From Jerry Bowyer:
To determine whether the framers [of the Declaration of Independence] and their principles would cause us once again to break from a central political authority one must first get into the head space of the founders. Their way of thinking, though alien to modern political philosophy and so much the worse for modern political philosophy, is clear and cogent:
There are certain ideas which are self-evidently true. One of those ideas is that we are created without legal primacy or inferiority with regard to one another. Another idea, which is just obviously true to people whose rational faculties are operating properly, is that the rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of a prosperous life which is what the word ‘happiness’ meant in 1776 are not alienable, that is they cannot have a lien placed on them by any other persons, not even representatives of the state.
Not only is government denied the authority to put a lien on and repossess those rights, but it is further required to protect those rights. And in fact, the protecting of those rights is the only reason that government should exist in the first place! And not only is it necessary for government to protect these rights, but its use of power to do so is still only just if it also involves the consent of the people whose freedom and property are being protected. Further and this is shocking, even to modern ears, when governments move from protecting those rights to injuring those rights, the people are allowed to erase the authority of the government.
….No amount of banning or inciting can change the facts. 238 years ago the principles of the Declaration found that the central government had lost the right to rule and called on the people to withdraw allegiance to it. Is that the case now?
Read more at The July 4th Question: 238 Years After The First Revolution, Is It Time For A Second?.
I can’t understand how Americans cling to the belief that the Declaration was somehow a statement that all people are created equal, with rights to life, freedom and opportunity, when it was written by men who had stolen almost all the land they were living on, and had gangs of slaves making them prosperous. It was a noble sounding but incredibly elitist opinion about the kind of monarch-less world they would feel safest living in. Self evident truth would have depended on who you were. The only self-evident truth to enslaved Africans and degraded Native Americans would have been whoever had the biggest gun spoke the biggest truth. If there were to be a second revolution, it would only be worth having if it came about through words instead of weapons, and based on un-coerced values that everyone truly believed in. Are there any?
…life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness/prosperity seem fairly universal values. The question is: are these rights being upheld and protected? In many parts of the world the answer remains no — people are being exploited by those meant to protect them.
Today in the USA, the Corporations have the defacto power, so I see the question as moot.