As we approach our nation’s 250th birthday, Americans will be doing a lot of celebrating. They will honor not only the fact of our independence and nationhood, but also the political thought that shaped America’s founding struggle for freedom. Special attention will be paid, of course, to our Declaration of Independence.
But some may be rather cool to celebrating the Declaration’s doctrine of universal truths, such as the equality of all human beings in their natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Declaration has become a source of controversy among some younger conservatives who came of age during the Trump era.
The New Right’s dissatisfaction with the Declaration’s universalism is an understandable — but mistaken — reaction to various political misuses of America’s founding creed in recent decades.
There is no conflict between the Declaration’s universal principles and the New Right’s America First nationalism.
The older generation of conservatives who grew up admiring Ronald Reagan love to boast about America’s defense of universal truths. The New Right has argued that this rhetorical approach has not served the conservative political movement or the country well.
The Reaganite message, so powerful in the late 20th century, proved unable to keep winning national elections in the 21st. As a result, conservatives ceded political power to a Democratic Party and a left wing increasingly committed to an alarming agenda of social and cultural transformation.
The old-guard conservatives could not beat the Obama coalition. Moreover, their excessive preoccupation with America’s commitment to universal moral principles harmed the nation’s interests — and the interests of many Americans, especially those of the working class — in areas such as immigration, trade, and foreign policy.
In response, the New Right developed its now well-known message of American nationalism in the wake of Trump’s victory in 2016. They have embraced an “America First” agenda that places the social and economic well-being of its citizens at the center of national policy.
This stands in sharp contrast to the older conservatism, which tended to approach immigration, trade, and foreign policy in light of the country’s universal moral commitments as expressed in the Declaration of Independence.
The New Right’s recalibration proved politically successful: witness President Trump’s electoral victories in 2016 and 2024. But such success breeds criticism, and many on the left and among the older conservative establishment have condemned the new nationalism as a betrayal of the Declaration’s universal principles. Such criticism has, no doubt, deepened the New Right’s skepticism of the Declaration.
What are we to make of all this?
The New Right is correct to reject superficial and politically unhelpful misappropriations of the Declaration. Its members are justified in repudiating suggestions that America is just a political “idea” with no particular and concrete interests. And they are correct to dismiss claims that the Declaration’s universal principles require us to embrace immigration, trade, and foreign policies at odds with the well-being of our own citizens.
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It would be a terrible mistake, however, for the New Right to go farther and reject the Declaration itself.
Such rejection is, in the first place, unnecessary. Contrary to the self-serving hectoring from the left and the old-guard conservatives, there is no conflict between the Declaration’s universal principles and the New Right’s America First nationalism. Those principles do not require the open-borders moralism preached by globalists of all stripes.
The Declaration asserts the great and universal truth that all human beings are equal in their natural rights. However, it nowhere asserts that everyone has a natural right to enter a political community of which he is not already a member, much less a natural right to become a citizen of that community.
The founders and subsequent generations of Americans regulated immigration according to the nation’s needs and interests rather than a fanciful moral obligation to accept all who want to come here.
Nor does the Declaration rule out an America First trade policy. Its philosophical framework was influenced by John Locke, in particular his claim that all human beings have a natural right to “life, liberty, and property.” None of these rights, however, entails a right to engage in trade across national borders.
Indeed, Locke’s Second Treatise makes clear that government, once established by the consent of the governed, would regulate foreign trade in the nation’s interests. The founders reflected this understanding in the Constitution by vesting Congress with the power to regulate foreign commerce.
Finally, nothing in the Declaration requires the U.S. government to promote democracy abroad or undermine tyrannies in foreign lands.
The Declaration famously teaches that a people can appeal to the right of revolution when their government is determined to destroy their individual rights and subject them to despotism. That right, however, must be exercised with “prudence” by the people living under a tyrannical government — not by the people of another nation.
Nothing in the Declaration indicates that America or any nation has a right — much less a duty — to liberate other nations from their tyrannical regimes and to impose on such peoples all the costs of a revolution that cannot be certain of success.
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The Declaration teaches that America’s foreign policy needs to be guided by our reasonable and just interests, the star by which founding-era statesmen such as Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison steered the ship of state.
Indeed, the Declaration itself affirms a kind of nationalism. Before turning to the political theory in its famous second paragraph, it teaches that peoples or nations are not mere artificial contrivances but instead exist in contemplation of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”
They have a right to a “separate and equal station” among the other “powers of the earth.” In other words, every people has a right to control its own political fate. Read as a whole, the Declaration is as much an affirmation of the sovereignty of nations as of the rights of individuals.
There is, then, no reason for the proponents of America First nationalism to reject the universal principles of the Declaration of Independence. In fact, to do so would be a grave mistake. However abused or misunderstood, those principles are a foundational and vital element of America’s political identity.
It is no part of the duty or interest of any movement of the political right — or of any movement governed by sobriety and caution, not to mention gratitude for what one has inherited — to reconstruct the identity of one’s own nation.
An America indifferent to the universal principles of the Declaration would no longer be the America we have all been blessed to inherit — and that we all have an obligation to preserve.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.
