Happy No Kings Day!

Today is July 4th, the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I had Notebook LM create a podcast discussion of the Declaration. Pretty fun. You can listen to it here.

I had hoped to have a quick writing project done by today, but alas. It is a carefully presented comparison of the history of the United States with this moment. Having missed the deadline, my goal now is the week after next.

But here are excerpts from chapter 19: "No More Kings." The book is 20 chapters and proceeds backward from the present day to America's founding. So this is one of the last chapters. It also has as an appendix the fully compiled sweep of US history that I did on this blog last week.

Here then in celebration of Independence Day are these excerpts from chapter 19.

No More Kings
The Founders didn’t dump tea in a harbor to trade one king for another.

1. When the Founders put ink to parchment in 1776, their clearest grievance was this: too much power in one person’s hands is dangerous. The Declaration of Independence isn’t just a poetic breakup letter to King George III. It’s a catalog of abuses by a monarch who saw no limits on his authority. He made decisions without consent. He dissolved legislative bodies when they disagreed. He stalled laws, delayed justice, and treated opposition as treason.

The American colonists didn’t start out demanding independence. They began by asking for respect. They wanted representation, fairness, and a say in how they were governed. But King George wouldn’t hear it. He ignored petitions, punished dissent, and doubled down with force. In the words of the Declaration, “He has refused his Assent to Laws... He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly..."

It was a pattern: power concentrated, voices silenced, systems sidelined. That’s what “tyranny” looks like. It often expresses itself in cruelty. But it is enabled by the absence of limits... The Founders insisted that power be shared between the President, Congress, and the courts... 

The Founders weren’t perfect. Many of them were deeply flawed. But they understood one thing with clarity: Power must be checked, or it will check us...

2. In the Declaration of Independence, the colonists listed King George III’s obstruction of justice among their most damning accusations. He had, they wrote, “obstructed the Administration of Justice,” and “made Judges dependent on his Will alone.” These were not technicalities. They were seen as fatal to any free society.

The Founders understood: If you cannot count on impartial justice, you are not free. If legal outcomes are determined by political allegiance rather than law, then you are not a citizen. You are a subject...

A government of laws, not of men, requires more than slogans. It requires limits. It requires courts that can operate without fear. It requires leaders who serve the law, not the other way around.

The colonists knew what it meant to live under a king who saw courts as tools. That’s why they rebelled. That’s why they listed judicial interference right alongside taxation without representation. Because they understood that once the legal system serves only one man, the republic is already gone. Justice must be impartial. It must be independent. It must have the power to say no – even to the president. In fact, especially to the president...

3. One of the most striking grievances in the Declaration of Independence was that King George III punished those who challenged his authority. He dissolved local legislatures. He revoked colonial charters. He quartered troops among civilians not as a defense strategy, but as a warning. Rule wasn’t based on consent. It was enforced through fear. Obedience was demanded. Dissent was punished...

One of the clearest complaints in the Declaration of Independence was the colonists’ outrage over being governed without their consent. They were taxed without representation, subjected to laws they had no voice in shaping, and forced to live under decrees imposed from afar. For them, legitimate government was not about power. It was about permission. As Thomas Jefferson famously put it, governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed”...

The Declaration of Independence was not just a break from Britain. It was a break from monarchy. It was a break from the idea that one man should have unchecked power over millions. The Founders weren’t perfect, but they understood one crucial truth: freedom demands limits on power. That’s why they created a government of checks and balances, with coequal branches designed to restrain tyranny in all its forms.

That’s why we don’t have a king.

Happy United States Day!

For whatever reason, I have never noticed that the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg was on July 1-3. So yesterday was the 150th anniversary. It was the turning point of the Civil War.

The Gettysburg Address was not delivered until four months later, but in it Lincoln built on the fact that the battle was over on July 4. The South wanted to argue from the Constitution that it could have slaves and even leave the Union as states if it wanted. Lincoln pushed back to the more fundamental principles of the Declaration of Independence.  "All men are created equal" and the Union was for "for the people," meaning all the people, not just the ones in power.

As one article put it, prior to the Civil War, we were "these United States." After the Civil War, we were "the United States."  The Civil War sealed us as a nation. Now we cannot be divided. No state could ever secede now and would be foolhardy even to think of it given the advantages of being connected with the broader nation.

The spirit of Gettysburg is a far more noble spirit to commemorate than the spirit of independence. It is the spirit of coming together rather than the spirit of breaking apart. Lincoln reached into the Declaration of Independence and seized the principle that slaves were equal to any other human being in value. It is a sign of the Constitution's imperfection that it had not fully played out this insight.

Rights are not absolute. They are tempered by the rights of others. Living together in society always involves the surrender of some rights in order to receive the greater benefit of living together in a just society. I agree not to kill you and in turn receive an assurance that you will not kill me. Talk of state's rights has almost always been the ignoble attempt to escape these principles of Gettysburg.

Lincoln's assassination was far more horrific than just the death of a great man. It allowed Andrew Johnson to muck up the next hundred years. The freed slaves were left to a freedom with no power to act on it, perhaps a worse state than before in many cases. Lincoln would not have let that happen, and Johnson is usually in the running for the worst president of US history. And yes, he was a state's rights kind of guy.

So let no celebration of Independence Day pretend that we are in the situation of the revolutionaries of 1776. We have representation. We as a whole are the ones making the decisions--through the people we elect--not some foreign power detached from us. Most of the complaints we make are when the majority vote differently than we want or when the justice system keeps us from using our freedoms to impinge on the freedoms of others.

The theory of the United States remains sound, even if it hits some rough spots from time to time in the implementation.

Jefferson's Preamble to the D of I

I was reading a little today in Hugh Brogan's The Penguin History of the USA.  I remembered that there was something about July 2 rather than July 4.  The acts of independence were signed on the 2nd.  It was the Declaration of Independence, mostly written by Jefferson, that was adopted on July 4th, with some edits (for example, they took out Jefferson's condemnation of slave trade to appease South Carolina and Georgia).  I guess it always irked John Adams that July 4th ended up the holiday ;-)

I was thinking about the famous preamble: "We hold these truths to be self-evident..."  Brogan argues that it is the preamble that made the Declaration stand out and endure as a document of interest.  "Had the Declaration been no more than an opportune and eloquent political manifesto its blemishes, and its occasional character, would have ensured that it was long ago forgotten: it would have diminished beside the enormous fact which it asserted, the independence of America" (175).  Brogan argues that it was the preamble that made it inspire and endure as a document of interest.

It is indeed a great preamble.  We can of course examine it.  But the inspiration for this post was not to critique the preamble.  It was to point out why we could critique it--or any great thinker from the past.

Someone might say, "Who are you to question Thomas Jefferson?" (here meaning anyone, not me in particular).  Someone might say, "Do you think you're as smart as Thomas Jefferson?"  The answer does not have to be yes for us to critique them.

Even if I am an average thinker, there have been many minds as brilliant as Jefferson since (or since any great thinker).  I doubt I come anywhere close to being as smart as Immanuel Kant or Thomas Aquinas or Augustine.  But there have been countless "thoughts" by intelligent men and women that rival theirs.

It is because we today stand on the shoulders of all the thinkers that have gone before us that it becomes possible for us to critique them.  If I critique the brilliant of the past well at any point, I do so because the history of thought did not stop with them...