Happy 4th of July

[The Nehor]

One of my favorite historians wrote up a piece about the nature of the Declaration of Independence I really recommend:

https://acoup.blog/2026/07/04/collections-on-the-declaration-of-independence/

Probably my favorite section:

Quote

It was also really radical in 1776, at a point when most states on Earth justified their power not from the consent of the governed but rather by divine right: the ruler was chosen by God, or had the Mandate of Heaven, or was of a divine lineage, and so on. The idea that government was by divine sanction was hardly new – we find it in some of the earliest governing documents that still survive. It seems to have been the governing principle of the earliest states, that the social order – with the king on top – was divinely ordained and thus any attempt to challenge it was a rebellion against God or the gods. One sees strains of this in certain forms of Christian nationalism in the United States, which regard either the American form of government or specific American leaders as divinely ordained, but the irony is that the Declaration is quite directly rejecting this vision. “Their Creator” who is also “Nature’s God” does not ordain rulers, rather he endows rights which earthly rulers may not in justice abridge and which humans cannot alienate – which is to say the rights can never be lost, only violated.

The next two points then serve as conclusions which follow these two initial assertions: if individuals have unalienable rights and if governments exist to protect those rights then (this is the third point) a government which fails to protect those rights loses its legitimacy and may be disestablished and therefore (the fourth point) a “long train of abuses and usurpations” can justify revolution.

In short, a government – and it is striking here that the Declaration uses the king as synecdoche (part-for-the-whole) for the whole British government – which greatly fails in its duty of protecting rights loses its legitimacy. Once again, the authors seem to sense how radical that claim is and so they qualify it, making clear that such a decision isn’t to be taken lightly (and it isn’t likely to be taken lightly).  The failure of the government in question to protect rights must be extreme to justify the radical cure of revolution, a position which will set up the bill of grievances that make up the actual bulk of the Declaration’s text (but which everyone skips – we shall not).

But before we move to the bill of grievances, I want to take one more chance to push back against the idea that the Declaration is just something ‘small ball’ or something that only mattered for the United States.

The Declaration was recognized as an incendiary, radical, dangerous document at the time. It was banned or suppressed in some European monarchies –not appearing in translation, for instance, in Russia until 1863 or in Spain until 1868; it was outright banned in Spain’s overseas colonies. And it isn’t hard to see why – the language and ideas of the Declaration, building on European political philosophy that had been ‘in the air,’ so to speak, for some time clearly played a role in the cultural foment that culminated in the French Revolution. A European monarch who worried that the publication of the Declaration might endanger their crown was right to worry.

That last sentence really drives home the radicalism of the American experiment: A European monarch who worried that the publication of the Declaration might endanger their crown was right to worry.

[quietcanon]

Happy 4th!