By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

[The following is an excerpt from Jeffrey Tucker's book, Spirits of America: On the Semiquincentennial.]

The word semiquincentennial is not likely to catch on - it's too hard to say - but it means the 250th anniversary. For the USA, that happens July 4, 2026, because we count our birthday from one of the most remarkable documents issued in the history of man: the Declaration of Independence.

That alone is notable. We don't date our birth from the Articles of Confederation, the ratification of the US Constitution, or back much earlier to the landing on Plymouth Rock. No, we date it from the time when some men representing everyone said that we are now independent from the British Empire. We can and will govern ourselves.

The nation's birthday is not the government's birthday. It marks instead a revolution against government.

The Americans did not want a war with Britain and they knew that such a declaration would likely provoke a wider one. Like all wars, this one war was a disaster, giving rise to death and inflation and traumatizing the happy life that most people were living at the time. On the other hand, the trauma of war forged a new national identity.

It is called a revolution but it was different from the later French case - or the many in British history - because it was not merely an attempt to replace the current government with a new one, much less start history anew. It is sometimes called a "conservative revolution" because the purpose was restorative. The colonies simply wanted the right to live as they had come to expect, without the ravages and exploitations that came with being subject to the British Crown.

That said, the document was certainly not lacking in ideals. Oddly, these ideals came from the British philosopher John Locke and his Second Treatise on Government. Entire sections of this book came to be paraphrased in the Declaration in much more poetic and memorable form.

The Declaration said: "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, - That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

It's hard at this stage of history to recapture the sheer radicalism of the above passage. It sums up the whole of political science and ethics as it pertains to politics. The author Thomas Jefferson replaced Locke's phrase "Life, liberty, and property" with "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" because of the long confusion over the meaning of property, which, in the British case, was compromised by Royal grants of privilege that the Americans rejected.

Here we simply embrace freedom and opportunity, which of course is inclusive of property rights but broader.

Remember that at the time, many Americans held slaves. And yet here was Jeffersion proclaiming all men to be equal in rights. For this reason, and it was a very good one, many suspected that Jefferson was a secret abolitionist. He was indeed. Eventual emancipation was already baked into the fabric of what America is all about. It took too long to happen and the horrible war that brought it about should have never taken place but we eventually got there.

My first time traveling outside the US I had a sudden shock - an obvious revelation and one that is probably only surprising to Americans - that we are not the only country in the world and the only culture that is robust, meaningful, and contributes to human flourishing. Any foreign person reading those sen...