We made it to our two-hundred-fiftieth birthday, America. What’s next? Let’s get back to work, so that our descendants can celebrate one thousand.
Making sure the American Experiment endures is work, after all. Protecting American ideals from our ideological enemies is never easy.
Well before our nation declared independence from Great Britain, the American system repudiated the whole “ruling class” hierarchy that — to this day! — still oozes from the infected abscesses of the United Kingdom and much of continental Europe. After we fought two world wars in the twentieth century to save Europe from itself, we spent the Cold War period in a bit of a kumbaya stupor during which Americans often equated the beliefs of Western nobles with those who founded and built the United States.
But Europe and America have never been the same. The people who built America left Europe behind for good reasons. They rejected Europe’s aristocratic allegiances, its feudal social structures, and its false pretension that blue-blooded “elites” are divinely and innately empowered to rule over everyone else.
The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution are not merely documents establishing America’s political separation from Britain and the legal foundations for its new government. They are revolutionary statements of America’s intent to remove itself from the generational enslavement upon which monarchies, ruling classes, and feudal systems depend.
Taken together, the Declaration and Constitution assert fundamental truths that governments throughout human history have tried to obscure from their peoples. Those truths include the recognition that all of us are equal before God; so-called noble aristocrats are not divinely given or entitled to receive more power or privilege than the common man. Furthermore, our rights come from God, not the government. Aristocrats, government officials, elected representatives, and bureaucrats cannot give us what only God provides for our well-being and happiness.
Additionally, because governments are artificial creations constructed by imperfect human beings, they are legitimate only when the people who live under those governments consent to their structure. Governments that exercise power in defiance of the will of the people are unjust governments utilizing illegitimate powers.