I’m going to start a simple series of key terms for our emerging political era. This is the first. Strap in!
Declarationism (n)—A modern conservative constitutional theory and political stance that treats the Declaration of Independence—especially its claims about natural rights and human equality—as the authoritative foundation of American political identity, moral philosophy, and constitutional interpretation.
This seems harmless, except that the context in which this concept is often leveraged is in debates about whether the US Constitution should have authority. In other words, what this is really about is that the moral values and natural laws referred to in the Declaration are superior to the US Constitution, and that the Declaration is the doctrinal foundation of the Constitution, which may drift wayward.
We might imagine someone saying that “the moral arc of the Constitution bends only when guided by the fixed truths of the Declaration” or that “when the Constitution drifts from the Declaration’s principles, it loses its moral authority.”
The basic thread here is from Jefferson to Lincoln to Strauss and Claremont conservatives to National Conservatives today.
Lincoln’s arguments in the Lincoln-Douglas debates are foundational—he asserted that the Declaration’s claims about equality were binding and universal and that the Constitution must be interpreted in light of them.
Harry Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided (1959) is the canonical modern articulation of Declarationism. Jaffa argued that Lincoln’s political philosophy—rooted in the Declaration—offered a principled moral alternative to both relativistic historicism and procedural liberalism.
The Claremont Institute and its affiliated scholars and publications (e.g., The American Mind) regularly promote Declarationist interpretations of the Constitution, often in direct critique of both progressive constitutionalism and originalist minimalism.
More can be found in these locations:
“From ‘Declarationism’ to the Common Good: The Story of American Conservatism” Ken Kersch Interviewed by Lénárd Sándor
Miller, Frederic P., Agnes F. Vandome, and John McBrewster. n.d. Declarationism.
“Perils of Declarationism” by Daniel McCarthy, 2012
Please add examples of this preference for the Declaration over the Constitution in the comments!
How do you reconcile the “Declarationism” with the seemingly explicit anti-Declarationism of Vance’s Claremont speech (https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/jd-vances-anti-declaration) echoed by Schmitt’s NatCon talk a few weeks later?