Two hundred fifty years ago this week, American colonists told a distant, unaccountable power that their rights came from God, not from the Crown — and that any government destructive of those rights could be scrapped and replaced. That claim still holds. The question is whether Americans still have the nerve to enforce it.
The Lewiston Morning Tribune marks the anniversary by calling the Declaration's core assertion "absolutely novel" — that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, and that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. The paper traces the expansion of that principle through the post-Civil War amendments, women's suffrage, and the Civil Rights movement. Fair enough. But the Tribune then drifts into listing FDR's Four Freedoms — including "freedom from want" — as though a New Deal spending promise belongs in the same breath as the Declaration's natural rights. It does not. One is a right that exists before government. The other is a government program. Conflating the two is exactly how the founding principle gets hollowed out.
The Deseret News gets closer to what matters. The Declaration's grievances weren't abstract complaints. They were responses to a distant power displacing local self-government that had existed for more than 150 years. By the time they declared independence, colonists had been governing themselves through elected legislatures since 1619 in Virginia, through compacts and constitutions in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. The Crown's attempt to govern the colonies directly, displacing colonial legislatures, "was a disruption of local autonomy that had persisted for a century and a half," the Deseret News notes. The Revolution worked because Americans already knew how to govern themselves — they weren't starting from scratch.
That's the frame that matters now. The Declaration's list of grievances against King George III — he "refused his Assent to Laws," "obstructed the Administration of Justice," "made Judges dependent on his Will alone" — reads like a checklist of what happens when concentrated, unaccountable power decides your rights are really just permissions it can revoke. Today those permissions are revoked by content moderation boards, DEI compliance offices, and federal agencies that write rules with the force of law without ever standing for election.
The Deseret News makes the essential point that the Declaration demands not just theoretical freedom but "an actual enjoyment of freedom and the pursuit of happiness under well-framed institutions that flow from the consent of the people." Consent of the governed. Not consent of the algorithms. Not consent of the HR department. Not consent of the administrative state.
Both papers note, correctly, that the Declaration's promise has faced backlash before — Jim Crow, McCarthyism, what the Tribune calls "a retreat from expanding civil liberties" today. But the Tribune buries the real threat in euphemism. The danger isn't "deep political polarization." The danger is a permanent class of institutional gatekeepers — in government, in tech, in academia — who have decided that rights are theirs to distribute, not yours by birth.
The Founders rejected a king who kept standing armies among civilians in peacetime without consent. They'd recognize the same impulse in a Silicon Valley that decides which opinions you're allowed to hold and a federal bureaucracy that writes the laws, enforces the laws, and adjudicates the laws all by itself. The question the Deseret News poses — what happens the morning after a revolution — cuts both ways. The morning after 1776, Americans governed themselves. The morning after we cede our God-given rights to the care of institutions that answer to no voter, we won't.
