We are, of course, about to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the Revolution of 1776. I say “commemorate” rather than “celebrate” because it is not clear what sort of celebration could be called for at this moment of American authoritarianism and reaction. Many commentators are discussing this fact, and some, like Robert Reich, will be wearing black armbands to mourn the assault on our long effort to achieve our fundamental ideals.

To be sure, there are signs of hope: Trump’s popularity ratings are abysmal, and the Democratic primaries in New York and Colorado indicate that the sleeping giant of American progressivism is waking and that a long-overdue generational turnover is afoot. The latter particularly is something to celebrate.

And it needs to be said that, while our current moment is truly unprecedented in many ways, it is not the first time that the forces of democratic progress have had to marshal themselves in the face of stasis, complacency, oligarchy, and reaction. American history is a history of revolution and counterrevolution, and the nation has stood on the edge of the abyss more than once — and at least once fallen off and had to claw its way back up.

Jamelle Bouie’s column today, “Five Words That Changed the World,” argues effectively that Jefferson’s stirring words in the Declaration — “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” — were not as revolutionary, as radical, as history has made them. Jefferson and the elite members of the Continental Congress, Bouie says, saw them primarily as a justification for rebellion, for change of government, “not a road map for emancipation.” There was nothing particularly inclusive about them. Nevertheless, there were those who were determined to read these words as what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would much later call “a promissory note.” Bouie writes:

But then there were those outside the circle of belonging: women, Natives, landless laborers and, most starkly, Black Americans, both free and enslaved. They did not read — or, most likely, hear — the Declaration as an abstract claim about a prelapsarian past. They understood it as a radical statement of principle for the present. And they wielded this principle against a society that would not extend the Revolutionary promise of freedom and self-government to those held in bondage.

It is to the excluded, the outsiders, that we owe the re-crafting of the Declaration into a tool for the advancement of its own stated democratic ideals.  (I recommend this review article by David Waldstreicher in Boston Review for some related reflections.)

After the Revolutionary War, the Declaration was in many ways forgotten or downplayed in the halls of power in favor of a focus on the Constitution — and the series of compromises around that document’s greatest flaw, the establishment of slavery. But the revolutionary voices were there — in slaves’ petitions and uprisings, in Abolitionists’ actions, even in the inspirations that others around the world found in those very words about equality and liberty that America’s Establishment seemed afraid to recognize. 

Finally, in the Civil War and Reconstruction, this revolutionary understanding of the Declaration was elevated and “enshrined,” as Bouie says, first by Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address, then by the Second Revolution of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and further by the policies of Reconstruction.

But counterrevolution remained. The KKK was founded in 1865 and has had resurgences to the present. With the death of Reconstruction at the hands of yet another ameliorating political compromise, numerous post-war democratic gains were wiped out and Jim Crow took sway in the South. In some ways, the Civil War has never ended, though for much of the 20th century it was waged on rhetorical grounds, such as the elevation of the “Lost Cause” mythology about the war, which changed an anti-humanity rebellion into a a quaint nostalgia for the supposed rural, anti-technological values of the antebellum era. Never mind that the cotton gin had transformed plantations into vast factories with human beings as the cogs in the machine.

Fortunately, revolution continued also: the emergence of the labor movement, the development of late-19th-century progressivism, women’s suffrage, the economic democracy of the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, and so on. All accomplished by the courage and hard work of the excluded — and their allies — in the face of stasis, complacency and worse.

And now we face the present Reaction. Perhaps never before have the Counterrevolutionaries exercised such power and worked so diligently to reverse the gains of revolution.

In commemoration of the Declaration, then, let’s remember that while the words were set to paper by Jefferson and his committee, their best meaning lies in our efforts to hear and see those who are excluded, to listen to their demands, and to champion their cause of true equality and liberty for all.

The hard work has to be ours.