27 Grievances
How much and how little has changed since the Declaration of Independence
It’s that brief annual moment. The one where we reflect on the meaning of human liberty, our American journey from colony to free nation, and our love for the idea of people emancipated from unjustified subjugation. We celebrate with fireworks, signifying that we had to fight our way to where we are.
As July 4th comes and goes, social media feeds swell with individual exhortations of liberty, various hot dog chronicles, and most importantly, some of the strongest memes we will see all year. As a US/UK dual citizen, I certainly have my favourites.
While the memes are fun, I do find myself inexorably drawn into a more serious meditation this time of year. A reflection on the ideas and values which fuelled America’s fight for independence, and about the civic responsibility necessary to a free people to sustain themselves in self-governance.
These reflections inevitably lead me to reread the Declaration of Independence. And each time, I find myself awe-struck all over again by the force of its words and ideas. Each time, I come away with a new insight about this untouchably ingenious document for the ages.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
These are perhaps the most powerful words in a document which was expressing the most powerful ideas of any political movement in recorded history. The American Revolution started for different reasons than it carried on. But of the many tasks it sought to perform, the Declaration’s most important function was to provide a unifying and coherent collection of ideas around which its movement could assemble, grow, threaten power, and eventually deliver itself from tyranny.
Truths. Not subject to debate because they are not opinions. The Declaration renders certain principles impervious to even the might and power of an absolute monarch, which establishes a theoretical limit on the King’s authority. To the extent he can no longer do whatever he wants to anyone he chooses, individuality is elevated and individual dignity is recognized.
Equal. And thus entitled to the same rights, not a lesser or greater version determined by politicians, courts, or even populist views.
Endowed and unalienable. Granted by nature, not by fellow man, government, by monarch, or by written decree. The Declaration was doing just that, declaring what was already true as an element of the human condition … not as a grant from a source of human power.
It’s fair to argue that in its immutable expression of the elemental entitlements of being human, the Declaration of Independence lit a spark of Enlightenment-inspired idealism which has propelled the advancement of liberty, self-governance, and resistance to unwarranted authority ever since. The world has been fundamentally changed as a result.
And yet, in its timeless beauty, to be justifiably revered across the ages, the Declaration of Independence acknowledges its own conundrum: in order to secure the equal rights granted by nature but threatened by man’s cravenness, a government must be formed with the purpose of codifying and protecting those rights.
It is not a legal document and carries no binding legal force. But it has a fundamentally legal purpose of declaring and legitimizing a legal separation between its signatory states and the empire by which they were previously possessed. Every revolution is plagued with this contradiction, and ours was no different. So we are left with a non-legal document which nonetheless does a much better job of expressing our core ideals than any law ever has or could.
For Americans, this puzzle has given rise to a lasting divide between what we believe and feel most fundamentally (our values) and what is legally binding (the Constitution and other bodies of law). This gestures to one of the Declaration’s most glaring omissions: its failure to deal with slavery.
Sometimes our reverence for our founding history clouds the reality of how it all actually happened. Like the imperfect ideas it expresses, our Declaration of Independence is an imperfect document. Most notably, a paragraph vilifying King George III for his role in creating the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the manner in which slavery offends the humane ideals voiced in the Declaration, was scrubbed from the document’s first draft.
Historians will tell us that makes sense. In the context of that time, including an open critique of slavery would likely have scuttled the consensus needed to earn the Declaration its legitimacy across all thirteen colonies, perhaps killing the revolution in its cradle. But historians must also concede that the fundamental contradiction between the Declaration’s language and the entire concept of slavery in the colonies robbed the founding period of an important hook upon which to hang a future debate on the legitimacy of selling human beings as property. No doubt this blemish delayed progress, contributed to the inevitability of the Civil War, and continues to ripple through America’s divided heart to this day.
But if there’s one thing I would want ordinary Americans to understand about the Declaration, it’s this extraordinary document’s focus on ordinary issues of governance. We are taught in popularized history that Americans rebelled because of unreasonable taxes, the quartering of soldiers in their homes, and as a response to compromised civil liberties. This makes for a good story. But the actual reasons are both more mundane and more profound.
In the text of the Declaration of Independence, drafted primarily by Thomas Jefferson and a small committee of fellow scribes in the few weeks prior to July 4th, 1776, there is a systematic list of 27 grievances against King George III forming the basis of the colonies’ decision to band together in separation from British rule.
Here’s a snip of the first 9 of these.
Let’s assume, reasonably, that Jefferson prioritized in this list of grievances those which were most objectionable to the colonies. Let’s further assume, reasonably, that in the drafting and revision process, others pushed for the same approach of making most prominent mention of the causes most important in compelling the Declaration. So these 9 grievances, one third of the those enumerated, are the main causes for the revolution.
The King, says Jefferson, refuses to pass laws, agree to laws, or empower his colonial governors to make laws. The King refuses to support or facilitate legislation. The King is fixing elections, appointing his cronies to judgeships, and refusing to allow anyone not beholden to him to occupy a legislative or judicial post.
These are complaints about basic governance. The impacts mentioned and alluded to here are not about some comic book version of jack-booted physical tyranny characterized by violence and military impunity. They are concerned with the disorganization, economic chaos, and unstable expectations resulting from the King’s failure to orchestrate adequate rule. The colonies are no longer properly represented, and their attempts to represent themselves are being undermined by corruption. No longer willing to tolerate these impacts, the signatories and those standing behind them took the hard path, the civically responsible path, and insisted on their own governance.
And this brings me to how little has changed in some ways since 1776. Or more accurately, how much we’ve erased our progress by back-sliding.
Public trust in government is at all-time low, and for valid reason. The American form of government provides that its citizens will be represented in a bicameral legislature, with elected Representatives responsible for the advancement of local interests at the Federal level. But, as is becoming broadly obvious, our representatives don’t represent.
Representatives today do not govern, continuing a pattern stretching back a few decades. The preference now is to engage in divisive rhetoric on hot-button issues, thereby getting everyone pissed off about wedge issues. This drives electoral funding donations while pushing Americans into tribalism over marginalia impacting very few people as a percentage of the population. The big, boring, procedural aspects of administering the world’s most consequential nation go untouched, and virtually no aspect of American life is properly understood, supported, or regulated by its governing bodies as a result.
Few meaningful laws get passed. Important economic and social issues languish until courts are forced to resolve them or (more often) the executive branch fills the power void by issuing legally-binding orders or re-interpreting laws to give itself the authority to move forward. When Representatives do get energized to push or obstruct on particular legislative issues, they are nearly always acting on behalf of a special interest which has lobbied them for support, fattening their re-election coffers or extending some other form of less obvious but perfectly legal political payola.
Americans are broadly under-informed about how their government is designed to work, and therefore far less outraged about this morass of ineptitude than they ought to be. As a nation, we are painfully oblivious to the issue of campaign finance and money in politics, and its perniciously insidious corrosion of our way of life. Many devoted patriots have tried to tell us, but the message is not burning through.
Why? Because we rely on factual information to enlighten ourselves, and this is becoming a dangerously scarce commodity. Media outlets, surrendering to merciless march of profit at the expense of principle, have transformed themselves into hate machines spewing opinion stripped of fact, if not openly defiant of it. They’re doing what sells, what vindicates their own ideological preferences, or both. They’re flooding the information economy with slick-sounding, palatable bullshit.
This provides a bottomless well of irresistible, bias-confirming misinformation packaged not just for easy digestion, but for easy addiction. The few outlets still attempting to report truth are sparse flickers in a hurricane of confusion-spiralling wickedness. Lies sold as truths, adopted as gospel, and chambered in the guns of the culture war. We are in a post-truth era, where facts are manipulated and redefined to suit agendas. Terrifyingly, Americans go along with this because it suits them ideologically. No one knows what to believe any more, so they believe what feels right to them.
So we are lacking in proper representation, and the accountability mechanism to help us see and act on this problem is irretrievably broken, kicked into the tall weeds of capital-driven free expression divorced from responsibility. Even if the media woke up tomorrow and regulated itself, it would take Americans decades to believe in anything it said again. Even longer for that confidence to extend to Congress and other government institutions.
It raises the fair question whether are making the proper use of the freedom we’ve been given at great cost to others.
America’s revolutionaries acted out of civic responsibility. They were unwilling to bear the erosion in humanity and breeding of chaotic ineptness that they saw as handmaidens to a deliberate vacuum of power. Today, we are perhaps not much better off. But the problem today is different. There isn’t an all-powerful King preventing us from governing ourselves at the point of a bayonet.
This time it’s on us. We’re the all-powerful. We own our government. We are its legal guardians. We pay for it. Our votes determine who participates in it. And with the rise of social media, we have a louder voice than ever before to influence it. But for any of this to matter, we have to overcome our selfish views, discard our biases, shut out the hate fed to us by those who profit from spewing it, and regain control of our own representation.
Every system ever built to protect freedom against the endless march of power is under attack from the moment it is born. The civic duty of its participants will determine how long it can survive between rounds of upheaval, usually marked by bloodshed. The next few decades will reveal whether we are capable of recapturing our founding spirit and relocating our will to be as civically responsible as those who ignited our march to freedom.
Or whether we are too far gone.
Either way, may the memes, fireworks, and hot dogs continue, preferably with a rock-n-roll soundtrack.
TC is an American and British writer sending his thoughts from his home in the UK.