The Declaration as Apologia for Revolution
Highlighting a section of the Declaration often neglected.
I come to write my belated Independence Day post. On the Fourth, I was too busy making merry to pen (or type) a post glorifying the exceptional nation that is the United States of America. I aim to rectify that oversight now.
Virtually every American is wont to quote the following from the Declaration of Independence:
“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.”
And right Americans are to cite such a substantive passage, for it articulates the essence of liberalism, classically understood.
Of equal importance are the following passages, which illuminate the conservative attitude of the Founders:
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes;. . .and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
I understand this section of the Declaration to mean that revolutions are almost always ill-advised; after all, the devil you know is the better you don’t and, when you aim to overthrow a government that is tyrannical to one degree—as all governments are, to some degree, however small or significant—there is absolutely no guarantee that you will succeed in supplanting it with a more righteous replacement. As the French Revolution would go on to demonstrate, those that agitate to throw off the yolk of one tyranny may very well substitute it with a state that is even more inimical to individual autonomy, liberty, and human flourishing than its predecessor.
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is [our] right, it is [our] duty, to throw off such Government. . .” And we must ensure we “provide new Guards for [our] future security,” instead of new masters to subjugate and subordinate us, the citizenry.
Note: The Founders were not anarchists; they always intended to replace the tyrannical form of government under which they suffered with one that defends their natural rights—not with nothing at all.