By the way, I hope you don’t think I’m critiquing the Declaration in some kind of Aristotelian way. When I say Jefferson’s line about self-evident truths proves nothing, it’s not that I think he intended to assert a cosmic principle and failed. It’s that I think his intent was mainly rhetorical and that his aim wasn’t to write a metaphysical proof text. As rhetoric it worked fine because the people that mattered at the time all agreed that what he wrote was true. He wrote the consensus view of the founders in a legal document whose function was to announce to the King that it was splitsville and to explain why (of course it wasn’t as utilitarian as that...he knew he was writing for history too).
However, since then, the Declaration has been elevated to a level where it is regarded as the definitive statement of classical American metaphysics. And when serving in that capacity, the “We” is more than just Jefferson and the founders; it is presumably the whole nation. That’s where the notion of self-evident or axiomatic becomes a problem, because for a lot of Americans the things Jefferson expressed are neither.
But that doesn't take away anything from the sheer audacity of the act, and the more I learn of it the more awestruck I am. These guys were a bunch of provincials who were defying the greatest empire of the day, stating their principles openly and backing them up with their lives. There's something breathtaking in that. Smirking nonentities such as Howard Zinn insist that it was all about class interest, which is precisely wrong. Were it true, nothing like the War of Independence would ever have happened - these guys were on top, successful, educated, had it all going for them if only they had decided to play ball with the Crown. They didn't do that, and nothing the cleverest Marxian reformulations can do will change it. The phrase is too loosely used, I think, but this, in every real sense, was a paradigm shift, and nothing after it could ever be quite the same as that which came before.