Debunking Princeton Idiocy

Sometimes I wonder about leftists. They are not very bright at all. Check this out. There is a college professorette who wants to reinterpret the Declaration of Independence by claiming it contains a typo. She thinks this means we need to rethink how the Founders viewed the government. Good grief.

The brainiac in question is Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, though I think the word “Advanced” is misplaced here. She argues that there is a “missing” comma in the Declaration of Independence which changes its meaning.

Here’s what the Declaration says now:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...”

According to Allen, the period after “Happiness” shouldn’t be there. She thinks Jefferson meant this to be a comma. Then she argues that since it should be a comma, what Jefferson (a noted slave holder the left sometimes hates) meant was that it is a self-evident truth that government is instituted to secure the above rights. Ergo, he meant that government was the key to freedom. Ergo, he meant we should worship government!

Allow me to respond.

(1) First and foremost, even if we accept that this should be a comma, her argument still fails. What the Declaration says without the comma is: “We create a government to secure these inalienable rights.” What it says with the comma is, “It’s obvious that men create governments to secure these inalienable rights.” The meanings are slightly different, but the substance is not. In both cases, the inalienable rights are the goal, and the government is the tool. Neither statement suggests that the rights are subordinate to or spring from the government.

(2) Even if she’s right, Allen doesn’t seem to get that the Declaration of Independence is not an establishing document. It has no legal effect; you can’t cite it in court. Don’t forget, it was written before the United States existed and, not only that, we had another form of government after the Declaration and before the constitution. Remember the Articles of Confederation? Allen apparently doesn’t.

(3) Even putting aside number two, her interpretation is not one that anyone has ever adopted. Just as “Born in the USA” is now seen as a patriotic song, the public made up its mind on the meaning of the Declaration regardless of what hyper-technical spins can be invented, and it has a meaning apart from its words now.

(4) From a technical standpoint, her interpretation is flawed. First, you don’t just need to change the period into a comma, you also need to lose the now-meaningless dash and eliminate the now-wrongly-capitalized “That” for her interpretation to work. Needing three changes to fix the "mistake" suggests the "mistake" was intentional.

Moreover, her interpretation changes this from being two grammatically correct sentences into one grammatically nonsensical sentence. Any interpretation that introduces nonsense or errors is automatically suspect.

(5) If this really was a mistake, then why did no one mention it at the time? There is not one article, interview or paper written by anyone at the time saying, “Wow, there’s a fricken typo in this thing! We didn’t mean there to be a comma!” No one mentions the missing comma. No one corrected the supposed misinterpretation. That's huge evidence.

With such spirited debate at the time, shouldn’t someone have said something if this was true? It would seem to be a rather fundamental mistake if Allen is to be believed, changing the meaning from being worshipful of government to making government a slave of individual rights. Yet, no one spoke up. That tells us no one saw it as a mistake.

(6) Finally, her proposed change flies in the face of history. At the time the Declaration was written, there had never been a democracy created for that purpose before. So believing this should be a comma means believing that an accurate statement – “we will form a government to do this” – should be replaced with an historically wrong statement – “yeah, dude, this is what democracies always do, duh!” Why would Jefferson have meant to include an obviously historically wrong statement?

This is what passes for scholarship on the left. Sad.

Thoughts?