{"id":1963826,"date":"2023-07-04T03:57:01","date_gmt":"2023-07-04T07:57:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/the-declaration-of-independence-defends-american-citizenship-not-abstract-ideas\/"},"modified":"2023-07-04T04:04:57","modified_gmt":"2023-07-04T08:04:57","slug":"the-declaration-of-independence-defends-american-citizenship-not-abstract-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/the-declaration-of-independence-defends-american-citizenship-not-abstract-ideas\/","title":{"rendered":"The Declaration of Independence protects American citizenship, not vague concepts."},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">20<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fthe-declaration-of-independence-defends-american-citizenship-not-abstract-ideas%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1963826&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div class=\"article-content\">\n<p>For many Americans, the Fourth of July, celebrating the American Declaration of Independence, has fallen into disrepute. The holiday has lost its meaning because Americans have forgotten their duties and rights as citizens and have become accustomed to their status as subjects.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Some Americans, primarily on the left, associate the document and the society that birthed it with slavery. They mock the declaration\u2019s principles as hypocritical or even as an outright justification of tyranny. They demand new holidays, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/nfl-begins-super-bowl-with-black-national-anthem\/\" title=\"NFL Begins Super Bowl With Black National Anthem\">separate national anthems<\/a>, and the destruction of national monuments.\u00a0<\/p>\n<div class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-2-long d-flex justify-content-center\" style=\"margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center; \" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-1146394893\">\n<div id=\"div-gpt-ad-1379703300879-0\" class=\"mb-30\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-1cc34908bbcdc371051427322007423c fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-2\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-1cc34908bbcdc371051427322007423c\"><\/div>\n<p>Other Americans, primarily on the right, attack what they see as the abstract character of the document. They equate its natural rights doctrine with unlimited freedom rather than with liberty in accordance with nature and the duties of citizenship. They see it as endorsing unlimited despotism.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Still others, including our leading politicians, defend the document from these claims by arguing that America is an \u201cidea\u201d \u2014 a form without content, a nation without a people or a way of life. Indeed, they say, that\u2019s its strength: we are Americans precisely because we are diverse. We are nothing. But the declaration is far more resilient than this. <\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Lincoln vs. Douglas<\/h2>\n<p>One hundred and sixty <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/ca-governor-breaks-his-own-covid-rules-to-eat-fancy-french-food\/\" title=\"Ca. Governor Breaks His Own COVID Rules To Eat Fancy French Food\">years ago<\/a> Stephen Douglas, the brilliant author of the Compromise of 1850, also belittled the declaration. Criticizing its application to abolitionism, he interpreted it and its principles as historical artifacts without present application. If it were the expression of a bygone revolt with narrow objectives, then he could deny its application to the fierce debate over slavery.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>But Abraham Lincoln, Douglas\u2019 opponent in the 1858 Illinois Senate race, seized on the absurdity of treating the Fourth of July as a mere historical fact.\u00a0<\/p>\n<div class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-58d5f2e9f05a7ffd1bac96ab4ee43ca0 fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-6\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-58d5f2e9f05a7ffd1bac96ab4ee43ca0\"><\/div>\n<p>During a speech in Springfield on June 26, 1857, Lincoln summarized Douglas\u2019 version of the declaration: \u201cWe hold these truths to be self-evident that all British subjects who were on this continent eighty-one years ago, were created equal to all British subjects born and then residing in Great Britain.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>If the declaration\u2019s principles lacked timeless significance, then there would be no need to celebrate the Fourth of July at all. \u201cI understand you are preparing to celebrate the \u2018Fourth,\u2019 to-morrow week,\u201d Lincoln said. \u201cWhat for? The doings of that day had no reference to the present; and quite half of you are not even descendants of those who were referred to at that day.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Lincoln knew the declaration was more than a historical curiosity to be \u201cfrittered away\u201d as an \u201cinteresting memorial of the dead past.\u201d It was inseparable from the American Revolution, which is to say inseparable from what defined the American people, if we may be so bold as to claim such an entity exists. Thousands of men fought precisely to establish, in the words of that document, \u201cone people\u201d in \u201cseparate and equal station\u201d with all others on the earth.<\/p>\n<p>More than a mere abstraction, the declaration expressed a rich tradition: a people of similar ethnicity, language, religion, and republican governance and manners. The citizenry was 98 percent Protestant, 90 percent British, and 60 percent English.\u00a0<\/p>\n<div class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-659f42834e2ce16d17e0d4c3d59dabc7 fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-10\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-659f42834e2ce16d17e0d4c3d59dabc7\"><\/div>\n<p>Thomas Jefferson said the declaration was not aimed at \u201coriginality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing,\u201d but \u201cwas intended to be an expression of the American mind\u201d \u2014 to describe a people already in existence. He specified that \u201call American whigs thought alike on these subjects.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Those who did not support the Revolution were not part of the American people. Revolutionary committees forged unity through oath-taking and often at the barrel of a gun. The situation turned nasty for those who refused to swear allegiance to the new nation. They were ordered to depart. Their property was confiscated, or they were fined and taxed. Their civil rights were revoked. They still possessed their natural rights but not the privileges and immunities of citizenship.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A New Kind of Citizen: Free and Equal<\/h2>\n<p>And that is what the declaration means to us \u2014 indeed, what it always has meant and always will mean: citizenship. In the British Empire, all were born subjects owing allegiance to the crown, not citizens with inherent rights. Britain accorded privilege and status through various hierarchical and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/the-declaration-of-independence-defends-american-citizenship-not-abstract-ideas\/\" title=\"The Declaration of Independence protects American citizenship, not vague concepts.\">overlapping group identities based<\/a> on tradition, statute, and common law. But the declaration claimed a new republican relation between free and equal citizens according to the \u201cLaws of Nature and of Nature\u2019s God.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The North and South did not fight the Civil War over racism but slavery, which violated natural rights. Lincoln accused the Democratic Party \u2014 Douglas, Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, and President James Buchanan \u2014 of a vast conspiracy to introduce slavery into every part of the country and to force Americans to accept it in their own towns.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Slavery violated more than an abstract creed. It violated the sacred republican traditions that defined the American people. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.history.com\/news\/american-civil-war-deaths#Lack%20of%20Written%20Records%20Present%20Challenge\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">750,000 Americans<\/a>, 95 percent of them white, died in that gruesome conflict \u2014 more than the American casualties in both world wars combined \u2014 to defend what they saw as their way of life.<\/p>\n<p>Just as the American Constitution was an experiment in self-government, the post-Civil War era introduced another experiment: whether new groups \u2014 blacks, then Indians, and then Asians \u2014 could become American citizens without destroying the republican way of life.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Northern blacks had been denizens, not citizens, like American expatriates who dwell abroad today. Nor did they have a right to become citizens. They had no more right than an American today to demand to become an Austrian, Israeli, or Japanese citizen. Still, white Americans voted to admit those diverse groups as citizens, while preserving the local institutions that allowed Americans to govern themselves.<\/p>\n<p>And that is the great challenge of the declaration to us. Can we still hold these truths with such diversity, which our founders saw as inimical to republican liberty?\u00a0<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A Disunited Herd of Subjects<\/h2>\n<p>The founders equated diverse populations, each adhering to their own mores, with empire, in which subjects are assigned group identities that determine their unequal privileges and duties. If this be our lot, then freedom has a desperate cause at hand. And if this be our lot, let us lay aside the farce of \u201cdemocracy\u201d and \u201crepublicanism\u201d and admit that we are a disunited herd of subjects ruled by a pseudo-aristocratic plutocracy.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Let us reject the myth of equal citizenship and admit our return to racial tribalism. Let us recognize that the melting pot has failed.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Let us admit that our Congress no longer passes laws but delegates lawmaking authority to experts in league with government-subsidized corporations. Let us concede that our courts no longer interpret laws but fabricate judicial tests whole cloth as their replacement.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Let us acknowledge that our soldiers and police officers are no longer citizen soldiers but military professionals or mercenaries who do not distinguish between the occupied peoples of the world and their fellow citizens. And let us admit we do not need borders because new immigrants seek not the rights and duties of true citizenship but the welfare status of laboring serfs.<\/p>\n<p>Any true American \u2014 that is, a citizen who still bears in his habits the principles of that ancient declaration \u2014 revolts at the above description. The citizen sees through the sham of liberty as licentiousness. Only a slave would accept inequality under the law and call the most wretched servitude peace.<\/p>\n<p>And the challenge for us, lest we admit the experiment in admitting diverse groups has simply failed, is to nourish those ancient habits of freemen. We can rule ourselves and overcome the tribalism that divides us by looking to the republican traditions that formed the American people. And that requires moral responsibility: demanding we take part in our children\u2019s education, our fraying private associations, our local governance, and our state politics.<\/p>\n<p>James Madison addressed this question in <em>The Federalist<\/em>: <\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p>\u201cIf it be asked, what is to restrain the House of Representatives from making legal discriminations in favor of themselves and a particular class of the society? I answer: the genius of the whole system; the nature of just and constitutional laws; and above all, the vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America, a spirit which nourishes freedom, and in return is nourished by it. If this spirit shall ever be so far debased as to tolerate a law not obligatory on the legislature, as well as on the people, the people will be prepared to tolerate any thing but liberty.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>That is what the Fourth means to us Americans. After all, good republicans can have no loyalty to an empire.<\/p>\n<div class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-4044a161f991340c43024cd8dd7ce2e0 fdrlst__b89e9-after-post-content\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-4044a161f991340c43024cd8dd7ce2e0\"><\/div>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\">    \t\t\t\t\t   \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For some Americans, the Fourth of July, commemorating the Declaration of Independence, has lost significance. Citizens have forgotten their responsibilities and rights, accepting their role as subjects. This perception is more common among left-leaning individuals, who link the document and society with a negative connotation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1927,"featured_media":1963827,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[546],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1963826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-federalist"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1963826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1927"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1963826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1963826\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1963827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1963826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1963826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1963826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}