As we observe the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the question has been raised whether our experiment in self-government still merits our celebration—or our condemnation.
I find myself having to republish a rebuttal to this claim every July 4, because every July 4 brings a new call to no longer celebrate the Fourth. Case in point: According to Time.com, “America’s 250th should not become an active celebration of people who enslaved other human beings.”
According to this anti-Declaration-of-Independence account, our Declaration-inspired Revolution primarily benefited a “white male minority.” So, true progress demands confronting—and repudiating—the Founding’s “flaws.” Following the tenets Critical Race Theory (CRT) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), their account portrays the Declaration as a flawed document entrenching inequality.
These views represent the very predictable extensions of long-standing misreadings of the American Founding. Fortunately, better-informed voices from our history offer a clearer guide.
The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, captured the Declaration’s true meaning: “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.”
We do not celebrate July 4 primarily as the anniversary of declaring independence from Britain (that occurred on July 2). We mark it because it is the day the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence—the document that articulated the moral foundation of our new nation: human equality as a self-evident truth, endowed by our Creator (not human governments) with unalienable rights. Far from entrenching power for a minority, the Declaration condemned such narrow self-interest and provided the standard by which future generations could judge and improve their practices.
Critics who reduce the Founding to mere group elevation echo the perverse logic of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). Abraham Lincoln refuted this in his 1857 speech, arguing that the Founders set forth “a standard maxim for free society” for constant approximation, even if never perfectly attained.
Frederick Douglass similarly insisted on reading the Declaration’s “beneficent range” as inclusive of all races, urging America to live up to its principles rather than discard them.
Today, as we witness heated school board battles over history curricula, state-level pushes against CRT and DEI mandates, and elite skepticism toward “patriotic education,” we would do well to remember that the late Lincoln scholar, Harry V. Jaffa, saw this all coming as early as 1959. In Crisis of the House Divided, Jaffa observed that universities shape the dominant ideas of our age, and he therefore warned that the combination of utopianism (unrealistic, perfectionist egalitarianism) and intolerance (suppression of dissenting views) taught in academia threatened the future of American constitutionalism.
Likewise, Lincoln, in his 1838 Lyceum Address, foresaw the danger of generational forgetting of the Declaration and called for deliberate education in our founding principles through schools, pulpits, and public life.
Sad to say, many Americans—particularly younger generations—encounter little deep engagement with these texts. Only 18–19% of U.S. colleges and universities require a course in American government or U.S. history. This has been consistent in recent years, meaning the vast majority of graduates complete their degrees without any required civics/government coursework.
At the same time, we all know that self-government requires citizens who both understand and revere the ideas that justify it. The Declaration’s assertion of equality and rights is, said Lincoln, the “last, best hope of earth.” Hence he called for “reverence for the Constitution” as the only reliable antidote to what he feared was coming—“mobocratic” rule.
As we mark 250 years, the antidote remains unchanged: restore serious, required study of the Declaration and Constitution at every level of education. In doing so, we would rediscover why the Declaration has inspired reform movements worldwide—from abolition to civil rights. We would reaffirm why the nation it helped found remains worth defending and improving—not by erasing its principles amid culture wars, but by laboring to approximate them more closely.
Only then can we properly celebrate America’s 250th—not as flawless perfection, but as a living promise, still well worth striving for.
