Think About Independence Day - Every Day
By Dr. Alan Keyes

Publisher’s Note: The following commentary by Dr. Keyes was written in 1999. However, upon reading it, I believe you will find it just as relevant today as was when he first wrote it. Truth is timeless.

The heart of our Independence Day celebration must always be a national recollection and reaffirmation of the great Declaration of principle that is the reason we understand the Fourth of July to be our national birthday.

I think that American patriots should think about the Declaration every day of their lives -- and as a nation, we should think about it every day of our national life. The Declaration of Independence is so important that we should strive to make it inform and determine every important position we take in American public life and policy. The ideas contained in the Declaration are fundamental to who we are, and if we want to survive as a free people we must learn to take them seriously again.

This is not just Alan's annual pious warning. Recourse to the Declaration is a critical practical need in the day to day political life of the nation. It is impossible to be a good citizen or leader without regular recourse to principles, because political life is a swirl of confusing, distracting and seemingly complex issues. We simply will not be able to exercise good judgment in political questions without cultivating the habit of seeking answers first from the political principles found in the Declaration.

Perhaps this isn't as striking a claim as it should be. After all, doesn't everyone claim to be "principled"? Certainly no one willingly admits to being politically unprincipled. But what exactly does it mean to have a clear sense of principle? Some people have the mistaken view that a clear sense of principle requires a set of rigid rules, and restricts political judgment to the mere mechanical application of those rules. But human life doesn't work that way, and political life in particular is no place for the inflexible judgments of the ideologue. Events and circumstances are so various and potentially changeable that no simple, hard and fast rule can be applied in an absolute manner to substitute effectively for prudent deliberation and judgment. The statesman and the citizen both must always be striving to think things through in view of the real and living circumstances they face. So what is the importance of principle for political judgment, if it is not to provide a rigid and safe answer for every question?

The critical value of political principle is to ensure that in the complexity and passion of particular events we always have a firm starting place for our deliberations. Starting with a clear view of the truths that guide us, we will be able to orient ourselves in the midst of changing circumstances and events. With our principles in mind as North Stars of deliberation, we can be sure that our thinking stays rightly directed, and that we are not drawn away from our objectives to chase illusory or base goals.

The word "principle" literally means “something first.” Principles are the first things, the starting points. Of course, a country can have various kinds of starting points, including the kind that later are best forgotten. Illegitimate conquest, for example, can be the starting point of a country. The wonderful, almost amazing thing that we celebrate on Independence Day is that the starting point for America was a public national agreement about the things that matter most. So literally our starting point in time was a set of first principles. I don't think this has been true of any other country, and the very idea of a nation having a statement of first principles as its historical starting point is so unusual that we are apt to overlook how unique a blessing it is.

The principles that our Founders stated also have a soundness about them, in terms of human political affairs, because they begin from the most important and fundamental truth - not just of human politics, but of human life. The first principle of the Declaration is that God exists and is in charge. The political starting point of America is that God determined the very moral fabric of the universe, and that we must therefore deduce our understanding of justice from that fundamental truth.

The principle of God's ultimate authority in our political life is a great obstacle to collectivist schemes and ideas. Remembering the Declaration is vital to remembering this principle, and thus to our ability to resist the leftist agenda. Let's examine one way that the principle of God's authority can help us to be wise in political matters - if we keep it before our eyes as we deliberate about the issues of the day.

Following from the principle of God's authority is the corollary that ultimate political authority cannot reside in mere mortals. And the Declaration accordingly reflects an understanding of human government that is by and large deeply suspicious of the claims to unbounded authority and responsibility that governments tend to make -- and which liberals tend to make for it. The Founders didn't look at government as an all-provident caregiver who will gently take care of us when we are in trouble and minister to our every need. The Founders did not take the warm, fuzzy view of government. They thought of government as incipient tyranny, like a plant that must be constantly and jealously trimmed lest it take over the garden.

The Founders saw government as a dangerous thing because of the inherent passions and ambitions of human beings -- because men are not God, nor even angels. They saw that government tended to arm the passions and ambitions of human beings with power to coerce and destroy the property, lives and privacy of other human beings. They judged that this view was well confirmed by history. Therefore, because they cared about human liberty and human dignity, they resolved to be very careful how they put government together, to prevent the unleashing of unrestrained human power. They were deeply suspicious of claims that the accumulation of power in the hands of government was justified by the benevolence of the purposes to which that power would supposedly be directed.

This suspicious view of government, and resulting resolve to hedge it about with all kinds of checks and constraints because it is potentially so dangerous and oppressive -- is precisely NOT how today's liberals look at government. Liberals see in government chiefly a wonderful tool to be used freely to produce utopia, to take care of the poor, to accomplish justice for all the different oppressed groups around the world. Government is a blessing, a solution -- not a threat and a problem.

It is as if something has happened since the era of the American Founding that would disprove the jaundiced view that the Founders took of government and government power. Perhaps the liberals of today have made a prudential correction to that view, and have wisely chosen principles other than those enshrined in the Declaration. Let's try the simple test of considering the following question: Between 1776 and [2007], has the history of human kind been such as to disprove the notion that government is a potentially abusive power that needs to be treated with extraordinary care and circumspection? Has history generally disproved the understanding of the Founders?

The answer is clear enough just from looking at the 20th century, leaving aside the slavery, depredations of colonialism, and other abuses of power that had so many people and nations of the world under the boot of arbitrary government in the 19th century. Let us consider whether in the 20th century most of the population of the world has had experiences that bear out the Founders' jaundiced view of government, or experiences that disprove that view.

What kind of experiences with government has the bulk of humanity had in the 20th century? Has it been the experience of governments careful of human dignity and human rights, and human property and human life? Or has it been the experience of holocausts in Europe directed against particular populations by coercive governments that herded them together into camps and destroyed their lives and despoiled them of their property? Has it been the experience of the Stalinist purges in Russia, and of the Maoist pursuit of perpetual revolution with people killed by the scores of millions in city and country?

If we are willing to surrender to the overwhelming weight of the evidence, we will acknowledge that pretty much everything about the 20th century confirms the notion that government power is dangerous and that without extraordinarily careful precautions it will generally be used to oppress and destroy humanity.

Indeed, many of the worst abuses have been associated with the kind of left-wing, totalitarian utopianism represented by liberals who reject the Declaration, and reject with it the principles that could have alerted them to the danger of trusting unqualifiedly in human political authority. It is not a coincidence that the very people who urge us to abandon the understanding of government represented in the Declaration, and to replace it with a more benign view of government, have been by and large responsible for most of the awful mass evil of this century. The Nazis are usually offered as an exception to this claim, because as everyone knows they were "right wing extremists." But not in this respect; they fit the leftist totalitarian pattern. The National Socialist Party -- the Nazis -- was socialist in respect of its understanding of what government was about and what it would do. It rejected the "archaic" understanding that was represented by the American Declaration -- that all earthly authority must be subjected to the laws of nature and nature's God.

A deep but prudent suspicion of the claims of government looks more like wisdom today than ever. In this as in so many other matters, the experience of the past two centuries has confirmed the importance of fidelity to the principles of the Declaration. On Independence Day and on every day, we should strive to re-orient ourselves and our politics by the light of the principles of our Founding. Why would anybody in his right mind join the leftist liberals in rejecting it?

Former Reagan administration official Dr. Alan Keyes was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Social and Economic Council and a 2000 Republican presidential candidate. Be sure to visit Alan’s communications center for founding principles, The Declaration Foundation, at www.declaration.net.