Slavery and the American Revolution

Historian Sean Wilentz wrote in 2019 about the contradictory political impulses toward slavery involved in the American Revolution. (1) He was addressing a concern that he raises about an argument made as part of the 1619 Project that highlights the history of slavery in North America, which was that an major impulse for the Revolution was to defend slavery against British abolitionism.

The American Revolution is a key founding myth of the United States. Interpretations of it vary, of course, both in academic discussions and in popular political understandings of it. From the beginning, there were more conservative adherents and more radical ones. Paul Revere and Thomas Paine could be taken as symbols of those two poles, respectively.

And over time, there have been interpretations made from a range of ideological and partisan viewpoints. On the academic side of the discussion, a lot of the differences are related to how “revolutionary” the American Revolution was, in the sense of how drastically it altered fundamental social and class relations, how much it democratized governance, and what the sources of it were. And the status of slavery is a key issue in those perceptions, as is the question of to what extent the Constitution represented the democratic impulses of the Revolution.

Back in the days when Calvin Coolidge was in the White House, the historian J. Franklin Jameson shook up the dominant academic narrative with a series of lectures published in 1926 as The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement. The conservative consensus regarded the Revolution as basically a war of independence against Britain but not as a social revolution.

Jameson was one of several prominent historians who were emphasizing the Revolution’s social dimension, including Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., Carl Becker, and Charles Beard. Beard depicted the creation of the Constitution as a kind of sleazy backroom deal made by rich men to scam the system to the benefit of their own pocketbooks in his An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of The United States (1913). The stodgy-but-reliable Britannica is a bit more generous in describing it in its article on Beard:

In this book he claimed that the Constitution had been formulated by interest groups whose motivations were just as much personal financial ones as they were political ones. Although American politicians were generally outraged at the implications of material interests embodied in the Constitution by the Founding Fathers, the book was received by academicians as an innovative study on motivational factors among socioeconomic groups. (2)

This was generally taken to be a “left” version and Beard was counted as a Progressive historian. He became one of the founders of the left-leaning New School of Social Research in 1919. But his view of the Constitution and the purposes of the men who had led the Revolution also lent itself to a kind of everybody’s-in-it-for-themselves viewpoint which was more laissez-faire individualist dogma than a left view. And Beard’s turn later in life to what can reasonably be described as a crackpot rightwing isolationist viewpoint that he expressed in President Roosevelt and the Coming of War, 1941 (1948) certainly makes it reasonable to wonder to what extent his view earlier in his career was consistently “left”.

Similar ambiguity can be encountered with ethno-nationalist historical narratives of the American Revolution. They can be rhetorically similar to left perspectives in terms of looking at the dark, undemocratic, inhumane, anti-egalitarian realities of American history. But they can also play into a rightwing narrative which argues, for instance, that white racism is as American as apple pie and it pointless and un-American to challenge it. In fact, for people who are looking to shift their image from very left to very right, that kind of argument is a natural.

Wilentz defines a common historical view in more recent times of the American Revolution that proceeds from this assumption, “The American Revolution may not have overthrown the institution of slavery but its egalitarian principles were at least implicitly antislavery.”

He describes a problem he sees with this comfortable interpretation:

One problem with this familiar view is that it obscures how new, how radical, antislavery politics were during the revolutionary era, and how, for many patriots, American slavery and American freedom were perfectly compatible. I’m referring here not to those slaveholders with troubled consciences like Jefferson and James Madison, Virginians who perceived slavery as an intolerable offense yet who (at least after the 1780s, in Jefferson’s case) lifted not a finger toward ending it - critics of slavery who continued owning, buying, and selling human beings until the day they died. I’m referring instead to stridently proslavery figures like that young South Carolina grandee and signer of the Constitution, Charles Pinckney - a patriot who served as an officer in the revolutionary militia and who, as a delegate at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, asserted “if slavery be wrong, it is justified by the example of all the world.” I am also referring to those white Northerners, as well as most white Southerners, who believed that the Declaration’s egalitarian principles were perfectly sound but that they categorically did not apply to blacks, slave or free. Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney attempted finally to enshrine this racist egalitarianism in American national law in his notorious ruling on the Dred Scott case in 1857.

These proslavery Americans and apologists for slavery and their progeny were no less products of the American founding than the early abolitionists inspired by Woolman and Benezet or the conflicted enlightened Virginians like Jefferson. Plantation slavery grew stupendously in the United States after the Revolution, generating a well-organized slave power that long dominated national politics. Slavery’s defeat was not inevitable. Nor, obviously, did white supremacy die with slavery. Over the century and a half since slavery’s abolition, the racist Americanism of Charles Pinckney and Roger Brooke Taney has survived and flourished in new forms, along with dominating social and political structures that uphold it. Far from vanquished, it has morphed and resurged in ways expected and unexpected, from the bloody overthrow of Reconstruction to the menacing rise of Donald J. Trump. [my emphasis]

But Wilentz also contests an alternative view that the Revolution itself was motivated by the fear of the colonists that Great Britain would abolish slavery. In other words, one of the American Revolution’s central goal, if not the central one, was to preserve slavery. He describes the implication of this view as follows:

The American Revolution, in effect, anticipated the slaveholders’ rebellion eighty-odd years later: the American patriots allegedly declared their independence of Britain in 1776 for the same reason that the Southern states seceded in 1860–1861, to guarantee that slavery would endure. American independence, in this view, was a precursor of Southern secession.

Wilentz continues:

It is worth noting that Jefferson Davis and the rebellious slaveholders also depicted secession as a glorious replay of the American Revolution, although they did not go so far as to claim that the patriots of 1776 fought to protect slavery. Not for the first time, modern critics have concluded that the Confederates were basically correct about American history, whereas Lincoln as well as most abolitionists, above all Frederick Douglass, were wrong—as when Douglass, in his most famous speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” excoriated American hypocrisy and white racism but also praised the US Constitution as “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.”

That dig Wilentz makes about “modern critics” who conclude that the Confederates were basically correct about American history” seems to be mostly casting shade on those like today’s MAGA radicals who operate very much in the spirit of Confederacy, as most dramatically illustrated on January 6, 2021 when Trump sent his violent mob to try to facilitate a coup. But is also makes the point that there were tensions between the emancipatory impulses of the Revolution and considerable amounts of unfreedom, particularly for slaves and for native peoples.

I won’t go further into the controversy in this post. But the cynical perspective implied in Beard’s approach is inadequate to understanding the real historical of democratic and liberal ideals and practices. And any interpretation of the American Revolution that fits with Jefferson Davis’ or John Calhoun’s view of its values and meaning should not be lightly accepted.

I’ll close by noting that a central factual-historical argument that Wilentz makes is to emphasize how rapidly antislavery ideas emerged in a particular time-frame, relying on the eminent historian of slavery David Brion Davis:

Suddenly, in the late 1740s and early 1750s, Western culture reached a turning point, producing what the great modern scholar of slavery and the antislavery movement David Brion Davis called “an almost explosive consciousness of man’s freedom to shape the world in accordance with his own will and reason.” The causes of this moral revolution were manifold and remain much debated, but need not detain us here; what is important is that it brought, in Davis’s words, “a heightened concern for discovering laws and principles that would enable human society to be something more than an endless contest of greed and power.” That concern made slavery appear for the first time - to the un-enslaved - as a barbaric offense to God, reason, and natural rights. [my emphasis]

And Wilentz adds, “Between 1767 and 1775, a wave of antislavery petitions, sermons, pamphlets, and private missives swelled across the colonies, from New England as far south as Virginia - a political outburst unprecedented in the Atlantic world.”

Notes:

(1) Wilentz, Sean (2019): American Slavery and ‘the Relentless Unforeseen’. NYR Daily <https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/11/19/american-slavery-and-the-relentless-unforeseen/>(Accessed: 2019-28-12).

(2) Britannica Editors (2026): Charles A. Beard. Encyclopedia Britannica, 11/23/2025. <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-A-Beard> (Accessed 2026-24-06).

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 25: Slavery and the founding principles of the US

Sean Wilentz reminds us of the key role that slavery played in the development of what we know by names such as Western culture and European values: "A fixture and force in Western culture, time out of mind, slavery, and more specifically racial slavery, had been essential to the European settlement of the New World ever since the Portuguese pioneered the plantation system with enslaved African labor in the sixteenth century." (American Slavery and ‘the Relentless Unforeseen’ New York Review blog 11/19/2019)

Wilentz gives us a brief intellectual history of the strain of European thought that developed a critique of modern slavery, an important step in the development of democracy, personal freedom, and social justice.

But he also reminds us that simple historic narratives of democratic progress can easily obscure important aspects of how such progress as took place actually did happen, i.e., by people fighting for it. He summarizes a liberal version of this narrative that is true as far as it goes:

The historian Bernard Bailyn has offered one influential version of this view in his description of how the Revolution unleashed a “contagion of liberty.” Slavery, although a central part of American society, hardly encapsulated the ideals of the Declaration of Independence; it contradicted them, for reasons later explained by no less of an authority than Abraham Lincoln. The American Revolution may not have overthrown the institution of slavery but its egalitarian principles were at least implicitly antislavery. The anomaly became more glaring over the succeeding two generations when, in yet another unfolding of the unforeseen, American slavery did not die out as most expected but expanded, turning the American South into the most dynamic and ambitious slavery regime in the world. Still, when Emancipation arrived, it did so as a vindication and affirmation of America’s founding principles, the “new birth of freedom” that Lincoln pronounced at Gettysburg in 1863. It confounded the claims of those reactionary proslavery apologists who belittled Thomas Jefferson as a cunning dissembler and who regarded the Declaration’s assertion of self-evident equality as, in the words of one Indiana senator from 1854, “nothing more than a self-evident lie.” [my emphasis]

Part of the process of creating a nation is creating narratives that function as myths, i.e., more-or-less sacred events and principles and heroic achievements that are taken as valid and shared by a large portion of the people. And in the United States, where we still operate under a constitution that became effective in 1789, readings of historical events and previous interpretations of them over 200 years ago can even have significant implications for court rulings.

American reactionaries and "reactionary radicalized conservatives" (a term Austrian political scientists Natascha Strobl uses to describe figures like most of the Republicans currently in Congress) are very suspicious of critical thinking about history. As evidence by their ridiculous jihad against their bogeyman version of "critical race theory."

Wilentz describes the limitation of the Bailyn view this way:

One problem with this familiar view is that it obscures how new, how radical, antislavery politics were during the revolutionary era, and how, for many patriots, American slavery and American freedom were perfectly compatible. ...

These proslavery Americans and apologists for slavery and their progeny were no less products of the American founding than the early abolitionists inspired by Woolman and Benezet or the conflicted enlightened Virginians like Jefferson. Plantation slavery grew stupendously in the United States after the Revolution, generating a well-organized slave power that long dominated national politics. Slavery’s defeat was not inevitable. Nor, obviously, did white supremacy die with slavery. Over the century and a half since slavery’s abolition, the racist Americanism of Charles Pinckney and Roger Brooke Taney has survived and flourished in new forms, along with dominating social and political structures that uphold it. Far from vanquished, it has morphed and resurged in ways expected and unexpected, from the bloody overthrow of Reconstruction to the menacing rise of Donald J. Trump. [my emphasis]

Two discussions of race, American history and "identity" politics

These are two recent discussions, actual scholarly discussions, broadly dealing with ideologies of race and identity in the US today. This one features political scientist Adolph Reed and historian Sean Wilentz. Their focus is the social and class character of the civil rights movement and its opponents in American history and how to understand the concept of white supremacy historically: Adolph Reed in conversation with Sean Wilentz 11/17/2021. (Embedding not available.) Also at Princeton Media Central.

The second is this panel featuring Judith Butler (who is a prominent representative of what in contemporary philosophy is actually known as Critical Theory, as opposed to the bizarre fantasy Republican are currently campaigning against), Cornel West, and Glenn Greenwald.

Glenn was only relatively good behavior in this video. Given his tilt toward the rightwing side of his libertarian perspective since 2017 or so, that's a bit surprising. He has been showing up on Tucker Carlson's White Power Hour on FOX News recently to promote a kind of rightwing populism. He does a relatively version of the Trump-as-working-class-hero schtick in this discussion. But the conversation remains substantive throughout and doesn't become a kind of verbal Twitter exchange.

The 2021 Holberg Debate on Identity Politics: J. Butler, C. West, G. Greenwald and S. Critchley. 12/04/2021:

I find both of them helpful in providing important historical and theoretical perspective on the current conversations about race and class. Because over time those conversations change and take on different meanings and nuances. These kinds of discussions are usually not the sort of events that provide snappy quotes to use in brief political debates on cable news shows. But they are important in helping us not to get so caught up in the disputes of the moment that we lose important perspectives on how those disputes fit into a longer picture of 5, 10, 20 years or longer.

"2020", the Bonus Army in 1932, and asymmetric partisan polarization in the US

We don't know yet whether in 5, 10, years from now classes on Contemporary History with have units on "2020" as an iconic year like "1968". (Hopefully not like "1914"!)

But three historians are giving us a preliminary look in current articles. One is Millsaps College historian Bob McElvaine, who in The Political Price of Military Assaults on Americans Medium 06/17/2020 looks at Herbert Hoover's human and political fiasco with the brutal military suppression of the Bonus Army protest in 1932. He also discussed that and the Great Depression as well in a recent English-language interview with Thomas Seifert from the Austrian Wiener Zeitung, Interview with Prof. Robert McElvaine, Author of "The Great Depression" 06/12/2020:

The German translation of the interview has the title, "'The deepest recession of all time'": "Die tiefste Rezession aller Zeiten" 14.06.2020. In the Medium piece, he writes about the attack on the Bonus Army protesters, commanded by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who is a heroic figure in the rightwing pantheon:

Though MacArthur had acted in direct disobedience of his orders, Hoover chose to take responsibility for what the military leader had done. The President was making a calculated move to the right, to stand in the fall election for law and order. The immediate reaction of major newspapers was generally in favor of the assault. The New York Times referred to the Bonus Army “insurrection.” “We are confident,” the paper’s editors affirmed, “that the decision of the President will be sustained by the great majority of our citizens.”

That confidence was misplaced, as the Democratic nominee understood. “Everyone could see what was there,” Franklin Roosevelt said of the man in the White House, “and they wouldn’t like it.” Hoover, Roosevelt remarked, had “set Doug MacArthur on those harmless vets.” Instead of sending troops and gas, FDR said, Hoover should have sent coffee and donuts. “There was nothing inside the man but jelly,” the challenger said of the incumbent. “Maybe there never had been anything.” [my emphasis]

Sean Wilentz also looks at the Bonus March and its possible relevant for the 2020 Presidential campaign, The Disgrace of Donald Trump Rolling Stone 06/15/2020. He also looks at more recent times, and gives the following description that is a key part of the story of asymmetric partisan polarization in the US. Picking up with the Bush 1 Administration, he writes:

When no conservative in Reagan’s mold successfully claimed his mantle, leadership of the GOP fell to those elements of the traditional party that had accommodated themselves to the Reagan revolution, personified by George H.W. Bush, the Connecticut Yankee reborn as a Texas conservative. Bush well understood that to win the presidency, he would need to claim and then agitate the Reagan base; and as his campaign manager Lee Atwater, steeped in the wiles of South Carolina politics, understood just as well, this meant stirring racist fears, an evil art at which Atwater excelled. When, as president, Bush ran afoul of supply-side dogma, old faces like the reactionary Pat Buchanan and new faces like the firebrand Georgian Newt Gingrich challenged his leadership of the party.

From that point forward, a radicalizing dynamic overtook Republican national politics. Constituencies that the traditional GOP had tried to absorb to build its post-1960s majority - conservative white Southerners, including, more broadly, white evangelical Christians - became the party’s heart and soul. Establishment Republican leaders vying for the presidency — Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney - had to appease an ever-hardening right-wing base, centered in what has become the solidly Republican white South. When those leaders lost - as they did twice to Bill Clinton and twice to Barack Obama - the base despaired of anything resembling conventional conservative politics. The one GOP victor, George W. Bush, did win over the party base, thanks in part to his Svengali, Karl Rove, and in part to the patriotic surge that followed the attacks of 9/11. But Bush disastrously invaded Iraq, and he ended his presidency with the start of the Great Recession and the birth of the radical Tea Party, which went on to hound President Obama at every turn. [my emphasis]

And that "radicalizing dynamic" is still running wild in the Republican Party, the sideshow of the NeverTrump Republicans notwithstanding.

And Rick Perlstein reflects on the current consequences of four decades of Reagan-Thatcher economic and cultural dogma, aka, neoliberalism, although he doesn't use the term here: Market Logic Is Literally Killing Us In These Times 06/17/2020. He writes:

Covid-19 has sucked the world into a vortex of interlocking crises that demand collective sacrifice to resolve. The world’s most powerful nation has revealed itself as tragically unequal to the challenge - unwilling to transcend private interest. From the deranged Republicans running the White House and the Senate to the penny-pinching Democrats running the House of Representatives, from ordinary folks who can’t be bothered to wear a mask to corporate titans scouring the horizon for profit-taking opportunities - it all marks the distillation of a national ideology: selfishness, über alles.

He also reminds us how bipartisan this push was:

President Carter ... declared, in his 1978 State of the Union, "Government cannot solve our problems, it can't set our goals, it cannot define our vision. Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy." Two years later, Carter ran for reelection against Reagan by holding himself up as Reagan's deregulationist equal: The party of FDR now believed, "We ought to get the government's nose out of the private enterprise of this country. We've deregulated rail, deregulated trucking, deregulated airlines, deregulated financial institutions, working on communications, to make sure that we have a free enterprise system that's competitive." [Carter]

That larger project, of writing public obligation out of business's social contract with the people, was bipartisan. "Business is entitled to its decade, and I will try to help them get it," the Democratic chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, Dan Rostenkowski, told a business association in 1981. By 2020, the surrender to market logic had advanced so far along that when the moral equivalent of war came, America's arsenal to fight it proved quite nearly bare[.] (my emphasis)

That represents the other side of the asymmetric partisan polarization. The Republican Party has spent four decades in the throes of Wilentz' "radicalizing dynamic." He suggests in the article is better dated to 1992, but his description of Old Man Bush's more moderate course running up against the Reaganized Congressional party is accurate.

The Democrats, on the other hand, have mostly been dominated for the last four decades by a tendency of what I'll call radical centrism, because that sound politer than the alternatives that come to mind. There has been durable opposition to the course of those decades, represented in Presidential politics by the campaigns of Jesse Jackson in the 1980s, Jerry Brown in 1992, and Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020. Ted Kennedy mounted a substantial primary challenge to Carter in 1980, attempting to keep the party more on the New Deal/Great Society track. Including, yes, national health insurance.

I don't want to get too caught up into the Presidential-level references. But Obama's 2008 campaign was generally perceived as a progressive work, particularly compared to his establishment Dem rival Hillary Clinton. But in his policy priorities, he quickly proved to be on board with the chronic centrism. And is still there in 2020, when he helped in the emergency operation to consolidate the donors quickly around Joe Biden. Biden's record, if it can be fairly called centrist at all, is a centrism titled toward the conservative side.

Donor influence and the steady increase of massive amounts of money in politics, particularly since Citizens United decision in 2010, has been the most important influence in this asymmetric polarization process. But some of it is also due to the duck-and-cover style the Democrats have developed, in which they embrace Republican framing of issues and a general duck-and-cover impulse they can't shake:

A final thought on Carter's deregulation policy in 1976-80. On the whole, it was clearly a bad general direction. But the Democrats' position on deregulation at that time was not simply surrender to business lobbies. It was also one of the response to the inflation that seemed to be intractable, the idea being that establishing more price competition could restrain inflationary pressures. Even figures clearly identified at the time as being on the pro-labor left of the party, including Ted Kennedy and Fred Harris, also adopted some form of this approach.

Jimmy Carter is also a special case, because after his Presidency, he has become a figure possibly more respected for his stances, which at times look radical in comparison to those of timid duck-and-cover Democrats. For instance, his book Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis (2005) was a more searing indictment of the Cheney-Bush Administration that established Democrats in Congress could muster. He has said publicly that he voted for Bernie Sanders in 2016, although in 2020 he expressed concern that both Biden and Sanders were too old to start a Presidency.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 16: Slavery and the American Revolution

Historian Sean Wilentz, who has what I take to be a nuanced and sophisticated view of early American and antebellum history, did a review essay last year on Harvard historian Jill Lepore's These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). (The American Revolutions New York Review of Books 11/08/2018)

I've been referring in the last few posts in this series to the conflicting trends we see in American history, such as that between democracy and white supremacy, or between the rule of law and authoritarianism. Wilentz describes three major narratives about slavery in the early decades of the United States as a country:

One well-established line of argument holds that the Revolution unleashed what Bernard Bailyn once called a “contagion of liberty” that eventually challenged the enormity of slavery. Another line is tougher on the Revolution’s hypocrisy, echoing Samuel Johnson’s famous jibe about hearing “the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes.” A still-darker argument asserts that slavery was a cornerstone of the Revolution’s republicanism - that slaveholding aristocratic rebels like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison could, as Edmund Morgan wrote, “more safely preach equality in a slave society than in a free one,” and that they accordingly promoted a racist republicanism that kept poorer whites contented by the fact that they were not black and not enslaved. [my emphasis]

All of those positions are based on real factors. I have a sentimental attachment to the “contagion of liberty” perspective. I try to maintain a critical perspective on my own outlook by paying attention to the Samuel Johnson take, which is based on the very obvious historical reality that slavery and white racism were deeply rooted in the early Republic. As one might guess from the name of this blog, I'm enough of a Hegelian to not be surprised at big contradictions in a country's historial process.

I pay attention to the third perspective. But it still looks to me like a basically reactionary position and ignores some important changes in the institution of slavery itself during the early years of the US, such as the invention of the cotton gin. I don't see how that view is compatable with things like the (pre-Constitution) Northwest Ordnance that banned slavery in northern territories. Or with the voluntary abolition of slavery in various northern states.

Wilentz writes that Jill Lapore "advances an emerging view among historians that there were two eighteenth-century revolutions in America, not one: the familiar successful rebellion against monarchical rule and a less remembered one to abolish slavery that would not succeed until 1865." I'm not sure if he means to differentiate that approach from the "contagion of liberty" outlook, because it seems to be consistent with that view. Also, since a large portion of the left and center-left seem to have written off much of early and antebellum American history as a long, dark night of slavery and reaction, I'm not sure that in popular understanding of history that the Civil War is "less remembered" that the Revolution. I would agree that the Civil War can and should be understood as a second revolution, although in very meaningful ways it was an extension of the first one. Which would be consistent with the "conagion of liberty" perspective, much less so with the slavery-as-a-cornerstone outlook.

Wilentz also makes this important observation about the evolution of the parties on the slavery issue. Note that the party he calls Republican in 1819-20, consistent with the contempory usage, was the Democratic-Republican Party founded by Thomas Jefferson, which was commonly referred to as the Republican Party until later in the 1820s, when it became known as the Democratic Party, of which today's Democratic Party is the same organization. The present-day Republican Party was founded in 1854 as an anti-slavery party.

Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans did not ... align as, respectively, antislavery and proslavery parties prior to the momentous crisis over the admission of Missouri as a slave state in 1819 and 1820; most congressmen in what John Quincy Adams called the “free party” were in fact northern Republicans. Adams, who was by then a Republican himself, did become increasingly opposed to slavery over the following decades, as Lepore relates, but partly on that account, he never “steered the erratic course of the Whig Party,” as the book contends. If he had, something like Lincoln’s Republican Party might have arisen two decades earlier than it did.

Much of Wilentz' essay is devoted to an evaluation of Lapore's analysis of the Populist tradition in US politics. He links that back to pre-Civil War days and the Calhounian trend that on which I've been focusing in several posts in this year's "Heritage" series:

Trump may perhaps reflect the worst in the long history that Lepore relates, but in more ways than she suggests, he also represents a sharp break, matched in our history only by Southern secession and the Civil War. Reclaiming America’s truths means, first and foremost, understanding the exact historic dimensions of the unprecedented crisis—a crisis that, beyond demagogy, lies, and phony populism, goes to the legitimacy of the constitutional order. [my emphasis]