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Steven Pincus

Tuesday 3rd of March 2026

Declaration of Independence The authors of the Declaration of Independence made no anti-imperial or antigovernment statement. Instead, Thomas Jeffereson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, John Jay, and their fellow members of the Second Continental Congress proclaimed their commitment to a Patriot government that would promote American development. The Declaration marked not the end of empire but the beginning of a new and energetic government in North America. Steve Pincus, The Heart of the Declaration [Patriots believed in governments promoting economic development by raising consumer demand, subsidizing immigrants, helping the poor, taxing the rich, eliminating slavery] © 2018 Kwiple.com
Declaration of Independence By the autumn of 1775, no one on either side of the Atlantic doubted that America was in practice independent. … The Americans declared independence in July 1776 not because they loathed the the oppression of the British government but because they desperately needed a state. The Declaration of Independence was a call to state formation. … [American Patriots] knew they had to borrow money. The American state, they agreed, was never meant to be debt-free. … But without de- claring independence it would be imposs- ible for the North American Congress to borrow money to support its urgent state-building needs. Steve Pincus, The Heart of the Declaration © 2018 Kwiple.com
 
Ideology By “ideology” I mean a worldview shared by broad swaths of people from all classes. [18th-century] Ideologies were shaped, not determined by social and economic realities. These ideologies were prisms through which people understood new information about government activities, economic performance, and foreign affairs. Ideological convictions led different groups of people to interpret the same piece of information in radically different ways. In the same way, twenty- first-century Americans might, depending on their ideological convictions, understand the soaring cost of medical care either as the result of insufficient government involve- ment in the health care sector, or as the con- sequence of too much government regulation. Steve Pincus, The Heart of the Declaration © 2018 Kwiple.com