CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Unfinished Revolution: When Rights Become Privileges

LAPD guarding the entrance to the LAPD Rampart Division building. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

What exactly are Americans celebrating this Fourth of July?

Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all people possess inalienable rights, we now live under a government that increasingly behaves as though rights belong to the government to distribute, restrict and revoke as it sees fit.

Freedom has become conditional.

Constitutional rights have become political bargaining chips.

Government now claims the authority to decide which religious beliefs deserve accommodation and which may be excluded—a clear violation of the First Amendment’s warning against both establishing a religion and favoring or disfavoring one religion over another.

It insists that some speakers deserve constitutional protection while others may be censored, surveilled or punished—a violation of the right to free speech.

It proclaims itself the defender of unborn life while dismantling programs that protect the health and welfare of children already born.

It welcomes some immigrants with extraordinary speed while denying others the full measure of due process promised by the Constitution.

It pays lip service to equality under law while dismantling programs designed to ensure equal opportunity and root out discrimination.

It invokes the sanctity of children while narrowing which children may claim the birthright citizenship guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

It insists that no one is above the law while expanding presidential immunity and removing many of the traditional checks on executive power.

Rights that the Declaration of Independence described as inalienable are increasingly treated as permissions—granted when convenient, withheld when inconvenient, and interpreted according to political priorities rather than constitutional principle.

That is not merely bad policy.

It is a repudiation of the American Revolution, because the Revolution began with one radical claim: freedom is our birthright.

To listen to those in........

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