Happy New Year! In this second musing on the Declaration of Independence (the first is here), I would like to reflect on the document’s core ideals and what they might mean for the renewal of our democracy today.
I ended yesterday by highlighting a phrase in one of the grievances leveled against the king: “the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise.” In other words, no one, no tyrant, can remove from the people their fundamental self-governance. The state might well fail to exercise the legislative authority delegated to it by the people — as for the most part the Republican-controlled Congress did in 2025 — but that is not an end to the legislative power, it is a failure of stewardship. The people retain the power, and when you and I engage in political action — canvassing and voting, writing and calling our representatives, participating in No Kings protests — we are exercising our legislative function.
The Declaration holds the basis of this power to be, of course, the fundamental ideals that are articulated in its second paragraph:
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.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
The Declaration could well be considered the definitive public document of the Age of Enlightenment, and perhaps no sentences better express the foundations of democracy than those in this paragraph.
We owe to Benjamin Franklin the term “self-evident,” which replaced Jefferson’s original “sacred and undeniable”; those who wish to call us a “Christian nation” might usefully reflect on the fact that in the Declaration’s view, human beings are self-organizing and self-authorizing, not beholden politically to any values that are not inherently knowable through their own reason.
The self-evident truths are, of course, equality and unalienable rights. Neither can be denied; neither can be abrogated; I cannot give them away, for myself or others. There could be much to say about the self-evidence of equality, and maybe I’ll post about that sometime. Right now what I want to say is that, although there is a body of literature that finds a tension between equality and rights, I believe they are intimately related: equality is a function of human dignity, and an attack on the “created” equality of human beings is also an attack on their unalienable freedom.
In this respect, the Declaration expresses the sociopolitical realization of human freedom that the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel saw as the absolute goal of the evolution of the human spirit. No form of government, for Hegel, could surpass the modern democracy (although there could be many variations on the theme, and Hegel himself saw democratic constitutional monarchy as superior to the non-monarchical democracy of the US).
The history of the Declaration’s ideals, however, is itself one of evolution and struggle. Equality and inalienable rights were at the signing already in practice negated in scope even while being written down in theory and as aspiration: slavery still existed in all thirteen colonies and plagued the nation for decades to come; in most cases, only propertied males were enfranchised; the colonials, as the Declaration itself attests, mostly viewed Native Americans as a dehumanized, “savage” barrier to be removed.
But, the ideals stuck and have energized our democratizing progress.
The first four-score-and-five years of the nation’s political history were dominated by the struggle over the original sin of slavery, leading to the Civil War. While the current administration is intent on re-valorizing the Confederacy, we must remember that the truly democratizing outcome of the war was the abolition of slavery. While the Declaration set forth the founding ideals of democracy, Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address gave expression to its fundamental form: “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” And the people now were to include, at least, African Americans freed from slavery.
And Lincoln and the Radical Republicans drove this change expressly based on the ideals of equality and inalienable rights set forth in the Declaration. This was not uncontroversial: that Lincoln included in the Gettysburg Address the hope that the nation should have “a new birth of freedom” was criticized as exceeding the mandate of preserving the Union for which the war was being fought. But Lincoln knew that so much blood could not be spilled over a question of geographical boundaries; the only acceptable justification could be that the fundamental ideals of equality and freedom would be advanced: the nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” — and, importantly, “any nation so conceived and so dedicated” — “should not perish from the earth.” In essence, Lincoln was saying that the American people, having established a democracy based on equality and rights, had a responsibility to sustain it and realize its ideals. As the historian Eric Foner has said, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were a “second Revolution” — a correction of our Constitution toward the ideals of the Declaration.
We are now facing the greatest challenge to our Constitutional order since the Civil War. While that war was fought over inequalities and violations of rights that were, regrettably, ensconced in the Constitution itself, we now have on our hands a war to preserve the fundamental ideals of our democracy.
That also means that we have an historic opportunity: to use this Constitutional crisis to remake again our constitutional order in greater fidelity to the Declaration’s ideals of equality and inalienable rights.
Trump will not be president forever, despite his wishes. He might not even survive his term, and if Democrats gain control of Congress in 2027, there would be the opportunity of impeachment. In light of Trump’s faltering, Republicans are already trying to readjust to political realities.
In some ways the worst thing that could happen now — and my fear about Democrats is that they will always choose the worst route available — is that we will not seize this moment, as Lincoln and his allies did, to truly advance the Declaration’s ideals.
I don’t know what advancement would mean in detail. But I do know that it means standing up for and shouting for those ideals. Maybe we need more focus on economic democracy. Maybe we need a restored attention — wiser and more attuned to where all people are coming from — to diversity, equity and inclusion. Maybe we need a cultural renewal in the spirit of deeply reflective arts. Maybe we need a deep and expansive commitment to voters’ rights. Maybe we need . . . I don’t know.
What I do know is that people of all political stripes are hurting. Their pursuit of life, liberty and happiness is thwarted.
We must reawaken their legislative power. We must reawaken our legislative power.
Affirming Democracy, Gathering Resistance 