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Visitors to the National Archives Museum in Washington view the original Declaration of Independence on Friday.Julia Demaree Nikhinson/The Associated Press
This might seem like a bad time to be talking about the wonders of American democracy.
The world’s most powerful nation is hardly a glowing democratic example at the moment. The destructive antics of its mad ruler have stained its reputation beyond measure. In the run-up to the country’s 250th anniversary, which falls this weekend, he chose to stage a fight on the White House lawn, called, of course, UFC Freedom 250. Today, the city on a hill that Ronald Reagan rhapsodized about looks more like a Biblical city of the plains, a warning rather than a model.
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In fact, this is the perfect occasion to remember what America stands for and why the American idea still matters.
Democracy is in retreat. The U.S. think tank Freedom House says that global freedom declined in 2025 for the 20th consecutive year. Autocrats from Moscow to Beijing, Pyongyang to Tehran, are sharpening their swords. Even in the established democracies, populism and extremism are threatening the pillars of democratic rule. In the United States, the president himself is taking an ax to those pillars, which shake with each succeeding blow.
Amid all this tumult, the words expressed in the American Declaration of Independence ring out.
In 1776, after a year of warfare with their British overlords, the leaders of the American colonies were ready for a final break with the motherland. Their declaration was designed to lay out a justification for taking such a radical step.
Yet it would do much more than that. In a few well-chosen words, Thomas Jefferson and his fellow founders managed to express the principles not just of the American Revolution but of the cause of freedom everywhere.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” says the declaration’s most famous passage, “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.”
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We could argue all day about whether the United States truly lived up to those ideals, then or later. If all men were created equal, what about Jefferson’s slaves? As Martin Luther King Jr. was to observe two centuries later, when it came to its Black citizens, America failed to deliver on the “promissory note” of its founding document.
What is indisputable is the impact of those 35 words. As familiar and often intoned as they are, they still land with freshness and force. “These truths” surely are self-evident – plain and obvious to anyone who can see, hear and think. We are all born equal. We deserve to live our lives in freedom. That right does not have to be bestowed on us. It is “unalienable.” It comes with being human. No tyrant has the right to take it away.
The “pursuit of happiness” is the phrase in the declaration that stands out the most. So modern-sounding, so simple. For what does anyone anywhere really want but a chance at happiness, however they may define it?
The gift America’s founders gave to the world was to conceive a form of government that, for the first time, made such a pursuit possible for large numbers of ordinary people. Based on “the consent of the governed” rather than divine right or brute force, the American formula proved more resilient, adaptable and ultimately stable than any monarchy or autocracy.
The Declaration of Independence laid the foundation for the most successful exercise in self-government the world has ever seen.
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From a collection of disparate political units on the eastern seaboard of North America, the United States grew into a dynamic nation that spanned the continent, then a military and economic superpower that straddled the globe. For all its sins, crimes and blunders, it has been an unparalleled force for good, what Barack Obama liked to call the one truly “indispensable nation.”
It saved the democratic world, in turn, from militarism, fascism and communism. It gave the world the airplane, jazz, rock music, the smartphone and the personal computer. Americans have won three times as many Nobel prizes as the second-place nation, Britain. Despite the idiocies of the Trump administration, from self-defeating protectionism to wildly improvident public spending, its innovative, enterprising companies lead the world, most recently in the AI revolution.
More important than all that, its ideals have stood as a beacon to the world. Even if the stature of the United States has fallen during the current chaos, that beacon still burns. Millions of people around the world look to it hopefully, from the fighting soldier in the trenches of Ukraine to the rebellious student on the streets of Myanmar.
Tarnished as it may be, the American idea as expressed in the Declaration of Independence still means something. As the United States celebrates this clouded birthday, that is worth remembering.