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.
Finally, when governments deny the people their God-given rights, fail to keep the public safe, undermine their citizens’ happiness, usurp powers belonging to the people, abuse the public, or threaten the lives and liberties of citizens, the people have a right — nay, a duty! — to overthrow those governments and replace them with new governments more likely to protect the people’s lives, liberties, and God-given rights.
These assertions didn’t just repudiate the British Crown. They repudiated the legitimacy of governments throughout the world. Princes justified their powers over common people as expressions of God’s will. Claiming to be God’s direct emissaries on Earth, noble aristocrats considered themselves the arbiters of what rights and liberties common people might enjoy. The American Revolution rejected these premises as outright lies. Princes are endowed with the same rights as commoners. Rights and liberties come from God, not ruling class elites!
In other words, America’s War for Independence was also a war that threatened systems of power throughout the world. If legitimate government powers come directly from the people, then the whole feudal hierarchy is inverted.
Rather than a pyramid with a king or queen on top who allocates certain powers to a small royal court of lords who allocate a few powers to vassals who allocate a tiny portion of those powers to peasants who remain in indentured servitude, the Declaration of Independence asserts that power arises from the base of the pyramid with the people and that government authorities merely borrow the people’s power as temporary custodians obligated to secure and advance the public’s will.
Nothing at the top of the pyramid is legitimate unless the bottom of the pyramid consents. Two-hundred-fifty years ago, America turned the world upside down.
Do any of these American convictions describe Europe today? Does the unelected European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen behave as someone who derives her power from the consent of those Europeans she insists upon governing? Do the digital censorship laws that prevent citizens of the United Kingdom and the European Union from freely communicating with each other protect their God-given rights and liberties? Do the growing swarms of European bureaucrats writing endless rules and regulations inside unaccountable government institutions appear to respect the people’s inherent powers? Do Europe’s open borders policies provide European citizens with security, safety, and happiness?
If the answer to these questions is “no,” then don’t common Europeans have the right and duty to overthrow their governments and form new institutions committed to their protection and the preservation of their freedoms? Otherwise, aren’t most of the bureaucracies and government institutions of Europe wholly illegitimate?
It is easy to see why governments around the world don’t spend much time teaching young students about the Declaration of Independence or the American Revolution. If they did, most citizens would immediately recognize their own forms of government as oppressive, harmful, unjust, and resentful of God’s authority.
This is why European political “leaders” refuse to talk about rights and freedoms and instead drone on about “democracy.” It is difficult to explain how rights and freedoms can be inalienable when governments insist on defining, redefining, or abridging them whenever those in power find it necessary or convenient to do so. “Democracy,” on the other hand, stands for nothing other than the dangerous proposition that fifty-one cannibals can vote to eat forty-nine of their neighbors.
“Democracy” can even be twisted to mean that a couple dozen European Commissioners are entitled to choose a European Commission president who is somehow entitled to write laws for all of Europe. Such an arrangement undermines all safeguards for Europeans’ inalienable rights and liberties. Describing fascism, socialism, or monarchy as “democratic” does not lend legitimacy to despotic forms of government.
To this day, Europe’s leaders don’t understand America. Or they understand, but they pretend that America embraces European “values.” Or they look down upon America as some kind of wild mongrel that makes a good guard dog but remains incapable of appreciating the dignified sensibilities of European “elites.”
The noble gentry who spread their cancerous ideologies from Brussels do their best to groom and domesticate America while expecting us to pee on the rug at any time. Europe’s entrenched aristocracy prefers for the unruly American dog to stay outside.
Part of the reason we are “unruly,” though, is that our political instincts are foreign and threatening to a European feudal structure that demands total power for the few and no power at all for the many. Europe’s bureaucrats prefer Karl Marx to Thomas Jefferson. Europe’s aristocratic “elites” prefer declarations of dependence to America’s Declaration of Independence.
The future is not a battle between the so-called “democratic” West and the authoritarian regimes of the world. The future is a battle between feudal forms of government and an American system that recognizes governments as legitimate only when they are used to protect each individual’s God-given rights. Both in Europe and the United States, the war against government tyranny and for human freedom will continue to rage. European and American “elites” will do everything they can to foster public dependence upon government. European and American citizens who wish to be free must declare their independence from Big Government.
There are those alive today who believe that Big Government cannot be beaten. That’s natural. Two-hundred-fifty years ago, few believed that America’s Declaration of Independence would lead to the British Empire’s defeat. The war for human freedom never truly ends. Every generation must fight to secure their God-given rights.
