The Spirit of ’76 and the Spirit of January 6

Abstract

In recent years, conservative political scientists have increasingly turned away from the textualist and originalist arguments of their legal academic compatriots by reviving defunct historiographical templates to reorient the Right’s constitutionalism around a fundamentalist orthodoxy centered on the Declaration of Independence. This essay considers C. Bradley Thompson’s America’s Revolutionary Mind (2019) as a contribution to this project that manifests its valorization of political violence, misrepresentation of the relation of revolutionary era ideas and events to contemporary politics, and misconstrual of the American founding that underwrote the events of January 6. By contrast, George Thomas’s The (Un)Written Constitution (2021) argues for moving beyond constitutional theory debates about the interpretive methods most likely to remove politics from constitutional law by imagining a polity constituted by a commitment to good-faith civic deliberation over core liberal democratic principles, manifesting the true Spirit of ’76.