"These truths" are not self-evident

Two hundred fifty years ago, a committee in Philadelphia argued over the words. Jefferson’s draft said we hold these truths to be “sacred and undeniable.” It was Benjamin Franklin, Jill Lepore tells us, who crossed that out for “self-evident.”

Nothing about “these truths” — political equality, natural rights, the consent of the governed — has ever been self-evident in this country. We don’t agree on where they come from; “self-evident” was always something of a dodge. And our failures to live up to them are foundational. Those principles are, of course, wildly inconsistent with genocide against Native Americans, with the transatlantic slave trade and property in human beings, with the denial of the vote to women.

The founders weren’t naive to these hypocrisies. Jefferson’s third draft, included the abolition of slavery and the sentence that, at least as concerned inheritance, “females shall have equal rights with males.” But these wound up on the cutting room floor. Seventy-five years later, Frederick Douglass would ask, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?”

And yet “these truths” are our founding principles, and still damn good ones. They aren’t self-evident — but they’re worth pledging, still, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor to. They have always had to be argued, organized, legislated, marched for, and — again and again — defended against people working just as hard to deny them.

We often tell American history as running in one direction: founding, flaw, struggle, progress. Slavery, then abolition. Denial of rights to women, then suffrage. Jim Crow, then civil rights. Exclusion, then a more perfect union, always trending toward justice if we’re patient. It’s a comforting shape, and there’s real truth in it — people did fight, and win, and expand who counts as “we the people.” That’s ours to tell, too.

But Lepore’s history doesn’t let us stop there. For every Reconstruction, there was a Redemption. For every expansion of who belongs, there has been an organized, well-funded, often electorally successful countermovement insisting the expansion went too far, and that some earlier arrangement of power was the real America to which we should return. That countermovement is not a deviation from our history. It is our history — as old as the founding, running alongside the freedom strand the whole way, sometimes losing, sometimes winning, often in the very same people and the same laws at the same time.

That’s where we are today. One sentence Jefferson wrote, and that survived every edit — “A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a people who mean to be free” — describes our current one.

He has looted the American people for billions, in corruption schemes so brazen they make Teapot Dome and Watergate look like high-school pranks. He has abducted tens of thousands of our immigrant neighbors without lawful cause. He has taken us into reckless, illegal wars. He has corroded and dismantled systems we built to educate our kids, feed the hungry, and care for the sick.

So the question today isn’t whether these truths are self-evident, or even how we understand the history of trying to make them real. It’s what we’re doing about it now. And I don’t just mean defeating Trump and Trumpism, though surely we must. The founders fought a war to be rid of George III — but what we actually celebrate today is what came after: they built a government, derived from the consent of the governed, to make our lives in common better.

They also built in the means to amend and evolve that government, so it could keep working for centuries to come. That’s our charge now — and it’s why I ran for Congress. Not as an inheritance to protect, a victory to defend, or even a wrong to right, but as an assignment to fulfill together.

In the years ahead, we’ll need major structural changes to our democratic institutions: expanding and reforming the Supreme Court, ending the filibuster, proportional representation in Congress, overturning Citizens United and getting money out of politics. We’ll need to establish new rights as part of our social democracy — universal health care, child care, housing — and build the systems to deliver them. We’ll need to harness technologies like AI for the public interest, and bring our full capacities to confronting climate change, whose brutal impact we feel this very weekend. And we’ll need to reset our relationship to the rest of the world — moving beyond American hegemony to seeing “these truths” as a multilateral project we help anchor, but do not control.

That’s not a job for one person, or for people who happen to hold office. If these truths get made true by politics — organizing, showing up, voting, serving on your community board, knocking on doors, arguing with your uncle, building coalition one relationship at a time — then that work belongs to everyone who wants to be part of the “we” in “we hold these truths.” That’s the invitation this anniversary is actually extending, if you listen past the fireworks: not “come admire what was self-evidently achieved,” but “come help finish writing the story.”

For the epigraph of her book, Lepore quotes Lincoln, writing to Congress in December 1862 as the war ground into its bloodiest year: “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” That work of disenthrallment is still urgent. Lincoln understood the war as a reckoning with the gap between “these truths” and property in human beings. Trump wants us to forget that gap ever mattered, to treat naming it as a kind of treason.

But there’s another kind of disenthrallment happening right now, one Lincoln didn’t have to contend with: so many of us have become disenthralled with the very possibility of American democracy. Worn down, cynical, half-convinced that self-government is a game already lost to money and grievance. That exhaustion is its own threat to the country, because a democracy nobody believes in is a democracy nobody shows up for.

So maybe what this moment calls for is some new enthrallment, too — getting caught up in something bigger than ourselves. We’ve felt a version of it these past few weeks in New York, watching this city — every borough, every language, every line of difference — pour into the streets for the Knicks, giddy and loud and, for a few nights, unmistakably something bigger together, more than the sum of our parts. And while that was sports, and not politics, you could feel the way it was connected to being New Yorkers, to the inheritance we have as the city with that copper-plated statue out in the harbor, the Mother of Exiles, bringing us together.

Charting that course as Americans feels even harder, to be sure, than a 53-year championship drought. But today, I think we should keep faith in it, recommit to it. Two hundred and fifty years on, the project of political equality, human rights, and democratic participation remains worthy of our lives, our fortune, and our sacred honor. Not grim duty, or something self-evident that we’re defending with gritted teeth. But enthrallment at what we could yet become.

Let’s go find out what that looks like, together. Happy 250th.