“We hold these truths”: The Enduring Message of the U.S. Declaration of Independence

By David Livingstone

Canada Day and the U.S.’s own Independence Day celebrations three days later are already receding into history, and most Canadians are by now either on summer vacation, planning to head out soon or wishing that they could.

I was born on July 1, 1967 – Canada’s Centennial – and have been a proud patriot my whole life. But I still think it’s worthwhile to consider the message and meaning of the document that started it all for the Americans – the Declaration of Independence, which turned 250 on July 4.

The anniversary is an opportunity to ask: do the Declaration’s central principles still deserve admiration and respect?

The Declaration of Independence is unquestionably one of history’s most consequential political documents. It was written primarily by Virginia farmer, noted intellectual and future President Thomas Jefferson. The Declaration was published on July 4^th, 1776, proclaiming that Great Britain’s 13 American colonies were seceding and forming their own union. But the Declaration was aimed not merely at King George III and the British Parliament, but all of humanity.

While the entire document is worthy of study, its revolutionary – and, in my judgment, universal and eternal – principles are in the first two paragraphs. The first paragraph asserts the right of a people to declare their independence, though noting they should consider themselves obliged to explain their reasons for doing so. The Declaration’s most famous lines – and most compelling ideas – are 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…”

The Declaration’s most famous sentence remains its most revolutionary: that all people are created equal and that each individual is endowed with unalienable rights, including to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In a nutshell, it is the idea of natural rights belonging to each and every person. These are not rights ascribed solely to one race, ethnicity or minority group and not to others. The inalienable rights spoken about in the Declaration belong to each human being. And they do not come from government – they inhere in the person.

As the great scholar of the American Founding, Harry Jaffa, wrote in a 1987 essay, “No one before the American Founding had ever before proclaimed the principles of freedom – the principle of freedom for all mankind – as the principles of a particular people.”

Among its revolutionary ideas is the Declaration’s insistence that government exists not to grant those rights but to secure them. Its legitimacy can be measured by how well or poorly it protects natural rights. Government’s power, in turn, is limited by the ends it must serve.

And the Declaration leaves no doubt who’s the boss: “…whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…” That is because government’s legitimacy comes not from heredity, the barrel of a gun or the Divine Right of Kings – but from the consent of the governed, i.e., the people. If that’s not revolutionary, nothing is.

The Declaration’s ideas continue to shape constitutional democracy throughout the Western world. Yet today they face criticism from opposite directions.

From the left, “progressives” reject the Declaration’s claim that there are enduring truths about justice and human nature. Rights, they argue, evolve with history and are ultimately defined by changing social values and political institutions – which is also where rights come from. As the influential early 20^th century progressive philosopher John Dewey accusingly wrote: “Natural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology.”

The progressive view undermines the natural rights concept, and intentionally so. If rights have no foundation beyond historical circumstance, they become whatever governments or majorities decide they should be. The Declaration’s argument limits government power; the progressives undermine natural rights in order to expand government’s role.

At the same time, a growing number of post-liberal conservatives argue that the Declaration’s emphasis on liberty and consent undermined older traditions rooted in virtue and the common good. While these concerns deserve consideration, they underestimate the moral seriousness of the American Founders. The Declaration was never a defence of moral relativism or unlimited individual choice.

Abraham Lincoln – the first Republican to be elected President – understood this better than anyone. During the debates over slavery preceding the American Civil War, Lincoln’s Democratic opponent Stephen Douglas argued that if a majority voted to permit slavery, democracy required accepting that decision. This “popular sovereignty”, as Douglas referred to it, is supposedly based on the Declaration’s assertion that “consent” is the basis of legitimate government.

Lincoln disagreed fundamentally with Douglas’ interpretation. The Declaration established a higher moral standard that no majority, however large, could vote away. As the document states, the people must choose a form of government that will secure the safety and happiness of everyone. Consent cannot be used as a tool to deny the natural and inalienable rights belonging equally to every human being.

The great civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King Jr. reached the same conclusion a century after the Civil War. King appealed to the “majestic words” of the Declaration of Independence: “This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable Rights’ of ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’”

The self-evident truth that all men are created equal was as true in 1963 when King spoke as they were 1860 when Lincoln reaffirmed it, as they were when first signed by the Founders on parchment in 1776. America, King argued, had the right ideals – it had merely failed to live up to them – and the civil rights movement at its best succeeded because it appealed to truths already embedded in the nation’s founding.

The Declaration of Independence is not merely an American document. It is one of the West’s greatest statements of political freedom. Its principles inspired constitutional government, challenged slavery, strengthened the civil rights movement and continue to serve as a barrier against arbitrary power. Two hundred and fifty years later, that is a legacy worth celebrating.

The original, full-length version of this essay was recently published in C2C Journal.

David Livingstone, PhD, is Honorary Research Associate in Vancouver Island University’s Political Studies Department and Senior Fellow with the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy.