Editor's Note: The below essay is excerpted from the IPR foundation's "Indiana Mandate: A Return to Founding Principles," available at www.amazon.com. It is for immediate release and in advance of the July 4 celebration.
Declaration of Independence, 2025
by Mark Franke
What is the American Dream that previous generations learned in school? The obvious answer is that it is opportunity for self-improvement, best realized in the United States over any other nation in the world. It is what the Statue of Liberty offers immigrants, those “yearning to breathe free.” It is protected in our Constitution and its Bill of Rights.
The simple fact is that one cannot speak of the American Dream without also recalling the Declaration of Independence and the incredible statement which opens the second paragraph:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
These words of Thomas Jefferson are recognizable and recitable, and they can’t but lead one to contemplative reflection on our nation’s founding and the promise it offered in 1776 and still offers today.
Memorizing a catchy phrase is one thing but understanding its significance intellectually is a different thing altogether. The fact that three rights are listed is not meant as some sort of grammatical parallelism. These are three different rights here, related but still distinct. Let’s look at each in turn.
Life must involve more than simply being alive, more than the mere consumption of oxygen as Peter Moore put it in his “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Britain and the American Dream.” How one chooses to live his life is what is unalienable: where to live, whom to marry, what vocation to undertake, etc. It can be argued that no one is truly free to the fullest extent; we all have our choices limited by circumstance and previous decisions made. Yet a modicum of choice always remains.
Liberty is the foundation for both life and the pursuit of happiness. The life choices mentioned above are made possible by a government that protects liberty, over against both itself and all the bad actors out there. Liberty is at once concretely foundational and abstractly evanescent. We celebrate liberty, thinking we know what it is, until mundane things like taxes, zoning laws, employment regulations and so forth disrupt our revelry.
Is pursuit of happiness the disconnect here? Jefferson and his antecedents did not see it this way. Happiness could only be pursued successfully if life and liberty were givens. John Locke used the term estate to refer to this and George Mason plainly called it property. How one spends one’s money is a key to happiness, assuming that life is secure under a regime of liberty. But happiness is more than being able to slam down one’s credit card at the slightest whim. It is a guarantee that what one works to create, develop and procure is safe from predation, particularly arbitrary governmental action—safe to dispose of as one chooses, to freely exchange for something that provides more happiness or to hold in moral escrow for one’s posterity.
Our Founding Fathers were Englishmen, as they liked to assert, and only wanted the natural rights residents of England proper enjoyed. Theirs was not a revolt against tyranny, as the rhetoric of the time claimed, so much as resistance to slow erosion of rights they claimed as their heritage. Americans were taxed at much lower rates than their cross-Atlantic cousins, so why all the fuss? The issue wasn’t the amount of the taxes but their type and origin. Putting aside the secondary issue of internal vs. external taxes, the primary objection was their imposition by a “foreign” government authority. “No taxation without representation” was a useful rallying cry because of its inherent truth even if exaggerated for political advantage.
Jefferson’s statement of unalienable rights scratched the right itch. When liberty is threatened, life becomes less happy. People did not need to recite the list of grievances against King George to viscerally get it. This was not a localized dispute between a British military governor and a bunch of Massachusetts farmers. Something bigger was involved.
That’s what good writing can do and make no mistake; Jefferson was an excellent writer. The Declaration may not have unified the entire continent but it did gain support from a majority in each colony to support a military response by a nascent nation. When George Washington had the Declaration read to his army, its effect was palpable. The cause was now clear and it was a noble one, one shared by all 13 colonies in common cause.
It is no stretch to see the Declaration as a classical statement of Enlightenment political thought, distilled to its essence. What remains is a document for the ages. It is one whose high principles and ascending rhetoric ought to be shared throughout the world. We hold no copyright on its principles and freely grant other peoples the right to use them.
The Declaration is the American Dream in words.
Mark Franke, M.B.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice-chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. A longer version of this essay can be found in "Indiana Mandate: A Return to Founding Principles," available at www.amazon.com.
