The Declaration and the recovery of self-government
I wrote an essay for the summer issue of State Policy Network News titled “America 250 & the Recovery of Self-Government.”
Building on Justice Clarence Thomas’s excellent speech at the University of Texas at Austin back in April, I explore what it means to recover the Declaration’s principles and the habits of self-government they require. I love the fact that Thomas did not use the opportunity to offer mere platitudes about American250 or our founding but attacked the problems with the progressive worldview and its differing view of government.
Thomas’s point is that progressivism reverses the Declaration’s understanding of the relationship between citizens and the state. Instead of government existing to secure rights that already belong to the individual, rights increasingly become something government defines and decrees upon the people.
“It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights,” declared Thomas.
From my essay:
The proper response to that warning is not simply a denunciation of progressivism. It is recovery. If the Declaration’s principles are endangered, they must be renewed where self-government is still most visible: in families, local communities, churches, civic associations, and statehouses.
Recovery, of course, is no easy task. The habits and mores that led to the cultivation of ordered liberty in America had been percolating in the colonies for generations and to a degree degree, were inherited from the nation that America separated from in 1776. The point being that change away from centralized power or a much healthier skepticism of national power will not be reversed by a single election or political movement. I think that’s something ignored or forgotten by the hyper-ideologues that so often act frantic on social media, filtering nearly every news story through a partisan lens.
A genuine renewal requires the harder work of returning to first principles and putting more focus on reforms at the state and local level.
And in his speech, Thomas’s overarching point is a simple one: the Declaration can endure only if Americans are willing to live by its principles and defend those principles, even if it comes at a high cost. The principles of the Declaration aren’t merely fancy words but they must be embodied in the people for the American Republic to endure.
Recovery requires so much more than political tribalism.
Recovery is going to require much more than winning elections but a commitment to renewing the habits of citizenship and self-government in the institutions and communities where Americans exercise responsibility every day. Because self-government requires a certain type of citizen, and its survival depends on habits as much as any elections or laws.
—Ray Nothstine
— The Federalism Beat