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Mr. and Mrs.President

See How They Ran

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Thomas Jefferson’s words rang out, “that all men are created equal.” Today, it is fashionable to harp on Jefferson’s failings, to discount these words because a slave-owner fashioned them. Actually, Jefferson’s sins make his words even more resonant. Jefferson knew what he was writing. He understood his quill pen’s subversive power. In turning an aspiration into an affirmation he was quite literally making history. Although neither he nor the other 55 signers would have dared predict how the idea of “all men are created equal” would flourish, encompassing women, blacks, and immigrants, Jefferson and his colleagues wanted to build their nation on foundations of equity. Some historians explain that it was precisely the slaveholders, regular witnesses to the effects of being unfree, who most realized that only equality guarantees liberty.

The founders were not pinched parliamentarians narrowly crafting a tax code; these were ambitious revolutionaries promising “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as “inalienable rights” to their fellow citizens, be they rich or poor, long-established or newcomers, deemed worthy or vulgar.With this revolutionary step, government would facilitate individual growth rather than perpetuate kingly prerogatives. Government would now serve the people, rather than having the people serve the government. The declaration emphasized that “governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Locating sovereignty in the people rather than the traditional “sovereigns” – the monarch or God himself – anticipated America’s Constitution a decade later emanating from “We the people.”

The innocuous phrase “consent of the governed” transformed the fundamental governing equation. Rights were no longer doled out to the people by the whims of the sovereign or the Parliament. Rights now inhered within the people who chose to grant certain powers to the government, as long as it suited them. “Consent of the governed” guaranteed a government working for those who do the consenting. This made every government bureaucrat in America, from dog-catcher to the president, the people’s servant not the other way around.

A country striving for equality and liberty cannot stand still. The Declaration of Independence is a mandate for continuous growth, a challenge to the status quo for “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.” Thomas Jefferson believed that revolutionary breezes should upend society periodically. Fortunately for his descendants and the world, the constitution-makers of 1787 were more sensible than the red-haired revolutionary. Still, the Constitution built in an engine for renewal – the amending process. America’s constitutional history began with a burst of amendments, the Bill of Rights, illustrating that the country remembered its revolutionary roots. Those first ten amendments guaranteeing freedom of speech, religion, and assembly, among others, demonstrated the system’s constructive dynamism, the way revolutionary aspirations of liberty and equality could be bottled but not squelched, channelled but not forgotten. The Constitution offered a stable framework that retained a remarkable capacity for growth.

And grow it did. Today’s America differs dramatically from Jefferson’s America. Yet the founding documents retain their magic, their wisdom, their guidance. The declaration’s ideals, the Constitution’s blueprint, have survived the tests of one civil war and two world wars, many booms and many busts. Combining unprecedented economic and political freedom on a massive scale the United States became the world’s model mass middle-class civilization in the second half of the 20^th century, mass producing more prosperity and more liberties for more people than ever before in world history. Blacks, women, immigrants have not just expanded their piece of the American pie, their aspirations became woven into the American dream. Perhaps the most powerful tribute to the subversive popularity of American ideals is that most of America’s critics, even in Canada, most often criticize America from within Jefferson’s tent, using ideas rooted in the declaration.

On this American Independence Day, then, from the left and from the right, let us indulge the American tradition of relaxing our partisan stances, stepping back and appreciating America’s great accomplishments and even greater ideals. Let us toast the good life of so many millions who settled there from all corners of the world. Let us applaud how the United States remains a beacon of expansive revolutionary liberty.

Gil Troy teaches history at McGill University.