Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Mary Bilder:

I think one of the things that’s interesting about the Declaration is the words are multivalent, they were designed to be multivalent. They’ve always meant different things to different people in different spaces, and that’s why they’re powerful. I mean, not everybody thinks the same way, so a vocabulary that can create shared belief and understandings, even though people interpret them differently is a very powerful vocabulary.

Danielle Allen:

People make a mistake and they stop after pursuit of happiness, but that’s incorrect. There’s a stray period that sneaked in, and a lot of additions shouldn’t be there. Jefferson wrote it as one sentence. Adams wrote it as one sentence. It’s a syllogism, two premises yielding a conclusion that follows logically from the premises that that’s what gives it the status of having self-evidence.

Preet Bharara:

Welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara. This is episode two of our special series that reflects on America 250 years after its founding. Today, I’m joined by two distinguished historians. Danielle Allen is a Political Philosopher and a Professor at Harvard University. Mary Bilder is a Historian of the American founding era, and a Professor at Boston College Law School. They are the perfect guide to help us understand the Declaration of Independence, not just as a historical relic, but as a live argument about democracy, equality, and our obligations to one another. That’s coming up. Stay Tuned.

Danielle and Mary, welcome to the show. So last week we had my friend and former colleague, Joanne Freeman, Historian from Yale on, to talk about some of these issues, and we wanted to have some more folks on to talk about the importance of the Declaration, the importance of this anniversary. And I thought the first question I would ask, which is a little bit along the lines of what I started out with Joanne, was why do we celebrate this anniversary? 1776, we didn’t have a president, we didn’t have a government until 1789. There was some war that still needed to be fought. Why this one? Why this anniversary? I don’t mean to belittle the document, but on a mere declaration as opposed to a treaty or a victory.

Danielle Allen:

Preet, for starters, the Declaration is just one of three things that happened simultaneously. So June 7th, 1776, Richard Henry Lee stood up in Philadelphia and Continental Congress and introduced a motion in Congress for independence. Congress was not ready to vote yet, they wanted to be unanimous before they took the radical step of breaking their formal allegiance to the Crown. And so because they weren’t ready to vote yet, they decided to get some other work done in the meanwhile, and so they made three assignments: draft a preamble for independence, draft treaties with France and Spain, and draft Articles of Confederation. So 1776 is the moment in which a government begins with the Articles of Confederation. Takes them a long time to actually get it done, but they are in fact setting up a government, treaties they’re setting up, and they have established themselves as independent on the world’s stage. So that is what the Declaration is really the summative text for, and why we celebrate it.

Mary Bilder:

For me, the Declaration of Independence creates constitutional regicide. It’s a moment where you have a year where what’s going to become a new nation, break with not just the King, but with the very idea of a King, and that is a sort of constitutional crisis that had been building since George the III took power in 1760. And in 1776, you actually have even going back to May, Congress having approved the, what are going to become called states to develop their own forms of government. And then you have this dramatic decision that actually is we’re going to end our relationship with a king or any king, and so for me, that’s a big anniversary. The fact that they don’t have everything worked out yet, the fact that they haven’t figured out exactly what the new forms of government are going to look like, they’re going to experiment with those, I think basically constitutionally killing a king is a pretty big deal.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I’m not disputing it, but it’s not just 100% clear to me why you would necessarily pick that date as opposed to other dates.

Mary Bilder:

Well, John Adams actually didn’t think they should do July 4th. He was always a little sad about it.

Preet Bharara:

That John Adams.

Mary Bilder:

Yeah. He thought it should have been the thing that he wrote in May.

Preet Bharara:

Like one of the letters he wrote to Abigail?

Mary Bilder:

No, he’s the one who drafted the, on May 10th, they vote that the states, the colonies basically can create new governments, and he writes a dramatic introduction to that that’s voted up in May 15th. And he thought that, or at least June was better, but Jefferson ends up getting all the credit, which is the story of John Adams’ life, I think.

Preet Bharara:

Right.

Danielle Allen:

It’s true. This was even his to-do list in February of 1776. It was assumed governments in all the colonies exactly as Mary is saying. And that was at the top of the list, and then the treaties with France and Spain were on the list. And then the 14th item, third to last, I think was Declaration of Independency. So it was Adams’ agenda that was being prosecuted all spring.

Preet Bharara:

So I want to get to both the text and the substance of the Declaration and remind people who may only remember a few fragments, which is most of us. I’ve always wondered if the fact of the, and I think there’s agreement on this, the sheer eloquence of the document is something that had actual impact beyond being pleasing to the ear. In other words, it’s a document that we celebrate, it’s a document that we venerate, it’s a document that had a lot of impact. In an alternate universe, you could have made all these same points a little bit more workmanlike. That wouldn’t have been as auspicious a founding document for the country and the same is true for at least parts of the Constitution. I’m not sure what my question is, but as a matter of language and pace, and if one could say poetry, and we’ll get to some of it in a moment, was that important or not?

Mary Bilder:

I mean, I think at the time what’s interesting, and I don’t think any of us are very smart about the Declaration. So one of the fun things about being a person who does constitutional stuff this year has been everybody’s gone back and read the Declaration and is like, “Whoa, that’s kind of interesting. And notice this.”

Preet Bharara:

I don’t remember that part.

Mary Bilder:

Yeah. There’s actually a lot of, I mean, there’s a couple lines in there that I never paid attention to before, but I think one of the things that’s interesting is at the time, the part that really mattered an enormous amount was what we know as the Lee resolution, which is actually the part that Congress had voted that they had declared independence. And then over time, other parts become really significant so we can show there’s actually-

Preet Bharara:

The less than easy parts.

Mary Bilder:

Yeah. There’s been great evidence about how Black Americans begin to use very early on the language of the beginning part to the famous language about all men created equal to put in the Declaration into conversation with slavery, and other people begin to think about how the Declaration sets up constitutional norms, but it’s in the 19th century that you get the embrace of the Declaration increasingly in the way we understand it.

Danielle Allen:

For a long time, people said it was only in the 19th century that the Declaration came to have its resonant meaning. People pointed to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address rededication to the proposition that all people are created equal. But Mary’s right that in fact it was used immediately by free Blacks in Boston, for example, Prince Hall among them. But not only there, the preamble language flows into the Massachusetts state constitution as John Adams drafted. It flows into the Vermont Constitution. Vermont is still its own country at that point in time. And that important preamble language right from the beginning then supports the abolition of enslavement in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Vermont, even before the end of the Revolutionary War. So that has changed the historiography of the document. People have now come to acknowledge that it did have an important impact immediately, and in fact, it was the most philosophical, most poetical language in a sense that people did use immediately and helped crystallize the early stages of abolitionism.

Preet Bharara:

So cool. We talk about that age-old tension between liberty and equality. So on the one hand, we call it the Declaration of Independence, which implies a statement of liberty, right? And on the other hand, the most famous phrase in the entire document is that we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. Do you want to take a gander at the issue of what actually happens at the intersection of liberty and equality? Are they actually at variance with each other in this country? Was there a lot of thinking about that in the Declaration of Independence? Is it a paradox or does it make a lot of sense? Because some people think the former.

Danielle Allen:

Well, my view is it makes a lot of sense. So as I’m sure you know, I’ve published a book called Our Declaration, a reading of the Declaration of Independence and Defense of Equality. And one of its major arguments is that, yes, liberty and equality belong together hand in glove in the Declaration. It’s important that when the Declaration is written, the authors are working with a conception of liberty that has its roots in Rome and ancient politics and it’s a conception of liberty understood as freedom from domination. Freedom from domination requires having steering rights with regard to the political system. In other words, it requires political equality. Equality is part of the necessary realization of liberty. It’s in the 19th century as the industrialization completely transforms the economy that you start getting a very different definition of liberty as freedom from governmental interference. And it’s that thinner definition of liberty that then through the 19th into the early 20th century, people drew on to make the case that there was a contrast or conflict between liberty and equality.

But in fact, in the richest sense of freedom, what it means to be free from domination requires everybody having steering control in their private lives and also steering together in their public lives. The fact that human beings need that is rooted in our moral equality, our equal status as creatures with purposes. So in that sense, again, liberty and equality are co-constituting. They’re mutually defining of each other based on that ancient, and then through the 18th century dominant idea of liberty. And again, it’s only in the 19th century when you get a strong contrast between communism and capitalism that the concept of liberty gets reduced to a freedom from interference concept.

Mary Bilder:

Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that’s interesting about the Declaration is the words are multivalent. They were designed to be multivalent. They’ve always meant different things to different people in different spaces, and that’s why they’re powerful. I mean, not everybody thinks the same way. So a vocabulary that can create shared belief in understandings, even though people interpret them differently is a very powerful vocabulary.

But the late 18th century, the 1760s and 1770s was a time when on both sides of the Atlantic, people went back to look at the first moment of regicide, the English Civil War. And the English Civil War is, of course, the time when people like Milton write and Milton puts those words into opposition. What does slavery mean? Slavery is slavery, but slavery is also slavery of the mind, slavery of the body, slavery to power. What does liberty mean? Well, liberty is the opposite of that about subordination, but it also begins to imagine the idea that people are created equal and therefore you can’t have a king.

Those are super important fundamental ideas that get brought back in the 1760s and 1770s, and in some ways, what’s pretty amazing is all of a sudden people decide to take that seriously, and then the implications of that begin to be taken seriously. So some people think you can use those words, Jefferson, and still enslave hundreds of people. Other people have already begun to realize like, “No, I’m not going to be enslaved because of those vocabulary.” And so I think that vocabulary is just incredibly powerful, and has democratic emancipatory potential from the moment it begins being used.

Danielle Allen:

Your question, Preet, though is interesting about the power of the rhetoric itself. How much power does poetry have leaving even aside the content of it? There’s an interesting contrast you can draw. There’s a Declaration of Independence in the United States. Then a few years later in Britain, I can’t remember if it’s 1780 or 1781, there’s a Declaration of the Rights of British, which nobody knows about. It’s completely buried, disappeared from view written by a guy named John Cartwright. And then of course, there’s the French Declaration of the Rights of Man in the context of the French Revolution. All three documents express quite similar basic fundamental propositions about human equality, natural rights, what the purpose of government is and the like. And two of those have a kind of iconic status, and one of them disappears altogether. Quality of writing is certainly variable across the three, but the political context matters a lot as well.

Preet Bharara:

So I want to read a passage that most people are not familiar with for various reasons, and it’s this quote, “He, King George, has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation wither,” and there’s more, but I’ll stop there. Once upon a time, that was in the Declaration and was deleted. Am I correct?

Danielle Allen:

Mm-hmm.

Mary Bilder:

Yeah, Jefferson wrote that, and he wrote that originally for what he imagined would be the Virginia Constitution, but it’s kind of important to read the whole thing because if you don’t read the whole thing, you don’t get the complexity of how Jefferson was thinking about… Part of it sounds oppositional to slavery, and part of it isn’t so oppositional to slavery, and that is the essence of Jefferson in a nutshell, but Congress deletes that entire section, and people have very divergent opinions about why and what the significance of that is.

Preet Bharara:

Danielle, do you have a reaction to the deletion?

Danielle Allen:

I know Mary’s summed it up well. I mean, it is attributing the sacred rights of life and liberty to Africans, the same vocabulary as Jefferson and Adams and the others use for themselves. At the same time, it is a critique of the King for maintaining the slave trade, but not exactly a critique of the institution of slavery itself.

Preet Bharara:

So it was a good thing it was deleted or not a good thing it was deleted?

Danielle Allen:

No, I mean, I think it was a regrettable thing it was deleted. I mean, the Declaration was already caught up in the politics of slavery and the members of Continental Congress were already finding themselves in the business of compromising on the question. There are two major compromises in the Declaration, one around slavery and one around religion. The slavery compromise comes in, and that passage gets cut. It’s clearly offensive to the slave interest as it already existed. On the other hand, the phrase life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness is actually a pro-abolition moment in the Declaration. The phrase pursuit of happiness is blocking the term property, which had already begun to be used as part of defenses of slavery at that point in time. So you have in life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, the voice of the anti-slavery contingent speaking, happiness was really introduced into the text by Adams, and then you have in that excision of the voice of the pro-slavery interest.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Danielle Allen and Mary Bilder after this.

How aspirational versus achievable did the drafters of this document think it was. Or the same question with respect to how it was received?

Mary Bilder:

In thinking about how the language ends up, being able to be used down the road for by people is to circle back to what Danielle said at the beginning about the way in which we get free and equal clauses in this time in the opening to the Virginia Constitution, which is written just about contemporaneously. And then eventually, they use that language, and then they cabinet by immediately talking about people who enter into a state of society, and so they’ve created a world where there are people who are free and equal, but not everybody, and their constitution excludes people. And the Declaration interestingly doesn’t do that, the Declaration doesn’t do this move of creating two worlds. And I actually think that’s incredibly important if the Declaration had sounded a lot more like the way that the Virginia Constitution ends up being, right from the get-go, constitutional documents would have codified that move that the Virginians do in order to use this language, and keep close to 300,000 people enslaved.

Preet Bharara:

How much argument was there about the particular language in the document?

Danielle Allen:

Well, there was meaningful revision, right? I mean, there’s the sort of, what the work done among the committee of five in the first place. So self-evident, I think is introduced by Benjamin Franklin and ditto creator, the phrase created equal, the created part of that endowed by their creator, that is also coming in from Adams and Franklin. Jefferson’s text had been more plainly a deist text in his first draft. And then Congress deletes not only the passage that you read about the slave trade, but also adds the phrases “divine providence” and “supreme judge” in the final paragraph. Jefferson is recorded as having been extremely grumpy about the revisions that were made during Congress’s debate over the document. It’s hard to say what was the sort of spirit of the debate that I say, was it argument or was it calm deliberation? I don’t think we can know that, but certainly, substantial matters changed in the course of the deliberations.

Preet Bharara:

So this line, the one that every school child knows, if they know any line, is the one that begins, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” And I asked Joanne Freeman about this as well, it’s a little bit of an odd choice, self-evident, when these very issues have been debated for hundreds and hundreds of years. Why self-evident?

Mary Bilder:

And Jefferson even said this originally, and then like all people, he backed off and said, “Oh, it was better. My way was better and I was the one who wrote it.” But originally, he sort of said, “There’s nothing particularly new or unique in this.”

And the opening paragraphs, which basically justify why you can get rid of a king are drawn from Catherine McAuley, they’re drawn from Milton, they’re drawn from Locke. They’re not original in any sense of some individual person’s unique thought. And that matters because what they did was they clarified and outlined a belief system that had decided that it is the right of the people. There is a people that can throw off a king and that’s what the beginning two paragraphs are. They justify constitutional regicide and they explain in a long understanding of how you related to monarchy that free people was no longer going to be part of a monarch.

And that’s why it’s written against the king, and I just think that in some ways, my own bet is there’s a bunch of people who literally could have cared less what those beginning things, what they cared about, what I do think they cared about was trying to persuade New York so that they could be unanimous on this decision. And my own guess just being a person who spent a lot of time in law schools and things like that is the desire for unanimity, which is what they’ve been working for for a long time, trying to get everybody to some position so that it looked particularly with respect to European powers. There weren’t a bunch of people who were going to go the other way. I think that mattered a lot, and I think the specifics are so fascinating, but my guess is at the time, they were looking for the right number of votes.

Danielle Allen:

I mean, Mary’s quite right that the opening paragraphs are a theory of revolution, and that is their most important contribution really. But the part about self-evidence, logic textbooks of the period, 18th century, teach people how to make self-evident arguments. I mean, that is one of the jobs, and so what that is actually a claim about is the structure of that sentence. And it’s a long sentence. People often read only the first clause, and so to understand the claim about self-evidence, you actually have to hear the whole sentence because what it is. So a self-evident logical argument is one in which the premises generate the conclusion, and it’s the relationship among them that actually creates the self-evidence. And so what you have, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. So that’s the first premise. Then you get the explanation of that, that they’re endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.

That’s just a detail on the first premise. Second premise is that to secure these riots, governments are instituted among men. And the conclusion that’s drawn from those is that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, so them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. That whole thing is the sentence. People make a mistake and they stop after pursuit of happiness, but that’s incorrect. There’s a stray period that sneaked in and a lot of additions shouldn’t be there. Jefferson wrote it as one sentence. Adams wrote it as one sentence. It’s a syllogism, two premises yielding a conclusion that follows logically from the premises, and that’s what gives it the status of having self-evidence.

Preet Bharara:

Right. I guess I’m coming at it from the perspective as someone who believes in it, and for whom it’s as an immigrant among other things, civic scripture, but it does have the feel of an assertion that during the course of human history is a minority view through most of history, self-evidence is just an interesting and highly assertive phrase to attach to it. That’s all.

Mary Bilder:

One of the things that if you think about the long course of, I mean, I wouldn’t say human history, but certainly the traditions that come out of England, most of what people thought came from a hierarchical structure, right? God to the king, to the people. And this sense, the Declaration is just radical, right? What is self-evident is what the people know. What do the people need to do? They need to create new guards for their, the people’s future security. It’s a radical document in terms of reunderstanding that knowledge and everything flows from the people up to whom they delegate power as opposed to down. In some ways, the Declaration’s most interesting by very boldly declaring that reversal of, you’re right, thousands of years of how people had understood which way does information go.

Preet Bharara:

I mean, nobody thought it was self-evident before, but okay, so is the document that I have not studied carefully in the way that you folks have, is it self-aware in its radical nature? I mean, certainly the drafters must have been, but did they choose to-

Danielle Allen:

Absolutely.

Preet Bharara:

Okay.

Danielle Allen:

Yeah. Well, they say they’re going to declare their causes to the candid world, out of decent respect for mankind, they’re going to declare their causes to the candid world. And that too is a radical thing that they are saying that the whole world is their judge. They are, as Mary said, untethering from received authorities. They are putting a new authority in place and that is the judgment of ordinary humans. They do also think that these propositions flow from nature, right? The laws of nature. Nature’s God. It’s not meant to mean that you just know these things without having to think about them. It’s rather saying, no, you and every other human being on the planet have the rational capacity to understand how this right to revolution flows from this fact that we’re all basically equal, and how do we know we’re basically equal?

Well, that we do just know from observing nature because at the end of the day, you look around and, yes, there are all kinds of differences among people, but fundamentally, we’re all making these judgments about our own future and we’re all capable of making judgments about our own future. And so it’s that tight connection to ordinary people’s ability to judge based on their observations of the world around them that explains that concept of self-evidence. It’s a really deep claim. I mean, yes, it is assertive. I mean, you’re right about that, Preet, but it’s not a hand-waving kind of assertion. It’s a much deeper philosophical claim about human beings.

Preet Bharara:

So on the question of liberty and equality, I want to ask you the question that modern listeners, and modern citizens will ask, we’ve already touched upon it a little bit. If you’re going to emphasize equality so much, and you’re going to use the self-evident language, and then you’re going to delete the slavery part, and you’re going to maintain slavery, didn’t you make your own document internally inconsistent, and shouldn’t I respect it less than all of you people are telling me that I should on the 250th?

Mary Bilder:

The point isn’t to respect it. It’s not a relic, right? It’s not a thing. In fact, that would be counter to the very notion of what it says. What’s so important about it is it creates a vocabulary that’s manipulable by people over time, and that vocabulary proceeds. There is people using the language that’s deep about liberty and equality before the Declaration. The Declaration doesn’t invent this, but what it does do is it puts it into a formative part of our nation’s history, and that gives it a lot of power.

And in terms of things that are weird about the Declaration that you don’t notice until you’re forced to be on lots of shows talking about it is that when they killed the King in 1641, the warrant for the regicide, the execution of Charles II was in the name of the good people of England. And the Declaration is actually explicit about the Declaration being in the name of the good people of the colonies. So the Declaration is actually self-referential to the unsuccessful moment when Charles I was executed.

And at the end of the Declaration, the Declaration says, “We pledge our lives and our fortunes and our sacred honor.” And what you used to pledge to the King was your lives and fortunes for his honor, but now you’re pledging to our sacred honor. That democratic impulse that the Declaration is fundamentally founded on is unbelievably radical, and it’s understandably radical, but a lot of the people in that room think they’re going to be able to stop that radicalness.

They think they’re going to be able to… John Adams, “I’m going to have property qualifications for voting. I’m going to, the first attempt to write the Massachusetts Constitution will try and exclude people of color from voting.” They think you can cabin that democratic equality, and what’s so interesting is you put that language in the beginning, and it has its own kind of, it’s like a little code written into the thing that becomes usable by lots and lots of people over 250 years.

Danielle Allen:

I too often, Preet, hear people say, “How can we take this seriously? Wasn’t it written by Thomas Jefferson, slaveholder? Shouldn’t we just throw the whole thing out?” And indeed, it does matter that it was a committee, that it was a Adams, who never held people in bondage, that it was Franklin who had repudiated enslavement by 1776. So he had helped people in bondage earlier in his life, but he had repudiated the practice by that point in time. And the text was genuinely used to support legal developments that allowed for the abolition of enslavement in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Vermont before the end of the Revolutionary War. So it’s actually false to say that what the Declaration did was simply install a slaveocracy, for example. It didn’t. What it did was install a society that already had a split in it between the states that were trying to protect the slave interest and the slaves that were already undoing the slave interest.

Preet Bharara:

Did those words in the Declaration ultimately help in any material and significant way the abolition movement and the civil rights movement?

Danielle Allen:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

So it was helpful ultimately, right?

Danielle Allen:

I mean, the Massachusetts Constitution, I mean, Adams is a complicated figure. So Jefferson’s got his complications, and Adams has his complications, but the Massachusetts state constitution has a preamble that closely tracks the preamble of the Declaration. And then when people sued for their freedom based on the language of the preamble, they won. Again, before the end of the Revolutionary War and we got a Supreme Judicial Court decision in Massachusetts that affirmed that given the language of the Constitution, people had a right to their freedom. So that’s a direct legal consequence of that preamble language. And Vermont was the same, it too had a similar preamble, and used the language to literally rule out slavery as a part of establishing the Constitution.

Mary Bilder:

Yeah. And you can see by probably most famously in the mid 19th century, the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, which begins basically like we looked around for how to complain about the fact that we’re all being subordinated. And the easiest text was the one we already had and it turned out to be very easy to rewrite in that sense. So it becomes part of a cultural way to critique the existing state in actually a short period of time. And Annette Gordon-Reed has a nice piece in The New York Times on Lemuel Haynes who uses the language of the Declaration early on in thinking about it. And Benjamin Banneker writes to Thomas Jefferson, “Hey, look, you wrote this. What about slavery?” So in some ways, we’ve lost the radicalness of it over time. It’s one of, it’s almost more radical-

Preet Bharara:

Well, I hope so. That’s good thing. Right.

Mary Bilder:

Yeah. I mean, I think at the time it began to feel more radical, but also relic-like. By the 19th century, they’re all obsessed with trying to get the signatures and it becomes its own at the 50th anniversary when Adams and Jefferson die simultaneously on July 4th, people begin to turn this into the cult of the founders in some way, and we have the first effort to create a myth around the Declaration. So that tension is very early on also.

Preet Bharara:

Were any of the drafters knowingly thinking about the language as a seed for the future, knowing that they wouldn’t get all the language that they wanted, or did it just work out that way?

Danielle Allen:

It’s a good question. I mean, James Wilson is an interesting figure to think about in this regard. So he was a Scotsman trained as a lawyer, landed in Philadelphia when he came as an immigrant to the country. He was one of the small number of people who signed both the Declaration and the US Constitution. At the Constitutional Convention, he was basically one of the most learned people there after Madison. He read the Declaration of Independence out in the Constitutional Convention, and he read the long second sentence that I quickly went through there with you, the full syllogism.

And at the conclusion of reading that portion, he said, “This is the basis of the entire thing.” So there’s one individual anyway who one could say saw what was done in 1776 absolutely as the seed for the whole thing, and then reintroduced it in the Constitutional Convention as a part of his broad arguments for the popular basis of the government that was being established, et cetera. And he carried it into his Supreme Court jurisprudence as well. He was one of the first justices of the Supreme Court.

Mary Bilder:

I like politics, so I think there was a huge amount of trying to get people not to show up, getting the right people to show up, getting people to agree not to vote in order to get that unanimity that they… I mean, they’re not even unanimous on July 4th, New York comes in later, but they’d spent most of June. They’d had the language of the Lee resolution that they were going to break in June, and it takes them almost a month to get the votes massaged and manipulated enough that they can have what they think will eventually be unanimity. And the first printing of the Declaration, the Dunlap printing isn’t the one we always see because it doesn’t say unanimous because it’s the July 4, it’s based on the July 4th text, and it wasn’t unanimous on July 4th. And so the one we’re more familiar with with the signatures isn’t done until January because… And there’s wonderful stuff.

I mean, if you like to geek out about this, there’s wonderful stuff about the fact that nobody signed on July 4th except for John Hancock. And then some of the people who signed weren’t there in July. Some of the people who were there don’t sign. Nothing turns out to be quite as obvious as we think. I think there are people fussing the language, but I think for a lot of people, the language is less relevant than making sure that you have a unanimous decision at this moment so you’re going to be able to prosecute the war, which has been going on for almost two years more effectively.

Preet Bharara:

So leaders and citizens of other countries, to the extent they were literate, they put the Declaration of Independence through Google Translate, such as it exists at the time, and they have what reaction? Who are these crazy people in that continent? This is inspiring to us? Combination of those two things? Were they quizzical? Were they perplexed?

Danielle Allen:

Well, I mean, it’s various. And again, here, I think Mary’s point about politics, it’s exactly right. It depended whether or not you were pro or anti-Britain essentially. In Britain, the King was really quite unimpressed by the Declaration, did not consider it serious. Britain had a set of military victories at about the same point in time, they actually thought the war was going well for them. There were other voices. I just published a biography of Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond. He, like Wilson, read the Declaration of Independence in Parliament. So there were people in Britain who held it up and considered it a powerful and lofty statement of natural rights. Also for them, the kind of tradition of basic British liberties it was expressing. So there was that sort of mixed reception.

If you were France and Spain where you already had good reason to be hoping that anything might undermine Britain, then it was something to embrace, and indeed supported the treaty work that the colonies were also working on. Were monarchs broadly concerned? Absolutely. I mean, it was also clear that this was unleashing political energies that went counter to their interests.

Mary Bilder:

Yeah. I mean, the interest, you’re going to go counterfactual, you think, what were the French thinking? I mean, I know the French were thinking we don’t really care about that because we hate the English, and so anybody who’s the enemy of the English is our friend, and Congress is going to have the portraits of the French royalty up inside Congress, which these are the people who are going to all be killed during the French Revolution. So in a world where the European powers had spent so much of their existence as states at war with each other, I think in some interesting way, there was a lack of understanding almost as if, sure, this will be fine, but then the people will go back to being subjects again and life will go on.

Preet Bharara:

As it always does.

Mary Bilder:

Yes, it always does. So I think one of the things that’s interesting this year and a lot of the new work that’s been done is showing how really across the globe this is a beginning moment when stopping being a subject is beginning to be of interest to lots of people while at the same time leaders of a lot of states don’t take it seriously and really don’t think it will be a threat to them.

Preet Bharara:

What should we be celebrating? Forget about the documents. You can talk about the concepts and notions in the documents or in the votes or in the battles, but speaking not as an academic, not as a podcast guest, but just as Americans, what is it we should be celebrating right now?

Danielle Allen:

The proposition that all people are created equal, that’s possible to build a society around that proposition, that building a society around that proposition means that you are aspiring to a government that’s for the people because it is also by the people, and that we have work to do to make sure that our current institutions actually operate in a way that they are truly by the people.

Mary Bilder:

I think for me, one of the things that is always interesting about this period is how much debate there was. There was disagreement, we want everyone to have agreed, they didn’t agree, they didn’t agree about a lot of things. But 250 years later, it’s pretty incredible that a country that was founded on the idea that the people without a king would be a stable type of political system in the grand scheme of things survived, did survive. And a lot of people at that time believed that this would collapse and you would go back to having to have a king. And I think that celebrating the fact that a democratic republic for 250 years is still chugging along, not maybe always the best, not in all the ways that we would all agree, lots of bumps on the road, but I think that’s a thing worth celebrating.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think as one of my more pessimistic podcast guests has said more than one time that there is a percentage of people in America, in other liberal democratic societies who are not all that into democracy and process and are much more outcome and result oriented, and if there was a benign authoritarian who agreed with their points of view, they would happily take that leader?

Mary Bilder:

Honestly, and I’m going to sound like the most positive person, I’m not-

Preet Bharara:

Please, I need it.

Mary Bilder:

… actually deeply cynical in all sorts of ways. I think the part everybody likes is the last line, right? Where it’s free and brave, and maybe there’s some people who are like, “I want a benevolent dictator,” but I don’t really think so. I think a lot of people at the end, if you sat them down quietly in a place where they didn’t have to shout and everything like that, I do think fundamentally there’s a lot of people, I’m sure there’s other people who don’t believe that, but I think there’s a lot of people who in their heart of hearts don’t really think that the outcome is all that matters, that they really do believe in the idea of being a democratic republic.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, no. And just to be clear, this person wasn’t saying that was a majority, but a non-insubstantial number of people. I think she said 20% or 20.

Danielle Allen:

Yeah, I would agree.

Preet Bharara:

I’m like, “That’s a lot of people.”

Danielle Allen:

No, I think the survey data’s pretty clear at this point actually on this. I think that Mary’s right that a lot of people haven’t actually had to come face to face with the question of what it means to give up freedom, and that if they had to come face to face with that, they would walk a different direction. But in the meanwhile, while they’ve been coasting along in this place of complacency, I think, yes, the numbers of people who say they would accept a benevolent dictator has been increasing, and there’s erosion of culture of self-governance that we should be concerned about.

Preet Bharara:

Those are just the people who will admit it in the poll.

Mary Bilder:

But the question is who would admit that in a poll anyway? You have to ask yourself, would you even answer a poll-

Preet Bharara:

Well, that makes me very concerned because there are a lot of… Look, I still think the overwhelming majority of people in this country believe rightly the way you described it, Mary. I just have been shocked and surprised that there are a percentage of people who don’t. And maybe it’s the number that’s coextensive with the number of people who think that the moon landing was fake or that the earth is flat and they’re just going to be that those people, but I’d like that number to be fewer, and I think I can say the work of both of you helps to reduce that number. Final word of hope, final word of hope from each of you, can be one sentence.

Mary Bilder:

I just have to say, I’m happy that the 250 rolls around and people get to talk about these topics. And I won’t be around 50 years from now, but I hope there will be new people with new voices getting to do the same kind of set of discussions of what the founding documents and moments mean to all of us.

Danielle Allen:

I’ve seen so many kids producing beautiful civic action projects taking powerful responsibility for how things are going in their community. They are inspired by the Declaration. They are inspired by other leaders they’ve seen historically over time. I watch rising generations and I feel confident that our future is bright.

Preet Bharara:

Those are two pretty good notes. Professors, thank you for your time. Thank you for your insight. Thank you for your service, and thank you for educating us. Really appreciate it.

Danielle Allen:

Thank you.

Mary Bilder:

Thank you.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Danielle Allen and Mary Bilder continues for members of the Insider Community. In the exclusive bonus content, we discuss the Trump administration’s impact on civic education, and the discussion may surprise you.

Mary Bilder:

The second Trump presidency has shown that there’s a lot of power in the executive. People who are associated with the Trump presidency in a lot of ways were interested in using a lot of this kind of history. People who are opposing the Trump presidency have also been interested in using this kind of history.

Preet Bharara:

In honor of America’s 250th anniversary, you can become a member for 25% off the annual membership. Visit staytuned.substack.com/250. Again, that’s staytuned.substack.com/250. The link is in the show notes. After the break, I’ll answer your questions about a swatting incident targeting Pete Buttigieg and his family, plus the latest on President Trump’s efforts to curb mail-in voting.

Now, let’s get to your questions.

This question was posted in the Stay Tuned Substack chat by Karen who asks, “What happened to Pete Buttigieg and his family was awful, and no public official’s family should be subjected to that kind of harassment. What can be done to try to stop something like this from happening again?”

Karen, thank you for your question, and it’s an important one and a disturbing issue to say the least. Last week, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg revealed that his family was targeted by a vile form of swatting, which resulted in him being separated from his children. More on that in a moment. So swatting, for those of you who don’t know, is when someone makes a false report to law enforcement to trick them into sending police to a targeted location. The goal is to harass, intimidate, or endanger the victim.

In recent years, we’ve seen several high profile government officials fall victim to swatting, including Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and former Special Counsel Jack Smith. It can happen to anyone on any side of the political spectrum. So back to your question, here’s what happened in this case. Pete Buttigieg said someone made a false report to Michigan authorities claiming he had abused his children. Because the allegation involved child abuse, child protective services and state police say they were required to investigate. And so for about a day, Buttigieg and his husband were separated from their four-year-old twins while investigators determined whether the report was true. That must have been a harrowing and traumatic experience.

Authorities quickly concluded the allegations were completely false and allowed him to reunite with his children. Buttigieg called it the ugliest thing that has happened to him since his career in service began. Now, situations like this are so challenging, and swatting can be so difficult to prevent because it’s tough to distinguish a real call for help from a fake one, and that’s why it’s a serious crime to make such a false report. So there is no comprehensive federal anti-swatting law. Maybe we need one. Congress, if you’re listening, take note. But every state makes it illegal to knowingly file false police reports or make false emergency reports, though the exact statutes and penalties vary. And most states also have laws specifically penalizing knowingly filing a false child abuse report to CPS as happened in Pete Buttigieg’s case.

So this incident happened in Michigan, which has such a law. If someone intentionally files a false report accusing another person of felony child abuse, they themselves can be charged with a felony. So it’s likely whoever filed this report could be charged under the statute. The hard part, of course, always, is finding the perpetrator. It’s also important to note that swatting, in addition to the harm it imposes on victims, also wastes taxpayer money and law enforcement resources by diverting critical emergency responders from actual crises. I’m sure you, like I, am glad that this ordeal is over for Pete Buttigieg and his family, but it’s a sobering reminder of how toxic our political climate has become and why we need to find our way back to decency.

This question also came as a post on the Stay Tuned Substack chat. It’s from Cassandra. She asks, “What’s the status of Trump’s executive order targeting mail-in voting?”

Thank you for the question, Cassandra. Now, mail-in voting is much in the news, much in controversy, although I think right-minded people don’t think it should be controversial at all. Before I get to your particular question, as you all may have seen or perhaps missed because there were so many Supreme Court decisions issued this week, there was a big one among the other big ones. The Supreme Court just upheld a Mississippi law that allows mailed ballots to be counted as long as they are postmarked by election day and received within five days. It was a 5-4 decision with Justice Amy Coney Barrett writing the opinion that was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson.

As Barrett wrote, “The election day statutes require the electorate’s choice to be made on election day. That occurs so long as election day is the deadline for individuals to vote, as it is in Mississippi, but the election day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt so they do not prevent Mississippi from counting ballots postmarked before Election Day yet received afterward.”

Barrett also address Trump’s allegations that accepting ballots that arrive after election day could make them susceptible to election fraud, saying those are policy arguments that should be directed to legislatures, not the court. So obviously, that Supreme Court ruling addresses pretty directly at least one of the issues set forth in the executive order that you are asking about.

So in his second administration, Trump issued two executive orders on voting. The first issued in March 2025 was called Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections. It required voters to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote. It also prevents mail ballots from being counted if they arrive after election day, even if they were postmarked by then, and it withholds federal funds from states that fail to comply. Now, we have a Supreme Court decision and we’ll see how that plays out.

But then this year, on March 31st, 2026, Trump signed another executive order called Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections. That orders the creation of federal voter lists, and it directs the postal service to transmit mailed ballots only to voters on those lists. Unsurprisingly, these state mail voting practices and Trump’s executive orders have faced various legal challenges. Now, I’ve already mentioned the major Supreme Court ruling, but I also want to highlight a couple of lower court rulings that are important too.

First, there’s a federal judge in Boston, Judge Denise Casper, who permanently blocked Trump’s first election executive order, agreeing with the coalition of Democratic Attorneys General that the Constitution gives states and Congress, not the president, the power to regulate elections. Then a US District Judge Indira Talwani, also in Boston, struck down Trump’s second executive order for similar reasons.

So to answer your question, when it comes to mail voting and a few other notable issues, it’s not going great for Trump and the courts. You can read a net assessment of sorts of the Supreme Court’s term that ended this week and how Trump has fared in Elie Honig’s article this week. The link is in the show notes.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guests, Danielle Allen and Mary Bilder. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. You can reach me on Twitter or Bluesky @preetbharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also call and leave me a message at (833) 997-7338. That’s (833) 99-PREET, or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is now on Substack. Head to staytuned.substack.com to watch live streams, get updates about new podcast episodes, and more. That’s staytuned.substack.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The Executive Producer is Tamara Sepper. The Supervising Producer is Jake Kaplan. The Lead Editorial Producer is Jennifer Indig. The Associate Producer is Claudia Hernández. The Audio and Video Producer is Nat Weiner. The Senior Audio Producer is Matthew Billy, and the Marketing Manager is Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. Special thanks to Torrey Paquette and Adam Harris. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, Stay Tuned.