On a glorious morning walk about a week before America’s 250th birthday, I was listening to Jon Stewart’s podcast on that theme. I recommend it. One of the things he discusses with his historian guests, Yale’s David Blight and Harvard’s Annette Gordon-Reed, is the Declaration of Independence, which both historians called a “dangerous document” in terms of its focus on the right of the people to overthrow an unjust ruler.

Indeed, as my colleagues David Corn and Tim Murphy pointed out exactly one year ago, certain of the tyrannical acts my co-author, Thomas Jefferson, cited as grievances in that founding document are uncannily evocative of the usurpations of our current presidential administration.

You can agree with that or not. But whether you are MAGA or a democratic socialist, it’s worth reading our founding document in full. It’s not too terribly long, and—problematic language notwithstanding—it offers some perspective as to the frustrations of the men, flawed as they may have been, who laid down a case for independence and a foundation for the American experiment.

Ben Franklin famously responded, in 1787, to the question of whether we had a republic or a monarchy: “A republic, if you can keep it.” And with that, I turn over this post to Mr. Jefferson and his peers.

In Congress, July 4, 1776 — The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

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, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing........

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