Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 10% (150 hits)
• Anchoring Bias - 0%
• Availability Heuristic - 7.4% (111 hits)
• Representativeness Heuristic - 9.8% (148 hits)
• Hindsight Bias - 4.1% (62 hits)
• Overconfidence Bias - 1.5% (23 hits)
• Framing Effect - 9.8% (148 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 0.9% (13 hits)
• Status Quo Bias - 2.8% (42 hits)
• Sunk Cost Effect - 0%
• Optimism Bias - 8.8% (132 hits)
• Pessimism Bias - 8.7% (131 hits)

Article text

Independence Day, From Jefferson to Reagan to Trump

Thomas Jefferson’s reported last words were, “Is it the Fourth?”

John Adams’s were, “Thomas Jefferson still survives.”

As a matter of fact, Adams was wrong; Jefferson had predeceased him by some hours.

Their fellow Americans viewed their joint deaths on July 4, 1826, as a providential sign.

Who are we to question their judgment?

Exactly 50 years and one day earlier, Adams guessed wrong on another matter.

Writing his wife Abigail from Philadelphia, where he was attending the Second Continental Congress, Adams predicted that:

*The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America.

I am apt to believe, that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival.

It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty.

It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever.

*

Adams was right to imagine what future celebrations would look like, but he did get the day wrong.

July 2 is a day that matters to historians who want to explain exactly how, why, and when the Second Continental Congress made national independence the goal of American resistance to British misrule.

But July 4 is the day that Americans celebrate, and what we cherish is less the decision for independence but its public Declaration, which was primarily the work of Jefferson with a little help from his friends.

Yet Adams was inadvertently right in one other respect when he said, “Thomas Jefferson still survives.”

Jefferson remains a lively, engaging, and now controversial presence in the American historical consciousness to an extent no other Founder enjoys.

One reason why is that he was the most cosmopolitan American of his age, and his estate at Monticello, that architectural treasure, remains the supreme manifestation of his genius.

But the main reason is that we link Jefferson to those five crucial words, that “self-evident truth,” of the Declaration of Independence: that “all men are created equal.”

That principle forms the dominant creed of American republicanism.

Even though it took our revolutionary forebearers some years to learn that Jefferson was, in fact, the key author of the Declaration, our association of the master of Monticello with that phrase is the source of his eternal fame.

Two ironies surround this association of Jefferson with the Declaration and its affirmation of equality as our dominant political value.

The first involves a matter of timing.

Jefferson had spent the winter and early spring of 1776 at home, returning to Congress only in mid-May.

No sooner had he arrived than he decided he could be more useful in Virginia, where the Fifth Provincial Convention was drafting a new constitution.

Amazingly, Jefferson thought that Congress itself should adjourn so that its members could return home and join this process of constitution-making, which he now called “the whole object of the present controversy.”

Instead, he was stuck in Philadelphia, laboring away on the Declaration.

The second irony is far more substantive.

For generations, Americans have read the famous five words, “all men are created equal,” as a promise extending to individuals and to minorities facing one form of discrimination or another, based on race or gender or disability or overt forms of legal oppression, starting with chattel slavery.

But that was not the form of equality that Jefferson and the Continental Congress were claiming in 1776.

It was rather the collective rights of the American people, having suffered “a long train of abuses and usurpations” on their rights and liberties, “to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”

In many respects, though, Jefferson *was* an egalitarian in the robust sense in which we use the term.

The revised code of Virginia laws that he largely drafted in the late 1770s is stocked with democratic provisions.

For modern readers, Jefferson’s great sins rest, of course, on his life as the wealthy slaveholding owner of Monticello and his willingness to invoke precociously racist premises to justify the colonization of the slaves he proposed Virginia should emancipate to some unspecified destination far away from the United States.

That these emancipated slaves would eventually become “a free and independent people” and assume their own “separate and equal station” among the nations—direct echoes of the Declaration of Independence—does not spare Jefferson the condemnation of his modern critics.

Yet these are hardly novel themes, and any sensible observer could have predicted that numerous conferences on “America at 250” would address them.

Based on events I’ve attended, that has indeed been the case.

Although some familiar arguments have been recycled, one can still be impressed by the new findings in books such as Emily Sneff’s *When the Declaration of Independence Was News* and Michael Auslin’s *National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America.

*

If this were any other era, we could rest content with the celebrations Adams anticipated and the earnest symposia and conferences that our universities, learned societies, and judicial conferences are holding.

But our historical moment is unlike any other the nation has ever known.

It is hard to celebrate America at 250 when our constitutional system is failing, and our democratic institutions are decaying.

That is why I’ve been brooding over another five-word phrase that resonates deeply: that the United States should act as “a city upon the hill,” an exceptionalist beacon of democratic equality to inspire other nations.

The phrase famously comes from the sermon that Governor John Winthrop gave aboard the *Arbella* as the Puritans were sailing to Massachusetts Bay in 1630.

In the closing passage of his sermon, entitled “A Model of Christian Charity,” Winthrop warned his fellow passengers that “we shall be as a city upon a hill.

The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken . . . we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.”

As the great historian Perry Miller explained in his brilliant essay, “Errand Into the Wilderness,” the Puritan mission had an avowedly religious purpose: to develop a form of religious governance that would serve as a model for Reformed protestant congregations in Britain and Europe.

Ronald Reagan had a more expansive vision of this metaphor, one that replaced Winthrop’s religious conception of the errand much as our own dominant reading of “all men are created equal” has supplanted the political objectives of the Continental Congress in July 1776.

In his Farewell Address of January 1989, Reagan recurred to the “shining city upon the hill” image he often used in his speeches.

In his mind,

*It was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity.

And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.

*

Reagan was invoking Winthrop, but the city he imagined would have its own Jeffersonian egalitarian character (even though we know that Jefferson was no fan of the London and Paris he visited in the mid-1780s).

There is no room in our current president’s tariff-addled, flagrantly corrupt, explicitly racist, and nativist world for this vision.

The algae flooding the reflecting pool fronting the sacred Lincoln Memorial are the fittest symbol of the Trump presidency.

But it is the other moral that Winthrop drew that haunts me most.

On the 250^th anniversary of independence, have we not indeed become “a story and a by-word through the world,” to echo the warning embedded in his sermon?

One dreads imagining how America will be portrayed when foreign leaders publish memoirs about what it was like to deal with Trump and his lackeys.

The recorded call with the Ukrainian president, in which Trump seemed to condition aid on Volodymyr Zelensky’s willingness to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, seems like a mere amuse-bouche, a trivial prequel to the inconsistent strategy and erratic diplomacy of the Iran debacle.

Or what will historians learn when they eventually read the correspondence between foreign governments and their emissaries serving in Washington?

The mind boggles at the thought.

In the meantime, enjoy the fireworks and even bless the Reflecting Pool algae.

In the long march of liberty, we can still hope and pray that this too shall pass.

But we can no longer share the enthusiasm that John Adams felt in April 1776 when he exulted on being “sent into life at a time when the greatest lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to have lived.”

The revolutionary optimism that Adams and Jefferson felt in the springtime of independence now seems a distant memory.