#1776Commission

The
1776
Report
The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission
January 2021
TABLEI.
II.
III.IV.V.
VI.OF CONTENTS
Introduction ……………………………………………………………….. 1
The meaning of the declaration…………………….. 2
A constitution of principles ……………………………… 6
Challenges to America’s Principles ………………. 10
Slavery……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 10
Progressivism ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 12
Fascism ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 13
Communism ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 14
Racism and Identity Politics ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 15
The Task of National Renewal ……………………….. 16
The Role of the Family………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 17
Teaching America………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 17
A Scholarship of Freedom……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 18
The American Mind ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 18
Reverence for the Laws ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 19
CONCLUSION ………………………………………………………………….. 20
Appendix I: The declaration of independence………………………….21
Appendix II: Faith and America’s Principles ……………………………… 24
Appendix III: Created Equal or Identity Politics?…………………. 29
Appendix IV: Teaching Americans about Their Country …. 34
The 1776 report
I.
INTRODUCTION
In the course of human events there have always been
those who deny or reject human freedom, but
Americans will never falter in defending the
fundamental truths of human liberty proclaimed on July
4, 1776. We will—we must—always hold these truths.
The declared purpose of the President’s Advisory 1776
Commission is to “enable a rising generation to
understand the history and principles of the founding of
the United States in 1776 and to strive to form a more
perfect Union.” This requires a restoration of American
education, which can only be grounded on a history of
those principles that is “accurate, honest, unifying,
inspiring, and ennobling.” And a rediscovery of our
shared identity rooted in our founding principles is the
path to a renewed American unity and a confident
American future.
The Commission’s first responsibility is to produce a
report summarizing the principles of the American
founding and how those principles have shaped our
country. That can only be done by truthfully
recounting the aspirations and actions of the men and
women who sought to build America as a shining “city
on a hill”—an exemplary nation, one that protects the
safety and promotes the happiness of its people, as an
example to be admired and emulated by nations of the
world that wish to steer their government toward
greater liberty and justice. The record of our founders’
striving and the nation they built is our shared
inheritance and remains a beacon, as Abraham Lincoln
said, “not for one people or one time, but for all people
for all time.”
Today, however, Americans are deeply divided about
the meaning of their country, its history, and how it
should be governed. This division is severe enough to
call to mind the disagreements between the colonists
and King George, and those between the Confederate
and Union forces in the Civil War. They amount to a
dispute over not only the history of our country but also
its present purpose and future direction.
The facts of our founding are not partisan. They are a
matter of history. Controversies about the meaning of
the founding can begin to be resolved by looking at the
facts of our nation’s founding. Properly understood,
these facts address the concerns and aspirations of
Americans of all social classes, income levels, races and
religions, regions and walks of life. As well, these facts
provide necessary—and wise—cautions against
unrealistic hopes and checks against pressing partisan
claims or utopian agendas too hard or too far.
Washington Crossing the Delaware
Emanuel Leutze
The principles of the American founding can be learned
by studying the abundant documents contained in the
record. Read fully and carefully, they show how the
American people have ever pursued freedom and
justice, which are the political conditions for living
well. To learn this history is to become a better person,
a better citizen, and a better partner in the American
experiment of self-government.
Comprising actions by imperfect human beings, the
American story has its share of missteps, errors,
contradictions, and wrongs. These wrongs have always
met resistance from the clear principles of the nation,
and therefore our history is far more one of self-
sacrifice, courage, and nobility. America’s principles
are named at the outset to be both universal—applying
to everyone—and eternal: existing for all time. The
remarkable American story unfolds under and because
of these great principles.
Of course, neither America nor any other nation has
perfectly lived up to the universal truths of equality,
liberty, justice, and government by consent. But no
The 1776 report
1
nation before America ever
dared state those truths as the
formal basis for its politics, and
none has strived harder, or done
more, to achieve them.
Martin LutherLincoln aptly described the
American government’s
fundamental principles as “a
standard maxim for free
society,” which should be
“familiar to all, and revered by
all; constantly looked to,
constantly labored for, and even
though never perfectly attained,
constantly approximated.” But
the very attempt to attain
them—every attempt to attain
them—would, Lincoln
continued, constantly spread and
deepen the influence of these
principles and augment “the happiness and value of life
to all people of all colors everywhere.” The story of
America is the story of this ennobling struggle.
The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission presents
this first report with the intention of cultivating a better
education among Americans in the principles and
history of our nation and in the hope that a rediscovery
of those principles and the forms of constitutional
government will lead to a more perfect Union.
II.
THE MEANING OF
THE DECLARATION
The United States of America is in most respects a
nation like any other. It embraces a people, who inhabit
a territory, governed by laws administered by human
beings. Like other countries, our country has borders,
resources, industries, cities and towns, farms and
factories, homes, schools, and houses of worship. And,
although a relatively young country, its people have
shared a history of common struggle and achievement,
from carving communities out of a vast, untamed
wilderness, to winning independence and forming a
new government, through wars, industrialization,
King Jr.
waves of immigration, technological progress, and
political change.
In other respects, however, the United States is
unusual. It is a republic; that is to say, its government
was designed to be directed by the will of the people
rather than the wishes of a single individual or a narrow
class of elites. Republicanism is an ancient form of
government but one uncommon throughout history, in
part because of its fragility, which has tended to make
republics short-lived. Contemporary Americans tend to
forget how historically rare republicanism has been, in
part because of the success of republicanism in our
time, which is derived in no small part from the very
example and success of America.
In two decisive respects, the United States of America is
unique. First, it has a definite birthday: July 4th, 1776.
Second, it declares from the moment of its founding not
merely the principles on which its new government will
be based; it asserts those principles to be true and
universal: “applicable to all men and all times,” as
Lincoln said.
Other nations may have birthdays. For instance, what
would eventually evolve into the French Republic was
born in 1789 when Parisians stormed a hated prison and
launched the downfall of the French monarchy and its
The 1776 report
2
aristocratic regime. The Peoples Republic of China was
born in 1949 when Mao Tse Tung’s Chinese
Communist Party defeated the Nationalists in the
Chinese Civil War. But France and China as nations—
as peoples and cultures inhabiting specific territories—
stretch back centuries and even millennia, over the
course of many governments.
There was no United States of America before July 4th,

1776. There was not yet, formally speaking, an
      American people. There were, instead, living in the
      thirteen British colonies in North America some two-
      and-a-half million subjects of a distant king. Those
      subjects became a people by declaring themselves such
      and then by winning the independence they had asserted
      as their right.
      They made that assertion on the basis of principle, not
      blood or kinship or what we today might call
      “ethnicity.” Yet this fact must be properly understood.
      As John Jay explained in Federalist 2,
      Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country
      to one united people—a people descended from the same
      ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same
      religion, attached to the same principles of government, very
      similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint
      counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a
      long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty
      and independence.
      Yet, as Jay (and all the founders) well knew, the newly-
      formed American people were not quite as
      homogenous—in ancestry, language, or religion—as
      this statement would seem to assert. They were neither
      wholly English nor wholly Protestant nor wholly
      Christian. Some other basis would have to be found and
      asserted to bind the new people together and to which
      they would remain attached if they were to remain a
      people. That basis was the assertion of universal and
      eternal principles of justice and political legitimacy.
      Declaration of Independence
      John Trumbull
      The 1776 report
      3
      All honor to Jefferson-to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national
      independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into
      a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times,
      and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a
      stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.
      Abraham Lincoln
      But this too must be qualified. Note that Jay lists six
      factors binding the American people together, of which
      principle is only one—the most important or decisive
      one, but still only one, and insufficient by itself. The
      American founders understood that, for republicanism
      to function and endure, a republican people must share
      a large measure of commonality in manners, customs,
      language, and dedication to the common good.
      All states, all governments, make some claim to
      legitimacy—that is, an argument for why their
      existence and specific form are justified. Some dismiss
      all such claims to legitimacy as false, advanced to fool
      the ruled into believing that their rulers’ actions are
      justified when in fact those actions only serve the
      private interests of a few.
      But no actual government understands itself this way,
      much less makes such a cynical claim in public. All
      actual governments, rather, understand themselves as
      just and assert a public claim as to why. At the time of
      the American founding, the most widespread claim was
      a form of the divine right of kings, that is to say, the
      assertion that God appoints some men, or some
      families, to rule and consigns the rest to be ruled.
      The American founders rejected that claim. As the
      eighteen charges leveled against King George in the
      Declaration of Independence make clear, our founders
      considered the British government of the time to be
      oppressive and unjust. They had no wish to replace the
      arbitrary government of one tyrant with that of
      another.
      More fundamentally, having cast off their political
      connection to England, our founders needed to state a
      new principle of political legitimacy for their new
      government. As the Declaration of Independence puts
      it, a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind”
      required them to explain themselves and justify their
      actions.
      They did not merely wish to assert that they disliked
      British rule and so were replacing it with something
      they liked better. They wished to state a justification for
      their actions, and for the government to which it would
      give birth, that is both true and moral: moral because it is
      faithful to the truth about things.
      Such a justification could only be found in the precepts
      of nature—specifically human nature—accessible to the
      human mind but not subject to the human will. Those
      precepts—whether understood as created by God or
      simply as eternal—are a given that man did not bring
      into being and cannot change. Hence the Declaration
      speaks of both “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s
      God”—it appeals to both reason and revelation—as the
      foundation of the underlying truth of the document’s
      claims, and for the legitimacy of this new nation.
      The core assertion of the Declaration, and the basis of
      the founders’ political thought, is that “all men are
      created equal.” From the principle of equality, the
      requirement for consent naturally follows: if all men are
      equal, then none may by right rule another without his
      consent.
      The assertion that “all men are created equal” must also
      be properly understood. It does not mean that all
      human beings are equal in wisdom, courage, or any of
      the other virtues and talents that God and nature
      distribute unevenly among the human race. It means
      rather that human beings are equal in the sense that they
      are not by nature divided into castes, with natural rulers
      and ruled.
      The 1776 report
      4
      Thomas Jefferson liked to paraphrase the republican
      political thinker Algernon Sidney: “the mass of mankind
      has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a
      favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them
      legitimately, by the grace of God.” Superiority of
      talent—even a superior ability to rule—is not a divine
      or natural title or warrant to rule. George Washington,
      surely one of the ablest statesmen who ever lived, never
      made such an outlandish claim and, indeed, vehemently
      rejected such assertions made by others about him.
      As Abraham Lincoln would later explain, there was no
      urgent need for the founders to insert into a “merely
      revolutionary document” this “abstract truth, applicable
      to all men and all times.” They could simply have told
      the British king they were separating and left it at that.
      But they enlarged the scope of their Declaration so that
      its principles would serve as “a rebuke and a stumbling-
      block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny
      and oppression.” The finality of the truth that “all men
      are created equal” was intended to make impossible any
      return to formal or legal inequality, whether to older
      forms such as absolute monarchy and hereditary
      aristocracy, or to as-yet-unimagined forms we have
      seen in more recent times.
      which exist independently of government, whether
      government recognizes them or not. A bad government
      may deny or ignore natural rights and even prevent
      their exercise in the real world. But it can never negate
      or eliminate them.
      The principles of the Declaration are universal and
      eternal. Yet they were asserted by a specific people, for
      a specific purpose, in a specific circumstance. The
      general principles stated in the document explain and
      justify the founders’ particular actions in breaking off
      from Great Britain, and also explain the principles upon
      which they would build their new government. These
      principles apply to all men, but the founders acted to
      secure only Americans’ rights, not those of all mankind.
      The world is still—and will always be—divided into
      nations, not all of which respect the rights of their
      people, though they should.
      We confront, finally, the difficulty that the eternal
      principles elucidated in the Declaration were stated,
      and became the basis for an actual government, only a
      relatively short time ago. Yet if these principles are both
      eternal and accessible to the human mind, why were
      they not discovered and acted upon long before 1776?
      When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and
      the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every
      American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well
      as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the
      pursuit of happiness.
      Martin Luther King, Jr.
      Natural equality requires not only the consent of the
      governed but also the recognition of fundamental
      human rights—including but not limited to life, liberty,
      and the pursuit of happiness—as well as the
      fundamental duty or obligation of all to respect the
      rights of others. These rights are found in nature and
      are not created by man or government; rather, men
      create governments to secure natural rights. Indeed, the
      very purpose of government is to secure these rights,
      In a sense, the precepts of the American founders were
      known to prior thinkers, but those thinkers stated them
      in entirely different terms to fit the different political
      and intellectual circumstances of their times. For
      instance, ancient philosophers appear to teach that
      wisdom is a genuine title to rule and that in a decisive
      respect all men are not created equal. Yet they also
      teach that it is all but impossible for any actual, living
      man to attain genuine wisdom. Even if wisdom is a
      The 1776 report
      5
      legitimate title to rule, if perfect wisdom is unattainable
      by any living man, then no man is by right the ruler of
      any other except by their consent.
      More fundamentally, by the time of the American
      founding, political life in the West had undergone two
      momentous changes. The first was the sundering of civil
      from religious law with the advent and widespread
      adoption of Christianity. The second momentous
      change was the emergence of multiple denominations
      within Christianity that undid Christian unity and in
      turn greatly undermined political unity. Religious
      differences became sources of political conflict and war.
      As discussed further in Appendix II, it was in response
      to these fundamentally new circumstances that the
      American founders developed the principle of religious
      liberty.
      While the founders’ principles are both true and
      eternal, they cannot be understood without also
      understanding that they were formulated by practical
      men to solve real-world problems. For the founders’
      solution to these problems we must turn to the
      Constitution.
      III.A CONSTITUTION OF
      PRINCIPLES
      It is one thing to discern and assert the true principles of
      political legitimacy and justice. It is quite another to
      establish those principles among an actual people, in an
      actual government, here on earth. As Winston
      Churchill put it in a not dissimilar context, even the
      best of men struggling in the most just of causes cannot
      guarantee victory; they can only deserve it.
      The founders of the United States, perhaps
      miraculously, achieved what they set out to achieve.
      They defeated the world’s strongest military and
      financial power and won their independence. They then
      faced the task of forming a country that would honor
      and implement the principles upon which they had
      declared their independence.
      The bedrock upon which the American political system
      is built is the rule of law. The vast difference between
      tyranny and the rule of law is a central theme of
      political thinkers back to classical antiquity. The idea
      that the law is superior to rulers is the cornerstone of
      English constitutional thought as it developed over the
      centuries. The concept was transferred to the
      American colonies, and can be seen expressed
      throughout colonial pamphlets and political writings. As
      Thomas Paine reflected in Common Sense:
      The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on
      a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias, and
      prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely
      connected with birth, education and family.
      Alexander Hamilton
      The 1776 report
      6
      For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free
      countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no
      other. But lest any ill use should afterwards arise, let the crown
      at the conclusion of the ceremony be demolished, and scattered
      among the people whose right it is.
      To assure such a government, Americans demanded a
      written legal document that would create both a
      structure and a process for securing their rights and
      liberties and spell out the divisions and limits of the
      powers of government. That legal document must be
      above ordinary legislation and day-to-day politics. That
      is what the founders meant by “constitution,” and why
      our Constitution is “the supreme Law of the Land.”
      Their first attempt at a form of government, the
      Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, was
      adopted in the midst of the Revolutionary War and not
      ratified until 1781. During that time, American
      statesmen and citizens alike concluded that the Articles
      were too weak to fulfill a government’s core functions.
      This consensus produced the Constitutional Convention
      of 1787, which met in Philadelphia that summer to
      write the document which we have today. It is a
      testament to those framers’ wisdom and skill that the
      Constitution they produced remains the longest
      continually-operating written constitution in all of
      human history.
      The meaning and purpose of the Constitution of 1787,
      however, cannot be understood without recourse to the
      principles of the Declaration of Independence—human
      equality, the requirement for government by consent,
      and the securing of natural rights—which the
      Constitution is intended to embody, protect, and
      nurture. Lincoln famously described the principles of
      the Declaration (borrowing from Proverbs 25:11) as an
      “apple of gold” and the Constitution as a “frame of
      silver” meant to “adorn and preserve” the apple. The
      latter was made for the former, not the reverse.
      The form of the new government that the Constitution
      delineates is informed in part by the charges the
      Declaration levels at the British crown. For instance,
      the colonists charge the British king with failing to
      provide, or even interfering with, representative
      government; hence the Constitution provides for a
      representative legislature. It also charges the king with
      concentrating executive, legislative, and judicial power
      into the same hands, which James Madison pronounced
      “the very definition of tyranny.” Instead, the founders
      organized their new government into three coequal
      branches, checking and balancing the power of each
      against the others to reduce the risk of abuse of power.
      Frederick Douglass
      The intent of the framers of the Constitution was to
      construct a government that would be sufficiently
      strong to perform those essential tasks that only a
      government can perform (such as establishing justice,
      ensuring domestic tranquility, providing for the
      common defense, and promoting the general welfare—
      the main tasks named in the document’s preamble), but
      not so strong as to jeopardize the people’s liberties. In
      other words, the new government needed to be strong
      enough to have the power to secure rights without
      having so much power as to enable or encourage it to
      infringe rights.
      More specifically, the framers intended the new
      Constitution to keep the thirteen states united—to
      prevent the breakup of the Union into two or more
      The 1776 report
      7
      smaller countries—while maintaining sufficient latitude
      and liberty for the individual states.
      The advantages of union are detailed in the first
      fourteen papers of The Federalist (a series of essays
      written to urge the Constitution’s adoption), and boil
      down to preventing and deterring foreign adventurism
      in North America, avoiding conflicts between threats,
      achieving economies of scale, and best utilizing the
      diverse resources of the continent.
      While the Constitution is fundamentally a compact
      among the American people (its first seven words are
      “We the People of the United States”), it was ratified by
      special conventions in the states. The peoples of the
      states admired and cherished their state governments,
      all of which had adopted republican constitutions before
      a federal constitution was completed. Hence the
      framers of the new national government had to respect
      For the founders, the principle that just government
      requires the consent of the governed in turn requires
      republicanism, because the chief way that consent is
      granted to a government on an ongoing basis is through
      the people’s participation in the political process. This
      is the reason the Constitution “guarantee[s] to every
      State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.”
      Under the United States Constitution, the people are
      sovereign. But the people do not directly exercise their
      sovereignty, for instance, by voting directly in popular
      assemblies. Rather, they do so indirectly, through
      representative institutions. This is, on the most basic
      level, a practical requirement in a republic with a large
      population and extent of territory. But it is also
      intended to be a remedy to the defects common to all
      republics up to that time.
      The framers of the Constitution faced a twofold
      To throw obstacles in the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes; to
      deny the rights of property is like cutting off the hands. To refuse political equality is to
      rob the ostracized of all self-respect, of credit in the market place, of recompense in the
      world of work, of a voice in choosing those who make and administer the law, a choice in
      the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment.
      Elizabeth Cady Stanton
      the states’ prior existence and jealous guarding of their
      own prerogatives.
      They also believed that the role of the federal
      government should be limited to performing those tasks
      that only a national government can do, such as
      providing for the nation’s security or regulating
      commerce between the states, and that most tasks were
      properly the responsibility of the states. And they
      believed that strong states, as competing power centers,
      would act as counterweights against a potentially
      overweening central government, in the same way that
      the separation of powers checks and balances the
      branches of the federal government.
      challenge. They had to assure those alarmed by the
      historical record that the new government was not too
      republican in simply copying the old, failed forms, while
      also reassuring those concerned about overweening
      centralized power that the government of the new
      Constitution was republican enough to secure equal
      natural rights and prevent the reemergence of tyranny.
      The main causes of prior republican failure were class
      conflict and tyranny of the majority. In the simplest
      terms, the largest single faction in any republic would
      tend to band together and unwisely wield their
      numerical strength against unpopular minorities,
      leading to conflict and eventual collapse. The founders’
      primary remedy was union itself. Against the old idea
      The 1776 report
      8
      that republics had to be small, the founders countered
      document written by human beings could ever be
      that the very smallness of prior republics all but
      perfect or anticipate every future contingency, they
      guaranteed their failure. In small republics, the majority
      provided for a process to amend the document—but
      can more easily organize itself into a dominant faction;
      only by popular decision-making and not by ordinary
      in large republics, interests become too numerous for
      legislation or judicial decree.
      any single faction to dominate.
      The first ten amendments, which would come to be
      The inherent or potential partisan unwisdom of a
      known as the Bill of Rights, were included at the
      dominant faction also would be tempered by
      demand of those especially concerned about vesting the
      representative government. Rather than the people
      federal government with too much power and who
      acting as a body, the people would instead select
      wanted an enumeration of specific rights that the new
      officeholders to represent them. This would
      government lawfully could not transgress. But all
      agreed that substantive rights are not granted by
      refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through
      government; any just government exists only to secure
      the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may
      these rights. And they specifically noted in the Ninth
      best discern the true interest of their country, and whose
      Amendment that the Bill of Rights was a selective and
      patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it
      not an exclusive list; that is, the mere fact that a right is
      to temporary or partial considerations. [Federalist 10]
      not mentioned in the Bill of Rights is neither proof nor
      And the separation of powers would work in concert
      evidence that it does not exist.
      with the principle of representation by incentivizing
      It is important to note the founders’ understanding of
      individual officeholders to identify their personal
      three of these rights that are decisive for republican
      interests with the powers and prerogatives of their
      government and the success of the founders’ project.
      offices, and thus keep them alert to the danger of
      encroachments from other branches and offices.
      Our first freedom, religious liberty, is foremost a moral
      requirement of the natural freedom of the human mind.
      The founders asserted that these innovations, and
      As discussed in Appendix II, it is also the indispensable
      others, combined to create a republicanism that was at
      solution to the political-religious problem that emerged
      once old as well as new: true to the eternal principles
      in the modern world. Faith is both a matter of private
      and timeless ends of good government, but awake to
      conscience and public import, which is why the
      and corrective of the deficiencies in prior examples of
      founders encouraged religious free exercise but barred
      popular rule.
      the government from establishing any one national
      One important feature of our written
      constitution is the careful way that it limits
      the powers of each branch of government—
      Freedom is never more than one generation away
      that is, states what those branches may do,
      from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in
      and by implication what they may not do.
      This is the real meaning of “limited
      the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected,
      government”: not that the government’s
      and handed on for them to do the same, or one day
      size or funding levels remain small, but that
      government’s powers and activities must
      we will spend our sunset years telling our children
      remain limited to certain carefully defined
      and our children’s children what it was once like in
      areas and responsibilities as guarded by
      the United States where men were free.
      bicameralism, federalism, and the separation
      of powers.
      Ronald Reagan
      The Constitution was intended to endure.
      But because the founders well knew that no
      The 1776 report
      9
      religion. The point is not merely to protect the state
      from religion but also to protect religion from the state
      so that religious institutions would flourish and pursue
      their divine mission among men.
      Like religious liberty, freedom of speech and of the
      press is required by the freedom of the human mind.
      More plainly, it is a requirement for any government in
      which the people choose the direction of government
      policy. To choose requires public deliberation and
      debate. A people that cannot publicly express its
      opinions, exchange ideas, or openly argue about the
      course of its government is not free.
      Finally, the right to keep and bear arms is required by
      the fundamental natural right to life: no man may justly
      be denied the means of his own defense. The political
      significance of this right is hardly less important. An
      armed people is a people capable of defending their
      liberty no less than their lives and is the last, desperate
      check against the worst tyranny.
      IV.ChallengesAmerica’s
      Principles
      to
      Challenges to constitutional government are frequent
      and to be expected in a popular government based on
      consent. In his Farewell Address, George Washington
      advised his countrymen that when it came to the
      preservation of the Constitution they should “resist with
      care the spirit of innovation upon its principles however
      specious the pretexts.” The Constitution has proven
      sturdy against narrow interest groups that seek to
      change elements of the Constitution merely to get their
      way.
      At the same time, it is important to note that by design
      there is room in the Constitution for significant change
      and reform. Indeed, great reforms—like abolition,
      women’s suffrage, anti-Communism, the Civil Rights
      Movement, and the Pro-Life Movement—have often
      come forward that improve our dedication to the
      principles of the Declaration of Independence under the
      Constitution.
      More problematic have been movements that reject the
      fundamental truths of the Declaration of Independence
      and seek to destroy our constitutional order. The
      arguments, tactics, and names of these movements have
      changed, and the magnitude of the challenge has varied,
      yet they are all united by adherence to the same
      falsehood—that people do not have equal worth and
      equal rights.
      At the infancy of our Republic, the threat was a
      despotic king who violated the people’s rights and
      overthrew the colonists’ longstanding tradition of self-
      government. After decades of struggle, the colonists
      succeeded in establishing a more perfect Union founded
      not upon the capricious whims of a tyrant, but
      republican laws and institutions founded upon self-
      evident and eternal truths.
      It is the sacred duty of every generation of American
      patriots to defend this priceless inheritance.
      Slavery
      The most common charge levelled against the founders,
      and hence against our country itself, is that they were
      hypocrites who didn’t believe in their stated principles,
      and therefore the country they built rests on a lie. This
      charge is untrue, and has done enormous damage,
      especially in recent years, with a devastating effect on
      our civic unity and social fabric.
      Many Americans labor under the illusion that slavery
      was somehow a uniquely American evil. It is essential to
      insist at the outset that the institution be seen in a much
      broader perspective. It is very hard for people brought
      up in the comforts of modern America, in a time in
      which the idea that all human beings have inviolable
      rights and inherent dignity is almost taken for granted,
      to imagine the cruelties and enormities that were
      endemic in earlier times. But the unfortunate fact is
      that the institution of slavery has been more the rule
      than the exception throughout human history.
      The 1776 report
      10
      It was the Western world’s repudiation of slavery, only
      just beginning to build at the time of the American
      Revolution, which marked a dramatic sea change in
      moral sensibilities. The American founders were living
      on the cusp of this change, in a manner that straddled
      two worlds. George Washington owned slaves, but
      came to detest the practice, and wished for “a plan
      adopted for the abolition of it.” By the end of his life, he
      freed all the slaves in his family estate.
      Thomas Jefferson also held slaves, and yet included in
      his original draft of the Declaration a strong
      condemnation of slavery, which was removed at the
      insistence of certain slaveholding delegates. Inscribed in
      marble at his memorial in Washington, D.C. is
      Jefferson’s foreboding reference to the injustice of
      slavery: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that
      God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.”
      James Madison saw to it at the Constitutional
      Convention that, even when the Constitution
      compromised with slavery, it never used the word
      “slave” to do so. No mere semantics, he insisted that it
      was “wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that
      there could be property in men.”
      Indeed, the compromises at the Constitutional
      Convention were just that: compromises. The three-
      fifths compromise was proposed by an antislavery
      delegate to prevent the South from counting their slaves
      as whole persons for purposes of increasing their
      congressional representation. The so-called fugitive
      slave clause, perhaps the most hated protection of all,
      Abraham Lincoln
      accommodated pro-slavery delegates but was written so
      that the Constitution did not sanction slavery in the
      states where it existed. There is also the provision in
      the Constitution that forbade any restriction of the slave
      trade for twenty years after ratification—at which time
      Congress immediately outlawed the slave trade.
      The First Continental Congress agreed to discontinue
      the slave trade and boycott other nations that engaged
      in it, and the Second Continental Congress reaffirmed
      this policy. The Northwest Ordinance, a pre-
      Constitution law passed to govern the western
      territories (and passed again by the First Congress and
      signed into law by President Washington) explicitly
      bans slavery from those territories and from any states
      that might be organized there.
      Above all, there is the clear language of the Declaration
      itself: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all
      men are created equal.” The founders knew slavery was
      incompatible with that truth.
      It is important to remember that, as a question of
      practical politics, no durable union could have been
      formed without a compromise among the states on the
      issue of slavery. Is it reasonable to believe that slavery
      could have been abolished sooner had the slave states
      not been in a union with the free? Perhaps. But what is
      momentous is that a people that included slaveholders
      founded their nation on the proposition that “all men
      are created equal.”
      So why did they say that without immediately abolishing
      slavery? To establish the principle of consent as the
      ground of all political legitimacy and to check against
      any possible future drift toward or return to despotism,
      for sure. But also, in Lincoln’s words, “to declare the
      right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast
      as circumstances should permit.”
      The foundation of our Republic planted the seeds of the
      death of slavery in America. The Declaration’s
      unqualified proclamation of human equality flatly
      contradicted the existence of human bondage and, along
      with the Constitution’s compromises understood in
      light of that proposition, set the stage for abolition.
      Indeed, the movement to abolish slavery that first began
      in the United States led the way in bringing about the end
      of legal slavery.
      The 1776 report
      11
      Benjamin Franklin was president of the Pennsylvania
      Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and
      John Jay (the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court)
      was the president of a similar society in New York.
      John Adams opposed slavery his entire life as a “foul
      contagion in the human character” and “an evil of
      colossal magnitude.”
      Frederick Douglass had been born a slave, but escaped
      and eventually became a prominent spokesman for the
      abolitionist movement. He initially condemned the
      Constitution, but after studying its history came to
      insist that it was a “glorious liberty document” and that
      the Declaration of Independence was “the ring-bolt to
      the chain of your nation’s destiny.”
      And yet over the course of the first half of the 19th
      century, a growing number of Americans increasingly
      denied the truth at the heart of the founding. Senator
      John C. Calhoun of South Carolina famously rejected
      the Declaration’s principle of equality as “the most
      dangerous of all political error” and a “self-evident lie.”
      He never doubted that the founders meant what they
      said.
      To this rejection, Calhoun added a new theory in which
      rights inhere not in every individual by “the Laws of
      Nature and of Nature’s God” but in groups or races
      according to historical evolution. This new theory was
      developed to protect slavery—Calhoun claimed it was a
      it was in the course of ultimate extinction,” Abraham
      Lincoln observed in 1858. “All I have asked or desired
      anywhere, is that it should be placed back again upon
      the basis that the Fathers of our government originally
      placed it upon.”
      This conflict was resolved, but at a cost of more than
      600,000 lives. Constitutional amendments were passed
      to abolish slavery, grant equal protection under the law,
      and guarantee the right to vote regardless of race. Yet
      the damage done by the denial of core American
      principles and by the attempted substitution of a theory
      of group rights in their place proved widespread and
      long-lasting. These, indeed, are the direct ancestors of
      some of the destructive theories that today divide our
      people and tear at the fabric of our country.
      Progressivism
      In the decades that followed the Civil War, in response
      to the industrial revolution and the expansion of urban
      society, many American elites adopted a series of ideas
      to address these changes called Progressivism.
      Although not all of one piece, and not without its
      practical merits, the political thought of Progressivism
      held that the times had moved far beyond the founding
      era, and that contemporary society was too complex
      any longer to be governed by principles formulated in
      the 18th century. To use a contemporary analogy,
      We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things.
      These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of
      the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity,
      overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren scepter in our grasp.
      Calvin Coolidge
      “positive good”—and specifically to prevent lawful
      majorities from stopping the spread of slavery into
      federal territories where it did not yet exist.
      “In the way our Fathers originally left the slavery
      question, the institution was in the course of ultimate
      extinction, and the public mind rested in the belief that
      Progressives believed that America’s original
      “software”—the founding documents—were no longer
      capable of operating America’s vastly more complex
      “hardware”: the advanced industrial society that had
      emerged since the founding.
      The 1776 report
      12
      More significantly, the Progressives held that truths
      were not permanent but only relative to their time.
      They rejected the self-evident truth of the Declaration
      that all men are created equal and are endowed equally,
      either by nature or by God, with unchanging rights. As
      one prominent Progressive historian wrote in 1922,
      “To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the
      Declaration of Independence is true or false, is
      essentially a meaningless question.” Instead,
      Progressives believed there were only group rights that
      are constantly redefined and change with the times.
      Indeed, society has the power and obligation not only to
      define and grant new rights, but also to take old rights
      away as the country develops.
      Based on this false understanding of rights, the
      Progressives designed a new system of government.
      Instead of securing fundamental rights grounded in
      nature, government—operating under a new theory of
      the “living” Constitution—should constantly evolve to
      secure evolving rights.
      branch of government called at times the bureaucracy
      or the administrative state. This shadow government
      never faces elections and today operates largely without
      checks and balances. The founders always opposed
      government unaccountable to the people and without
      constitutional restraint, yet it continues to grow around
      us.
      Fascism
      The principles of the Declaration have been threatened
      not only at home. In the 20th Century, two global
      movements threatened to destroy freedom and subject
      mankind to a new slavery. Though ideological cousins,
      the forces of Fascism and Communism were bitter
      enemies in their wars to achieve world domination.
      What united both totalitarian movements was their
      utter disdain for natural rights and free peoples.
      Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands.
      Miracles do not cluster, and what has happened once in 6,000 years, may not
      happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, because if the American Constitution
      should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world.
      Daniel Webster
      In order to keep up with these changes, government
      would be run more and more by credentialed
      managers, who would direct society through rules and
      regulations that mold to the currents of the time.
      Before he became President of the United States,
      Woodrow Wilson laid out this new system whereby
      “the functions of government are in a very real sense
      independent of legislation, and even constitutions,”
      meaning that this new view of government would
      operate independent of the people.
      Far from creating an omniscient body of civil servants
      led only by “pragmatism” or “science,” though,
      progressives instead created what amounts to a fourth
      Fascism first arose in Italy under the dictatorship of
      Benito Mussolini, largely in response to the rise of
      Bolshevism in Russia. Like the Progressives, Mussolini
      sought to centralize power under the management of
      so-called experts. All power—corporate and
      political—would be exercised by the state and directed
      toward the same goal. Individual rights and freedoms
      hold no purchase under Fascism. Its principle is instead,
      in Mussolini’s words, “everything in the State, nothing
      outside the State, nothing against the State.” Eventually,
      Adolf Hitler in Germany wed this militant and
      dehumanizing political movement to his pseudo-
      scientific theory of Aryan racial supremacy, and Nazism
      was born.
      The 1776 report
      13
      The Nazi juggernaut quickly conquered much of
      Europe. The rule of the Axis Powers “is not a
      government based upon the consent of the governed,”
      said President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “It is not a
      union of ordinary, self-respecting men and women to
      protect themselves and their freedom and their dignity
      from oppression. It is an unholy alliance of power and
      pelf to dominate and enslave the human race.”
      Ronald Reagan speaking
      at the Brandenburg Gate
      Before the Nazis could threaten America in our own
      hemisphere, the United States built an arsenal of
      democracy, creating more ships, planes, tanks, and
      munitions than any other power on earth. Eventually,
      America rose up, sending millions of troops across the
      oceans to preserve freedom.
      Everywhere American troops went, they embodied in
      their own ranks and brought with them the principles of
      the Declaration, liberating peoples and restoring
      freedom. Yet, while Fascism died in 1945 with the
      collapse of the Axis powers, it was quickly replaced by a
      new threat, and the rest of the 20th century was defined
      by the United States’ mortal and moral battle against
      the forces of Communism.
      Communism
      Communism seems to preach a radical or extreme form
      of human equality. But at its core, wrote Karl Marx, is
      “the idea of the class struggle as the immediate driving
      force of history, and particularly the class struggle
      between the bourgeois and the proletariat.” In the
      communist mind, people are not born equal and free,
      they are defined entirely by their class.
      Under Communism, the purpose of government is not
      to secure rights at all. Instead, the goal is for a “class
      struggle [that] necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the
      proletariat.” By its very nature, this class struggle would
      be violent. “The Communists disdain to conceal their
      views and aims,” Marx wrote. “They openly declare
      that their ends can be attained only by the forcible
      overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the
      ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution.”
      This radical rejection of human dignity spread
      throughout much of the world. In Russia, the bloody
      Bolshevik Revolution during World War I established
      the communist Soviet Union. Communism understands
      itself as a universalist movement of global conquest, and
      communist dictatorships eventually seized power
      through much of Europe and Asia, and in significant
      parts of Africa and South America.
      Led by the Soviet Union, Communism even threatened,
      or aspired to threaten, our liberties here at home. What
      it could not achieve through force of arms, it attempted
      through subversion. Communism did not succeed in
      fomenting revolution in America. But Communism’s
      relentless anti-American, anti-Western, and atheistic
      propaganda did inspire thousands, and perhaps millions,
      to reject and despise the principles of our founding and
      our government. While America and its allies
      eventually won the Cold War, this legacy of anti-
      Americanism is by no means entirely a memory but still
      pervades much of academia and the intellectual and
      cultural spheres. The increasingly accepted economic
      theory of Socialism, while less violent than
      Communism, is inspired by the same flawed philosophy
      and leads down the same dangerous path of allowing the
      state to seize private property and redistribute wealth as
      the governing elite see fit.
      The 1776 report
      14
      For generations, America stood as a bulwark against
      global Communism. Our Cold War victory was owing
      not only to our superior technology, economy, and
      military. In the end, America won because the Soviet
      Union was built upon a lie. As President Ronald Reagan
      said, “I have seen the rise of Fascism and
      Communism…. But both theories fail. Both deny those
      God-given liberties that are the inalienable right of each
      person on this planet; indeed they deny the existence of
      God.”
      Racism and Identity Politics
      The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, passed
      after the Civil War, brought an end to legal slavery.
      Blacks enjoyed a new equality and freedom, voting for
      and holding elective office in states across the Union.
      But it did not bring an end to racism, or to the unequal
      treatment of blacks everywhere.
      Despite the determined efforts of the postwar
      Reconstruction Congress to establish civil equality for
      freed slaves, the postbellum South ended up devolving
      into a system that was hardly better than slavery. The
      system enmeshed freedmen in relationships of extreme
      dependency, and used poll taxes, literacy tests, and the
      violence of vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan to
      prevent them from exercising their civil rights,
      particularly the right to vote. Jim Crow laws enforced
      the strict segregation of the races, and gave legal
      standing in some states to a pervasive subordination of
      blacks.
      It would take a national movement composed of people
      from different races, ethnicities, nationalities, and
      religions to bring about an America fully committed to
      ending legal discrimination.
      The Civil Rights Movement culminated in the 1960s
      with the passage of three major legislative reforms
      affecting segregation, voting, and housing rights. It
      presented itself, and was understood by the American
      people, as consistent with the principles of the
      founding. “When the architects of our republic wrote
      the magnificent words of the Constitution and the
      Declaration of Independence, they were signing a
      promissory note to which every American was to fall
      heir,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his “I Have a
      Dream” speech. “This note was a promise that all men,
      yes, black men as well as white men, would be
      guaranteed the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the
      pursuit of happiness.”
      It seemed, finally, that America’s nearly two-century
      effort to realize fully the principles of the Declaration
      had reached a culmination. But the heady spirit of the
      original Civil Rights Movement, whose leaders
      forcefully quoted the Declaration of Independence, the
      Constitution, and the rhetoric of the founders and of
      Lincoln, proved to be short-lived.
      The Civil Rights Movement was almost immediately
      turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals
      of the founders. The ideas that drove this change had
      been growing in America for decades, and they
      distorted many areas of policy in the half century that
      followed. Among the distortions was the abandonment
      of nondiscrimination and equal opportunity in favor of
      “group rights” not unlike those advanced by Calhoun
      and his followers. The justification for reversing the
      promise of color-blind civil rights was that past
      discrimination requires present effort, or affirmative
      action in the form of preferential treatment, to
      overcome long-accrued inequalities. Those forms of
      preferential treatment built up in our system over time,
      first in administrative rulings, then executive orders,
      later in congressionally passed law, and finally were
      sanctified by the Supreme Court.
      Civil Rights March on
      Washington, D.C.
      The 1776 report
      15
      Today, far from a regime of equal natural rights for
      equal citizens, enforced by the equal application of law,
      we have moved toward a system of explicit group
      privilege that, in the name of “social justice,” demands
      equal results and explicitly sorts citizens into “protected
      classes” based on race and other demographic
      categories.
      Eventually this regime of formal inequality would come
      to be known as “identity politics.” The stepchild of
      earlier rejections of the founding, identity politics
      today our country is in danger of throwing this
      inheritance away.
      The choice before us now is clear. Will we choose the
      truths of the Declaration? Or will we fall prey to the
      false theories that have led too many nations to tyranny?
      It is our mission—all of us—to restore our national
      unity by rekindling a brave and honest love for our
      country and by raising new generations of citizens who
      not only know the self-evident truths of our founding,
      but act worthy of them.
      Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general
      diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force
      to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.
      George Washington
      (discussed in Appendix III) values people by
      characteristics like race, sex, and sexual orientation and
      holds that new times demand new rights to replace the
      old. This is the opposite of King’s hope that his
      children would “live in a nation where they will not be
      judged by the color of their skin but by the content of
      their character,” and denies that all are endowed with
      the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
      happiness.
      Identity politics makes it less likely that racial
      reconciliation and healing can be attained by pursuing
      Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream for America and
      upholding the highest ideals of our Constitution and our
      Declaration of Independence.
      V.
      THE TASK OF
      NATIONAL RENEWAL
      All the good things we see around us—from the
      physical infrastructure, to our high standards of living,
      to our exceptional freedoms—are direct results of
      America’s unity, stability, and justice, all of which in
      turn rest on the bedrock of our founding principles. Yet
      This great project of national renewal depends upon
      true education—not merely training in particular skills,
      but the formation of citizens. To remain a free people,
      we must have the knowledge, strength, and virtue of a
      free people. From families and schools to popular
      culture and public policy, we must teach our founding
      principles and the character necessary to live out those
      principles.
      This includes restoring patriotic education that teaches
      the truth about America. That doesn’t mean ignoring
      the faults in our past, but rather viewing our history
      clearly and wholly, with reverence and love. We must
      also prioritize personal responsibility and fulfilling the
      duties we have toward one another as citizens. Above
      all, we must stand up to the petty tyrants in every
      sphere who demand that we speak only of America’s
      sins while denying her greatness. At home, in school, at
      the workplace, and in the world, it is the people—and
      only the people—who have the power to stand up for
      America and defend our way of life.
      The 1776 report
      16
      The Role of the Family
      By their very nature, families are the first educators,
      teaching children how to treat others with respect,
      make wise decisions, exercise patience, think for
      themselves, and steadfastly guard their God-given
      liberties. It is good mothers and fathers, above all
      others, who form good people and good citizens.
      This is why America’s founding fathers often echoed the
      great Roman statesman Cicero in referring to the family
      as the “seminary of the republic.” They understood that
      the habits and morals shaped in the home determine the
      character of our communities and the ultimate fate of
      our country.
      When children see their mother and father hard at
      work, they learn the dignity of labor and the reward of
      self-discipline. When adults speak out against dangerous
      doctrines that threaten our freedoms and values,
      children learn the time-tested concept of free
      expression and the courageous spirit of American
      independence. When parents serve a neighbor in need,
      they model charity and prove that every human being
      has inherent worth. And when families pray together,
      they acknowledge together the providence of the
      Almighty God who gave them their sacred liberty.
      For the American republic to endure, families must
      remain strong and reclaim their duty to raise up morally
      responsible citizens who love America and embrace the
      gifts and responsibilities of freedom and self-
      government.
      Teaching America
      The primary duty of schools is to teach students the
      basic skills needed to function in society, such as
      reading, writing, and mathematics. As discussed in
      Appendix IV, our founders also recognized
      a second and essential task: educators must convey a
      sense of enlightened patriotism that equips each
      generation with a knowledge of America’s founding
      principles, a deep reverence for their liberties, and a
      profound love of their country.
      Make no mistake: The love we are talking about is
      something different from romantic or familial love,
      something that cannot be imposed by teachers or
      schools or government edicts, least of all in a free
      country. Like any love worthy of the name, it must be
      embraced freely and be strong and unsentimental
      enough to coexist with the elements of disappointment,
      criticism, dissent, opposition, and even shame that
      come with moral maturity and open eyes. But it is love
      all the same, and without the deep foundation it
      supplies, our republic will perish.
      State and local governments—not the federal
      government—are responsible for adopting curricula
      that teach children the principles that unite, inspire, and
      ennoble all Americans. This includes lessons on the
      Revolutionary War, the Declaration of Independence,
      and the Constitutional Convention. Educators should
      teach an accurate history of how the permanent
      principles of America’s founding have been challenged
      and preserved since 1776. By studying America’s true
      heritage, students learn to embrace and preserve the
      triumphs of their forefathers while identifying and
      avoiding their mistakes.
      States and school districts should reject any curriculum
      that promotes one-sided partisan opinions, activist
      propaganda, or factional ideologies that demean
      America’s heritage, dishonor our heroes, or deny our
      principles. Any time teachers or administrators
      promote political agendas in the classroom, they abuse
      their platform and dishonor every family who trusts
      them with their children’s education and moral
      development.
      The 1776 report
      17
      “Law and liberty cannot rationally become the object of
      our love,” wrote founding father James Wilson, “unless
      they first become the objects of our knowledge.”
      Students who are taught to understand America’s
      exceptional principles and America’s powerful history
      grow into strong citizens who respect the rule of law
      and protect the country they know and love.
      A Scholarship of Freedom
      Universities in the United States are often today
      hotbeds of anti-Americanism, libel, and censorship that
      combine to generate in students and in the broader
      culture at the very least disdain and at worst outright
      hatred for this country.
      The founders insisted that universities should be at the
      core of preserving American republicanism by
      instructing students and future leaders of its true basis
      and instilling in them not just an understanding but a
      reverence for its principles and core documents. Today,
      our higher education system does almost the precise
      opposite. Colleges peddle resentment and contempt for
      American principles and history alike, in the process
      and historical truth, shames Americans by highlighting
      only the sins of their ancestors, and teaches claims of
      systemic racism that can only be eliminated by more
      discrimination, is an ideology intended to manipulate
      opinions more than educate minds.
      Deliberately destructive scholarship shatters the civic
      bonds that unite all Americans. It silences the discourse
      essential to a free society by breeding division, distrust,
      and hatred among citizens. And it is the intellectual
      force behind so much of the violence in our cities,
      suppression of free speech in our universities, and
      defamation of our treasured national statues and
      symbols.
      To restore our society, academics must return to their
      vocation of relentlessly pursuing the truth and engaging
      in honest scholarship that seeks to understand the world
      and America’s place in it.
      The American Mind
      Americans yearn for timeless stories and noble heroes
      that inspire them to be good, brave, diligent, daring,
      generous, honest, and compassionate.
      To place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm
      as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are
      compelled to take. . . . it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and
      to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.
      Thomas Jefferson
      weakening attachment to our shared heritage.
      In order to build up a healthy, united citizenry,
      scholars, students, and all Americans must reject false
      and fashionable ideologies that obscure facts, ignore
      historical context, and tell America’s story solely as one
      of oppression and victimhood rather than one of
      imperfection but also unprecedented achievement
      toward freedom, happiness, and fairness for all.
      Historical revisionism that tramples honest scholarship
      Millions of Americans devour histories of the American
      Revolution and the Civil War and thrill to the tales of
      Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Franklin,
      Lincoln and Grant, Sojourner Truth and Frederick
      Douglass. We still read the tales of Hawthorne and
      Melville, Twain and Poe, and the poems of Whitman
      and Dickinson. On Independence Day, we hum John
      Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” and sing along
      to Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.”
      Americans applaud the loyalty, love, and kindness
      The 1776 report
      18
      shared by the March sisters in Little Women, revere the
      rugged liberty of the cowboys in old westerns, and
      cheer the adventurous spirit of young Tom Sawyer.
      These great works have withstood the test of time
      because they speak to eternal truths and embody the
      American spirit.
      It is up to America’s artists, authors, filmmakers,
      musicians, social media influencers, and other culture
      leaders to carry on this tradition by once again giving
      shape and voice to America’s self-understanding—to be
      what Jefferson called “an expression of the American
      mind.”
      To them falls the creative task of writing stories, songs,
      and scripts that help to restore every American’s
      conviction to embrace the good, lead virtuous lives, and
      act with an attitude of hope toward a better and bolder
      future for themselves, their families, and the entire
      nation.
      Reverence for the Laws
      The principles of equality and consent mean that all are
      equal before the law. No one is above the law, and no
      one is privileged to ignore the law, just as no one is
      outside the law in terms of its protection.
      In his Lyceum Address, a young Abraham Lincoln
      warned of two results of a growing disregard for the
      rule of law. The first is mob rule: “whenever the
      vicious portion of [our] population shall be permitted to
      gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn
      churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw
      printing-presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and
      burn obnoxious persons at pleasure and with impunity,
      depend upon it, this government cannot last.”
      But Lincoln also warned of those of great ambition who
      thirst for distinction and, although “he would as
      willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as
      harm, yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left
      to be done in the way of building up, he would set
      boldly to the task of pulling down.”
      Whether of the Left or of the Right, both mob rule and
      tyrannical rule violate the rule of law because both are
      rule by the base passions rather than the better angels of
      our nature. Both equally threaten our constitutional
      order.
      When crimes go unpunished or when good men do
      nothing, the lawless in spirit will become lawless in
      practice, leading to violence and demagoguery.
      Patriotic education must have at its center a respect for
      the rule of law, including the Declaration and the
      Constitution, so that we have what John Adams called
      “a government of laws, and not of men.”
      In the end, Lincoln’s solution must be ours:
      Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to
      his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to
      violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and
      never to tolerate their violation by others. As the patriots of
      seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of
      Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws,
      let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred
      honor;-let every man remember that to violate the law, is to
      trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the character of
      his own, and his children’s liberty. Let reverence for the laws,
      be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe,
      that prattles on her lap-let it be taught in schools, in
      seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in Primers,
      spelling books, and in Almanacs;-let it be preached from the
      pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts
      of justice.
      The 1776 report
      19
      VI. CONCLUSION
      government. We are shaped by the beauty, bounty, and
      wildness of our continent. We are united by the glory
      On the 150th Anniversary of the signing of the
      of our history. And we are distinguished by the
      Declaration of Independence, President Calvin
      American virtues of openness, honesty, optimism,
      Coolidge raised the immortal banner in his time. “It is
      determination, generosity, confidence, kindness, hard
      often asserted,” he said, “that the world has made a
      work, courage, and hope. Our principles did not create
      great deal of progress since 1776 … and that we may
      these virtues, but they laid the groundwork for them to
      therefore very well discard their conclusions for
      grow and spread and forge America into the most just
      something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be
      and glorious country in all of human history.
      applied to this great charter. If all men are created
      As we approach the 250th anniversary of our
      equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable
      independence, we must resolve to teach future
      rights, that is final. If governments derive their just
      generations of Americans an accurate history of our
      powers from the consent of the governed, that is final.
      country so that we all learn and cherish our founding
      No advance, no progress can be made beyond these
      principles once again. We must renew the pride and
      propositions.”
      gratitude we have for this incredible nation that we are
      blessed to call home.
      America’s founding principles are true not because any
      generation—including our own—has lived them
      When we appreciate America for what she truly is, we
      perfectly, but because they are based upon the eternal
      know that our Declaration is worth preserving, our
      truths of the human condition. They are rooted in our
      Constitution worth defending, our fellow citizens
      capacity for evil and power for good, our longing for
      worth loving, and our country worth fighting for.
      truth and striving for justice, our need for order and
      our love of freedom. Above all else, these principles
      It is our task now to renew this commitment. So we
      recognize the worth, equality, potential, dignity, and
      proclaim, in the words our forefathers used two and a
      glory of each and every man, woman, and child created
      half centuries ago, “for the support of this Declaration,
      in the image of God.
      with a firm reliance on the protection of divine
      Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our
      Throughout our history, our heroes—men and women,
      Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”
      young and old, black and white, of many faiths and
      from all parts of the world—have changed America for
      the better not by abandoning
      these truths, but by appealing to
      them. Upon these universal
      ideals, they built a great nation,
      The Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain
      unified a strong people, and
      of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles
      formed a beautiful way of life
      contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by
      worth defending.
      those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places,
      To be an American means
      against all foes, and at whatever cost.
      something noble and good. It
      means treasuring freedom and
      Frederick Douglass
      embracing the vitality of self-
      The 1776 report
      20
      Appendix I
      The declaration of independence
      In Congress, July 4, 1776
      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 the earth, the separate and equal station to which
      the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they
      should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
      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.-That to secure these
      rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -That
      whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to
      abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such
      form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that
      Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience
      hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by
      abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing
      invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty,
      to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.-Such has been the patient
      sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of
      Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all
      having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be
      submitted to a candid world.
      He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
      He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in
      their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend
      to them.
      He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people
      would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable
      to tyrants only.
      He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of
      their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
      He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the
      rights of the people.
      The 1776 report
      21
      He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative
      powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State
      remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
      He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for
      Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the
      conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
      He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary
      powers.
      He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and
      payment of their salaries.
      He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat
      out their substance.
      He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
      He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
      He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged
      by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
      For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
      For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the
      Inhabitants of these States:
      For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
      For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
      For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
      For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
      For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighboring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary
      government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for
      introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
      For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of
      our Governments:
      For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all
      cases whatsoever.
      He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
      The 1776 report
      22
      He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
      He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to complete the works of death,
      desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the
      most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
      He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to
      become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
      He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our
      frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all
      ages, sexes and conditions.
      In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated
      Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which
      may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
      Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of
      attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the
      circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and
      we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably
      interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity.
      We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest
      of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
      We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to
      the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good
      People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be
      Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political
      connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and
      Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and
      to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration,
      with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes
      and our sacred Honor.
      The 1776 report
      23
      Appendix II
      Faith and America’s Principles
      History underscores the overwhelming importance of religious faith in American life, but some today see
      religious practice and political liberty to be in conflict and hold that religion is divisive and should be kept out of the
      public square. The founders of America held a very different view. They not only believed that all people have a
      right to religious liberty but also that religious faith is indispensable to the success of republican government. “The
      God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time,” Thomas Jefferson once wrote. “The hand of force may
      destroy, but cannot disjoin them.”
      The idea that faith sustains the principles of equality and natural rights is deeply rooted in American society
      and proven through human experience. The social, political, and personal value of religious faith within America’s
      public space has been recognized and honored from the start. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to
      political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports,” George Washington observed in his Farewell
      Address. “In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great Pillars of
      human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and citizens.” He went on to warn:
      Let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be
      conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to
      expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
      Civil and Religious Liberty
      By the time of the American founding, political life in the West had undergone two momentous changes.
      The first was the sundering of civil from religious law. Prior to the widespread adoption of Christianity, Western
      societies made no distinction between civil and religious law, between the demands of the state and the demands of
      the gods. Laws against murder and theft, for instance, had the same status as laws compelling religious observance,
      and all laws were enforced by the same political institutions. Pagan societies recognized no “private sphere” of
      conscience into which the state may not justly intrude.
      Christianity overturned this unity by separating political from religious obligation and making the latter
      primarily a matter of faith, superintended by a church whose authority was extrinsic to civil law. Thus began a
      millennium of tension and conflict between secular and ecclesiastical authorities.
      The second momentous change was the emergence of multiple sects within Christianity. In the pre-Christian
      world, all subjects or citizens of any given political community were expected to believe in and worship the same
      God or gods by the same rites and ceremonies. This basic unity held through the first several centuries of Christianity.
      But the Great Schism and, more significantly, the Reformation, undid Christian unity, which in turn greatly
      undermined political unity. Religious differences became sources of political conflict and war. The nations of Europe
      fell into internal sectarian divisions and external religious-political wars.
      British monarchs not only disputed one another’s claims to the throne but imposed their preferred religious
      doctrines on the whole nation. Gruesome tortures and political imprisonments were common. The Puritans
      proclaimed a “commonwealth” which executed the Anglican king. The executed king’s son proceeded to supplant the
      “commonwealth,” but because his brother was suspected of being Catholic, Protestants expelled him in the so-called
      The 1776 report
      24
      “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 that installed the Protestant monarch of the Netherlands and his wife as England’s
      king and queen.
      In the 17th century, religious believers of many stripes came to North America as refugees from Europe’s
      religious persecutions. Ironically, the most famous attempt to form a separate religious community—the Pilgrims’
      relocation to Massachusetts—eventually led to the core American principle of religious liberty.
      The Founders’ Solution
      The founders were ever mindful of the religious oppression and persecution that had existed throughout
      history. They knew that religious zeal often leads to the assumption that specific beliefs should be “established” by
      governments, meaning certain religious doctrines should be enforced by law as the official religion of the state.
      Individuals who are not members of that religious body and do not accept its teachings often did not enjoy the same
      rights as a result. Discriminations against nonbelievers ranged from mild to the most awful, but the “establishment”
      of one religious body by government always divided the population into privileged and non-privileged classes,
      resulting in endless bitter struggles for religious dominance.
      At the same time, the founders recognized man’s natural yearning to pursue the truth about God and freely
      practice the teachings inspired by those religious beliefs. They knew that religious beliefs, good for the ultimate
      happiness of the individual, were also good for politics because they encouraged the virtues (such as justice, self-
      restraint, courage, and truthfulness) necessary for self-government. To violate the consciences of citizens by using
      force to change their religious beliefs was a gross injustice. Violations of conscience by government would not
      strengthen the attachment of citizens to their government but would only foster hypocrisy, hatred, and rebellion.
      The American founders did not claim to settle the ultimate questions of reason and revelation. But for the
      first time in history, the founders believed they saw a practicable and just alternative to religious persecution and
      conflict. Unlike previous forms of government, the Constitution they framed did not include the power to
      “establish” a national religion, and it specifically denied that anyone could be prevented from holding office by a
      “religious test.” They underlined this by expressly forbidding the federal government in the First Amendment from
      “establishing” any religion and, to make it even clearer, guaranteeing the free exercise of religion.
      Together, these provisions give religious liberty primacy among the natural rights secured by our
      Constitution. This follows from the principles of the Declaration, as the foremost way individuals fulfill their well-
      being—in exercising their natural right to “the pursuit of happiness”—is through the religious teachings and
      institutions they believe and hope will lead to their salvation.
      We often use the phrase “the separation of church and state” to refer to the founders’ practical settlement of
      these questions, but this phrase is usually misunderstood to mean a complete separation of religion and politics, which
      is a very different idea. When the founders denied government the power to establish a religion, they did not intend
      to expunge religion from political life but to make room for the religious beliefs and free expression of all citizens.
      The Common Ground of Reason and Revelation
      The founders emphasized where the moral teachings of religious faith and the ground of political liberty
      were in agreement. Just as they were confident that government has no theological expertise to decide the path to
      The 1776 report
      25
      salvation, they were equally confident that a well-designed republican constitution is sanctioned by human nature and
      open to moral reasoning shared among human beings.
      General moral precepts can be understood by human reason, and faith echoes these precepts. In other
      words, when the Declaration of Independence opens by appealing to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” it
      means that there is a human morality accessible to both reason and revelation. This is the common moral ground of
      the American founding, where reason and revelation work together for civil and religious liberty. Consider this from
      the Reverend Samuel Cooper in 1780:
      We want not, indeed, a special revelation from heaven to teach us that men are born equal and free; that no man has a
      natural claim of dominion over his neighbors. . . . These are the plain dictates of that reason and common sense with
      which the common parent of men has informed the human bosom. It is, however, a satisfaction to observe such everlasting
      maxims of equity confirmed, and impressed upon the consciences of men, by the instructions, precepts, and examples given
      us in the sacred oracles; one internal mark of their divine original, and that they come from him “who hath made of one
      blood all nations to dwell upon the face of the earth.” [Acts 17:26]
      In proclaiming the self-evident truths of the Declaration, the founders interwove reason and revelation into
      America’s creed. One such truth is that there are fixed laws higher than those enacted by governments. Reason and
      faith secure limits on the reach of man-made laws, thereby opening up the space for civil and religious liberty.
      Another is that, in the act of creation, however conceived, all came into existence as equals: the Creator gives no
      person or group a higher right to rule others without their agreement. Yet another is that all are gifted through their
      human nature with intrinsic rights which they cannot sign away, above all the great rights of “Life, Liberty, and the
      Pursuit of Happiness.” In all of these things, the founders limited the ends of government in order to open up the higher ends of
      man.
      The purpose of the founders’ ingenious division of church and state was neither to weaken the importance of
      faith nor to set up a secular state, but to open up the public space of society to a common American morality.
      Religious institutions, which were influential before the American Revolution, became powerful witnesses for the
      advancement of equality, freedom, opportunity, and human dignity.
      •
      The American Revolution might not have taken place or succeeded without the moral ideas spread through the
      pulpits, sermons, and publications of Christian instructors. On the nation’s 150th Independence Day
      celebration, President Calvin Coolidge said that the principles of the Declaration of Independence were
      found in the text, the sermons and the writings of the early colonial clergy who were earnestly undertaking to instruct
      their congregations in the great mystery of how to live. They preached equality because they believed in the fatherhood of
      God and the brotherhood of man. They justified freedom by the text that we are all created in the divine image, all
      partakers of the divine spirit.
      •
      Even before the eighteenth century, Quakers and the faithful of other denominations, drawing on the Bible and
      on philosophy, began a crusade to abolish race-based slavery in the colonies. Anti-slavery literature was largely
      faith-based and spread through the free states via churches. One of the most famous anti-slavery writers in
      history, Harriet Beecher Stowe, was the devout daughter of a great American reformist clergyman and wife of
      a well-known theologian. Her worldwide best-seller, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, fired the moral indignation of
      millions that helped lay the ground for abolition.
      The 1776 report
      26
      •
      America’s greatest reform movements have been founded or promoted by religious leaders and laypersons
      reared in faithful home environments. Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton in the early nineteenth century set up
      orphanages and established free schools for poor girls. The tireless effort to end Jim Crow and extend civil and
      voting rights to African Americans and other minorities was driven by clergy and lay faithful of a multitude of
      denominations, including most prominently the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who used nonviolent
      tactics to advocate for equal rights. The Pro-Life Movement today is led by clergy and the faithful of virtually
      every denomination.
      •
      Local religious leaders have been a key buttress supporting our communities. Neighborhood and parish
      churches, temples, and mosques still are the strongest organized centers of help for the local poor, jobless,
      homeless, and families down on their luck. For generations, neighbors have assisted neighbors through church
      networks, helping the needy avoid the dehumanization of prolonged dependency on government welfare.
      Today, countless men and women actively feed and care for the poor, house and speak for immigrants and the
      disadvantaged, minister to jailed and released criminals, and advocate powerfully for a better society and a
      more peaceful world, supported by the charitable funding of Americans of all faiths.
      •
      Clergy of various denominations have sacrificed career goals and risked their lives in order to minister to men
      and women serving in the armed forces. The brave soldiers who protect America against foreign dangers
      depend on the corps of military chaplains who help cultivate the warriors’ courage, inner strength, and
      perseverance they need to succeed in their missions. Religious chaplains open every session of Congress, and
      clergy pray at presidential inaugurals, state funerals, and other official occasions.
      Conclusion
      The United States has journeyed far since its founding. While the founders certainly had disagreements
      about the nature of religion, they had little doubt that faith was essential to the new experiment in self-government
      and republican constitutionalism. They knew that citizens who practiced the faith under the protection of religious
      liberty would support the Constitution that embodies their rights.
      The shared morality of faithful citizens would sustain a republican culture that would foster stable family
      relationships and encourage important virtues like fortitude to defend the nation in war, self-restraint over physical
      appetites or lust for wealth, compassion toward neighbors and strangers in need, self-disciplined labor, intellectual
      integrity, independence from long-term reliance on private or public benefits, justice in all relationships, prudence in
      judging the common good, courage to defend their rights and liberties, and finally, piety towards the Creator whose
      favor determines the well-being of society.
      We have arrived at a point where the most influential part of our nation finds these old faith-based virtues
      dangerous, useless, or perhaps even laughable. At the same time, many Americans feel that we have veered off the
      path that has brought so many happiness and success, and fear a growing factionalism cannot be overcome merely by
      electing a different president or political party. How can America overcome this partisan divide?
      The answer to this rising concern must begin by frankly and humbly admitting that the common ground of
      equal natural rights on which our common morality is based is no longer visible to many Americans. We must
      refocus on the proposition that united this nation from the beginning: the proposition of the Declaration of
      Independence that there are “self-evident truths” which unite all Americans under a common creed.
      The 1776 report
      27
      But it is almost impossible to hold to this creed—which describes what and who we are—without reference
      to the Creator as the ultimate source of human equality and natural rights. This is the deepest reason why the
      founders saw faith as the key to good character as well as good citizenship, and why we must remain “one Nation
      under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
      The proposition of political equality is powerfully supported by biblical faith, which confirms that all human
      beings are equal in dignity and created in God’s image. Every form of religious faith is entitled to religious liberty, so
      long as all comprehend and sincerely assent to the fundamental principle that under “the Laws of Nature and of
      Nature’s God” all human beings are equally endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
      happiness. As the first American president wrote in 1790 to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island:
      The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of
      an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of
      citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that
      another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives
      to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean
      themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
      The 1776 report
      28
      Appendix III
      Created Equal or Identity Politics?
      Americans are deeply committed to the principle of equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence,
      that all are created equal and equally endowed with natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This
      creed, as Abraham Lincoln once noted, is “the electric cord” that “links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving”
      people everywhere, no matter their race or country of origin. The task of American civic education is to transmit this
      creed from one generation of Americans to the next.
      In recent times, however, a new creed has arisen challenging the original one enshrined in the Declaration of
      Independence. This new creed, loosely defined as identity politics, has three key features. First, the creed of identity
      politics defines and divides Americans in terms of collective social identities. According to this new creed, our racial
      and sexual identities are more important than our common status as individuals equally endowed with fundamental
      rights.
      Second, the creed of identity politics ranks these different racial and social groups in terms of privilege and
      power, with disproportionate moral worth allotted to each. It divides Americans into two groups: oppressors and
      victims. The more a group is considered oppressed, the more its members have a moral claim upon the rest of
      society. As for their supposed oppressors, they must atone and even be punished in perpetuity for their sins and those
      of their ancestors.
      Third, the creed of identity politics teaches that America itself is to blame for oppression. America’s
      “electric cord” is not the creed of liberty and equality that connects citizens today to each other and to every
      generation of Americans past, present, and future. Rather, America’s “electric cord” is a heritage of oppression that
      the majority racial group inflicts upon minority groups, and identity politics is about assigning and absolving guilt for
      that oppression.
      According to this new creed, Americans are not a people defined by their dedication to human equality, but
      a people defined by their perpetuation of racial and sexual oppression.
      The Historical Precedent for Identity Politics
      Whereas the Declaration of Independence founded a nation grounded on human equality and equal rights,
      identity politics sees a nation defined by oppressive hierarchies. But this vision of America is actually not new. While
      identity politics may seem novel and ground-breaking, it resurrects prior attempts in American history to deny the
      meaning of equality enshrined in the Declaration. In portraying America as racist and white supremacist, identity
      politics advocates follow Lincoln’s great rival Stephen A. Douglas, who wrongly claimed that American government
      “was made on the white basis” “by white men, for the benefit of white men.” Indeed, there are uncanny similarities
      between 21st century activists of identity politics and 19th century apologists for slavery.
      John C. Calhoun is perhaps the leading forerunner of identity politics. Rejecting America’s common
      political identity that follows from the Declaration’s principles, he argued that the American polity was not an actual
      The 1776 report
      29
      community at all but was reducible only to diverse majority and minority groups. Calhoun saw these groups as more
      or less permanent, slowly evolving products of their race and particular historical circumstances.
      Like modern-day proponents of identity politics, Calhoun believed that achieving unity through rational
      deliberation and political compromise was impossible; majority groups would only use the political process to
      oppress minority groups. In Calhoun’s America, respect for each group demanded that each hold a veto over the
      actions of the wider community. But Calhoun also argued that some groups must outrank others in the majoritarian
      decision-making process. In Calhoun’s America, one minority group—Southern slaveholders—could veto any
      attempt by the majority group—Northern States—to restrict or abolish the enslavement of another group. In the
      context of American history, the original form of identity politics was used to defend slavery.
      As American history teaches, dividing citizens into identity groups, especially on the basis of race, is a recipe
      for stoking enmity among all citizens. It took the torrent of blood spilled in the Civil War and decades of subsequent
      struggles to expunge Calhoun’s idea of group hierarchies from American public life. Nevertheless, activists pushing
      identity politics want to resuscitate a modified version of his ideas, rejecting the Declaration’s principle of equality
      and defining Americans once again in terms of group hierarchies. They aim to make this the defining creed of
      American public life, and they have been working for decades to bring it about.
      Intellectual Origins of Identity Politics
      The modern revival of identity politics stems from mid-20th century European thinkers who sought the
      revolutionary overthrow of their political and social systems but were disillusioned by the working class’s lack of
      interest in inciting revolution. This setback forced revolutionaries to reconsider their strategy.
      One of the most prominent, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, argued that the focus should not be on
      economic revolution as much as taking control of the institutions that shape culture. In Gramsci’s language,
      revolutionaries should focus on countering the “Hegemonic Narrative” of the established culture with a “Counter-
      Narrative,” creating a counter-culture that subverts and seeks to destroy the established culture.
      Gramsci was an important influence on the thinkers of the “Frankfurt School” in Germany, who developed a
      set of revolutionary ideas called Critical Theory. Herbert Marcuse, one member of the Frankfurt School who
      immigrated to the United States in the 1940s, became the intellectual godfather of American identity politics. With
      little hope that the white American worker could be coaxed to revolution, Marcuse focused not on instigating class
      conflict but on instigating cultural conflicts around racial identity. He saw revolutionary potential in “the substratum
      of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors.”
      These ideas led to the development of Critical Race Theory, a variation of critical theory applied to the
      American context that stresses racial divisions and sees society in terms of minority racial groups oppressed by the
      white majority. Equally significant to its intellectual content is the role Critical Race Theory plays in promoting
      fundamental social transformation. Following Gramsci’s strategy of taking control of the culture, Marcuse’s followers
      use the approach of Critical Race Theory to impart an oppressor-victim narrative upon generations of Americans.
      This work of cultural revolution has been going on for decades, and its first political reverberations can be seen in
      1960s America.
      The 1776 report
      30
      The Radicalization of American Politics in the 1960s
      Prior to the 1960s, movements in American history that sought to end racial and sexual discrimination, such
      as abolition, women’s suffrage, or the Civil Rights Movement, did so on the ground set by the Declaration of
      Independence.
      In leading the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King, Jr., was aware that other, more revolutionary
      groups wanted to fight in terms of group identities. In his “I Have a Dream” speech, King rejected hateful
      stereotyping based on a racialized group identity. The “marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro
      community must not lead us to distrust all white people,” he warned. King refused to define Americans in terms of
      permanent racialized identities and called on Americans “to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to
      the solid rock of brotherhood” and see ourselves as one nation united by a common political creed and commitment
      to Christian love.
      “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of
      Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” King wrote. “This
      note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights to
      life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
      As the 1960s advanced, however, many rejected King’s formulation of civil rights and reframed debates
      about equality in terms of racial and sexual identities. The Civil Rights Movement came to abandon the
      nondiscrimination and equal opportunity of colorblind civil rights in favor of “group rights” and preferential
      treatment. A radical women’s liberation movement reimagined America as a patriarchal system, asserting that every
      woman is a victim of oppression by men. The Black Power and black nationalist movements reimagined America as a
      white supremacist regime. Meanwhile, other activists constructed artificial groupings to further divide Americans by
      race, creating new categories like “Asian American” and “Hispanic” to teach Americans to think of themselves in
      terms of group identities and to rouse various groups into politically cohesive bodies.
      The Incompatibility of Identity Politics with American Principles
      Identity politics divide Americans by placing them perpetually in conflict with each other. This extreme
      ideology assaults and undermines the American principle of equality in several key ways.
      First, identity politics attacks American self-government. Through the separation of powers and the system
      of checks and balances, American constitutionalism prevents any one group from having complete control of the
      government. In order to form a majority, the various groups that comprise the nation must resolve their
      disagreements in light of shared principles and come to a deliberative consensus over how best to govern. In the
      American system, public policy is decided by prudential compromise among different interest groups for the sake of
      the common good.
      Identity politics, on the other hand, sees politics as the realm of permanent conflict and struggle among
      racial, gender, and other groups, and no compromise between different groups is possible. Rational deliberation and
      compromise only preserve the oppressive status quo. Instead, identity politics relies on humiliation, intimidation, and
      The 1776 report
      31
      coercion. American self-government, where all citizens are equal before the law, is supplanted by a system where
      certain people use their group identity to get what they want.
      Second, by dividing Americans into oppressed and oppressor groups, activists of identity politics propose to
      punish some citizens – many times for wrongs their ancestors allegedly committed – while rewarding others.
      Members of oppressed groups must ascend, and members of oppressor groups must descend. This new system denies
      that human beings are endowed with the same rights, and creates new hierarchies with destructive assumptions and
      practices.
      On the one hand, members of oppressed groups are told to abandon their shared civic identity as Americans
      and think of themselves in terms of their sexual or racial status. The consequence is that they should no longer see
      themselves as agents responsible for their own actions but as victims controlled by impersonal forces. In a word, they
      must reject, not affirm, the Declaration’s understanding of self-government according to the consent of the governed.
      If members of oppressed groups want to become free, they must rely upon a regime of rewards and privileges
      assigned according to group identity.
      On the other hand, members of oppressor groups merit public humiliation at the hands of others. Diversity
      training programs, for example, force members of “oppressor” groups to confess before their co-workers how they
      contribute to racism. Educational programs based on identity politics often use a person’s race to degrade or ostracize
      them.
      These degradations of individuals on the basis of race expose the lie that identity politics promotes the equal
      protection of rights. Advocates of identity politics argue that all hate speech should be banned but then define hate
      speech as only applying to protected identity groups who are in turn free to say whatever they want about their
      purported oppressors. This leads to a “cancel culture” that punishes those who violate the terms of identity politics.
      Third, identity politics denies the fundamental moral tenet of the Declaration, that human beings are equal
      by nature. This founding principle provides a permanent and immutable standard for remedying wrongs done to
      Americans on the basis of race, sex, or any group identity.
      Repudiating this universal tenet, activists pushing identity politics rely instead on cultural and historical
      generalizations about which groups have stronger moral claims than others. They claim this approach offers a superior
      and more historically sensitive moral standard. But unlike the standard based on a common humanity—what Lincoln
      called “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times”—their historical standard is not permanent. Rather, it
      adjusts to meet the political fashions of a particular moment. By this standard, ethnicities that were once considered
      “oppressed” can in short order turn into “oppressors,” and a standard that can turn a minority from victim to villain
      within the course of a few years is no standard at all.
      Fourth, identity-politics activists often are radicals whose political program is fundamentally incompatible
      not only with the principles of the Declaration of Independence but also the rule of law embodied by the United
      States Constitution. Antagonism to the creed expressed in the Declaration seems not an option but a necessary part of
      their strategy. When activists are discussing seemingly innocuous campaigns to promote “diversity,” they are often
      aiming for fundamental structural change.
      The 1776 report
      32
      Conclusion
      Identity politics is fundamentally incompatible with the principle of equality enshrined in the Declaration of
      Independence.
      Proponents of identity politics rearrange Americans by group identities, rank them by how much oppression
      they have experienced at the hands of the majority culture, and then sow division among them. While not as barbaric
      or dehumanizing, this new creed creates new hierarchies as unjust as the old hierarchies of the antebellum South,
      making a mockery of equality with an ever-changing scale of special privileges on the basis of racial and sexual
      identities. The very idea of equality under the law—of one nation sharing King’s “solid rock of brotherhood”—is not
      possible and, according to this argument, probably not even desirable.
      All Americans, and especially all educators, should understand identity politics for what it is: rejection of the
      principle of equality proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. As a nation, we should oppose such efforts to
      divide us and reaffirm our common faith in the fundamental equal right of every individual to life, liberty, and the
      pursuit of happiness.
      The 1776 report
      33
      Appendix IV
      Teaching Americans about Their Country
      America’s founders understood the importance of education to the long-term success or failure of the
      American experiment in self-government. Liberty and learning are intimately intertwined and rely on each other for
      protection and nurturing. As James Madison noted, “What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than
      that of Liberty and Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual and surest support?”
      Education in civics, history, and literature holds the central place in the well-being of both students and
      communities. For republican government, citizens with such an education are essential. The knowledge of human
      nature and unalienable rights—understanding what it means to be human—brings a deeper perspective to public
      affairs, for the simple reason that educated citizens will take encouragement or warning from our past in order to
      navigate the present.
      A wholesome education also passes on the stories of great Americans from the past who have contributed
      their genius, sacrifices, and lives to build and preserve this nation. They strengthen the bond that a vast and diverse
      people can point to as that which makes us one community, fostered by civil political conversation and a shared and
      grateful memory.
      The crucial contribution that a quality civics education makes to the well-being of America and its citizens is
      love for our country, properly understood. A healthy attachment to this country—true patriotism—is neither blind
      to its flaws nor fanatical in believing that America is the source of all good. Rather, the right sort of love of country
      holds it up to an objective standard of right and wrong, with the desire and intent that the country do what is right.
      Where the country has done what is good, citizens justly praise those who came before them. Where it has done
      wrong, they should criticize the country and work to make sure that we—the people who govern it—do what is
      right.
      Rather than cast aside the serious study of America’s founding principles or breed contempt for America’s
      heritage, our educational system should aim to teach students about the true principles and history of their country—
      a history that is “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling.”
      The Misuse of History
      To begin such an education, we must first avoid an all-too-common mistake. It is wrong to think of history
      by itself as the standard for judgment. The standard is set by unchanging principles that transcend history. Our
      founders called these “self-evident truths” and published these truths for all the world to see in the Declaration of
      Independence: there are “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” that inform human interactions, all human beings are
      created equal, and all human beings have fundamental rights that are theirs as human beings, not the gift of
      government.
      Consider the subject of slavery. At the time the Declaration was written, between fifteen and twenty
      percent of the American people were held as slaves. This brutal, humiliating fact so contradicted the principles of
      equality and liberty announced in 1776 that many people now make the mistake of denouncing equality and liberty.
      Yet as we condemn slavery now, we learn from the founders’ public statements and private letters that they
      condemned it then. One great reason they published the Declaration’s bold words was to show that slavery is a
      The 1776 report
      34
      wrong according to nature and according to God. With this Declaration, they started the new nation on a path that
      would lead to the end of slavery. As Abraham Lincoln explained, the founding generation was in no position to end
      this monstrous crime in one stroke, but they did mean “to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might
      follow as fast as circumstances should permit.”
      The point is this: The key to freedom for all is discovered in the moral standard proclaimed in the
      Declaration. It would, the founders hoped, prove to be the key that would unlock the door to equality and liberty for
      all. History tells the story of how our country has succeeded—and at times failed—in living up to the standard of
      right and wrong. Our task as citizens in a national community is to live—and it is the task of teachers to teach—so as
      to keep our community in line with our principles.
      The purpose of genuine, liberal education is to come to know what it means to be free. Education seeks
      knowledge of the nature of things, especially of human nature and of the universe as a whole. Man is that special part
      of the universe that seeks to know where we stand within it. We wonder about its origins. The human person is
      driven by a yearning for self-knowledge, seeking to understand the essential nature and purpose of his or her life and
      what it means to carry that life out in relationship with others.
      The surest guides for this quest to understand freedom and human nature are the timeless works of
      philosophy, political thought, literature, history, oratory, and art that civilization has produced. Contrary to what is
      sometimes claimed, these works are not terribly difficult to identify: they are marked by their foundational and
      permanent character and their ability to transcend the time and landscape of their creation. No honest, intelligent
      surveyor of human civilization could deny the unique brilliance of Homer or Plato, Dante or Shakespeare,
      Washington or Lincoln, Melville or Hawthorne.
      But far too little of this guidance is given in American classrooms today. In most K-12 social studies and
      civics classes, serious study of the principles of equality and liberty has vanished. The result has been a rising
      generation of young citizens who know little about the origins and stories of their country, and less about the true
      standards of equality and liberty. This trend is neither new nor unreported, but it is leaving a terrible and growing
      void as students suffer from both the ignorance of not realizing what they lack, and a certain arrogance that they have
      no need to find out.
      The Decline of American Education
      This pronounced decline of American education began in the late nineteenth century when progressive
      reformers began discarding the traditional understanding of education. The old understanding involved conveying a
      body of transcendent knowledge and practical wisdom that had been passed down for generations and which aimed to
      develop the character and intellect of the student. The new education, by contrast, pursued contradictory goals that
      are at the same time mundane and unrealistically utopian.
      In the view of these progressive educators, human nature is ever-changing, so the task of the new education
      was to remake people in order to improve the human condition. They sought to reshape students in the image they
      thought best, and education became an effort to engineer the way students think.
      This new education deemed itself “pragmatic,” subordinating America’s students to the demands of the new
      industrial economy for skills-based, jobs-oriented training. Rather than examine the past for those unchanging truths
      and insights into our shared humanity, students today are taught to assume that the founders’ views were narrow and
      deficient: that’s just how people used to think, but we know better now.
      The 1776 report
      35
      Under this new approach, the only reason to study the works of Aristotle, Shakespeare, or America’s
      founders is not to learn how to be virtuous, self-governing citizens, not to learn anything true, good, or beautiful, but
      to realize how such figures of yesteryear are unfit for the present day. Such a vision of education teaches that ideas
      evolve as human progress marches on, as supposedly old and worn ideas are cast aside on the so-called “wrong side of
      history.”
      This new education replaced humane and liberal education in many places, and alienated Americans from
      their own nature, their own identities, and their own place and time. It cuts students off from understanding that
      which came before them. Like square pegs and round holes, students are made to fit the latest expert theory about
      where history is headed next.
      As the twentieth century continued, these progressive views reached their logical apex: there is no ultimate
      or objective truth, only various expressions of different cultures’ beliefs. Wittingly or unwittingly, progressives
      concluded that truth is an ideological construct created by those with inordinate wealth and power to further their
      own particular agendas. In such a relativist environment, progressive education may as well impose its own
      ideological construct on the future. They did not call it indoctrination, but that is what it is.
      Since the 1960s, an even more radicalized challenge has emerged. This newer challenge arrived under the
      feel-good names of “liberation” and “social justice.” Instead of offering a comprehensive, unifying human story, these
      ideological approaches diminish our shared history and disunite the country by setting certain communities against
      others. History is no longer tragic but melodramatic, in which all that can be learned from studying the past is that
      groups victimize and oppress each other.
      By turning to bitterness and judgment, distorted histories of those like Howard Zinn or the journalists
      behind the “1619 Project” have prevented their students from learning to think inductively with a rich repository of
      cultural, historical, and literary referents. Such works do not respect their students’ independence as young thinkers
      trying to grapple with social complexity while forming their empirical judgments about it. They disdain today’s
      students, just as they doubt the humanity, goodness, or benevolence in America’s greatest historical figures. They see
      only weaknesses and failures, teaching students truth is an illusion, that hypocrisy is everywhere, and that power is all
      that matters.
      A few reforms of note have been attempted to improve America’s civic educational system, but they fail to
      address the key problems.
      The first was embraced with good intentions. Common Core appeared to be a promising way for the
      federal government to supply a framework to improve the nation’s schools. But the Constitution leaves education to
      the states and localities and denies the federal government any authority to impose what it wants to be taught in the
      nation’s schools. To surmount this obstacle, the federal government used significant federal funding to entice states
      to adopt Common Core. Nevertheless, within a few years it became clear that students in states that “voluntarily”
      adopted Common Core suffered significantly lower academic performance and fewer marketable skills than
      comparable cohorts of students who had been educated outside the Common Core regime. This system of
      micromanaged “standards” proved to be a recipe for bureaucratic control and sterile conformity instead of a pathway
      towards better instruction. We learned from the failed Common Core experiment that one-size-fits-all national
      models are a blueprint for trivializing and mechanizing learning.
      The 1776 report
      36
      A more recently proposed remedy is called the “New Civics” (or “Action Civics”). The progressive approach
      to education rests on the faulty notion that knowledge concerning long-term human and social concerns is divided
      between “facts” (scientific data separated from judgments about right and wrong) and “values” (preferences about
      moral matters, such as justice, which are said to have no objective status). Most students, yearning to make the
      world better, find the study of “facts” boring and meaningless. The New Civics approach is to prioritize a values-
      oriented praxis over fact-based knowledge. As a result, New Civics uses direct community service and political
      action (such as protesting for gun control or lobbying for laws to address climate change) to teach students to bring
      change to the system itself. Under this guise, civics education becomes less about teaching civic knowledge and more
      about encouraging contemporary policy positions.
      However well-intended, the New Civics only aggravates the already inherent problems of progressive
      education. Dispensing with ideas that transcend and inform history, students lack criteria for judging what a
      politically healthy nation looks like and they cannot defend what practical actions actually would improve the health
      of their community. A well-formulated education in political and moral principles is the necessary source of the
      knowledge citizens need to make wise judgments about voting, demonstrating, or any other civic activity. By
      neglecting true civic education, the New Civics movement only compounds the mistakes of today’s conventional
      education in civics.
      What is Authentic Education?
      There are many aspects of formal education. The importance of professional education and technical training
      is not here in dispute. There is no question that one crucial purpose of education is to equip individuals with the
      knowledge and skills they need to provide for themselves and their families. More fundamental is the broader and
      deeper education called liberal education.
      Education liberates human beings in the true sense—liberation from ignorance and confusion, from
      prejudice and delusion, and from untamed passions and fanciful hopes that degrade and destroy us as civilized
      persons. It helps us see the world clearly and honestly. In revealing human nature, it reveals what is right and good
      for human beings: authentic education is not “value-neutral” but includes moral education that explains the standards
      for right and wrong. It takes up the hard but essential task of character formation. Such an education can form free
      men and free women—self-reliant and responsible persons capable of governing themselves as individuals and taking
      part in self-government.
      Such an education starts by teaching that all Americans are equal members of one national community. The
      unique character and talents of each person should be recognized and developed. The wide experiences and the
      varied backgrounds of our citizens should be respected and honored. But the truths that equality and liberty belong
      by nature to every human being without exception must be taught as the moral basis of civic friendship, economic
      opportunity, citizenship, and political freedom.
      Such an education respects students’ intelligence and thirst for the truth. It is unafraid both to focus on the
      contributions made by the exceptional few, or acknowledge those that are less powerful, less fortunate, weaker, or
      marginalized. With the principle of equality as a foundation, such an education can incorporate the study of injustice
      and of tragedy in human affairs—including the American story’s uglier parts—and patiently addresses the ways
      injustices can be corrected.
      Rather than learning to hate one’s country or the world for its inevitable wrongs, the well-educated student
      learns to appreciate and cherish the oases of civilization: solid family structures and local communities; effective,
      The 1776 report
      37
      representative, and limited government; the rule of law and the security of civil rights and private property; a love of
      the natural world and the arts; good character and religious faith.
      In the American context, an essential purpose of this honest approach is to encourage citizens to embrace
      and cultivate love of country. Thoughtful citizens embrace their national community not only because it is their own,
      but also because they see what it can be at its best. Just as students know their family members have good qualities
      and flaws, good education will reckon the depths and heights of our common history.
      Genuine Civics Education
      Civics and government classes should rely almost exclusively on primary sources. Primary sources link
      students with the real events and persons they are studying. The writings, speeches, first-hand accounts, and
      documents of those who were acting out the drama of history open a genuine communication, mediated by the
      written word, between historical figures and students that can bring to life the past. Primary sources without
      selective editing also allow students to study principles and arguments unfiltered by present-day historians’ biases and
      agendas.
      It is important for students to learn the reasons America’s founders gave for building our country as they
      did. Students should learn and contemplate what the founders’ purposes, hopes, and greatest concerns truly were,
      and primary sources will help them begin these considerations. Students should not read the Declaration of
      Independence as archaeology but as the idea that animates our nation with claims that are true for all time. As
      Alexander Hamilton reminds us in one of those primary documents (his 1775 essay Farmer Refuted),
      The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as
      with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or
      obscured by mortal power.
      Civics and government classes ought to teach students about the philosophical principles and foundations of
      the American republic, including natural law, natural rights, human equality, liberty, and constitutional self-
      government. Students should learn the reasons why our constitutional order is structured as a representative
      democracy and why a constitutional republic includes such features as the separation of powers, checks and balances,
      and federalism. They should study the benefits and achievements of our constitutional order, the Civil War’s
      challenge to that order, and the ways the Constitution has been changed—not only by amendment and not always for
      the better—over the course of time. Finally, these classes ought to culminate in the student’s understanding and
      embracing the responsibilities of good citizenship.
      A genuine civics education focuses on fundamental questions concerning the American experiment in self-
      government. The best way to proceed is for the teacher to assign core original documents to students to read as
      carefully and thoroughly as they are able and then initiate age-appropriate discussion to surface and consider the
      meaning of the document. Teachers will find that students of every age have a genuine interest in engaging in
      discussion (and disagreement) about what these documents say, because they soon realize these enduring words speak
      to their own lives and experiences.
      Using the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers, the following are a few
      examples of prompts teachers can use to encourage civics discussion amongst students:
      The 1776 report
      38
      •
      What does human equality mean in the statement that “all men are created equal”? Equal in what
      respects? What view of human nature does this presuppose? Does the Declaration intend to include
      African Americans, as Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King, Jr., all insisted?
      •
      What does the Declaration mean by asserting that all persons possess rights that are not “alienable”?
      Who or what, precisely, can alienate our rights? Are all rights deemed inalienable, or only some? And if
      the latter, why are they different?
      •
      Why did the founding generation consider government’s powers to be “just” only when government is
      instituted by the consent of the governed? Is justice for the founders based on nothing more than
      consent? What considerations might be more authoritative than consent?
      •
      At the time the Federalist Papers were being written, the new Constitution did not include the Bill of
      Rights. What are the rights and protections enumerated in the Bill of Rights and how did they come to
      be amendments to the Constitution?
      •
      Why did the founders opt for representative democracy over the “pure” version of democracy practiced
      in ancient Athens? How do the two kinds of democracy differ? What did the Federalist assert was the
      inadequacy of ancient democracy?
      •
      How does the Constitution seek to reconcile democracy, which means rule by the majority, with the
      rights of minorities? Stated differently, how does the Constitution do justice both to the equality of all
      and to the liberty of each? What exactly is the difference between a democracy and republic?
      •
      What economic conditions make American democracy possible? Could American democracy under the
      Constitution be reconciled with any and every economic system? Why does the Constitution protect
      property rights? Why do critics of American democracy such as Karl Marx believe that private property
      (protected by our Constitution) is the root of injustice? How would Madison and Hamilton have
      responded to Marx and his followers’ criticisms?
      •
      Students should read the best-known speeches and writings of progressive presidents Woodrow
      Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt on economic democracy. In what ways do they
      differ from the principles and structure of the Constitution? Would the Constitution need to be
      significantly amended to fit their proposals? Apart from amendments, in what other ways has
      progressivism changed our constitutional system?
      •
      Implicit in these questions are other basic documents and major speeches that every American citizen
      should study. The questions concerning the meaning of human equality, inalienable rights, popular
      consent, and the right of revolution call for a fresh examination—in the light of the Declaration—of
      such key works as Frederick Douglass’s speech on “The Meaning of the Fourth of July to the Negro” and
      Chief Justice Taney’s infamous opinion for the Supreme Court majority in Dred Scott v. Sandford (holding
      that African-Americans “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect”). Douglass’s and
      Lincoln’s scathing criticisms of Taney’s pro-slavery opinion should be taught with these as well.
      The 1776 report
      39
      •
      Students should read the 1848 Seneca Falls “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions” calling for
      women’s suffrage, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Why did Elizabeth Cady
      Stanton look to the form and substance of the Declaration of Independence in crafting the Seneca Falls
      Declaration? What did King mean in asserting that the Declaration of Independence and the
      Constitution constituted a “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir”?
      These questions cover just a sample of the issues that come to the fore as students read the primary
      documents of the founding and history of America. Other less fundamental but still important documents, speeches,
      and topics could be added. Recognizing that political activism has no place in formal education, mock civics and
      community service projects should be encouraged.
      Conclusion
      Among the virtues to be cultivated in the American republic, the founders knew that a free people must
      have a knowledge of the principles and practices of liberty, and an appreciation of their origins and challenges.
      While this country has its imperfections, just like any other country, in the annals of history the United
      States has achieved the greatest degree of personal freedom, security, and prosperity for the greatest proportion of its
      own people and for others around the world. These results are the good fruit of the ideas the founding generation
      expressed as true for all people at all times and places.
      An authentic civics education will help rebuild our common bonds, our mutual friendship, and our civic
      devotion. But we cannot love what we do not know.
      This is why civics education, education relating to the citizen, must begin with knowledge, which is, as
      George Washington reminds us, “the surest basis of public happiness.”
      The 1776 report
      40
      The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission
      Larry P. Arnn, Chair
      Carol Swain, Vice Chair
      Matthew Spalding, Executive Director
      Phil Bryant
      Jerry Davis
      Michael Farris
      Gay Hart Gaines
      John Gibbs
      Mike Gonzalez
      Victor Davis Hanson
      Charles Kesler
      Peter Kirsanow
      Thomas Lindsay
      Bob McEwen
      Ned Ryun
      Julie Strauss
      Ex-officio Members
      Michael Pompeo, Secretary of State
      Christopher C. Miller, Acting Secretary of Defense
      David L. Bernhardt, Secretary of the Interior
      Ben Carson, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
      Mitchell M. Zais, Acting Secretary of Education
      Brooke Rollins, Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy
      Doug Hoelscher, Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs
      The Commission is grateful to the following individuals who assisted with the preparation of the 1776
      Report: William Bock, Alexandra Campana, Ariella Campana, Joshua Charles, Brian Morgenstern, Macy
      Mount, McKenzie Snow, and Alec Torres.
      Adam Honeysett, Designated Federal Officer.