The Betrayal of the Promises of the Declaration of Independence

Donald Trump is a Fascist, perhaps even a Nazi authoritarian leader. Though elected under the laws and Constitution of our Republic, he has no intention of following them or using them to destroy our Constitution and laws. As Timothy Snyder wrote:

“The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions—even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do.”

Donald Trump announced his intentions as early as 2015, but few believed him. Now he is beginning his second term in office by doing exactly what he said that he would from 2015 until the day before his inauguration, just 5 days ago. Anyone who did not believe him before now was either deaf and blind, mentally deficient, or a damned fool. Of course there are quite a few who actually have the same ideas as Trump and they can only be considered Fascists or Nazis who want to destroy the very ideals that are the foundation of our country.

Those ideals are the promise of the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence which I taught to the students of one of my High School history classes last month. As I was grading their final examinations for this semester, I noted those ideals which were part of the exam. When I teach American history I spend a lot of time on the Declaration, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, not to mention key amendments which were the logical continuation of those rights, including the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Nineteenth amendments. Likewise, I discuss Supreme Court decisions and legislation which expanded them, all which furthered liberties for people hitherto left out, without infringing on the actual freedom of anyone who opposed them, except their ability to deny liberties they enjoy to others.

The preamble, written by Thomas Jefferson included the ideals that are foundational to the American experience. While we have often failed to live up to them, only once, until Trump did any Americans seek to destroy them, those were the men who enslaved millions and seceded from the Union in order to have the right to expand slavery, and force it upon Free States.

The preamble of the Declaration stated:

“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. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

Those rights are the most treasured and happen to be part of many nations founding documents, as well as the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. They are the most consequential words written in human history. However, there were those in the American South who held those ideals in the same disdain as Donald Trump and his Fascist mob.

George Fitzhugh, a defender of slavery and a believer that women and poor whites were not entitled to the same rights as the slave owning oligarchs, the very kind of people Donald Trump despise. Fitzhugh wrote:

“We must combat the doctrines of natural liberty and human equality, and the social contract as taught by Locke and the American sages of 1776. Under the spell of Locke and the Enlightenment, Jefferson and other misguided patriots ruined the splendid political edifice they erected by espousing dangerous abstractions – the crazy notions of liberty and equality that they wrote into the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Bill of Rights. No wonder the abolitionists loved to quote the Declaration of Independence! Its precepts are wholly at war with slavery and equally at war with all government, all subordination, all order. It is full if mendacity and error. Consider its verbose, newborn, false and unmeaning preamble…. There is, finally, no such thing as inalienable rights. Life and liberty are not inalienable…. Jefferson in sum, was the architect of ruin, the inaugurator of anarchy. As his Declaration of Independence Stands, it deserves the appropriate epithets which Major Lee somewhere applies to the thought of Mr. Jefferson, it is “exuberantly false, and absurdly fallacious.”

That is exactly what Trump, Musk, Bezos, Thiel, and Zuckerberg believe, and what their intentions are for everyone, including the very people that voted for Trump.

Trump intends to destroy the very ideals our country is founded upon. He cannot be allowed to compete what he wants to do. In his July Fourth oration of 1852, spoken in the darkest time of our history, Frederick Douglass said:

“I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.”

Likewise, Judge Learned Hand spoke these words in his address to thousands of new immigrants in New York not long before D-Day:

“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. The spirit of Liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of Liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of Liberty is that which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.”

In times like this with the darkness of tyranny enveloping us and our country we must hold onto these words and ideals, for if we allow them to die within us, nothing can stop the advance of evil.

Please be safe, watch your six, and do not ever give up in the fight for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.