At the age of 250 years, the American republic cements its place near the top of the longevity leaderboard.  Two older republics sitting in history’s clubhouse will see their leads erode as the future unfolds.

The founding of the Roman Republic is traditionally dated to 509 BC.  It lasted until 27 BC, almost five hundred years.  The City of Venice, Italy was founded in 410 AD and adopted a republican form of government in 697, according to tradition.  The republic ended in 1797, courtesy of Napoleon Bonaparte.  The US will have outlasted the Venetian Republic on July 5, 2876. 

What makes the United States special is not its longevity, impressive as that is.  It is the fact that it was founded on the principle that all humans are equal in their natural rights.  The opposite view – that individuals derive their rights as a grant from government based on status, such as race, social class, religion, or nationality– has been held by many of the rebels, adversaries, and enemies that the American republic has seen off over 250 years.

The southern confederacy, German nationalism of the early 20^th century, Japanese ultra-nationalism, German national socialism, and Soviet international socialism all saw government’s purpose as the preservation and expansion of the rights of members of the favored group, which might be white slaveholders, worshippers of the Japanese emperor, self-described Aryans, or the proletariat.  The details have depended on time and place and on whatever can be sold by political leaders to a credulous public.

The U.S. victories over those dedicated to the preservation and advancement of group rights have been achieved in the name of high and noble principles.  Yet, the temptation to default to the philosophy of group rights has been difficult to overcome.  Each statement and restatement of the fundamental founding principles has – so far – been followed by decades of retreat.

That tension was present at the beginning.  If all persons are equal in their natural rights, then no one has the right to govern another without consent (putting aside those like children or the mentally ill who cannot give meaningful consent).  Slavery is the most extreme case of one person governing another without consent.

Yet, well more than half of the signers of the Declaration of Independence – Wikipedia says forty-one of the 56 – held slaves.  How could they sign the document in good conscience?

Abraham Lincoln pointed out some eighty years later that the signers approved of the principle and fully believed in it, with implementation and enforcement to follow as circumstances would allow.  Lincoln was a fine lawyer. His argument has a legalistic air, but there is evidence for his position.

It was common among Virginia gentlemen of the early republic to free all their slaves in their wills.  This behavior suggests that they accepted the principle of equal natural rights but could not bring themselves to accept the loss of personal comfort that would have come from adhering to it.

Further evidence can be found in the Constitution, many of whose framers were also signers of the Declaration.  They referred to slaves as persons, even if they were “held to service or labor in a state under the laws thereof”.  (They avoided saying that these individuals were held “pursuant” to law, only that they were held “under” law.)  They gave Congress power to end the importation of such individuals, although not before 1808.

Whatever the level of enthusiasm for individual natural rights was in 1776, support for the concept declined through the first half of the nineteenth century. By the 1850s, the fundamental proposition was openly doubted: one US Senator said the principle of equal natural rights was a “self-evident lie”, while others held that the principle was valid but applied only to white descendants of the founding generation.  (These were northern Democrats, not southern slaveholders.)  The Supreme Court held in 1857 that persons of African ancestry were not and could not be citizens of the United States.

The group rights philosophy suffered a serious blow with the Union victory in the Civil War.  With eleven southern states not represented in Congress, the nation restated the principle of equality by amending the constitution to abolish slavery, to confirm that former slaves (nearly 4 million individuals) and free black persons (nearly 500,000 individuals) born in the United States were citizens, and to provide that the states could not deny voting rights to any individual on account of race or previous condition of servitude.

Once again, a noble principle was declared, adopted, and codified only to be undermined by later developments.  A series of Supreme Court decisions stretching over a quarter century – including the “Slaughterhouse” Cases (1873), the Civil Rights Cases (1883), and the notorious Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) – limited the scope and power of the post-Civil War amendments. 

The idea that an individual’s rights depended on status – race in this case – was held to be embedded in the Constitution even though it is plainly in opposition to the fundamental principle of the Declaration.

In the middle of the twentieth century, the nation once again found a way to restate its fundamental founding principle.  The Supreme Court decided beginning in 1954 that state laws imposing racial segregation in education and other public services were unconstitutional.  In 1964, Congress enacted a civil rights act that outlawed discrimination in services and employment, whether or not imposed by government, when based on race, sex, religion, or national origin.

Yet, the group rights philosophy survived those reforms.  One key to this undeserved success is that the reforms did not expressly acknowledge their debt to the founding principle of equal natural rights.  The Supreme Court’s opinion in the1954 Brown v. Board decision underscored the psychological harm that black children suffered under a system of racially separated schools.  The decision ought to have been based instead on the fundamental principle that states are required to treat citizens equally.  There was no need to consider whether the person being denied a natural right was suffering a particular harm.

In the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Congress used its power under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause to outlaw racial discrimination in a wide range of contexts.  In effect, it bowed to the post-Civil War court decisions that weakened the 14^th Amendment.  The 1964 Congress found a way around the obstacles placed by those decisions.  It would have been better to use Congressional power to implement the fundamental principle of equal natural rights.  Instead, Congress got rid of irrational discrimination because it adversely affects interstate commerce.

The group rights philosophy was able to use these flaws to secure fresh victories.  By the late 1960s, discrimination was back in the driver’s seat, although with colors reversed.  Despite recent Supreme Court decisions on college admissions and executive actions limiting DEI, the group rights philosophy is well entrenched in education, media, government, and commerce.

The group rights philosophy sells well.  Humans are natural categorizers.  It is easier to see our nation as a patchwork of groups than as a sea of individuals.  And, if benefits are to be gained by group membership, individuals have an incentive to trade away equal natural rights in order to gain for themselves the benefits offered by membership in a favored group.

At the end of the Second World War, Leo Strauss wrote that Germany “deprived its conquerors of the most sublime fruit of victory by imposing on them the yoke of its own thought”.  The same could be said of the confederates, segregationists, socialists (democratic and otherwise), Islamists, Bolsheviks, social Marxists, neo-racists, modern “antiracists”, and all other advocates of group rights. 

The fundamental principle of equal individual natural rights, the maxim of a free society as Lincoln called it, remains visible and accessible to all of us because it is stated so clearly and elegantly in the Declaration.  Placing the concept in a public and foundational document was an act of genius.  We should reclaim it.

— Gerry Bresslour