Most nations begin with power.

Throughout history, kings, warlords, dynasties, and autocratic regimes have built nations by seizing thrones, consolidating control, claiming territory, conquering land, and calling it a country. Nations measured themselves by the whims of kings, the ambitions of emperors, the decrees of tyrants, the desires of high priests, or the interests of ruling parties. If the king wanted conquest, conquest became virtue. If the regime demanded obedience, obedience became morality. If the ruler changed his mind, the nation’s conception of justice changed with him. The ruler—not the people—stood at the center of the nation’s existence.

The United States attempted something radically different. Lacking a king, a dynasty, a unifying religion, or even a shared ancestry, it was instead founded on the belief that all people are born with inalienable rights, that governments derive their power from the people, and that our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not gifts from rulers, but birthrights no ruler may take away. Rather than placing its founders on a pedestal, the American experiment placed its founding principles above the founders themselves. More than creating a new government, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights together created a new kind of nation, one measured, in every generation, against the same benchmark and committed to holding everyone—the Founders, the financiers, the factory workers, the frontiersmen, and the farmhands—under the same rule of law.

That benchmark was never meant to describe the world as it was, but the world as it ought to be. Precisely because America so often failed to live up to it, that benchmark became both an indictment of the country’s failures and a blueprint for correcting them. From the destruction and dispossession of Native American peoples and chattel slavery to the Chinese Exclusion Act, the refusal to admit Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, and the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, America’s history contains painful examples of a nation falling short of its own ideals. These dark chapters in American history became profound moral failures only because the country had articulated a higher standard for its own conduct. Without those ideals, they would not have been betrayals. Only ideals this great can produce betrayals this profound.

Unfortunately, these days, too many young Americans are taught far more about the betrayals than about the ideals themselves. Rather than learning American history as the story of a nation struggling—however imperfectly—to live up to its founding principles, many students are taught to........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)