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SPECIAL SERIES:America Turns 250

This is the first of a three-part series based on a lecture delivered on May 15 at a conference, “The Declaration of Independence at 250: What New Can Be Said?” hosted by the Stanford Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School.

With the signing of the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago, America’s founders accomplished something new under the sun: They brought into existence a nation rooted in the belief that individuals are by nature free and equal. This year marks another achievement for the Declaration: Never before has a nation dedicated to securing its citizens’ unalienable rights – the rights inherent in all human beings – persevered for 250 years. Notwithstanding the social and political turmoil currently roiling the nation, America has done much more than persevere. No multireligious, multiracial, and multiethnic nation-state in history has more successfully established freedom and equality under law, promoted economic prosperity, and developed the capabilities to defend itself by projecting military power around the world.

America’s perseverance and flourishing – as presidents including Abraham Lincoln, Calvin Coolidge, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt have affirmed and as venerable reformers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr. have demonstrated – owe much to the nation’s founding on universal principles and to its enduring dedication to them. The self-evident truths proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence start with the conviction that human beings are by nature free and equally endowed with unalienable rights. They include the belief that government’s first purpose is to secure citizens’ unalienable rights, that just power stems from the consent of the governed, and that citizens by right may replace a government that destroys the conditions for securing their unalienable rights.

These universal principles inform the 27 grievances – abuses of executive power, lawless legislation, and acts of war – that the Declaration spells out against King George III and the British Parliament. Some argue that the Declaration’s primary significance lies in these grievances and downplay as Enlightenment commonplaces the historic document’s opening paragraphs about universal principles. But it was revolutionary for a people to claim the authority of unalienable rights to throw off one form of government and institute another. Indeed, according to the Declaration’s logic, American colonists’ specific grievances justified their break with Britain and the establishment of free and independent states because taken together the grievances violated rights that the colonists shared equally with all persons.

In recent years critics on both left and right have subjected the truths that the Declaration holds to be self-evident to harsh criticism. Eminent figures associated with the postmodern-progressive left accuse these principles of obscuring if not empowering the evil institution of slavery. Prominent members of the postliberal right charge that the Declaration’s self-evident truths are neither true nor beneficial but rather constitute the chief source of the........

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