Last Saturday, the Americans celebrated the 250th anniversary of their Declaration of Independence.
That declaration remains unique in history for its power and audacity: for the first time, in fact, a state was founded with the explicit aim of guaranteeing every citizen’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It was not, as in the case of Great Britain, a kingdom born of the expansion of a dynasty which, over time, had incidentally undertaken to guarantee those rights.
The nascent United States based its very legitimacy, its very raison d’être, and the motivation to continue fighting its bloody war against the mother country on the guarantee of those rights.

Two truths, as we know, were ‘self-evident’ in the eyes of the Founding Fathers: that the Creator has endowed every man with at least three inalienable rights, and that the reason why men establish governments over themselves is to safeguard those rights as best they can.

One wonders, however, what the American colonists actually had in mind when they spoke of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
A life to be lived how? Freedom to do what? Happiness in what sense?

Rum and psalms

All too often we forget that freedom of choice, the pursuit of happiness and life itself are not ends in themselves but means to an end. When the government, quite rightly, respects these, it is merely respecting a toolbox: what those tools are used for depends on us.

In the case of the American colonists, it is easy to see what sort of way of life, what idea of happiness and what uses of freedom they wished to defend. One need only consider that their struggle began because of a tax on sugar – the by-products of which were used to distil rum – and then continued in opposition to taxes on printed matter and tea.

From 1774 onwards, the King had therefore sent an occupying force which civilians were required to house at their own expense in their private homes; a force that could not be prosecuted for acts of violence against them; and which made every public decision by dissolving the civil administrations.

Offence after offence, therefore, the sovereign had not merely trampled on abstract values: he had wiped out the very fabric of the colonists’ daily existence.
The privacy of family life, physical safety, the pleasures of the table, reading in company and public debate, the joy of making one’s farm or shop thrive. Concrete realities, yet sacred to them.

A world under attack

Society in the Thirteen Colonies, despite the differences between them, was in fact a rural society (the most populous urban centre, Boston, had a population of around 20,000).

It was scattered across a vast territory (the population living along the coasts and in the countryside of the thirteen states was not even as large as the population of Brooklyn today): inevitably, therefore, it tended to respect personal initiative, family self-sufficiency and the dignity of women.

Finally, it was a deeply religious society, which, through the Bible, shared a collective imagination and a common ground for debate (often heated). Even when intellectuals such as Franklin and Jefferson described themselves as ‘deists’ or ‘rationalists’, they nevertheless had the integrity to praise Christian ethical teaching.

Well, King George’s repressive decrees dismantled, stone by stone, this entire edifice of customs and worldviews, adding insult to injury by treating the colonists as second-class British subjects: indeed, after 1774, even as a hostile people to be subdued by force of arms.
In doing so, the monarch had also stripped them of their pride in belonging to a great nation (for which, incidentally, they had fought a few years earlier in the ‘Seven Years’ War’, not without suffering losses).

To the question ‘Who am I? Why do I live?’, he had silenced every answer.

Like the skin covering the organs

The Declaration of Independence, therefore, was a conservative act: it was the defensive reaction of a people made up of farmers, stockbreeders and small traders, who in the evenings would read the Bible or recite the Rosary with their children, who for the most part felt English and suffered from not having the benefits of English law like all other English people.

An exasperated reaction, certainly, but a defensive one nonetheless.

In the new democratic system they established for themselves after breaking away from London, they did not ask for guarantees of some sort of ‘life’, a generic ‘liberty’ or the pursuit of an undefined ‘happiness’. They asked it to guarantee their lives , their exercise of freedom and access to whatever made them happy .

In short, democracy was not a value in itself: it was a shell designed to envelop and protect the values of that society, just as the skin envelops and protects the body’s internal organs.

The controversy over slavery was proof of this.
When the Civil War broke out, the Confederates felt they were the true interpreters of the Declaration of Independence. They had feared that the federal government, like a new King George, might forcibly overturn – without consulting them – the system of large-scale landownership on which their well-being and civilisation depended, and they had responded by seceding and taking up arms.

The Unionists retorted that the Creator could not have denied Black people those very same inalienable rights that He had granted to white people.
But this was a line of reasoning based on abstract philosophical consistency, which could do very little in the face of the fiery spirit of insurrection against the abuses of supreme power that was shaking Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas, just as it had shaken them in 1776.
And yet the Confederates were defeated, and events proved that the skin of democracy could not be grafted onto the internal organs of the slave-owning plantation system.

Will the transplant work for us?

Despite these illustrious precedents, when we talk – and gossip – about the ‘crisis of democracy’ today, we never ask ourselves: are the inner workings – that is, the deep-seated spiritual principles – of our societies still compatible with the outward form of democracy?

Let us set aside the most striking cases, such as ethnic groups in our countries who would like to legalise marriage to underage cousins or other Neolithic customs. Let us stick to what has been produced by Western universities and the media.

For well over a century, mainstream culture (first European and then American) has sought to defend the unrealistic myth of freedom as an end rather than a means: one after another, we have been subjected to existentialism, deconstructionism, relativism, anarcho-capitalism and so on and so forth.

It has also gone to great lengths to spread the myth of a fenced-in happiness, which can be achieved simply by preventing anyone from challenging us: hence the rush towards ‘safe spaces’, ‘words are violence’, the ten thousand ‘phobias’, ‘interspecies families’, the ‘right to educational success’ and the other endless variations on the imperative that turns every desire into an order.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to graft the skin of democracy onto these two bodies.
Advocates of absolute freedom, in fact, are often inclined to accept a supreme technological power, from which they hope their freedom will be further enhanced. As for the advocates of fenced-in happiness, a supreme ethical and censorial power is the very premise of all their claims.

It cannot be a coincidence that, in almost all Western countries, the proportion of matters regulated by the state and the proportion of wealth managed by the state have been increasing immeasurably for generations and show no sign of stopping, at the very same time as surveys are recording a peak in loneliness, mistrust and ideological conflict.

And indeed, it is no coincidence.
The less people have a clear, shared idea of what to do with their freedom and how to pursue happiness, the more readily they relinquish their independence without a second thought and willingly hand back portions of their power to the sovereign.
As for life itself, the fact that nobody knows what to make of it any more is evident from the collapse in birth rates.

Preliminaries to any future form of liberalism

In 1776, ‘inalienable rights’ were not demanded in a vacuum, but to defend a specific society with its own specific values and ways of life.
To demand them in a vacuum has probably always been, and always will be, nothing but a waste of breath. Anyone who today calls themselves a ‘liberal’ or a ‘centrist’ and dreams of engaging in politics ‘outside the two identity-based poles’ should take this bitter (but perhaps also salutary) truth as their starting point .