The American Creed

The Declaration of Independence should give us hope.

Two of my favorite holidays are Independence Day and Thanksgiving. They are solely American celebrations. Yet I woke up a bit depressed this morning, remembering that Agent Orange (thanks Spike Lee) still sits in the White House. So, I went back and reread the Declaration of Independence again and some of the things I have written about it in the past in some of my books on American history.

Jefferson opens with the stirring words “When in the course of human events …” telling the reader that the colonists are separating from Great Britain and declaring “the causes which impel them to the separation.” The second paragraph would, over time, become the expression of the American mind that Jefferson referred to as he began to write the Declaration. The historian Joseph Ellis has called these the most important fifty-five words written in American history, words that would inspire not only Americans but people throughout the world.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

There have always been two views of what makes America a nation. One is tied to a traditional racial or ethnic view, ethnonationalism for short, the other that America is an idea. Gunnar Myrdal of Sweden dubbed the second one the American Creed, that Americans were bound together by “the ideals of the essential dignity and equality of all human beings, of inalienable rights to freedom, justice and opportunity.” Myrdal was referring to Jefferson’s natural-rights section of the Declaration of Independence. It is not hard to guess which of these visions that Donald Trump subscribes to, a person always in search of the worst of our past.

At Gettysburg, Lincoln would place the Declaration at the center of what it is to be an American. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brough forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Lincoln argued that the Civil War was in fact about a new birth of freedom that all should be entitled to. Charles Sumner, the senator from Massachusetts who was caned on the floor of the Congress due to his opposition to enslavement, also held the Declaration in high esteem. He was one of the Republican members of Congress who helped pass the 14^th amendment, which place equality under the law into the Constitution.

Fast forward one hundred years and Martin Luther King called on the country to live up to its founding creed when he gave his I Have a Dream speech in front of the Lincoln memorial.

“In a sense we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness … America has given the negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds”. But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt…. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children”.

The largest part of the Declaration, the part we focus least on, is also the part the leaders of the day cared most about, since it provided justification for independence. This was the section that contained a list of indictments and grievances against the King. It would be the section of Jefferson’s draft that the Congress would debate and edit the most.

Yesterday, Jennifer Rubin wrote a brilliant article on Substack comparing the abuses which Jefferson drafted in the Declaration’s list of grievances to those Trump has unleashed upon the American people. I have reposted that to my Substack page.

Writing this article helped to remind me that all of us that oppose Trump’s lawlessness stand in good company. I would take Jefferson, Lincoln and King over Trump, J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller. What about you? Don’t lose faith, we will ultimately defeat these illiberal autocrats.