In this year celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and through nutshell extrapolation the birth of the world’s greatest democracy, the United States, we find ourselves free-falling into dictatorship. Needless to say, this dampens the celebration for Americans who care about democracy, and enhances it for those who don’t.
One thing we’ve heard people in the first group say is that “the Revolution never happened. It was a non-Revolution. It didn’t change anything, accomplish anything, free anyone, or birth democracy.”
The feeling is understandable. How can we be where we are in 2026 if 1776 had really been the revolution we remember it as? There must be a fault from the start, or, to use a not-great phrase that has only become less great, an “original sin” in our founding that we’ve never been able to eradicate. When we see the majority of Americans on board with fascism, it’s only natural and justifiable to turn angrily on our failures as a nation. It took four score and seven years after 1776 to outlaw slavery. It took 144 years to acknowledge women’s citizenship with the right to vote. It took 178 years to desegregate public schools, and eventually all public businesses and spaces. 239 years to acknowledge gay peoples’ right to marry (and therefore exist).
But we at the HP draw the line at locating these failures, and the ongoing failure to provide liberty and justice for all in this nation, in 1776 and the Founders. The American Revolutionary War was a real revolution. The fact that it doesn’t seem so radical to some of us is proof of the fact that it was–it created such a fundamentally new kind of nation that those born into it took it for granted.
Beyond that, it’s the worst kind of cop-out to say “America was always terrible because the Founders were slaveholding, colonizing monsters and they set an irreversible path for the nation.” One of the most salient ways to make this case is to point to the words of the Declaration itself–“all men are created equal”. Just men, not women. Clear intent of describing only white men.
And this absolutely was a failure of the Founders. They extended political rights and legal personhood to every white man regardless of social class, and for them this was radical enough to seem like the very biggest revolution they could make.
It wasn’t. But did their limited understanding and experience set us forever on a path of failure? Or does ours?
It’s not the job of one generation to change things forever, to accomplish everything, to overturn every unjust belief, to right every wrong, so later generations can sit back and take it easy. One generation can’t have that kind of eternal reach. It’s the job of each generation that follows to commit itself to the revolutionary principles they inherit, enforce them, then take them farther.
It’s on us to do that work. In her article about the “origin and history of the Constitution” course she teaches at UNLV, history professor Dr. Michelle Elizabeth Tusan sums it up better than we can:
In order to make the case that the Declaration is an Enlightenment document, we used to trot out the usual suspects—Locke, Montesquieu, and Paine—and then move on. Only when I started engaging more fully with the limited nature of Enlightenment thinking about slavery, women, and Indigeneity by chronicling the Haitian Revolution, Olympe de Gouges, and the colonial arguments of Bartolome de las Casas and Juan Sepulveda did I start to get at the question students wanted to understand about the exclusionary nature of so-called Enlightenment universalism.
“All men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” needed context and explanation, otherwise it sounded to students at one of the most diverse campuses in the United States like empty rhetoric. It made me start talking about the “we” in the Declaration more pointedly. Who is included in the circle of “we the people”? The answer that is repeated throughout the course is that it changes from generation to generation and that it is in their power to broaden or shrink that circle. In other words, they may not have been in “the room where it happened” but they have a role to play.
FORUM 1776. “Views from the British World: Teaching the Declaration of Independence as Imperial History”. Michelle Elizabeth Tusan, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 65, 2026.
Each generation born after and outside of those hot rooms in Philadelphia where the Declaration was written has had a role to play in keeping the revolution alive by extending it. Every generation has had a mandate to use their experience living in a nation with a degree of revolutionary freedom to increase that degree. And there have always been many Americans who have done that. If that weren’t true, slavery would not have been ended, women would not vote, public businesses and places would be segregated, and gay unions would have no legal validity.
The fact that there have also always been many Americans who have not extended the revolution is likewise demonstrated by the endurance of slavery in all but name, systemic oppression of women, redlining and other forms of continued segregation in all but name, and continuing anti-gay legislation and violence.
When we ask why America hasn’t been able to do better, the first thing to do is refresh our memories on all we have done. Any public organizer will tell you you have to celebrate the wins. But the next thing to do is to refresh our memories on who is responsible for our failures. And the answer is not “the Founders who set us on an inescapable path to fascism”. The answer is “every American ever since 1776 who did not get on board with the revolution and either worked to destroy it or sat back and did nothing while others destroyed it.”
Stop blaming the past. Stop saying there was no Revolution. Start doing what we’re supposed to and carry it forward.
The Historic Present 