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.

Equal justice under law has become selective.

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 processpromised 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.

None of these contradictions exists in isolation.

Together they reveal a dangerous shift in the relationship between the citizen and the state.

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 power, however, freedom is a privilege reserved for a select few: the politically favored, the ideologically acceptable, the obedient, the compliant, the useful.

The Declaration of Independence advanced a very different idea: that all people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.

That was the real revolution.

America’s founders may have disagreed—often grievously and hypocritically—about who qualified as “the people,” but they were united in one essential conviction: our rights do not come from government.

The government exists to serve us.

Government exists to safeguard and protect our inalienable rights—not ration them, redefine them or revoke them.

That distinction matters.

Once government is allowed to decide whose rights count, rights cease to be rights at all.

They become privileges.

And privileges can always be revoked.

For 250 years, Americans have treated the Declaration of Independence as the nation’s birth certificate, but the Declaration was never merely a birth certificate—it was a warning label.

It was written by people who understood that freedom is fragile, power is relentless, and no generation remains free simply because an earlier generation fought for liberty.

The Declaration was not a celebration of government.

It was an indictment of government.

It catalogued the abuses of a ruler who had placed himself above the law, treated the people as subjects rather than sovereigns, undermined representative government, obstructed justice, maintained standing armies, imposed surveillance, abused power and waged war against the very people he claimed to govern.

The names have changed. The machinery has changed. The technology has changed.

That is why the Constitution matters.

The Constitution translated the warnings of the Declaration into law.

Through separated powers, checks and balances, federalism, and a........

© Eurasia Review