Independence Day

 

Happy Birthday,  USA!

Today is Independence Day, "the Fourth of July," the 249th birthday of the United States, our primordial patriotic holiday and now our principal summer vacation holiday,

On the patriotic side, this holiday is frequently observed by a public reading ot the Declaration of Independence. The stirring phrases of the Declaration's first few paragraphs are very familiar. When in the course of human events ... a decent respect for the opinions of mankind ... We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal ... life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ... consent of the governed.

But then comes the bulk of the document, which is a somewhat less stirring recitation of the colonists' complaints against the British government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

Singling out King George III for unique political opprobrium was, of course, politically inaccurate and transparently unjust. It was the British government which was asserting its power over the rebellious colonies. The colonists, however, wanted to pretend that the British Parliament (in which they were unrepresented) had no legitimate jurisdiction over the colonies. It was as if the colonists were imaginatively and anachronistically anticipating for themselves something like what would later be called "Dominion" status, in which their singular connection with the mother country would have been their shared relationship to the king as sovereign!

Thus, much of the Declaration became this long laundry list of accusations of repeated injuries and usurpations all directed against the king, as a surrogate for the British government's ineffective colonial administration. Reading it today, however, we might more profitably project the Declaration's concerns about autocratic injuries and usurpations into the present and understand it more broadly as a litany of accusations against any potential autocratic tyranny - even against an ostensibly limited government, where checks and balances have broken down.

Late 18th-century Britain purported to be a limited government, as does the 21st-century United States. However misdirected the Declaration's ideologically infected critique of George III, it stands the test of time as a prescient indictment of any actual or aspiring American autocrat.