When we want to believe a “truth” we can deceive ourselves better than any con-man can. We want to believe in the America of the dream. We want to tell our kids America is great. We want it so bad we lie to ourselves about truths that stare us in the face. So the lie becomes the truth.

The Declaration of Independence is a statement of principles about government and the human rights of people that the folks that won the American Revolution proclaimed to the world were the ideas of America they were willing to fight and die for. Once they won the Revolution, the harder work of applying those principles began, and opposition went from the Tories supporting the English Empire to domestic opponents with their own interests and goals. That’s the human condition.

The principles declared are pretty simple. First, the human rights of the people come from being a person, and are granted each person by nature’s god. These human rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” exist before government (there are other human rights not named that are included).

The people can form a government to protect those rights. A government formed by the people must have the “consent” of the people or the government is not legit. (Without consent any government is a form of slavery.) If the government formed by the people with their consent later becomes destructive of those rights, the government is no longer legit and it is the “right or the duty of the people to alter or abolish it.”

Then the people make a new government that better protects those rights. The law making power is in the people and they only delegate it to government so long as government protects the human rights of the people and no longer.

Where do these principles stand as the 250th Birthday of the Declaration, July 4, 2026, approaches? A candid, honest assessment is not promising.

Consent of the governed? Many people say, “What can I do, I can’t do anything, the government does what it wants and I can’t change it.” If true, consent of the governed does not exist.

Voting still exists. However, Congress in 1910 froze the number of representatives in the House at 435. The Senate was frozen in the Constitution at two per state. The House dilution of representation as population has soared, has effectively demoted the peoples’ voting power (vote inflation). In 2026, each member of the U.S. House of Representatives represents an average of roughly 761,000 to 770,000 people. In 1798, a decade after the Constitution was adopted by the people, each member of the US House of Representatives represented an average of approximately 34,000 to 35,000 people. Clearly vote inflation has diluted the value of each voter’s consent. This is why your “representative” does not much care about your individual vote.

The Constitution does not limit the House to 435. The Congress itself granted itself the power of dilution by statute. As a result, the power of each voter to demand representation has been diluted while at the same time the power of money to lobby or influence representatives has grown.

Many today, despairing they are not represented, say rather that America has “the best government money can buy.” This is not representation in any meaningful sense. Thus, the complaint of the Americans who rebelled, no taxation without representation, is essentially extant in America today. You have the right to pay taxes for every government misadventure, but little say in what your representative authorizes. Another foreign war? Pay up and shut up, citizen.

As a result, government is seen by many as unrepresentative, much like the one overthrown in the Revolution.

Take another principle: “[T]o secure these rights, Governments are instituted?” Does the current government “secure” the peoples’ rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?” Many facts seem to deny this requirement for legit government. Rather, one sees a government deploying troops to the streets, just like the Redcoats were before the Revolution. ICE and DHS are funded to some $191 billion, deployed to round up people on mere suspicion, arrested without warrant, detained without trial in “for profit” detention camps, and even murdered without due process.

Again highly reminiscent of the actions of the Redcoats at the Boston Massacre and other abuses of human rights carried out before the Revolution that compelled rebellion. The President seeks to intimidate the press for free speech, and universities for open debate and free thought. The President challenges the peoples’ birthright citizenship protected by the Constitution he swore to god to defend.

The NSA spies on Americans 24/7/365. Wars are started and continued without even the feeble representatives in Congress participating at all, like the President is King and can declare/wage war despite the supreme law authorized by the people, the Constitution, requiring war be declared by Congress. The diluted representation is actually revealed to be no representation even on the most fundamental questions of life and death.

One can adduce many more facts demonstrating the principles of the Declaration are damaged, injured, and degraded, at best. The totality of their current degenerate state indicates the national principles are on life support.

It appears that today the nation stands in lurid juxtaposition to its principles. It has before: Frederick Douglass on July 5, 1852 asked, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

Douglass argued that for the enslaved population, the Fourth of July is “a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim”. Douglass explicitly told his white audience, “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”

He argued that forcing Black people who did not enjoy the principled human rights proclaimed by the Declaration to celebrate American independence was an “inhuman mockery.”

Today, the great mass of the people, outcast from representation, denied fundamental human rights on the streets of their towns and villages, threatened with reprisal for speaking, writing and teaching the great human rights for which America was to stand, gassed, beaten, imprisoned and even killed by agents of their own government, are urged to celebrate a 250th Birthday while the very heart of the Declaration is torn out and trampled upon in the gutters.

It is an “inhuman mockery” for a dispossessed, disenfranchised, disregarded people to celebrate the majestic achievement of their ancestors while shaking in their shoes before a metastasizing authoritarian government apparently intent on “Making England Great Again” and restoring a King.

Celebration of the Declaration in the presence of such facts, is indeed an inhuman mockery, an insult to the memory of those who fought, bled, and died to advance the principles of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and to erect a nation where “law is king,” and all protected by equal protection of the law by a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

The Declaration of 1776 did not win universal human rights. It was merely the first shot in a long and difficult struggle because as history shows “all governments tend towards tyranny.” Even one proclaimed with a Declaration of human rights derived from “nature’s god.”

America must be vigilant against encroaching erosions of its great principles. Every generation must renew their commitment to defending and expanding those human rights, not only in rhetoric, but in the halls of Congress, the White House, and the courts, and the streets, until “liberty and justice for all” is the lived reality of “we the people.”

Only then will the right to celebration of the Declaration be earned. And every generation must earn that right by carrying forward the struggle for the “inalienable” rights of all.