Democratic Writing and the Declaration

Biden says the common thread of U.S. crises is an "incumbent president who fails at the basic duty of the job, which is to advance the truth that all of us know: that we're all born to the right of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. That's right, all of us.”

— Julian Routh (@julianrouth) August 31, 2020

For Wednesday, read Allen through ch. 31 (i.e., through part VI)

Democratic Writing

• "Yet if the Declaration resembles a wedding, it bears an even closer kinship to divorce" (p. 94 of hardcover)
  
  Annotated Declaration
  
  Examples of democratic/group writing
  
  • The Constitution
  • Presidential speeches
  • Supreme Court opinions
  • Congressional markup
  Functions of writing
  
  • Performance
  • Record-setting: memoranda
  • Persuasion

"If a speaker or writer has packed a sound bit well, it will unpack well” (Allen, p. 148)

W.H. Auden, "September 1, 1939"

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

FRAMING p. 148:  “The opening is an example of prolepsis -- a rhetorical device in which a speaker assumes that something is the case, before the argument has been made.”

"The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America"

• Why states instead of colonies.
• Other examples of name changes: countries, historical figures, fictional characters.

 `When in the course of human events Latin cursus, meaning "flow" --a tide e-ventus "outcome"it becomes necessary .."

• Why course?
• “The course can be altered – with strenuous effort” (Allen, p. 111)

" for one people to dissolve the political bands, which have connected them with another and to assume, among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station"

• What is a “nation”? Shared cultural life, having or wanting their own government.
• What holds us together?
• What is a “station”? (Allen, p. 119) -- Latin for “stand.”

"to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them"

Spinoza -- TJ himself was a Deist. Locke: "The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges everyone, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life,health, liberty or possessions."

•  King’s concept of natural law
•  Compare and contrast to Jefferson? – Editors added more God -- why?

 a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

• Address to the whole world (France, in particular)
• mpel (Allen, pp. 115-116) – to be pushed