Living up to the promise of our declaration
Washington Examiner
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We date the beginning of our nation not from the first shots fired against the kingdom of Great Britain in Lexington and Concord in 1775 but from 1776, when delegates, elected by popular vote, issued the Declaration of Independence. In doing so, the United States of America recognizes that our legitimacy comes not from brute force but from the consent of the governed.
“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,” the declaration begins. “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 SUPREME COURT SAVED THE CONSTITUTION FROM BIDEN
The Constitution, ratified 12 years later, is not perfect, but in the almost 250 years since the declaration was published, our nation has largely lived up to this promise.
Take that radical assertion “that all men are created equal,” a right the founders acknowledged came from God, not the government, and for good reason because the government took centuries and a Civil War to bring about equality in reality. The same Supreme Court that wrongly decided Plessy v. Ferguson and Dred Scott eventually overturned Jim Crow laws across the country. It has only been 103 years since the 19th Amendment enfranchised half the country, and in the time since, Republicans and Democrats alike have nominated women as presidential candidates, vice presidential candidates, and Supreme Court justices. Kamala Harris, a woman of black and Asian descent, is one heartbeat away from the presidency.
Even liberals who lambasted the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn affirmative action forget this is progress, not retreat, from realizing the equality of men, regardless of race.
In replacing a thousand-year-old monarchy with a republic, the U.S. also succeeded in regularizing a transition of power that was not only peaceful but also predictable. No longer was control of the Americas contingent on a mad king or an infant prince in a cradle — we, the people, got to choose for ourselves.
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Our national birthday should also serve as a stark reminder that a sound currency takes decades to make and mere moments to depreciate. To finance the Revolutionary War, Congress flooded the country with cash, resulting in ruinous, double-digit inflation. Happy to capitalize on the chaos, the British government counterfeited our currency to compound the price instability. This “Continental” currency eventually collapsed entirely, giving way to the Spanish dollar as the de facto reserve currency. Only when Alexander Hamilton crafted a new currency on a fixed gold and silver standard was an American dollar back in business.
Benjamin Franklin famously said the government created by the Constitutional Convention was “a republic, if you can keep it.” While the system as written by the founders is as sound as ever, keeping it is contingent on the governed. We get the republic for which we vote, and to quote one great Republican, freedom is never more than a generation away from extinction.