The Enduring Wisdom of America's Founding Documents

A liberal reading of the Declaration of Independence.

(Photo via Getty Images.)

“Why Liberalism” is a series by Persuasion in collaboration with the Institute for Humane Studies. In August, Jeffery Tyler Syck argued that equality is not the bogeyman right-wing critics of liberalism make it out to be. Today, William Galston embarks on a tour de force analysis of the Declaration of Independence in response to antiliberal critiques.

To read the other essays in the series, click here. To receive future installments directly into your inbox, subscribe to Persuasion today!

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Why liberalism? I am tempted to reply, as I have before: because all things considered, it is the best form of government possible under modern conditions and—if pressed for evidence—drop a footnote to Jonathan Rauch’s comprehensive case for the affirmative in this series.

But matters are not so simple. Liberalism is under attack on many fronts. In practice, like all forms of government, liberal regimes are judged more by their fruits than by their roots, and for many less educated members of liberal societies, the fruits have been bitter during the past generation. Critics have attributed this outcome not to policy mistakes, but to the flawed roots of the liberal enterprise itself.

In this essay I will explore these claims, using the United States as my main example and the Declaration of Independence as my topos. Throughout, I will endeavor to take the critics of liberalism seriously in the spirit of John Stuart Mill, who rightly observed that “he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”

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The Declaration of Independence is the founding charter of American liberalism, which is why a careful reading of this document can help blunt several of the charges that antiliberals often level at liberal governance.

Many supporters (and critics) of the Declaration can recite the document’s “we hold these truths to be self-evident” second paragraph by heart, but few have paid equal attention to its first paragraph. It’s worth quoting it in full:

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.

The first critique I will deal with is the often-repeated claim that liberalism is abstract universalism, blind to the power of particular customs and history. To the familiar thesis that America is a “creedal nation”—or, as Abraham Lincoln famously put it, “a nation dedicated to [a] proposition”—antiliberals juxtapose ties of consanguinity, language, geography, memory, and religion.

As the drafters of the Declaration understood, however, this is a false choice: a political community can be both dedicated to what it takes to be universal truths and shaped by particular traditions. Indeed, the Declaration begins by squarely situating the emerging American nation within historical particularity. Americans are now a “people,” it says, distinct from the British people and connected to them by “political bands” that it has become necessary to dissolve. When this happens, Americans (like all peoples) are entitled to claim an independent self-governing status that is equal to as well as separate from all others.

It’s worth examining the implications of this claim in detail.

Human beings are not abstract ciphers; they form collectivities with characteristics that distinguish each from the rest. These collectivities are not ahistorical, fixed for all time; they evolve. Americans were not a distinct people when they landed at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock; their collective identity arose through shared experiences in a new land and through interactions with a distant king and Parliament whose understanding of the colonies was often remote from their lived reality—and ultimately at odds with their interests and sentiments.

In Federalist #2, John Jay tried his hand at identifying the commonalities that had forged Americans into a distinct people. They were, he claimed,

… 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.

While historians have poked holes in many of these claims, the point is the particularist terms in which Jay cast them. Of course, the identity of the American people has evolved over time. Whatever may have been the case when Jay wrote Federalist #2—and indeed when the Declaration of Independence was drafted—descent from the same ancestors and practicing the same religion are no longer conditions for full membership—even though a small but vocal minority still believes that you can’t be a “real American” unless you are of European stock and profess some form of Christianity.

But despite these changes, key elements of the particularism that shapes Americans remain. We share customs; we inherit (or acquire) a distinctive history; generations of immigrants have learned the language that infants born in America imbibe from parents and peers; we pledge allegiance to the same flag; we love the same country above all others; although some are loathe to admit it, becoming American continues to mean learning English, American history, and civics, adopting some version of prevailing customs and manners, taking an oath to defend the Constitution, and being willing to defend the country that has admitted you into its ranks.

In his speech to the 2024 Republican National Convention, JD Vance—the Republican vice-presidential nominee whose outlook has been shaped by the New Right—insisted that America is “not just an idea” but also a “homeland” in which geography and memory matter. He invoked the mountain cemetery in Eastern Kentucky where his ancestors are buried and where he hopes to be interred alongside them.

In principle, at least, there is no need for the defenders of liberalism to disagree. The authors of the Declaration and the Framers of the Constitution certainly did not. Neither did Abraham Lincoln, the greatest defender of American “propositional” liberalism, who invoked the “mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land” in a futile effort to ward off civil war. What liberals cannot accept is the elimination of what Vance calls the “idea” of America as a core element of shared citizenship in favor of a “blood and soil” conception.

Despite its universalist dimension, however, the notion of a “people” found in the Declaration’s opening paragraph does not mean that liberals must believe in open borders—a charge often leveled at them by antiliberals like Vance. Yes, non-citizens are our moral equals; all human beings are. But moral equality does not imply, let alone require, a right to be admitted into a political community that is not one’s own.

To be sure, circumstances can generate a humanitarian duty to admit people in dire circumstances, just as there is a duty to rescue a drowning man if it does not entail undue risk to one’s own life. But liberalism does not rule out justified self-preference, for either individuals or collectivities. The national interest, rightly understood, can serve as a reasonable standard for immigration policy without contradicting liberal principles. Exclusionary policies become illiberal only when they rest on the belief that some people have lesser moral worth than others.

This brings me to the affirmation of moral equality found in the second paragraph of the Declaration.

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How Liberal Societies Learn

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I have proceeded thus far under the assumption that the liberal principles so memorably sketched in the Declaration are sound, an assertion that antiliberals deny. I turn now to the status of these principles, and to the alternatives to them, proceeding through the document’s famous second paragraph:

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. …

I begin with the introduction: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” The “we” is not only the document’s authors, but also the American people—or so Thomas Jefferson claimed. In a letter penned a year before his death, he asserted that the Declaration was an “expression of the American mind,” in commonsense terms “so plain and firm as to command . . . assent.” In this respect, it was a spectacular success, but it came with a cost: treating liberal principles as self-evident invited liberals to forget the arguments that bolster their principles—and that there are alternatives to them.

Today’s antiliberals have taken advantage of this amnesia. To see how, and to what effect, let’s go step by step.

“All men are created equal.”

Slaveowners denied this before the civil war, and Nietzschean antiliberals do so now. If human beings are unequal in worth, their interests and concerns may rightly be given less weight, or none at all. They may be treated as means to others’ end and not as ends in themselves. For liberals, this consequence is a reductio ad absurdum; for antiliberals bold enough to deny moral equality, it represents a natural hierarchy that liberals seek to repress.

But what sort of equality are we talking about? Confusion arises because individuals differ in every observable respect. Some are more intelligent, more virtuous, or stronger than others. A few are endowed with extraordinary talents—for music and the arts, physics and mathematics, literary imagination, surgery, flying complex aircraft, and so forth. Some have high tolerance for risk, the predicate for great success and huge disaster alike. Groups may differ culturally in ways that incline them toward different professions and ways of life.

In liberal societies, these differences often lead to economic and social inequalities, which are sometimes regarded (wrongly) as denials of moral equality. Liberals do their cause no favor by eliding the difference between these forms of inequality. The Declaration is concerned primarily with moral equality, which is perfectly compatible with inequality of income and wealth, at least up to a point. (It is not compatible with inequalities that prevent some individuals from acquiring the education and skills needed to participate in economic life, or from being recognized as full members of their society.) If liberals argue that equality in one respect ought to entail equality in all respects—as some progressives do today—then antiliberals will win the argument by appealing to common sense. This is not the meaning of equality found in the Declaration.

“They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

These words pose a deep challenge to those liberals who cannot in good conscience accept a Creator God: if religious belief is not the basis for individual rights, what is? This question is too vast to detain us here—but thoughtful liberals cannot avoid it without ceding the field to antiliberals who will provide their own answers.

There are more immediate difficulties, however. This line affirms the existence of natural rights—rights that exist beyond the positive prescriptions of governments or law. The idea of natural rights has been criticized from numerous directions. The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, for example, asserted that “‘natural rights’ is simple nonsense; ‘natural and imprescriptible rights’, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense on stilts.” He argued that, instead, the goal of doing the greatest good for the greatest number is the main end of politics.

The most compelling response to Bentham, laid out in the early sections of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, is that the utilitarian principle permits (and may even require) unconscionable treatment for the individuals and groups whose interests must be overridden to pursue that greatest good for the greatest number. Rights make concrete the belief that no individuals should be subject to slavery, torture, or oppression, whatever the collective good that such treatment may produce.

Yet this understanding of rights leads some contemporary antiliberals to argue that liberal rights-claims are antithetical to the pursuit of the “common good.” Their concern is not frivolous, at least in principle. In practice, however, their objections collide with the fact that the content of the common good is not self-evident and that reasonable people can disagree about what it requires. In liberal political communities, the meaning of the common good is developed through public discussion in which individuals exercise their right to speak freely and choose collectively. From a liberal standpoint, the people must accept a conception of the common good; it cannot be imposed on them, and they may alter this conception when sentiments or circumstances change.

Antiliberals also argue that the liberal focus on rights reflects and drives an individualism that undermines social bonds and group solidarity. A system of rights gives short shrift to the responsibilities we have toward others and to the duties we owe them. Liberals point out that we do have a duty: to respect the rights of others. Antiliberals will reply that this conception of duty is too thin to sustain a decent society.

They have a point. Having a right to do X means that neither other individuals nor the government may legitimately prevent you from doing X.

Nevertheless, the premise that “I have a right to do X” does not entail the conclusion that “X is the right thing to do.” We do not, for example, consent to be the children of our parents, but we have obligations to them that we cannot rightly ignore. And even if we have the right to make rude, cutting remarks about others, there may be compelling moral reasons not to do so.

In order to answer the antiliberal charge that liberal rights erode all duties, liberals should be comfortable adopting a richer moral vocabulary that also invokes responsibilities whose binding force does not rest on consent. This will more accurately reflect the way most liberals already live their lives. It is fully compatible with the ideal of “unalienable rights” found in the Declaration.

“Among [them] are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

While they may appear simple on the surface, these three enumerated rights are not self-explanatory. For example, liberalism as such does not have a settled view on what constitutes “life” or on when it begins and ends. You can oppose abortion and euthanasia without ceasing to be a liberal, even though some objections do clearly rest on illiberal foundations.

This points to a broader truth about liberalism: it is not, as some of its critics allege, a comprehensive doctrine of human nature and the human condition, let alone the metaphysical nature of reality. In this respect it is incomplete, allowing people with different views on these matters to converge on shared principles of political order. Some liberals are optimists about human nature and embrace the doctrine of inevitable historical progress; other liberals (I count myself among them) focus on our species’ capacity for evil and regard the belief in progress as a dangerous delusion. Not all comprehensive accounts are compatible with liberal politics, but many are, including some (such as Catholicism) long regarded as being irremediably hostile to it.

The concepts of “liberty” and “the pursuit of happiness” are similarly left unspecified, opening liberalism to a potent line of attack. Critics charge that liberalism cannot distinguish between liberty and license, or between worthy and degrading conceptions of happiness. Where liberals see space to conduct what Mill called “experiments in living,” its critics see moral anarchy.

Throughout the evolution of liberalism, some of its proponents have worked to counter these charges by offering thicker accounts of human flourishing. I find many of these accounts valuable (including, I must confess, my own). But in practice, the critics have a point: beyond the familiar point that no one is free to violate another’s rights, liberal societies do have a hard time drawing lines between permissible and forbidden conduct.

But against this criticism, liberals can retreat to higher and more defensible ground by posing questions of their own: Who decides, the government or individuals? What is the evidence that government is more qualified to draw these lines than those who must live with the consequences of their decisions? If the choice comes down to a conception of liberty that allows individuals to make self-destructive mistakes versus one that opens the door to moral tyranny backed by force, liberals have good reason to stand their ground.

Liberals also can point to the historical evidence. Liberal societies have the capacity to decide which moral experiments they find acceptable. Six decades ago, few Americans accepted interracial marriage; now, nearly all do. In a single generation, the share of Americans who endorsed same-sex marriage moved from a small minority to a supermajority. By contrast, almost all Americans condemn infidelity within marriage, even if they are willing to tolerate leaders who have indulged in it. In other words, liberalism functions perfectly well without the government stepping in to define the meaning of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” A liberal society’s moral common sense often resolves such issues flexibly and responsively.

“To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

With this limpid sentence, we reach the heart of legitimate government as liberals understand it. Three points stand out.

First: Government has a single, overriding purpose—to secure the rights with which individuals are endowed. It falls short when it fails to protect these rights from invasion, whether from abroad or from within the community. It goes too far when it engages in activities unrelated to its purposes.

Second: Liberal government does not exist to inculcate virtue or specific religious beliefs. It cannot create morality police or impose a theocracy. Liberals have no choice but to resist contemporary antiliberals’ call for a fusion of religious and political authority, even in the unlikely event that a majority of the population endorses it. Rights are neither granted nor withdrawn by popular majorities, and a political leader is not God’s vicar on earth.

Third: Although liberal government is a means to secure rights, the institutions and authority needed to do so may vary with circumstances. It is up to the people to decide the form and extent of government. Only popular consent can give government its “just powers,” and—as the Declaration goes on to make clear—only the people can alter these powers, acting through the institutions they have authorized or, in dire circumstances, directly on their own behalf. In practice, this meant that the people needed to authorize the Constitution—and that their consent is necessary to amend it.

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Why You Should Feel Good About Liberalism

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Through experience, peoples learn that securing rights requires measures that they had not previously contemplated. A simple example: The Sixth Amendment gives every defendant in a criminal trial the right to have the “assistance of counsel.” But some defendants are unable to afford one, which is why government has stepped in to make the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee effective for all. This step has proved relatively uncontroversial. More controversial examples include Franklin D. Roosevelt’s statement that “Necessitous men are not free men” and that those who do not enjoy what he termed “freedom from want” lack the right to liberty in social and political life. Suffice it to say that the evolution of markets in liberal polities has posed further questions about the scope of government needed to secure rights for all.

The point here is that liberal principles frame all these questions but cannot resolve them. In the end, only the people can do so, acting through the institutions and representatives that they have authorized. It is this process of discovery that the framers had in mind when they wrote that government derives its powers from the “consent of the governed.”

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In the end, liberalism is a choice—for the moral equality of all human beings, for rights as protections for individuals against unrestrained collectivities, for popular consent rather than divine authorization as the basis of legitimate government. To the antiliberals arrayed in opposition, liberals can reply: “Our species tried out your way for millennia. The evidence of the past three centuries shows that our way is better for the vast majority.”

Despite this track record, however, the principles contained within the Declaration of Independence leave many people unsatisfied. Three facets of liberalism contribute to this sentiment.

First, while the liberal creed is capacious, it is not neutral. Freedom of expression challenges authority and settled ways of life. So does self-government. And so do well-regulated market economies, to which liberal governance is linked. In practice, liberalism means dynamism in a world where many people prize stability. Such people look with admiration to traditionalist autocrats such as Portugal’s Antonio Salazar and Spain’s Francisco Franco.

Second, liberalism fosters heterogeneity. In circumstances of liberty, people will reach different conclusions about how to lead their lives, and also about the policies that best promote the interests and principles of their country. Many liberals celebrate diversity as an unalloyed good; all consistent liberals accept it as the consequence of freedom, even when the views of their fellow citizens trouble them. Antiliberals, however, experience diversity as anarchy and yearn for unity, which free societies achieve, if ever, only in circumstances of war and catastrophe.

Third, liberalism embraces peace over war and reason over passion, and it sees commercial societies as promoting these objectives. For centuries, the opponents of liberalism have despised this way of life as petty and ignoble and have assaulted what they call “bourgeois society.” True greatness of soul is realized during armed conflict, they contend, and lives animated by grand passions are superior to those given over to self-interested calculation.

These objections are not without force; witness the romantic reaction to liberalism that erupted early in the 19th century and has returned periodically ever since. On occasion, even liberal societies need military greatness to surmount their external and internal foes—and the passions that lead reformers to sacrifice themselves for a cause. Liberals must hope that there is space within their societies for these virtues to develop; and indeed, experience suggests that they have been available in challenging times.

In the main, however, the liberalism of the Declaration aims at the virtues and wellbeing of ordinary citizens—taking responsibility for themselves and their families, obeying the law, pursuing modest prosperity with reasonable prospects of achieving it, and serving their country when duty calls. To promote these goals, liberals must enforce equal treatment under law for all, promote sustainable economic growth, and protect the institutions that are designed above all to minimize the risk of tyranny. Antiliberals may scorn societies and ways of life built on these foundations. But the modest virtues of liberal life will become evident as soon as autocrats set out to destroy them.

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One final point. Liberal societies are self-critical, regularly asking themselves whether their practices live up to their principles. This fact leads antiliberals to charge that liberals cannot be true patriots. “My country, right or wrong” should be the patriot’s creed, they insist. Instead, liberal principles generate non-stop criticism.

But antiliberals have forgotten how Senator Carl Schurz explicated their creed. “My country, right or wrong,” he declared. “If right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” Liberals believe that their country’s founding principles are fundamentally sound and can be used to correct its practices. Replying to Stephen Douglas in 1857, Abraham Lincoln insisted that the authors of the Declaration intended to establish 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.” In a similar vein, President Clinton declared in his First Inaugural Address, “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.”

These are the authentic voices of liberal patriotism. They are rejected by illiberal critics on the left, who charge America with the unpurgeable original sins of slavery and capitalist exploitation, and by illiberal critics on the right who insist, with Patrick Deneen, that “Liberalism . . . has failed because it has succeeded”: the more liberal principles are realized in practice, the sicker liberal societies become.

While liberals believe that a fair reading of history refutes this claim, they do not deny that the realization of liberal principles will disrupt longstanding practices, to the dismay of many citizens who derive a sense of security and stability from the established order. While Americans are now experiencing disruption on many fronts, liberals see eras of destabilization regularly giving way to periods of stability as changes are incorporated into revised patterns of social practice. Problems eventually develop within the new status quo and generate new demands for change, in a cycle that never ends.

In short, liberal patriotism means devotion to a form of politics in which practices change even as principles remain fixed. To those who cherish stability, this mutability entails unacceptable sacrifices. To this lament, liberals must reply that in the modern world, stability can be preserved only through forms of oppression that thwart political and economic freedom.

This choice is not unthinkable. No doubt some Portuguese would prefer to return to the frozen society that its authoritarian ruler Antonio Salazar imposed for nearly four decades, just as some traditionalist Catholics want to return their church to its 19^th century antiliberal stance. But (and here’s the important thing) most would not. It is a ground for optimism that the American people have been consistently willing to uphold the liberal ideals contained within the Declaration against antiliberal alternatives. Until most Americans are willing to surrender the principles that constitute the core of their history, liberalism’s critics will, thankfully, remain a dissenting, not dominant, voice.

William A. Galston is Ezra K. Zilkha Chair and senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution.

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The “Why Liberalism” series is a project of Persuasion in partnership with the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS). IHS is a non-profit organization that promotes a freer, more humane, and open society by connecting and supporting talented graduate students, scholars, and other intellectuals who are advancing the principles and practice of freedom. For additional information and details, media, programmatic, and funding opportunities, visit TheIHS.org.

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