Cascade Commentary No. 2002-17
July 2002

Independence Day: Remember the reason

By Michael Barton, Ph.D

As we celebrate Independence Day we have the opportunity to understand and appreciate both how our freedoms were won, and how many of them have been lost. Celebration is indeed in order but let's be clear on what Thomas Jefferson accomplished when he wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Jefferson's words were a manifesto for a new kind of nation-state with a new view of the purposes of and justification for government.

As nation-states began emerging in Europe in the late middle ages, the common assumption had been that governments existed to ensure order and protect the stability of society. While not denying the need for order, the Declaration of Independence asserts that the prime purpose of government is to protect the rights of the individual. For the first time it was the individual and not the society that was paramount. The success of government was to be measured not by how well society was regulated, but by how free the individual was from government.

The justification for government put forth in the Declaration holds that a compact exists between the State and the citizens. Jefferson echoed the theory of English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) who held that government was a contract between the governed and those governing, who derived their power solely from the consent of the governed and whose purpose it was to protect every man's inherent right to life, liberty, and property. On this basis when the consent of the people is systematically violated they have not only the right but also the duty to revolt and establish a more just system. The list of some 30 grievances against King George III provided the justification for revolution.

The genius of the Declaration is that by arguing from universal principles the document is not just a statement by 13 colonies in a corner of the New World seeking independence from a distant King, but rather a standard against which all states and systems of government can be judged. These principles allow us to oppose all tyrannies from the monarchies familiar to the Founders to horrors like the Nazis and Communists not imagined in the 18th century.

The Founders also rejected another tyranny with which they were familiar: Democracy. In Federalist Paper 10 James Madison argued for a constitutional republic because, "...democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." Where the rule of the majority is absolute, there are no protections for the "unalienable" rights that form the cornerstone of the Founders' theory of government. In 399 B.C. in Athens under the purest form of democracy the world has seen, a jury of five hundred of his fellow citizens charged Socrates with impiety. He was convicted to death by a margin of six votes.

Yet there are democratic ideas in the Declaration, democratic in the sense of an equality of entitlement and responsibility. All people have a right to liberty only in so far as they are by nature equal, which is to say none are naturally superior, and deserve to rule, or inferior, and deserve to be ruled. Because we are endowed with these rights, the rights are unalienable, which means they cannot be given up or taken away.

From this understanding of the Declaration we can truly appreciate a legacy of individual rights and limited government with democratic institutions that led to the establishment of the best and freest country in history. When our Constitution was adopted in 1787 it laid out the responsibilities of the federal government. James Madison stressed the concept of enumerated powers for government and innumerable rights possessed by individuals and initially opposed incorporating a bill of rights into the Constitution. He worried that by specifying rights in the Constitution, it would be implied that rights are definite and numerable. How right he was has become clear, as the Bill of Rights has become the defacto statement of all the rights enjoyed by the people rather than just those called out for special attention.

Reading the list of grievances cited in the Declaration as cause for revolution, one is struck by how benign many of the offenses seem compared to the powers routinely exercised today by our federal and local governments in violation of the Constitution. Certainly a revolution is called for, a revolution in understanding and education on the unalienable rights of man and the dangers of unlimited government power.