makes that striking?

In a document intended to honor and recall the fathers, Lincoln shows, I want to argue, his greatest departure from them.

What do I mean by that?

This paraphrase of the Declaration is revealing.

What had Jefferson written?

Jefferson wrote this: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

While Jefferson proclaimed equality a truth, which we know to be the case, Lincoln put this forward as a proposition to which we must remain dedicated.

So what is the difference between a truth held to be self-evident and a proposition to which we must be dedicated?

The language, the Jeffersonian language, of self-evidence comes from mathematics, or more precisely, from Euclid's "Elements."

It is what the logical positivists of the mid-20th century referred to as an analytical truth of the kind found in mathematics or formal logic.

A self-evident truth is a statement judged true by definition of the terms.

All unmarried men are bachelors, a self-evident truth.

It takes the form if A, then B, a truth, that is to say, independent of social context, language, or history, but deemed true simply in terms of reason and logic alone.

Jefferson believed that human equality was a truth of this kind: To know what it means to be a human being is to know that human beings are equal in a way that does not hold between human beings and horses, or dogs, or any other species.

We are equal by nature of the terms involved.

But to call equality a proposition, as Lincoln does, is something quite different.

Propositions are statements that require verification.

A proposition suggests a certain indeterminacy, something that has yet to be established.

While Jefferson called equality a possession, "We hold these truths to be self-evident," Lincoln's proposition is something to which we must be dedicated if it is either to be proved or disproved.

No one needs to be dedicated to the Pythagorean theorem to know that the three angles of a triangle equal 180 degrees.

It is true no matter what we may believe or what language we speak, but this is not the case with a term like equality, at least for Lincoln.

It depends on our degree of belief in or commitment to its truth.

The term proposition carries an almost existential quality to it that requires faith and dedication.

It must undergo a trial by fire before its truth can be recognized.

It seems close to William James's description of truth as an event, something that happens, or that we make to happen in the world.

Lincoln offers no guarantee whether the proposition that all men are created equal will be proven true.

It will depend entirely on us, on our dedication to it, to make it so.

For Douglass, democracy meant a simple form of majority rule, whatever a majority of the people of a state or territory, and by majority, he meant whatever the free white males of that territory wanted, was regarded by him as a source of legitimacy.

This was the basis of his claim of what he called indifference to the future of slavery.

If a state or territory wanted to vote slavery in or out, either choice was equally legitimate in his view, so long as it expressed the majority will.

It was, you might say, a kind of debased form of Rousseau's idea of the general will.

Lincoln's reference to the earth and the world, "the last, best hope of earth, the world will forever applaud," anticipates Gettysburg's statement, "shall not perish from the earth."

Lincoln began his speech with an allusion to "this continent," but concludes with a reference to the earth, suggesting that the struggle for democracy is something that affects the whole of mankind.

This is clearly an upward trajectory from the particular to the universal.

If I can quote an earlier message to Congress, "This issue," meaning the war, "embraces more than the fate of these United States, it presents to the whole family of man the question whether a constitutional republic or a democracy, a government of the people by the same people, can or cannot maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic foes."

Lincoln wrote this in his 4th of July message to Congress.

The phrase, "the whole family of man" shows that virtually from the outset of the war, Lincoln was thinking of it as a matter of world historical importance.

The war that began as a purely sectional conflict between North and South has become part of a global struggle that will, in turn, determine the fate of humanity.

By the way, this reference to "the domestic foes of democratic institutions" should have special meaning for us today.

The Gettysburg Address turned the war against slavery into a war for democracy, and Lincoln saw this as part of a global struggle.

This is something I believe he intended all along.

His reading of the Declaration is an excellent example of what Yale literary critic, Harold Bloom, once called "creative misinterpretation," which is what he believed all great writers and poets do to the works of their predecessors; they deliberately upend them in order to make their own voices speak more clearly, and this is something that, I think, clearly runs throughout Lincoln's Gettysburg address.

Lincoln's promise of a new birth of freedom clearly suggests this aspiration.

The new birth would be an attempt to endow democracy with a new beginning, rooted in the respect for the dignity of the individual.

His talk of conception, dedication, rebirth, gave to democracy the almost sacred meaning that we attribute to it today.

When we speak of democracy today, we do so in the language created by Lincoln, and it was in this sense, I think I can argue, that Lincoln created American democracy.

Thank you very much.

(audience applauding) (chiming music) - Steven, that was splendid!

Thank you so much.

You quoted the last phrase, this extraordinary phrase, but clarified that the signers commit only to each other, right?

- Mm-hmm.

- "For the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor."

So in a way, the nation calls for everyone - Mm.

- to be committed to each other, this ethical principle.

It's worth dying, they're saying it's worth dying, over the idea that all men are created equal, and there are these natural rights, but that Lincoln, there's a kind of biblical spirit in that, you know, sacred honor, and there are references to a divinity, but that after a century of testing (chuckles), that the biblical part will have to be more fully blended with the enlightenment, rational part, and there'll have to be a mutual commitment universally to all human beings - Yes.

- having equality.

It's not Lincoln being unfair to the founding as a whole, he's trying to make sense of the human beings, the political civic culture that could have given rise to the Declaration, and now we must say, many decades later, we have to be more explicitly committed to the civic, cultural, political reality.

- I mean, - Is that fair?

- That's fair, certainly, that's fair.

- There's a good reading of Lincoln's reading of the Declaration and the founding text.

I took it a little differently.

When they refer to "we pledge to each other," I took that to mean a far more exclusive statement.

We're not speaking for everybody, it's just we, the signers, are doing this.

There's, you know, maybe not surprisingly, an aristocratic character to that statement in many ways, the reference to honor, and so on, these seem to be just often thought of as kind of an aristocratic virtue, and the founders, that would in many ways be in keeping with some of their Roman sensibilities in certain respects, so I do want to say, maybe Lincoln is drawing what is implicit, but only kind of merely implicit there, but he certainly goes much further than they do in embracing the we, the collective we, the people, and Lincoln, as we know, especially in the light of his second inaugural, too, you know, "four score and seven years," the cadence, the rhetoric has a far more biblical resonance to it, which I think is not just a refinement of what they did, but in many ways indicates a very different sensibility that he brings to politics, he brings to democracy.

- In Lincoln, it seems that you're getting closer to this notion of thinking about people with respect to identity, of who are we?

I'm even thinking here of the way, you know, during the last inaugural address, President Biden channels Augustine, the people, as being defined by the objects of their loves, the who are we, as the identity question, as you sort of were alluding to, and this is very much our trouble today, the who are we?

We have a great tension to struggle over what America is what democracy is, whether we're committed to democracy, and I fear that the one thing that Lincoln seems to suggest is that this effort to understand who we are ultimately leads to or entails some kind of violence, and I wanted to ask you if you thought that the struggles that we are facing today over who we are are struggles that are going to entail more violence.

- Yeah, no, that's a great- - but there's that kind of death that's part of the necessary, that's necessary, even, that becomes as a precondition of rebirth, right?

- You raise a powerful question about that, and I do think Lincoln saw, in Gettysburg and elsewhere, that, of course, they were in the middle of a war, to be sure, but he did see that this was a crucible, the fiery trial through which we pass.

I mean, the language there is almost 17th century, you know, Puritan language.

We are...

The redemptive power of struggle and violence can change a people and will be perhaps even necessary to emerge out of this, and I think that's very real in Lincoln's speech.

We hear him use that language occasionally, he doesn't revel in it, but occasionally.

I mean, I think of the famous statement from the Peoria speech about "We must wash the," we must," speaking of slavery, "We must wash the...

The Republican robe is soiled.

We must wash it in this blood, if not the spirit, of the revolution," you know, this kind of redemptivist language which invokes violence and transformation, it's used cautiously but vividly, throughout Lincoln.

I don't know where we are now.

I hope we don't have another fiery trial of the kind that he experienced.

You're definitely right in pointing to the way in which this language of, this religious language, redemptivist language is very powerful throughout, and scary, scary that Lincoln does invoke it.

- Thank you very much.

- Yeah.

- And with that, one final round of thanks to Steven Smith.

(audience applauding) - [Announcer] The Civic Discourse Project is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership.

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