Breaking History - America Has Always Been a Dangerous Idea

Episode Date: July 3, 2025

As our nation turns 249 this week, we explore the radical and enduring power of the Declaration of Independence. More than just a break from the British Empire, the Declaration was a bold statement of universal human rights, an idea so dangerous it has sparked revolutions and inspired liberation movements around the world ever since, from Vietnam to Israel, from China to the Black Panther Party. We trace its intellectual origins, unpack its contradictions, and examine how a document written in 1776 continues to challenge America (and the world) today. Producers Poppy Damon, Bobby Moriarty and Charlie Bell. Go to groundnews.com/Coleman to get 40% off the unlimited access Vantage plan and unlock world-wide perspectives on today’s biggest news stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We want to make sure that we can fight against the authoritarianism that's happening as we speak. No fights! No KKK! No fascists! You listen! Last month, there was a spate of protests across America, united by a two-word slogan. No kings. This was the rallying cry of Democrats against the bold prerogatives assumed by President Donald Trump. It was also an echo of the Tea Party, the movement that emerged

in the 20 teens to hold President Barack Obama to account. Whether it's the Black Panthers or the Daughters of the American Revolution, Americans of all creeds and passions tend to voice their protest of the government in the language of the Declaration of Independence. It's a remarkable document, and it's how we mark our nation's birth. And that in itself is peculiar. I mean, why not celebrate America's birthday on April 19th, the date our patriots took up arms against their colonial masters in the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775. Or maybe Independence Day should be celebrated on October 19th when George Washington led a French and American army to victory over the forces of General Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781. That was when the colonies

actually really won the Revolutionary War. Instead, we trace our independence back to an act of Congress. On July 4th, 1776, the Continental Congress representing 13 British colonies officially quit the British Empire and issued a short declaration explaining why. It began with these immortal words. When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them. A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

And then there is the enduring truth expressed in the first sentence of the second paragraph. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Christopher Hitchens once quipped, There is no other example in history, apart from the composition of the King James Version of the Bible, in which great words and concepts have been fused into poetic prose by the banal processes of a committee. What is exceptional about this is that the founding of America is at its essence the

assertion of immutable truths about human nature. Founding a nation on a principle up to that point had never been done. Most national origin stories usually are about a great man, sometimes with divine providence or even powers, who creates a new country and a specific land for a specific bloodline. The first Korean kingdom is believed to have been founded in 2333 BCE by Dungun, the son of a demigod named Huanong, and a bear who became a woman named Ungayo. Russia's origin story traces back to the Kingdom of Kievan Rus, which united Slavs in what is today Ukraine against various Scandinavian and Byzantine conquerors. France begins when Clovis I brings the Frankish tribes in the late 5th century under his yoke.

You get the idea. Until America, one's nationality was determined by blood and soil. America is a country founded on an idea. And what an idea it was! For the grand sweep of history, most of the time, people were the subjects of their rulers. They lived according to the whims of those who governed them. What the founders said in the Declaration was that the government does not derive its power from the heavens or the sword. It is empowered by the consent of the people. And the people have a God-given right to dissolve the government.

Well, it's a revolutionary idea to base a government on the principle of individual rights taking precedence over the rights of the state. This is author Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of Dangerous Nation, a history of America's idealistic foreign policy. The biggest difference between the founding of the United States and every other government in history is that even in ancient Greece and ancient Greek democracy like Athens, it was still the government that people owed their loyalty to. The government was democratically

run, but there was no protection for the rights of the individual against the state. The most obvious example of this is the execution of Socrates for preaching ideas which the state thought were undermining of them, and may well have been in fact, but that certainly Socrates did not enjoy the rights under the Athenian government to say what he wanted to say. All of that said, the founders did not take the right to break ties with the British Empire lightly.

The declaration says that revolution is serious business and should not be done for trivial reasons. Prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes, and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and user-patience, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards

for their future security. I do think that it's too simple to see the declaration as just saying people have certain rights, if governments fail to protect them then people have another right which is to overturn that government and start over. This is Ival Levin, the Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. That's one way to read one paragraph of the Declaration. But seen in the larger context of the entire Declaration, this is really a statement about what government owes society. And part of what government owes society is the protection of rights. Part of it is also the protection of a way of life, of a kind of ordered freedom

that proves to be very important when you look beyond that famous second paragraph. Most of the Declaration of Independence is a list of grievances that the Americans have against the King for how he's treated them. The Declaration itself says that the description of where rights come from is not enough. Having said that we're all created equal, governments exist to protect the rights that result from that, the declaration makes a kind of turn. It says, yes, all that, but prudence will dictate that governments long established shouldn't be changed for light and transient causes. You shouldn't just overthrow government on a whim.

There have to be serious reasons, and the reasons they give have much more to do with providing the foundation for an ordered social life than just with protecting individual rights. They start out by saying the king's not a good executive. He's not giving his approval to important laws. He's not letting the state legislatures meet. These are kind of strange arguments for a political revolution. But in a sense, they say a society needs a working government. And we're not just being denied our individual rights, we're being denied a working government here.

To me, that's fascinating. And Evol is correct. Go to the declaration and you find that most of the complaints listed against King George III are about his interference with or prevention of the local and state legislatures and courts to function properly. Yes, there's all the stuff we remember from middle

school too, like taxation without consent and quartering an army in private homes during peacetime. And let's not forget my favorite, quote, he has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people, end quote. Now that last one, lives of our people." Now that last one, which alone would seem to be enough to justify dissolving the bans which have connected the young Americans to the British Empire, is the 24th of 27 complaints against the King in the Declaration. The bulk of its Bill of Particulars are about depriving Americans of rights and democratic institutions that the vast majority of the world at the time, England being a partial

exception, did not know or have reason to believe their government owed to them. And in this respect, the Declaration of Independence was dynamite. It wasn't only a statement of a self-evident truth about the nature of human beings and society. It was asserting that everyone is entitled to those rights, and this idea has resonated throughout the last two and a half centuries. It has served at home as a promissory note, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. And it has inspired revolutions and uprisings all over the world. It is what makes America

exceptional. The Declaration of Independence, the idea of America, in this sense is much larger than the charter of our nation president Calvin Coolidge on the 150th anniversary of our country's founding put it like this when we come to examine the action of the continental congress in adopting the declaration of independence in the light of what was set out in that great document and the light of succeeding events we cannot escape the conclusion that it had a much broader and deeper significance than a mere secession of territory and the establishment of a new nation. Events of that nature must have been taking place since the dawn of history. One empire after another has arisen only to crumble away as its constituent parts separated

from each other and set up independent governments of their own. Such actions long ago became commonplace. They have occurred too often to hold the attention of the world and command the administration and reverence of humanity. There is something beyond the establishment of a new nation, great as that event would be, in the Declaration of Independence which has ever since caused it to be regarded as one of the great charters that not only was to liberate America, but was everywhere to a noble humanity. ["The Greatest Charter of America"] I'm Eli Lake, and you're listening to Breaking History.

In this episode we examine the dangerous ideas in our founding charter. After the break, the intellectual and political roots of the most viral document in political history. If you don't leave, you're gonna fly Enough King George, it's over now Till he doesn't die The journey is going down Most of mankind is used to suffering Crawl from the crime of use and hustling.

Maybe this time, but not the other day, We have the right to live without a king. When it's the cause of human events, There comes a time when draw our consent. Here's all the bands we once connected. The English king we once respected. Hey there, it's Eli. With a constant barrage of alarming headlines, wars, a warming planet, and high stakes politics, it might feel like we're teetering on the edge, but the world contains a lot more good

news than you hear on mainstream media. If you're looking for another show that questions the status quo, then I recommend What Could Go Right? The twice weekly news podcast hosted by Zachary Carrabell and Emma Varvaloukas. Recently nominated for Best Politics or Opinion Podcast at the Ambi Awards, What Could Go Right provides a balanced view of what's going on across the globe, even during difficult times. Each Wednesday, they sit down with leading minds like bestselling author John Green and

environmental reporter Emily Atkin to discuss today's biggest challenges with nuance and insight. And on Fridays, they highlight the latest progress reports from around the world, from life-changing medical advancements to groundbreaking efforts to combat climate change. If you need a place to start, check out their recent episode with economics expert Matt Stoller, who breaks down the 100-year war between monopoly power and democracy. It's an enlightening conversation that's perfect for breaking history fans. So fight the urge to doom scroll. Tune in to what could go right wherever you get your podcasts. To understand the Declaration we have to understand its principal author, Thomas

Jefferson, our third president. A man who has recently gone through a brutal historical revision, focusing on the fact that the apparent author of Our Liberty owned slaves and sired children from his slave, Sally Hemings. Statues of Jefferson were targets during the Great Awakening of 2020 and 2021. The Thomas Jefferson statue at City Hall will have a new home. The city's Public Design Commission voted today to remove the statue from the city council chambers and move it to the New York

Historical Society. And it is true that the man who penned the words about inalienable rights endowed by their creator owned slaves. It's hard to imagine a much more profound example of hypocrisy than that. In this sense, you could say that Jefferson was the 18th century version of a limousine liberal. Except, the principles he placed at the center of the future republic did not exempt him from judgment, and he knew it. He wasn't justifying the system he inherited, but articulating the foundation for a better one.

Jefferson contained multitudes. He was an accomplished botanist, an amateur architect. He designed his home in Monticello. He invented the lazy Susan, along with other gadgets. He was the best writer in the English language of his proto-American generation. Tall, gangly, and shy, in his prime when he wasn't wearing powdered wigs, he stood out for his shock of bright red hair. Christopher Hitchens, in his great book on Jefferson, author of America, acknowledges

the man's contradictions as follows. Modern and postmodern historians are fond of using terms such as inventing America or imagining America. It would be truer to say of Thomas Jefferson that he designed America or that he authored it. This being the case, it would be lazy or obvious to say that he contained contradictions or paradoxes. This is true of everybody and everything. It would be infinitely more surprising to strike upon a historic figure, or indeed a nation, that was not subject to this law. Jefferson did not embody contradiction. Jefferson was a contradiction, and this will be found at every step of the narrative that

goes to make his life. We focus on Jefferson because he was the man tasked to write the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress. But it's important to note here that he was more of a curator. The Declaration is akin to a quilt or a collage. It's a reordering and restatement of prominent ideas that were circulating in this age of Enlightenment. The biggest tributary came from John Locke's Second Treatise on Government. Locke first came up with inalienable rights and enumerated them as life, liberty,

and property more or less. Jefferson would later write that one of his fellow Virginia delegates to the Continental Congress, Richard Henry Lee, had said that the Declaration's entire preamble was copied from Locke's second treatise. Locke himself, though, was influenced by the Hebraic monotheism he found in the Old Testament. He literally begins the Second Treatise with a disquisition on why God did not grant Adam the right to rule over all of his future descendants. Think of the book of Genesis, which states that man is created in God's image. That right there gets you a kind of radical equality of all men even though it is couched in the supernatural. One sees the echo of that immortal phrase from Genesis in the declarations phrase, endowed

by their creator. So does this mean that Thomas Jefferson was a plagiarist? No more than endowed by their creator makes people a cheap imitation of the divine. He himself did not believe he was creating a work of original philosophy in the Declaration. In an 1823 letter to James Madison, he wrote, I did not consider it part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether. There were other differences as well. George Mason's draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights,

which we know Jefferson had with him in Philadelphia when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, for example, contains this phrase. All men are born equal, free, and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity, among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty with the means of acquiring and possessing property

and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety." And Mason's draft Declaration of Rights was in turn influenced by the English Declaration of Rights, which was later ratified as the English Bill of Rights in 1689, the same year that Locke published his two treatises on government. The events of 1688 and 1689, known as the Glorious Revolution, in some ways were a dress rehearsal for the American one. It was a confessional war between the Catholic King, James II, and the Protestant majority led by a Dutch noble, William of Orange. To make a long story short, King James was forced to

abdicate his throne and flee to France. William and his wife Mary, both Protestants, then assumed the throne. And in this swift transition, Parliament drafted a set of basic rights limiting the power of future kings. For example, taxation required an act of Parliament, and excessive bail was banned. The one thing that the English Bill of Rights did not do, though, was to assert plainly that King James II had violated a trust with the English people. That was too controversial for the conservatives in Parliament, even though everyone

largely agreed that the Catholic King was a disgrace. I bring this up to acknowledge the debt the colonists paid to their mother country. Jefferson, Adams, and the other founders did not discover a new political insight. They were tinkering with the political philosophy of their era. But they were also putting these ideas into action. The English Bill of Rights ended the House of Stuart and secured a new contract between Parliament and King. Notable accomplishments for sure. The Declaration of Independence, though, went much further.

The rights it enumerates are inalienable and their truth is self-evident. They are not based in English tradition. They are based in human nature. They are not negotiable. And these rights apply to everyone. That is the intellectual context of the Declaration. But there is also an important political context. What is often overlooked in the studies of the American Revolution is that even in 1775, when Massachusetts was in rebellion and Boston was under siege, the Continental Congress still held out hope to negotiate a new agreement with King George III. There were many prior declarations and petitions from the colonies, both from the state legislatures and the Continental Congress itself, beseeching the King to end depressive taxation, to pack up the army

in peacetime, to allow their legislatures to meet. Even the 1775 Declaration on Taking Up Arms includes this caveat. We have not raised armies with ambitious designs of separating from Great Britain and establishing independent states. And here's a great irony of the American Revolution. King George had already decided to treat the Patriots of 1774 as traitors and rebels.

He knew before the foundinging Fathers themselves that their agenda would end in revolution. Here's how Pauline Mayer in her brilliant book, American Scripture, explains this. No one agreed more heartily than George III, who never wavered in supporting the rights of Parliament. The King was stubborn, not especially imaginative, and temperamentally disinclined to think through the careful arguments colonists posed, which he quickly dismissed as the work of a few troublemakers.

It was safer, he thought, to take a hard line than to make concessions to such nonsense. He also turned a deaf ear to petitions from the colonists' sympathizers in England, particularly from the city of London urging that he intervene on behalf of his American subjects. The first Continental Congress's petition to the King meant no better fate. As the Declaration on Taking Off Arms complained, it was huddled into Parliament, amongst a bundle of American papers and there neglected. By the time he received that petition, and months before the outbreak of war, the King had already made up his mind.

The New England governments, he wrote, lured north on November 18, 1774, are in a state of rebellion, and blows must decide whether they are subject to this country or independent. Had the King not been so stubborn, there is a good chance that New York and Pennsylvania would have continued to push for what they called a middle way. But the King wouldn't budge, so even the Quaker pacifists of Philadelphia ended up endorsing revolution. After the break, how the Declaration of Independence is the standard by which we measure our moral and political progress as a nation.

$15 in PC optimum points on your first five orders. Shop now at nofrills.ca. Allow me to anticipate an objection thus far in the podcast. As you may have noticed, I've only lightly touched on America's original sin, slavery. And yet, the practice was not abolished until nearly a century after the Declaration of Independence. Women, landless whites, let alone the native tribes, were not afforded the inalienable rights and equality promised by our national charter.

In this respect, one could argue that the document is nothing more than marketing material. The American Revolution was really just a bunch of white elites who didn't want to pay their taxes. They just dressed up their economic grievances in flowery prose. This is the standard view these days from what might be called the post-American left. Here is how Howard Zinn expressed the idea in his 1980 People's History of the United States. To say that the Declaration of Independence, even by its own language, was limited to life, liberty and happiness for white males, is not to denounce the makers and signers of

the Declaration for holding the ideas expected of privileged males of the eighteenth century. Reformers and radicals, looking discontentedly at history, are often accused of expecting too much from a past political epoch, and sometimes they do. But the point of noting those outside the arc of human rights in the Declaration is not, centuries late and pointlessly, to lay impossible moral burdens on that time. It is to try to understand the way in which the Declaration functioned to mobilize certain groups of Americans Americans ignoring others. Surely inspirational language to create a secure consensus is still used in our time to cover up serious conflicts of interest in that consensus, and to cover up also the omission of large parts of the human race."

Well, Zinn gets it wrong in a few important respects. Let's start with Jefferson. His original draft of the declaration included these words. He, King George, has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him,

captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither. This practical warfare, the approprium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold. He has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this excrucible commerce, and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished eye. He is now exciting those very people to rise

in arms amongst us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them, thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another. Talk about contradictions. In this section, Jefferson is attacking the English king for imposing the slave trade on the colonies and preventing legislatures from ending what he calls an exorbitant commerce. And at the same time, he is attacking the king for inciting these slaves to rise up

against their masters. But even here, we can see that Jefferson acknowledges that the slaves are human beings who have the same inalienable rights as their masters. The language did not make it into the declaration because the southern delegates did not see the things the same way their fellow southerner Jefferson did. All of that said, Jefferson, Washington, and Madison, all slave owners at the end of their lives, acknowledged that eventually the young republic

would have to abolish slavery. But the big flaw in Zin's argument about the declaration is his failure to appreciate how this document was a standard by which Americans who were deprived of their rights could hold their country to account and obtain them. This was the playbook for the abolitionists of the 19th century and the civil rights movement of the 20th century.

Nat Turner's failed slave rebellion of 1831 was initially scheduled to commence on July 4th. You think that's a coincidence? This is how the suffragettes argued for the right of women to vote. This is how immigrants demanded equal treatment under the law. Every immigrant group that has come to this country and been discriminated against, the Irish Catholics had to use the declaration to insist on their rights for equal treatment The Jews who came to the United States the Italians who came to the United States again

This is Robert Kagan were treated as second-class citizens by virtue of the fact that they were not white Anglo-saxon Protestants use the declaration to say no that is not acceptable. We enjoy the same rights as everybody else You need to respect those rights. And they force the system to do that. And so the power of the ideas are great. And this is why I ask, what could you possibly appealing to if not the declaration? You cannot appeal to Christianity.

Christianity did not deliver these rights. Christianity existed for 2,000 years without delivering this kind of government. So when people want to say, you know, where do their rights come from, they come from the declaration. There's no other place to come from. So in this respect, the declaration is a kind of engine of American progress. This is again, because the rights enumerated are self-evident truths. There is no appeal to celestial, ethnic, or government authority.

Just consider the Declaration of Sentiments that emerged from the Seneca Falls Convention, the first meeting of American women to organize for voting rights. It's the Declaration of Independence, except with one important edit. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain and alienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,

that to secure these rights, governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Or listen to the righteous fury of Frederick Douglass in his July 4, 1852 address. Here he turns our national identity on itself. How can you claim to oppose tyranny and love liberty when the nation keeps three million people in bondage?

Americans, your Republican politics, not less than your Republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation, as embodied in the two great political parties, is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three million of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas on the crown-headed tyrants of Russia and Austria and pride yourselves on the democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and

bodyguards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water. But the fugitives from your own land, you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot, and kill. You glory in your refinement and your universal education. Yet you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the character of a nation. A system begun in avarice, supported in pride

and perpetuated in cruelty. In the 19th century, Douglas and the other abolitionists heightened the contradictions in a republic whose charter asserted the equality of all people and their rights to live in freedom to one that allowed the practice of chattel slavery. That contradiction, identified by Jefferson himself, could not hold.

And it was for Abraham Lincoln, our greatest president, to resolve it through the Civil War. Lincoln argued that his decision to emancipate the slaves was to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence. It's right there in the opening sentence of the Gettysburg Address. For score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Again, this is Robert Kagan. Lincoln, more than anyone, returned to the Declaration as the founding document prior to the Constitution. In fact, there's a wonderful phrase that people found in a fragment of Lincoln's writings where he referred to the Declaration and the Constitution in the following way, that the Declaration of Independence was the apple of gold and the Constitution was the frame of silver around the apple of gold and the Constitution was the frame of silver around the apple.

And as he said, the frame was made for the apple, the apple wasn't made for the frame, by which he meant that the prince, it was the principle of declaration that were the founding that where that was where the core of the nation was about. The Constitution was supposed to defend and further those rights and it obviously was manifestly flawed from the beginning and the Civil War was necessary to, as they would say, purify the Constitution and make it be what it was intended to be. The Civil War was of course necessary, but it was not sufficient. Blacks would remain second-class citizens for another century. But notice again,

argument remains couched in the Declaration of Independence. Here is Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous I Have a Dream speech delivered in 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 out. 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. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation,

America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient far. After the break, how America's national charter inspired the world. Well, that didn't take long. Only 13 years after the founding fathers declared their independence from Great Britain in 1789, the French decided to take that idea even further and just abolished the Bourbon dynasty altogether. The new national anthem sounds like something an American patriot would sing, with lines like the bloody flag of tyranny confronts us by being raised. Then there's the Declaration of the Rights of Man, another nod to the Declaration of

Independence. But it went a bit further. For example, the first article asserts that all men are born and remain free and equal in rights, a restating of our Declaration's famous preamble. But then it says social distinctions may be based only on common utility. Well that goes a bit further, no? Our charter enshrines the right to pursue happiness, but it allows for social and material inequality that results from that pursuit.

The nature of the French Revolution, with its total upending of the social fabric of France at the time and the violent zeal with which its eventual leaders, known as the Jacobins, conducted class warfare in the 10-year struggle against Louis XVI, made for a much messier transition to democracy. And to be real, that democracy didn't really last. The anarchy of this reign of terror, as it was known, led Frenchmen at first to embrace a new tyrant, Napoleon. Now, I should note that just as the reign of terror was getting going, America had its

first elections and was in the process of ratifying the Constitution. The successful American transition is due in part to the fact that the colonies were no threat to the royal house of Hanover. King George III had the rest of his empire going just great. But it was also because while the self-evident truths expressed in the Declaration of Independence are profound, they are more modest demands than the French version. Now, we could do an entire show on just the differences between the French and the American revolutions, but the point is that it's impossible really to have one without the other. The Declaration of Independence

let the count out of the bag. Again, this is Yvall Levin. By the time of the French Revolution, which happens about a decade after the American, it's already clear that the Declaration of Independence is going to be a source of ideas for all kinds of movements around the world. Now, I think the French misread the character of the American Revolution. I think the Vietnamese probably did too, and a lot of other revolutionaries have. But the power of this transformational idea is undeniable.

And you see it in the self-understandings of a lot of nations that didn't misunderstand it. After 1789, the Declaration of Independence really began to go viral. There is the Haitian Revolution of 1804. Seven years later, Venezuela, under Simone Bolivar, declared independence from Spain. By 1817, the European powers had begun to notice. John Quincy Adams that year from his post as the American minister in England, observed in a letter to his father, John Adams, quote, The universal feeling of Europe in witnessing the gigantic growth of our population and power

is that we shall, if united, become a very dangerous member of the society of nations. Again, this is Robert Kagan. It was precisely because they feared that this virus of liberalism, that this idea, I mean, after all, that the revolution was founded on the principle of the illegitimacy of monarchy. They hadn't set out to make that point, but they wound up making that point. And effectively, they overthrew a monarch. Now they didn't overthrow him, you know, they didn't overthrow King George III in England, but they overthrew him for themselves.

And so there was the precedent of overthrowing monarchy, and it was a precedent that immediately had impact. The power of the Declaration's ideas continued to spread. Our DNA is all over the independence movements of the 20th century. Ho Chi Minh opened Vietnam's own Declaration in 1945 by quoting directly from Jefferson's famous second paragraph. It resurfaced in Israel, whose 1948 Declaration of Independence echoes the American one in both structure and spirit.

And it was invoked by the Black Panther Party, whose 1966 founding platform listed a long train of grievances against Black Americans. We wrote this program, you know, piece by piece. Another day come down to the War on Poverty Office at night when everybody else was off work. And then I ran into this Declaration of Independence, and I read it and reread it in the first two paragraphs. And it said, When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for any one people to

dissolve the political bondage which have connection with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth to separate and equal station to which the laws of another, and to assume among the powers of the earth to separate an equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of humankind dictate that they should declare the causes which impel them to dissolve that political bondage." Across continents and centuries, the Declaration's assertion of universal liberty continues to be one of the most contagious ideas in political history. Even during the Cold War, when so much anti-colonial ferment was motivated by the Russian Revolution and the ideas of Marx and Engels, noted

in materialist theories of historical inevitability, the beacon of our national charter lit the way for freedom fighters. Here is Nelson Mandela, whose African National Congress was aligned with the Soviet Union during apartheid, making this point before the U.S. Congress in 1990. It would have been an act of treason against the people and against our conscience to allow fear and the drive towards self-preservation to dominate our behavior, obliging us to absent ourselves from the struggle for democracy and human rights, not only in our country, but throughout the world. We could not have made an acquaintance through literature with human terms, such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson,

and not been moved to act as they were moved to act. My hope is that we will see the power of declaration today inspire a new generation of revolutionary patriots in Iran as their regime reels from the humiliation of the 12-day war. This American scripture is something all of us should revere because we are closer to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence today than we were in 1776. Its words inspired Lincoln, Douglas, King, the suffragettes, and countless other Americans to demand that we live up to its ideals. That's not a criticism of the Declaration, that is a tribute to its power. This is why I reject the fashionable

theory today that America was founded in 1619, a century before any of the founding fathers were born, and the date the first African slaves kidnapped by Portugal were sent to the British colony of Virginia. In the end, the spirit of 1776 defeated the spirit of 1619 in the Civil War and later in the Civil Rights Movement. Calvin Coolidge, in his speech on the 150th anniversary of our founding, explained that the core ideas in the Declaration, the equality of human beings, their endowment with inalienable rights, and the consent the governed must give to the government are permanent truths they cannot be improved upon. And if we stray from these principles, we will find ourselves adrift in what he called a pagan materialism. For Coolidge,

the Declaration is not just a work of philosophy, it is the embodiment of the American spirit. I am hopeful about the prospects for these ideas because I do think that they are final. Again, this is Yvall Levin. As Calvin Coolidge put it, they are final. That means not that they are the future or that they are the past. They're true. They've always been true. Now, that doesn't mean that we're going to live by them

and it certainly doesn't mean that other people are going to live by them, but here they are staring us in the face. They're hard to deny. They're hard to ignore. They're impossible to refute. They're hard to deny, they're hard to ignore, they're impossible to refute, they're true. And to me, that speaks to an extraordinary strength that they're always going to have over the life of our society. I'm not of the view that they're just going to conquer the world and that eventually every country becomes the United States and that the fate of every society is fundamentally a kind of Jeffersonian democracy. I don't think that's true. I don't think history's ending. I don't think our challenges go away.

But it is nonetheless the case that the truths put forward in the Declaration are true. And we, more than any other nation, cannot pretend that we don't know that. Sometimes we live as if we don't by ignoring it, but we can't really pretend that we haven't been told that this is the truth about the human person and therefore about politics.

When asked at the Constitutional Convention what kind of government this new United States would adopt, Ben Franklin famously responded, a republic if you can keep it." That quote is usually dusted off as a kind of warning, but it is also a source of hope if you can keep it. Already the Republic isn't somebody else's business, but everyone's. How you feel about that depends on how you feel about your fellow citizens and perhaps even your fellow human beings. Though there are always plenty of reasons to worry for the future, in the end, I'm with Ival Levin and Calvin Coolidge. I'm an optimist.

Who would have thought that a government founded in revolution, whose charter asserts the right to shake off the chains of tyrants, would last 250 years? Will we last another two and a half centuries? I don't know the answer. But so long as we never lose sight of the Declaration of Independence, we have a fighting chance.

We hold these truths to be self-evident. We got the right to choose our own president. You hold these ones to stop the King meddling. You tax our tea in crocodile settlement. Enough King George, we have no right. Oh, oh right. If you don't leave, we're gonna fight. Thanks for listening to Breaking History. If you liked this episode, if you learned something, if you disagreed with something, or if it simply sparked a new understanding of our present moment, please share it with your friends and family

and use it to have a conversation of your own. And remember, if you want to support Breaking History, follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a five-star rating and a nice comment too. Also, if you loved this episode, there's more great content at TheFP.com. Please become a subscriber today, and until then, I'll see you next time. Liberty life, pursuit of happiness These are the rights that one can take back from us Righteous man may lack a precedent

But cause these truths to clear is self evident We understand that we will not forget Leave us alone, we want gender And rain There's enough King George, we have no right If you don't leave, we're gonna fight Enough King George, it's over now Oh Lord, your journey is going down. Thank you. you you