Creed, Culture, and the Electric Cord of the Declaration – Richard M. Reinsch II

As America limps toward the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—one of the most remarkable political documents in history—the country itself no longer knows with precision what to make of the Declaration’s truths. Its principles are the self-evident truths of equality under the law, the consent of the governed, the protection of life and liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the right to rebellion when the government no longer secures these rights. We are a revolutionary people embodying truths given to us by a Creator and recognized by us in our capacity as rational persons. They do not originate in history, science, race, or gender.

Many now refer to the American Creed, particularly on the “new right,” as merely “an ideological proposition,” one that commits America to perpetual revolution and, in particular, to limitless immigration. But the Declaration’s creed never demands that we sacrifice prudence about membership, nor the judgment that any community must be formed over time and not subjected to ongoing disruption. What this also ignores, though, is something even more profound: We are a revolutionary people, but we are not engaged in an ongoing revolution. How so? The creed is essential to American citizenship, but only its full reading and grounding can reveal who we are as a people and what we should do.

The 28 grievances in the Declaration, frequently unread, further develop not only the colonists’ reasons for separation from Britain but also establish America’s political commitments in consent of the governed, majority rule, deliberation, civil control of the military, trial by jury, immigration, free trade, rule of law, limits on government, and the distinction between private and public. As James Stoner argues in his superb essay, “Is There a Political Philosophy in the Declaration of Independence?,” the self-evident truths are concretized and made actionable through the record of grievances of British violations of the common law. This record also furnishes the self-governing principles on which the colonists had built their new states. The “Revolution Principles,” to use John Adams’ term, are also tethered to the old law, which the colonists have made their own. And the grievances that became the colonists’ governing commitments would also be addressed in the Constitution of 1787.

The Declaration, in brevity and eloquence, continues to engage minds and hearts. While context is essential to understanding its meaning, consigning it entirely to a past age, as a closed historical document, misses everything. Those who do so always act on behalf of an alternative founding. By breaking from Britain, the Declaration establishes an independent American political society and defines the commitments of that society in a national compact. And as a national compact, it remains part of what we live under as Americans. As Don Lutz notes in Origins of American Constitutionalism (1988), “The Declaration contains the grounding for the Constitution.”

One problem is fundamental ignorance of the document itself, an ignorance carefully and ploddingly built by a government education system that has left multiple generations bereft of knowledge of the basic structure of the American political tradition. The architects of our social democratic education program have sought to keep us from knowing much about America’s founding because their objective remains that of the original progressives: to redefine America along egalitarian principles rooted in consolidated, centralized power. To the extent they sought to build on the American founding, they misappropriated the Declaration’s language of equality to argue that the nation was dedicated to egalitarianism and to equality of result. Their ideological proposition bound the Declaration to the progressive project, thereby ignoring or distorting its sound philosophical and common law principles.

Progressive political thought maintained that the Declaration represented a democratic moment in America, but its principles had been betrayed by a Constitution crafted to serve the interests of the wealthy and privileged. For many progressives, not only was the Constitution in tension with the Declaration, but it was also intentionally designed to undermine the latter’s democratic promise. In recent generations, progressives have continuously argued that the Constitution was a document rooted in slaveholding interests. This is despite the fact that when the Southern states seceded from the Union, they explicitly crafted a document—the Confederate Constitution—that protected slavery. From progressive constitutional beliefs, it follows that politics and policy are theatrical moral dramas, constantly shaping the country to align with what the clerisy considers the right side of history.

But to this Progressive deformation of the Declaration, we must now consider the increasing confusion among the American right, which frequently denounces the notion that America is even partially defined by constituting ideas. Such a view reduces America’s creedal constitution to an ideological proposition that amounts to invading the world and inviting the world to come to America. Their primary target appears to be progressive egalitarianism and their conception of what second-wave neoconservatism articulated in the post-Cold War period. Their other target is immigration, which they mean to curtail drastically.

Missouri Senator Eric Schmidt (R) stated at the 2025 National Conservative Conference, “That’s what set Donald Trump apart from the old conservatism and the old liberalism alike: He knows that America is not just an abstract ‘proposition,’ but a nation and a people, with its own distinct history and heritage and interests.” He continues that “Kentucky settlers repelling wave after wave of Indian war band attacks believed they were forging a nation—a homeland for themselves and their descendants.” Not to be undone, Schmidt caps this series of observations with the notion that “America, in all its glory, is their gift to us, handed down across the generations. It belongs to us. It’s our birthright, our heritage, our destiny.” These true observations never get to the core of the matter, though.

Schmidt does not include non-European immigrants in his parade of American heroes. He should have, as it magnifies the story of American greatness in its principles. The senator argues that the true enemies of America are those who would tear down our statues and rewrite our history books to build their new America. Yes, it’s a problem. But so also are those who refuse to grant as true the notion of American citizenship set forth in the Declaration that in legally entering this country and choosing to make its ideas and laws their own, they, too, become certified Americans, charged with dutifully upholding American constitutionalism. This is volitional allegiance, the standard that defines American citizenship. The state receives the person’s willingness to take on the rights and duties of being an American and, in effect, become part of the law itself.

Schmidt’s question is best addressed by Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 speech in Chicago, which responded to Senator Stephen Douglas’s claim that the equality in the Declaration only meant that the English colonists of 1776 were equal, as a nation, to the British. However, the nation now included many immigrants from across Europe. Lincoln’s “Electric Cord” speech seeks to connect these immigrants to the Fathers:

If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.

Schmidt’s focus is on birth, heritage, and interests. Of course, that’s a concern for every nation. But we’re trying to understand the Declaration of Independence, which refuses to be reduced just to history and legacy. The question Schmidt elides when he pits American “history and heritage” against an American “proposition” is whether the distinctiveness of our country and its legacy and culture—the more popular ways citizens connect to patriotism—might be rooted in the fruits of the American creed; he ignores the possibility that political principles shape American culture. A nation built on equality under the law and the consent of the governed, which places limits on government power so individuals can self-govern and pursue happiness, gives rise to Kentucky pioneers who settle the “empires of liberty,” as Thomas Jefferson called them.

We can recognize culture, history, memory, songs, and battles as vital to sustaining American identity, recognizing that for many, these will be their primary ties to the American founding. But what will this cultural memory and practice be if we lose the principles that gave rise to it through misinformation, propaganda, and cultivated ignorance? Right now, we need understanding, and the more we explore the richness of our creedal principles, the more we should want to embrace them.

By dismissing the “ideological proposition,” detractors of the Declaration overlook its primary national standard for American citizenship: volitional allegiance. This is where the American citizen is called to excellence, which is only attainable in conditions of genuine freedom and virtue. I owe thanks for this point to the late GM Curtis, former senior fellow of Liberty Fund, and a man who taught me about the American Founding during numerous Friday afternoon beer summits.

Our Declaration emphasizes that the individual initiates acts of citizenship because the individual is, in an intellectual and moral sense, capable of gathering knowledge and making decisions. The state is receptive, accepting the pledge of allegiance made by the citizen. How else to understand the Declaration’s natural right grounding of the citizen’s capacity to consent to just government and to throw off unjust government based on the human capacity to think and judge about politics and government freely? The revolution depended on the prior consent of individual Americans to their states and to the emerging nation it was helping to establish. In this way, Curtis observed that in America, the citizen becomes, through his own volition, the very embodiment of the law. There was a beautiful expression of this idea in Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address:

But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm, on the theoretic and visionary fear, that this government, the world’s best hope, may, by possibility, want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest government on earth. I believe it the only one, where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern.

We are each charged by the Creed with embodying the fundamental law and protecting it in moments of danger, indeed, as Curtis remarks, American citizenship was born in danger and war. Here, the abstractions rapidly come to a head. But that risky business should lead to strengthening our law and Constitution; instead, emergency conditions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have led to rushed legislation, more administrative state rules, and diminished citizenship. We aren’t Jefferson’s citizens any longer. In not taking seriously the notion that the government exists primarily to secure our rights, we want it to give us everything. We struggle with comprehension, which ineluctably leads to poor practice.

Those are the stakes for America at 250: understanding the deep wellspring of anthropological, natural theological, rational, and legal truths that have shaped us as a constitutional people and formed the culture we cherish. We sense that we might no longer be its equal. But to doubt is to recognize that one’s inheritance isn’t lost but misplaced. The “Revolution Principles” can be rediscovered and made our own again.