US Declaration at 250: New Challenges, Enduring Principles, Part III

Respectable political opinion and salutary reform in the United States give concrete expression to propositions the U.S. Declaration of Independence held to be self-evidently true. In an 1825 letter, Thomas Jefferson maintained that these self-evident truths reflected “the common sense of the subject” at the time of the founding. First among them is that human beings are equally endowed with unalienable rights – an 18^th-century term for the rights inherent in all human beings – beginning with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Declaration also affirms as self-evident that government’s first responsibility is to secure the people’s unalienable rights, that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, and that the people have a right to alter or abolish government that destroys the conditions that make possible the common enjoyment of their unalienable rights.

The Declaration promotes the rights principle on which (almost) all agree

Neither American conservatives, who focus on preserving tradition and respecting order under law, nor American progressives, who concentrate on rectifying injustice by improving existing arrangements and creating new ones, routinely put matters in these terms. Yet at their most thoughtful, both embrace the equality in rights in which the United States is rooted.

Thoughtful American conservatives recognize that in a rights-protecting democracy tradition and order under law sustain citizens’ effective and responsible exercise of equal rights. Thoughtful conservatives also appreciate that in modern circumstances a system of equal individual rights creates conditions favorable to citizens’ maintaining their traditions and pursuing the good life as they understand it.

Thoughtful American progressives recognize that in a rights-protecting democracy rectifying injustice by improving inherited arrangements and creating new ones consists in significant measure in enabling the excluded to claim and enjoy the individual rights all share equally. Thoughtful progressives also appreciate that in modern circumstances a system of equal individual rights creates conditions favorable to citizens’ mobilizing democratic majorities to enact legislation that ensures fair treatment for all.

That conservatives and progressives do not always operate thoughtfully is one reason that it is useful to return regularly to the study of the propositions that the nation’s founders held to be self-evidently true.

But progressives repudiate the principles of the Declaration

Another reason for careful reconsideration of the Declaration’s teaching about freedom, equality, and self-government is that influential professors – both of the postmodern-progressive left and of the postliberal right – are inclined to repudiate the nation’s founding principles. Postmodern progressives deride them as a mask for allegedly systemic oppression of minorities and women. Postliberals on the right scorn them as the source of the supposed systemic moral and political evils that plague contemporary America. In the process, postmodern progressives raise serious questions about dangers hidden within America’s unwritten norms, political institutions, and laws, while postliberals on the right draw attention to the excesses to which the principles and practices of freedom can be taken.

But the tendency of both to misconceive the roots and practical implications of America’s founding principles, to distort the purposes of American political institutions, and to obscure the common good at which the constitutional order aims exposes the disadvantages of derision and scorn as drivers of intellectual inquiry.

A third reason for attentively reexamining and restating the Declaration’s main ideas is the failure of colleges and universities to ensure that undergraduates gain an understanding of America’s founding principles and constitutional traditions.

As America celebrates its 250^th birthday, the 2020 Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights can contribute to giving the U.S. Declaration of Independence its due.

The Commission on Unalienable Rights

In July 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo established the Commission on Unalienable Rights. Pompeo cherishes human rights as an essential component of the American heritage. Politicization of the great post-World War II human-rights movement by diplomats, professors, journalists, international organizations, and NGOs, he worried, jeopardized that heritage. With a special interest in the place of human rights in a responsible U.S. foreign policy, Pompeo asked the commission to reground human rights in America’s founding principles, in the best of the nation’s constitutional traditions, and in the obligations that the United States embraced in 1948 in voting at the United Nations General Assembly to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

The chair

Pompeo appointed his Harvard Law School mentor, Professor Mary Ann Glendon, to chair the commission. Glendon’s unusual combination of accomplishments and virtues made her just right for the job. She possesses wide learning in law, politics, and religion. She authored two major books on rights: “Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse” (1991) explored the costs to democratic self-government of the proliferation of rights; and “A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (2002) celebrated the UDHR’s achievement in advancing international appreciation of basic rights and fundamental freedoms as well as the responsibilities from which they are inseparable. She served as Vatican representative to the UN’s 1995 Beijing Conference on Women and as U.S. ambassador to the Holy See from 2008 to 2009. And she possesses in abundance the rare ability to both generously interpret diverse views and subject them to rigorous criticism.

The executive secretary

In my capacity as then-director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, I served as the commission’s executive secretary, joining Glendon in assembling a small group of distinguished men and women to draft a report. They brought to our task expertise in ethics, international law, comparative literature, political philosophy, sociology, African-American studies, and religion; backgrounds in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; conservative and progressive political opinions; and experience in scholarship, law, and the promotion of human rights. Within that diversity of ideas, expertise, and experience and notwithstanding disagreements on public policy and law, commissioners shared a crucial conviction: All agreed that conserving America’s founding principles was vital to preserving and improving the nation.

The report consists of a prefatory note and five parts.

The prefatory note addresses the civic unrest and social convulsions that rocked the nation following the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. As it prepared to release its report to the public, the commission recognized that the tumult sweeping the country testified to America’s unfinished business in overcoming the nation’s long history of racial injustice. At the same time, the report emphasized the fundamental distinction between rights-protecting democracies that fall short of their principles and authoritarian regimes that reject those principles. The report also stressed that despite the nation’s imperfections, America has been and should remain a beacon to those around the world struggling for human rights.

Introduction

Part I introduces the undertaking. It reviews the erosion of the post-World War II human-rights project owing to diplomats’, intellectuals’, and activists’ abuse of rights language to advance partisan goals; international institutions’ disappointing performance as impartial upholders of human rights; and the resurgence of authoritarianism. It stresses the report’s focus on the principles that should inform the conduct of foreign affairs rather than on the advancement of specific measures. And it highlights the report’s multiple ambitions: to assist diplomats in weaving the defense of human rights into U.S. foreign policy; to renew American citizens’ understanding of, and dedication to, America’s distinctive rights tradition; and to encourage friends of freedom around the world to look to their own moral, political, and religious traditions for resources to elaborate and sustain the rights human beings share.

About the Declaration – and another Declaration

Part II concentrates on the Declaration of Independence. It discusses the roots of America’s founding principles in three traditions: Biblical faith, classical civic-republicanism, and the modern tradition of freedom. It examines the Declaration’s pioneering promise of equality in fundamental rights, the nation’s grievous departures from that promise, seminal reformers’ appeals throughout American history to the Declaration, and the dramatic progress the nation has made since its birth to honor more fully its founding promise of equality in individual rights. It explores how the Constitution – through its institutional structure and formal guarantees, and its reliance on moral virtues and the associations of civil society that cultivate them – safeguards basic rights and fundamental freedoms. And it reviews the implications for foreign policy of the nation’s grounding in human rights.

Part III deals with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It recounts America’s leading role in drafting the UDHR and winning its approval in 1948 in the UN General Assembly. It explores the aim, structure and content, and logic of the historic document. And it provides answers to persistent questions about the UDHR concerning national sovereignty, the hierarchy of rights, the relation between civil and political rights and social and economic rights, states’ obligations to safeguard human rights, democracy and human rights, positive law and human rights, and the emergence of new human rights.

Human rights in foreign policy

Part IV takes up human rights in U.S. foreign policy. It observes that securing American freedom has been at the core of American diplomacy – from Washington’s warning to the vulnerable new nation in his 1796 Farewell Address to steer clear of “permanent alliances” to America’s dependence in 2026 as a great power on a multiplicity of alliances and partnerships, formal agreements, and international organizations. It argues that the growth of U.S. power and influence, the increasing interconnectedness of nation-states, and the horrors of World War II compelled Americans in the 20^th century to assess the proper place of human rights in a responsible U.S. foreign policy, one that must balance a variety of vital interests and competing principles.

It examines the constitutional and statutory bases of American human-rights policy and the nation’s obligations under international law and assumed through treaties. And it reviews new challenges to human rights, including the decline of human-rights culture and the corruption of international institutions, resurgent authoritarianism led by the Chinese Communist Party, large-scale migration, global health and pandemics, the growing menace presented by non-state actors, and new technologies, particularly AI.

Part V offers concluding observations. Among the most important are that the UDHR recognizes the sovereign nation-state as the primary political entity for securing human rights, rights-protecting democracy is the regime best suited to safeguarding them, and respect for human rights begins with education and must be nurtured by families, schools, and the voluntary associations of civil society.

Reception testifies to the power of the Declaration of Independence

The commission’s report enjoyed a dramatic diplomatic success that demonstrated the power of the U.S. Declaration of Independence to inspire across national boundaries and the capacity of human rights to provide common ground for men and women of diverse religious traditions.

In the summer of 2020, a few weeks after the report’s publication, Nahdlatul Ulama reached out to me at the State Department. Headquartered in Indonesia, NU, the world’s largest independent Muslim organization with an estimated 100 million followers, champions an interpretation of Islam that emphasizes toleration, pluralism, and human dignity. A representative of NU’s general chairman, Kyai Haji Yahya Cholil Staquf, conveyed the organization’s enthusiastic agreement with the report’s understanding of human rights based on the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the American constitutional order, and the UDHR. Our correspondence culminated with a visit by Pompeo to Jakarta in late October 2020 to present the report to NU.

In 2022, Glendon and I discussed the commission’s report at the inaugural meeting of the G20 Religious Forum in Bali, organized by Nahdlatul Ulama under the auspices of the G20, which Indonesia hosted that year. And in the summer of 2025, Glendon and I conducted several seminars on Western political thought as part of NU’s launch in Jakarta of an educational program for its senior leadership combining the best of Islamic civilization and the Western tradition.

Appeal of the Declaration

The appeal of the U.S. Declaration’s affirmation of unalienable rights to other peoples and nations suggests that America’s founding principles can also furnish common ground for repairing the rifts among American citizens.

Every generation in America faces challenges – some perennial, some distinctive – in bringing to life and living up to the moral and political principles enshrined in the nation’s Declaration of Independence. The laziness, forgetfulness, and narrow partisan spirit that today plague both sides of the political spectrum are perennial vices. The broadsides against America’s founding principles from the postmodern-progressive left and postliberal right are distinctive to the moment. The laziness, the forgetfulness, and the narrow partisan spirit as well as the intellectuals’ broadsides from the left and the right have been exacerbated by an education establishment that tends to neglect – where it does not outright deny – its responsibility to educate young citizens about America, and which often prefers to accentuate the nation’s actual flaws and even invent and propound new ones.

A rededication

As the nation grapples with daunting challenges, it is vital to recall that in 1776 the U.S. Declaration of Independence accomplished something new under the sun by establishing a nation dedicated to securing its citizens’ equal basic rights and fundamental freedoms. And it is urgent to appreciate that, 250 years later, preservation and improvement of that magnificent achievement rest on fidelity to the nation’s founding principles. Fidelity to those principles requires vigorous debate about how best to honor and implement them. To be fruitful, such debate should be informed by the reasoning that supports the nation’s founding principles, the traditions out of which they spring and which nourish them, their instantiation in the American political order, the gap between their promise and current realities, their appeal beyond America’s borders, and temptations presented by political alternatives.

Consequently, recovery of and rededication to the Declaration’s principles – undertakings that are today essential to conserving and improving the nation’s experiment in ordered liberty – hinge on reclaiming liberal education in America.

This is the third of a three-part series originally delivered as a lecture May 15 at a conference, “The Declaration of Independence at 250: What New Can Be Said?” hosted by the Stanford Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. The first two parts can be found here and here.

CNAV published Part I here. The author did not release Part II to RealClearWire – Ed.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.