Why Does a 250-year-old Country Have So Many People Who Think Like 10-year-olds?
With the most recent Supreme Court term now behind us, we here at Dorf on Law will soon be moving on from the case-specific analyses penned by our constitutional law scholars -- including, just this past week, the rulings on independent federal agencies (plus a guest scholar's analysis of the same case), anti-transgender laws, and birthright citizenship -- to writing summary analyses of the term, a term that was defined by the six Republican-appointed justices' increasingly blatant (and depressingly predictable) choice to be part of the Trumpian assault on democracy and the rule of law.
I will write one such summary soon, but because today is the last weekday before the Fourth of July holiday, I am offering here some thoughts about the depressing spectacle that is my country at age 250. In 2005, a bit more than a year before Dorf on Law was founded, I published a short guest piece about the Declaration of Independence on someone else's blog. (That blog later lost all credibility by ceaselessly abetting Republicans' attempts to hype a tax "scandal" that turned out to be a huge nothingburger, but who remembers such things?) My guest piece has been reprinted a few times, and I have copied it in full here (all 423 words of it):
I thought I would take another look at our oft-mentioned and seldom-read Declaration of Independence to see what it has to say about taxes and other issues of import. Herewith, a quick (and admittedly incomplete) summary of the contents:
Obviously, the most important issue addressed in the Declaration was the ongoing violence in the colonies. Among its more memorable descriptions of conditions at the time, the Declaration reminded the world that King George III "has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people." The founding fathers were understandably focused primarily on matters of life and death.
Beyond those immediate concerns, though, the bulk of the Declaration expresses, in essence, a thirst for politics. That is, the major non-war-related complaint is that there is no locally-elected legislature passing laws for the colonies. Our founders were willing to lay their lives on the line, in other words, to create legislatures.
For those of us who are law professors and lawyers, it is interesting that the Declaration also seems to express (or at least imply) a desire for lawsuits and defense lawyers. The king "has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing Judiciary powers" and "depriv[ed] us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury." (Current readers are likely to split into two camps in their reactions to those statements, with some saying "If they only knew what they were getting us into," and others saying, "Yes, lawyers are an essential ingredient of a stable nation.")
The Declaration also notes that the king had prevented colonists from trading with foreign nations, which was an especially sore point for our resource-rich and young nation. (There is also, I should say, a rarely-quoted–and inflammatory–comment about the American Indians, reminding us that even the Founding Fathers made controversial statements.)
Finally, though, what about taxes? Exactly one statement appears on the subject: The king had assented to Parliament’s laws that "impos[e] Taxes on us without our Consent." That’s it. For some reason, I always thought that taxes played a bigger part in the Declaration. All it says, though, is that taxes are unacceptable if we do not impose them on ourselves.
The Declaration of Independence, in addition to calling for peace in our country, called for four basic things: the right to pass our own laws, to operate our own courts of law, to trade with other nations, and to create our own tax system. Simple, elegant, complete. No wonder we still read it.
In 2022, I wrote much longer version of that analysis in a column on Verdict: "The Declaration of Independence Was a Call for More Government and More Taxes—And That’s Still an Important Lesson for Us Today." I seriously considered updating that analysis once again for this year's 250th, especially because my column on the Fourth last year was so dispiriting: "Happy Birthday, America: 249 Years Was a Pretty Darned Good Run." (Side note: That column assessed the idea that the Roberts Court in 2025 was "keeping its powder dry" to stand up to Trump at some future time when it would be truly needed, a notion that was implausible then and is utterly laughable now.)
But because the Declaration of Independence in fact was a bill of particulars against a monarch who harmed Americans with his arrogance and rapacity, updating that analysis to 2026 would simply be too easy. Instead, I thought I might share a quick thought about why the people who are currently destroying America (or at least enabling its destruction) are so touchy about the very idea that America might not be perfect in every way. This is, of course, a question with many answers, so in no way am I saying that what I am offering here should replace all other explanations.
The news has been filled of late with stories about how the Trump people have intensified their efforts to sanitize US history, especially as the 250th celebration came into sharper focus. The question is why, after the Republicans decided to use the word "woke" as a political weapon (but then steadfastly refused to define that word), they applied their new all-purpose insult to acknowledgements of anything negative in the country's past.
I mean that as a deadly serious question. Why is being "pro-American" in those people's eyes all about denying that the country ever did anything wrong, when it could be about celebrating a country that continued its march toward greatness by seeing and trying to overcome those wrongs?
The short answer for the hardest-core Trumpists, of course, is that they are ultimately neo-Confederates who wish that our Civil War had come out differently. But that certainly cannot cover all of the people who freak out about teaching our children (or each other) about what we could certainly describe as their country's "challenges faced, challenges overcome." Framing the story in that latter sense is especially revealing, because one would think that a bunch of people who are all about being "tough" and "winners" would welcome any proof that their country has demonstrated those supposedly "manly" virtues.
Some of the resistance to that framing might be connected to the toxic masculinity epidemic that has infected so much of the American right. I have discussed such things on occasion (recently here, for example), and I do believe that there are people who have fully taken on the bro-infused idea that tough guys show their toughness by being brutal and pitiless, which means that they would not view any of America's history of war crimes (past or ongoing) or brutalization of others as anything but cause for celebration.
But come to think of it, if they were truly confident about their righteousness, they would keep all of that information about genocides and racist and sexist violence in all of our museums and national parks, then simply add two words at the end of each description: "Cool, right?!"
Again, however, I strongly doubt that people like Pete Hegseth are representative of anything but a small slice of Republicans -- politicians as well as voters -- when it comes to his warped views on manliness and war crimes. The people who are sticking with Trump are making the horrible decision to support all of the racism and human rights violations that their cult leader promotes, but I suspect that the "Don't bad-mouth America!" thing need not be driven by bigotry or the glorification of brutality. (How many people truly liked the idea of bloodsports on the White House lawn? Sixteen percent!) Those explanations are sufficient, of course, but not necessary.
What, then, is my explanation? As the title of this column suggests, the problem is that they are thinking like ten-year-olds. They have a happy place in their minds where the entirety of the story about George Washington is that he "cannot tell a lie" about a cherry tree and that he stood up in a small boat to pose for a painting. Thomas Jefferson is by definition a saint because he wrote that Declaration of Independence that everyone so loves but never reads. More recently, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s entire legacy is about people "being judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character" (which Dr. King clearly and famously labeled a dream, not an accomplished reality).
In short, there is the grade-school version of history, and anything that attempts to intrude on that uncomplicated story is met with what amounts to "la la la la ... I can't hear you! ... la la la la." I should be clear, however, that this point is very different from the cottage industry in which observers catalog "Trump as toddler," "Trump as adolescent," "Trump as bully," and so on. Those are revealing, but I am trying here to capture something more widespread than the immature narcissism of one person.
The ten-year-old's mindset is surprisingly easy to find in public discourse, even among people who seem to be functioning adults. Back in 2020, for example, the reckoning around the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer sparked a broader effort to reconsider the Founders and to acknowledge their failings. Now-retired New York Times columnist Roger Cohen wrote what was in many senses a very good column, including the statement that "[w]e can celebrate our history without hiding from its stains."
Full stop, right? Unfortunately not, because before he wrote those sensible words, he went off the rails with this:
Some of the founders are now under attack for owning slaves. When George Washington and Thomas Jefferson fall from grace, you have to wonder. Union generals, including Ulysses Grant, who fought to defeat the Confederacy and slavery, were not good enough. They were imperfect, the human condition.
Moral absolutism has its giddy day. The guillotine falls. This is madness. Be careful what you say. It is the hour of the new judges; the judged are scared; and judgment of the judges may be decades or even centuries off.
As I wrote at the time, Cohen "apparently cannot wrap his head around the idea that it is important to debate the not-easy cases," and I added:
How exactly are those founders "under attack"? We are simply asking whether they deserve to be held up as heroes. That is not an attack but an unavoidable question, a question that only seems avoidable to those who approve of the current answer.
Per Cohen, however, people like me are simply being nitpicky, because they/we refuse to admit that the human condition is imperfect. But this is not moral absolutism. It is a question about whether the way that we have been honoring these particular imperfect humans should continue. We remember certain imperfect humans in one way, but we remember others in other ways (or not at all). And that can change.
So no, this is not madness, because we are all now asking how best to "celebrate our history without hiding from its stains."
Think about how panicky Cohen's response is to the very idea that Washington and Jefferson might "fall from grace." It is, he says, "madness." And madness does not call for a reasoned response, because it labels one's opponents as beyond reason. They are crazy. Just. Plain. Wrong. Again: la la la la ... I can't hear you! ... la la la la. And again, that was from a leftish-leaning columnist at a top newspaper.
This is the part of today's column in which I state emphatically that there are a lot of reasons to admire what the United States has done (and even continues to do, on an unfortunately diminished basis) and could do again, especially including when the country has faced up to its mistakes and tried to do better. There is an adult version of patriotism that is clear-eyed and open to criticism and doubt.
Unfortunately, for much longer than Trump has been on the scene, the American right has returned again and again to the playground retort: "Why do you hate America?" Twenty-two years ago, that misplaced patriotism even turned America's favorite ten-year-old into a treasonous villain. Happy birthday, USA!
- Neil H. Buchanan