‘Never before has a nation dedicated to securing its citizens’ unalienable rights – the rights inherent in all human beings – persevered for 250 years’
By Peter Berkowitz, Real Clear Wire
This is the first of a three-part series based on a lecture delivered on May 15 at a conference, “The Declaration of Independence at 250: What New Can Be Said?” hosted by the Stanford Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School.
With the signing of the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago, America’s founders accomplished something new under the sun: They brought into existence a nation rooted in the belief that individuals are by nature free and equal. This year marks another achievement for the Declaration: Never before has a nation dedicated to securing its citizens’ unalienable rights – the rights inherent in all human beings – persevered for 250 years. Notwithstanding the social and political turmoil currently roiling the nation, America has done much more than persevere. No multireligious, multiracial, and multiethnic nation-state in history has more successfully established freedom and equality under law, promoted economic prosperity, and developed the capabilities to defend itself by projecting military power around the world.
America’s perseverance and flourishing – as presidents including Abraham Lincoln, Calvin Coolidge, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt have affirmed and as venerable reformers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr. have demonstrated – owe much to the nation’s founding on universal principles and to its enduring dedication to them. The self-evident truths proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence start with the conviction that human beings are by nature free and equally endowed with unalienable rights. They include the belief that government’s first purpose is to secure citizens’ unalienable rights, that just power stems from the consent of the governed, and that citizens by right may replace a government that destroys the conditions for securing their unalienable rights.