Are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution really at odds? At this year’s Constitution Day lecture, Professor Tyson Reeder challenged a common narrative that portrays the Declaration as championing democratic ideals and the Constitution as protecting elite interests. “We can’t draw too stark of a contrast between the Constitution and the Declaration. If we do, we understand neither very well,” Reeder said. Drawing on sources from Polybius to James Madison, Reeder explained that the framers weren’t anti-democratic but were wrestling with an ancient problem: how to escape the cycle of governments degenerating from democracy to anarchy to tyranny and back again (anacyclosis). Cataloguing the Declaration’s 27 grievances against King George III, Reeder traced how each found its remedy in the Constitution’s text. In this way, the two documents present as a continuous conversation rather than a contradiction. Exploring slavery as a point of tension, Reeder illustrated how Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln read the founding documents as aspirational rather than descriptive. Seen in this light, the Constitution is an unfinished project, one requiring each generation to improve it and continue to close the gap between the nation’s ideals and its reality.
