Collections: On the Declaration of Independence – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

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Bret Devereaux

Collections

July 4, 2026

19 Minutes

Hello again all. It is once again the week of July 4th and so, as is customary here, I am going to use this week’s post to talk about the United States. This is going to be a bit more of an open musing than an argument as compared to previous years (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025) because my attention has been turned this way and that over the past few weeks and then just when I thought I’d be able to focus on this, one of home ownership’s many annoyances (a busted pipe) cropped up to consume much of the week.

Nevertheless, the Declaration of Independence turns 250 this year – ratified on July 4, published on July 6, read aloud in public on July 8, 1776 – and I want to muse on it a bit, with some focus to the actual text. Americans revere our founding documents (the Declaration and the Constitution) but I fear we do not read them very often. I was a ‘pocket-constitution’ kind of fellow in college, but one is regularly shocked by how little the average American citizen understands about how their government functioned or what the ideals of the framers were and one is regularly disappointed, but very much not shocked, by the endless parade of political entrepreneurs looking to exploit that gap in knowledge.

I will also note, for my international readers, that I think the exercise of looking at these documents is valuable, for the same reason I’ve made my students read Magna Carta or the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: these are documents of world-historic significance (hardly the only ones, of course, but they make ready examples). At some point, particularly in leftish circles, it became trendy to dismiss the American founding as a mere ‘bourgeois’ revolution in favor of later revolutions in Europe and I think this is a mistake. There quite possibly is no French Revolution without the American one; the cross-pollination of ideas is obvious. The American Revolution (and thus the Declaration) therefore must also play a role in 1848 and it very obvious plays a role in the advance of democracy in Europe after 1945 and again after 1989.

The Declaration of Independence was recognized as a radical, potentially explosive document at the time of its issuance, as we’ll see. And it was explosive: the world of 1775 was one dominated by monarchies with just a tiny handful of traditional republics (which we should not ignore!). It took a long time for the seeds of the declaration to spread, but the world it helped create is one where liberal democracies, while hardly universal (more people have always lived in unfree societies than free ones) represent the most economically and culturally dominant bloc in world affairs – something that had never happened before. The Declaration, in its way, remade not just the Thirteen Colonies, but slowly, surely, as water seeps through the cracks of rocks (or my floorboards, alas), it remade the whole world.

So if you haven’t, go read the text of the Declaration. It isn’t long (but don’t skip!). My thoughts at present don’t necessarily fit together neatly, so we’ll break them down under a few major headings.

The signed copy of the Declaration of Independence displayed in the National Archives in Washington D.C., engrossed by Timothy Matlack.

A Decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind

When I was growing up, one of the things it was fashionable to argue was that the American Revolution was a ‘conservative’ revolution, in that it did not overturn the social structure of the Thirteen Colonies. Conservatives said this about the revolution to claim it for their own and to distinguish it as the ‘good’ revolution in contrast to those ‘bad’ revolutions in Europe and Latin America. Leftists sometimes did the opposite, terming the revolution ‘conservative,’ unlike ‘real’ revolutions which upended social and economic patterns more completely. And there’s not nothing to this: the revolution did not immediately challenge the socio-economic systems of the Thirteen Colonies (though the notion that the revolution was fundamentally pro-slavery is, at best, quite overstated; it was certainly not an anti-slavery revolution, either, of course).

I think both positions however, are fundamentally wrong, however, in that they miss the inherent radicalism of the principles of the Declaration. Indeed, the framers themselves seem to have only imperfectly understood the course of the rock they were about to set rolling. But they very well understood the momentousness of it.

Now there’s a tendency at this point to jump right to, "We hold these truths…" but let’s start at the beginning.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of...