The American Revolution bequeathed to us a set of ideals so radiant and powerful they can still illuminate our path—and so often ignored, they reveal the long shadows we cast as a nation.
To journey from the world of the founders to our own is to witness a constant, often painful, dialogue between what we profess and what we practice.
The founders, for all their profound flaws, launched a great argument—not just with a king, but with themselves and with the future. They declared that our rights are “unalienable,” endowed by our Creator, not granted by the state.
This was a radical claim then, and it remains so today.
You see it in the citizen standing up at a town hall meeting, in the journalist protecting a source, in the parent demanding a better school. It is the bedrock assertion of human dignity against the inertia of power.
And that other founding principle, “the consent of the governed”—that’s the engine of the American experiment.
It’s the conviction that legitimacy flows upward from the people, not downward from the powerful. We are still fighting to ensure that consent is meaningful.
When we debate voter access, when we question the influence of dark money in our elections, when we demand that our representatives actually represent us, we are fighting the same battle.
We are asking, “Who does this government belong to?”
But here’s the thing about these ideals: they shine a light on our failures.
The men who declared all men equal were also men of their time, enmeshed in an economy built on slavery. That original sin, that hypocrisy, was written into the nation’s genetic code. And we are still living with the consequences.
You can’t understand the deep disparities in wealth, health, and justice in this country today without understanding that foundational contradiction. The trauma is not just historical; it is contemporary. It’s in the soil, in the water, in the very air we breathe.
The founders, particularly James Madison, feared what they called “factions.” They worried that party loyalty would overwhelm public good.
Well, look around. They couldn’t have imagined the financial firehose of campaign cash, the echo chambers of digital media, the gerrymandered districts that make representatives fear only a primary challenge from their base, not a general election from their entire constituency.
The system they designed to force compromise now seems expertly engineered to produce gridlock. The center isn’t holding because we’ve organized ourselves to blow the center apart.
And so we are left with a pressing question: in this new Gilded Age, what does “consent of the governed” mean when vast economic power can translate so directly into political power?
When a worker holding down two or three gig jobs to make ends meet has, in effect, no lobbyist in the statehouse? There is a new kind of servitude in such precariousness, a limitation on liberty that the founders might recognize, even if its form is modern.
The great challenge of our time is to reconnect the revolutionary idea of political equality with the democratic necessity of economic justice.
To make the “consent of the governed” meaningful for everyone, not just the wealthy and the powerful. The founders began that argument. They left us the words.
It is up to us to finish the work. The promise of America is not a relic to be preserved behind glass. It is a covenant to be renewed, a conversation to be continued. And the next line in that conversation is ours to write.