Thad Williamson: 

1. It’s the “Declaration of Independence,” not the “Declaration of World Domination.”

    Just in case anyone in the current White House forgot.

2. According to the signers of the Declaration, it’s okay to care about what the rest of the world thinks. The very rationale of the Declaration is that when folks do something as momentous as dissolve existing political bonds, “a decent respect as to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

3. According to the signers of the Declaration, government is a Good Thing. It’s what enables us to “secure these rights” of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

4. The second paragraph of the Declaration is almost entirely inspired by John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, especially the assertion of the right of revolution and the principle of justifying government by consent of the governed. That’s very important. Notably, however, the Declaration does not state that we have an “unalienable Right” to property.

5. Nor, related to this, do we have a right to be free from taxation as such. Instead, we have a moral right to be free from taxation “without our Consent.”

6. It turns out that the signers of the Declaration were big fans of the “benefits of Trial by Jury” and opposed to “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.” Fortunately, the federal appeals court which earlier this week ruled that the Bush Administration has wrongly held a Chinese Muslim in Guantanamo Bay for six years agrees.  Many similar cases regarding Guantanamo prisoners are expected to be heard in coming months in the wake of last month’s restoration by the Supreme Court (over the Bush Administration’s protests) of the detainees’ habeas corpus rights.

7. The signers of the Declaration took it as a complaint that King George was “transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries” to fight against the colonists.  Evidently they didn’t realize what a fine, upstanding job those Blackwater people are capable of.

8. The Declaration also complains of the use of “Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages” by the crown. It’s hard to say exactly, but that sounds like the signers probably thought that torture and other forms of “Cruelty” were an unconditionally bad thing.

9. What’s not hard to say is that at the heart of the Declaration is an assertion of a universal right to self-determination. One nation should not dominate another, nor should it interfere in another’s affairs. The specific list of offenses in the Declaration is a reminder that occupation of one people by another is bound to lead to a series of abuses. This is an important thought to keep in mind as America enters its sixth year in Iraq. The Iraqis at this point probably could put together a pretty long list of abuses committed by occupying Americans if they wanted to, the most damning of which is our utter incompetence in assembling a functional new government.

10. Finally, and this may be heresy, by declaring the “self-evident” truth that “All men are created equal” did not in itself make it so. Equality and liberty are just words on paper if they are not realized in practice. Doing that in the American case required not just throwing off the British yoke, but also establishing a constitutional form of government, and then filling in a few “minor” details along the way….such as adding a Bill of Rights to the Constitution, ending slavery, enfranchising women, recognizing the rights of labor, ending Jim Crow and legal discrimination, starting to establish civil rights for gays and lesbians, making public spaces accessible to the disabled . . . None of those things would have happened—not even the Bill of Rights, as University of Richmond historian Woody Holton reminds us in his recent book Unruly Americans—without the loud, committed and engaged struggles of ordinary people willing to challenge elite groups and established customs.

That’s why discussions of the Declaration of Independence like that offered this week by neoconservative guru William Kristol (one of the geniuses who brought you the Iraq War) celebrating the Declaration as an exercise of leadership by brave elites are not so much wrong, as wrong-headed.

The bald statements of a right to self-determination, the assertion of human equality, and the assertion of fundamental rights which government must respect contained in the Declaration are all important for their own sake. But we don’t get self-government, the realization of equality, and the protection and the exercise of liberty simply by declaring it; we get it only through sustained civic engagement with and oversight of government.

So by all means, just as Kristol suggests, make it a 4th of July tradition to break out the Declaration and read with your friends and family what old TJ had to say 232 years ago. But don’t expect to find a document sanctioning a view of the world that so it’s okay for some countries to dominate others, by invasion and occupation if necessary, or okay to simply ignore what the rest of the world thinks. The entire theme of the document is anti-imperialistic to the core, repeatedly voicing the thought that it’s unnatural for one group of people to try to rule another (especially from a long distance).

And don’t take it for granted that the grand but imperfect political experiment set in motion 232 years ago -- the idea that you could achieve meaningful self-government across an expansive territory -- cannot yet fail. It might, if we let elites (especially deranged neoconservative elites) rule in our name, and if we forget that as soon as we fall into the belief that politics and the work of governance are someone else’s business, we cease to remain our own masters.

Norman Leahy:

Time and distance tend to weaken even the strongest of bonds. Such is the case with Independence Day, an occasion that has become more identified with fireworks shows, cook outs and overindulgence than with civic or patriotic pride.

Of course, the day has always been one of celebration (and fireworks). It is a birthday party and we’ve all been invited. But what of the day’s more profound and, one would hope, enduring meaning?

That seems to have been largely lost, as has our familiarity with the text of the Declaration of Independence itself.

The Declaration remains one of the most extraordinary documents ever written. It challenged not just a king and a global empire, but laid the foundations for an entirely new type of government -- one that placed the rights and privileges of the people above the petty constraints of princes and states.

In its philosophical bones, the Declaration is an expression of the Enlightenment, a combination of natural law, self-determination and republicanism (with a small "r"). In the Preamble alone, we have an establishment of natural law (the legal reasons for dissolving the bonds between Britain and America) and the right of the people to form a new government. From there, we move on to a declaration of what rights people have separate from government -- and that government itself is a creation, rather than the master, of the people. When government breaks its contract with the people to guard their rights, the people have not only the right, but the responsibility, to change that government through the means they deem best.

It’s heady stuff.

And it the sentiments and philosophy behind it have been under assault almost from the beginning.

The republican strains in the Declaration have been eroded to the point of meaninglessness today. Where the founders, generally, believed that public life was a duty to be assumed for a time and then surrendered, lest they get too comfortable with the trappings of power, we have a political class today that is professional both in its aims and outlook. In the Republic’s early days, there was great debate as to whether officeholders should be paid for their trouble. We still argue over legislative pay, except now, it’s how much the raise should be.

The founding generation, generally, believed in rotation in office, what we would call term limits. Too much time in any place of power, their thinking and experience told them, makes office holders forget their constituents’ concerns. Better to leave office on a regular basis and live under the laws they made than continue in any position for life.

Needless to say, the modern political class thinks itself too important to the future of the nation to consider any such quaint notions.

The founding generation was deeply concerned with proscribing the limits of state power. Having fought a war against tyranny, they were keenly opposed to seeing it reborn in the new government they would create. Thus, in the Articles of Confederation, the central government is hobbled in deference to the states. For those of us who truly admire limited government, these were the good old days that came to a crashing end with the Constitution.

They were just as concerned with freedom of commerce -- they were merchants, after all. They were concerned with immigration, as a new nation of seemingly endless spaces demanded as many new people as it could get. They championed freedom from expensive standing armies, were wary and weary of judicial and executive caprice and were determined to see that political power centers were as close to the people as possible.

Few of these concerns have survived. We have a standing, professional army, a powerful lobby devoted to undermining free trade and a very vocal sect devoted to restraining immigration. And as for concentrated power … we all know how that ended.

But the point of the Declaration, and perhaps its most enduring truth, is that things as they are now need not continue. Right there on the page, it outlines how we can, and how we should, approach a government that preys upon our rights rather than defend them:

"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

Are we at this point? It depends who you talk to. Some believe we live in the next best thing to a police state. That’s extreme, if not fanciful. But there are reasons for concern. There have been almost from the start.

In a letter to John Adams’ future son-in-law, William Smith, Thomas Jefferson wrote, "god forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion … the tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure."      

The rebellion Jefferson was referring to was Shay’s Rebellion, which gripped western Massachusetts in 1786-87. Shays and his compatriots took up arms against what they conceived to be a rapacious tax system that was pushing them into debt, and into jail (Abigail Adams called them "Ignorant, restless desperados, without conscience or principles …"). While the uprising was put down, and provided urgency to the cause of those seeking to form a more powerful central government, it nonetheless exposed just how deeply some took to heart their liberties and any official attempts to thwart them.

Could such a thing happen today? Not likely. We are too busy to consider our freedoms, and too diverted to worry about our liberties. But just the same, it is even less likely that a truly remarkable document like the Declaration could be written today. Its sentiments are unfashionable here at home. It’s not inclusive, it’s too strident. And what is "sacred honor" anyway (besides sounding like a new test case for the ACLU)?

Time and distance have dimmed the fires that birthed the Declaration. It would do us all a great deal of good to carve out a moment between burgers and fire crackers to read the text again. Read it aloud, and with feeling, as it was when it was first made public. The truths there are still relevant, still powerful. And they still have the ability to ignite sparks more brilliant and enduring than any fireworks show.