One assumption that has guided generations of interpreters is that Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and their collaborators meant a lot more than they said. Photo: John Trumbull, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” — The Declaration of Independence, 1776
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“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” Walt Whitman wrote, but the nation was conceived in prose. Other countries have national holidays that commemorate feats of revolutionary or military glory. This one celebrates a document. The Declaration of Independence was a charter and a manifesto, yes, but in essence it was a memo, a hastily drafted, feverishly edited, hand-copied piece of committee work. A masterpiece too.
It’s poetry, philosophy and polemic, all in a little more than 1,300 words and all represented in its second and most famous sentence.
No matter how many times you’ve read it before, it’s worth reading again. Each idea flows from the previous one, and a comprehensive argument takes shape.
We are equal. We have rights. Those rights describe the very essence of our humanity.
That’s a lot. Pages and pages have been written on this passage, seeking out its ideological subtext, its historical context and its intellectual pretexts in classical and early modern thought. But the plain English of the first 35 words — from “We” to “happiness” — is still remarkable in its sweep and radical in its implications.
It moves from a theory of knowledge to a vision of the good.
We — putting aside for a moment just who this “we” might be — don’t appeal to precedent, tradition or any other external authority, but to the evidence of our own eyes. Human equality is not aspirational: It’s obvious.
Furthermore, this equality isn’t just a formal, mathematical axiom. It has a specific moral and metaphysical content. A human creature is defined by the possession of rights, by a divinely granted entitlement to live, to act and to prosper.
This is remarkable writing — and also a slippery and variable text.
English grammar was a more fluid enterprise in 1776; punctuation and capitalization were irregular.
In the first printed version, for example, there was no period after “happiness.” The sentence kept going, swelling to paragraph length and encompassing all of human nature in a chiming succession of clauses.
Even the simplest gloss — the near-heretical attempt to put the language of the declaration “in other words” — hints at the complexities rippling through the crystalline clarity of the prose. Every word is a fighting word, begging to be contested. What exactly did they mean by “equal”? By “Creator”? By “Liberty”? By “We”?
Over the years, writers of various scholarly, literary and political temperaments have proposed answers.
One assumption that has guided generations of interpreters is that Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and their collaborators meant a lot more than they said. Their simple words reflect deep learning and complicated agendas. Some historians have highlighted the influence of John Locke and other philosophers of the Enlightenment; others have emphasized the economic and political concerns of merchants, artisans and farmers in a prosperous outpost of the British Empire.
Those specific contexts and hidden meanings are important. But if the declaration remains relevant and vital for ordinary readers after 250 years, it may be for the opposite reason: Its writers said so much more than they meant. The genius of the document lies not in the original, local intentions that might be excavated from it, but in the meanings that later generations have projected onto it.
Unlike its younger sibling, the U.S. Constitution, the declaration isn’t an instruction manual. Interpreting it isn’t the job of tenured specialists. It belongs to the secular realms of politics and literature, which means that it lives to be adapted, quoted (and misquoted), wrenched out of its original bearings and repurposed.
The contradictions and limitations of the historical text are self-evident. The founders proclaimed liberty in a slave-owning society. They could hardly have anticipated the raucous, pluralistic, self-polarizing democracy the United States would become. (For what it’s worth they didn’t, in 1776, imagine what we know as the United States at all, but rather 13 autonomous, loosely affiliated political entities.) They wrote, as everyone does, in the heat of a chaotic present and in the face of an unknowable future.
That future, a succession of chaotic presents, including the one we now occupy, has looked back at those men gathered in Philadelphia as signers of an as yet uncashed check.
Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg cited the words of the declaration as a promise to be, however belatedly, fulfilled.
And nearly 100 years later, at the March on Washington, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. warned that the check had bounced.
For Lincoln and King, the declaration functions as both a sacred text and an unfulfilled promise. The conditions that it holds to be self-evident in that second sentence did not, at the time it was written, exist in any known reality. Whether they subsequently did or ever could is the subject of debates that have more or less defined our politics ever since, but the ringing confidence of the statement has not diminished.
The source of that confidence, the conviction that gives the prose its bracing clarity, lies in the founders’ understanding of what they were against. Liberty and equality were ideals yet to be realized, but tyranny was a fact. The main body of the declaration is devoted to describing its manifestations in exacting detail — taxing the colonists without their consent, suspending their legislatures, keeping standing armies among them — in order to justify the radical and unprecedented disruption of the status quo put forth at the beginning.
The invocation of self-evident truths and inherent rights is a warrant for the destruction of existing order, a rhetorical erasure not only of the divine right of kings but also, more generally, of the prerogatives of power.
This is a revolutionary document. Many years after it was written, when the world, emerging from the Napoleonic Wars, seemed to be entering an era of reaction and retrenchment, Jefferson wrote to Adams that “the flames kindled on the 4th of July 1776 have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism. On the contrary they will consume those engines, and all who work them.”
A commuter sits as members of the group Patriot Front ride the metro on the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence on the Fourth of July in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 4, 2026. REUTERS/Cheney Orr TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY (REUTERS)
U.S. President Donald Trump sits at his desk, behind a hat that reads “America is back” at the White House in Washington, D.C., on February 3, 2026. Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
Eighteen states have turned their complete voter files over to the Trump Justice Department, including the driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers of every registered voter in them. That count comes from Protect Democracy, which names all eighteen; Texas, Florida, and Ohio are among them. Together those eighteen states have 148 US House seats, 36 US Senate seats, and 184 electoral college votes, roughly two thirds of what it takes to control the House, the Senate, and the presidency. The question in the headline has an answer, and it is fewer than eighteen.
Since early 2025, the Trump administration has been trying to take control of voter rolls, mail ballots, and registration rules away from the states and hand it to the federal executive branch.
A March 2025 executive order demanded changes to state voting procedures and ordered federal election money withheld from states that refused. Courts blocked parts of it, and on June 24, 2026, a federal judge permanently barred key provisions. The Justice Department demanded voter registration data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, including driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers. The Department of Homeland Security rebuilt a database called SAVE so states could submit their voter rolls to it for citizenship checks.
A second executive order, issued March 31, 2026, ordered federal agencies to build lists of United States citizens and send them to the states before every election, ordered the Postal Service to create a list of approved mail voters, and told the Postal Service to refuse to deliver ballots from anyone not on that list.
DHS has also written new grant conditions, obtained by CNN and expected to go out to the states, that would make states change their election procedures and run their full voter rolls through SAVE to receive homeland security grants from a program worth more than one billion dollars this fiscal year. States that refuse would lose 20 percent of the money. As of this writing DHS has not formally announced the conditions. Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said that cutting the funds of refusing states “endangers American lives and democracy itself.”
Most states said no. The Justice Department answered with 31 federal lawsuits against 30 states plus Washington DC to force the data handover, and so far no court, trial or appellate, has ruled in the department’s favor. On June 22, a federal judge ruled that the rebuilt SAVE system broke three federal laws: the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. That judge, Sparkle Sooknanan, wrote that the federal government had “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens.” Two days later, the Sixth Circuit became the first appeals court to rule on the data lawsuits, upholding the dismissal of the case against Michigan. And on June 25, a federal judge in Boston blocked the core of the mail voting order for the November 2026 election in a lawsuit brought by 23 Democratic-led states and DC. The judge, Indira Talwani, wrote that “The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.”
News stories about these rulings count the states that refused and the rulings the administration lost. Every one of those stories is accurate. They still measure the wrong thing, because a count of refusing states only means something if each state’s choice stays inside that state’s borders. It does not, for two reasons.
The first reason: once voter data leaves a state, the federal government keeps it, and every new state adds to the same federal database. That database works as soon as one state hands over its records, no matter how many others refuse.
Twelve of the eighteen had handed over complete files, driver’s license and Social Security numbers included, by early April; the other six complied partly or later. Texas alone accounts for a large share of the affected voters: it signed an agreement with DHS in March 2025 and ran its more than 18 million registered voters through SAVE. Separately, the DHS agency that handles citizenship began building a registry that combines its own records with data from the Social Security Administration and the State Department.
The Justice Department also asked states to sign a confidential agreement along with the data handover. Under its reported terms, a state that signs agrees to remove any voter the department flags as ineligible within 45 days. Two states signed: Alaska and Texas. Mississippi, South Dakota, and Tennessee handed over their rolls but refused to sign. A state that signs has given the federal executive branch ongoing control of its voter roll.
A court ruling issued after a transfer does not bring the data back. On May 12, 2026, the Office of Legal Counsel issued a written opinion saying federal law lets the Attorney General force states to produce their voter lists and share them with DHS. Losing individual court cases does not erase that opinion.
The second reason is geography. Control of the House and Senate will be decided in a small number of competitive districts and states, and several cooperating states hold those races, including Texas, Ohio, Florida, Iowa, and North Carolina. At least 25 states have run their rolls through SAVE since April 2025, 60 million registrations in a year, plus another 7.4 million from North Carolina, where Republicans control the state election board.
The court wins protect mostly the governments that sued. The June 25 injunction covers the 23 suing states and DC, and the administration told the courts this week that it is moving ahead with the system in the remaining states. Postmaster General David Steiner told the Senate on June 24 that under the proposed rule the Postal Service would refuse to deliver mail ballots in states that do not send their voter lists to the federal government. A voter in Houston or Columbus gets nothing from the injunction, because that voter’s state government joined the federal programs instead of fighting them. One ruling reaches further: in a separate case brought by the NAACP, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan found the plan to deliver ballots only to preapproved voters broke a 2021 agreement with the Postal Service, and his ruling applies nationwide. That ruling protects ballot delivery. It does not touch the data collection, the purge agreements, or the state purge laws. So the court protection concentrates in states whose governments already refused to cooperate. In the cooperating states that hold the races deciding control of Congress, only the ballot delivery ruling applies.
The 60 million registration checks flagged about 24,000 possible noncitizens, and officials also flagged several hundred thousand registrations of people who may have died. Those totals only show how many people the government has flagged so far. It can flag as many as it chooses, and no one has to prove a flagged voter is ineligible before the registration is canceled; the voter has to prove they are eligible. That arrangement is a devastatingly powerful voter disenfranchisement tool.
In Texas, flagged voters got a letter, and if the county heard nothing within 30 days, the registration was canceled; some who did answer turned out to be citizens. A new Ohio law makes local election boards promptly cancel the registrations of people the secretary of state flags as noncitizens in checks he must run at least monthly. That secretary, Frank LaRose, defends the law on the ground that flagged voters can “immediately restore their registration status” by showing proof of citizenship.
The system also discourages people from registering at all, separate from the cancellations. A federal official confirmed that people flagged by SAVE are referred to DHS for possible criminal investigation, and the judge who reviewed the system wrote that a centralized federal database like this would discourage registration because citizens could fear misuse of their personal information. In races decided by hundreds or a few thousand votes, losing voters from only one side, and mostly from one party, can change the result even when the national numbers stay small.
The administration has also arranged its litigation so that losing in court still produces something useful. After losing the voter data cases in California, Michigan, and Oregon, the Justice Department filed emergency appeals warning that the security and sanctity of elections in those states would be questioned without quick rulings, and its filings say that without a final court decision there is “no other process to ensure a fair election in 2026.”
Stated plainly, months before the election, the department put into official court documents the claim that results in refusing states should be treated as doubtful. If a state cooperates, the government gets its data and a purge process. If a state refuses, the government gets a written reason to challenge that state’s results in November. Either way, the administration gains something it can use. David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former Justice Department voting section attorney, said of the department’s conduct, “There’s so much lawyering from the DOJ here that is raising ethical questions.”
The same approach is underway with the mail voting order. Within a week of the June 25 injunction, the administration appealed to the First Circuit, asked the district judge to lift her order by July 6, and warned in its filings that the injunction will make it impossible for the Postal Service to build the new ballot delivery system before November even if the administration wins the appeal. Those filings put in writing, ahead of time, a federal reason to call November mail ballots compromised.
Collecting the names of individual election workers and threatening officials with prosecution discourages people from doing that work whether or not charges are ever filed.
President Trump is also pressing Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would make people show citizenship papers to register, limit mail voting to reasons such as illness, disability, military deployment, and travel, and make states submit their voter rolls to DHS and remove anyone the system flags. In March he said of the bill, “It will guarantee the midterms.”
Between June 22 and June 29, federal courts ruled the SAVE overhaul unlawful, permanently barred parts of the 2025 executive order, upheld the dismissal of the Michigan data case on appeal, blocked the mail voting order for 23 states and DC, and upheld Mississippi’s ballot deadline law at the Supreme Court. Those rulings stop specific legal mechanisms.
They do not bring back data already handed over, automatically restore wrongly canceled registrations, reassure naturalized citizens who now connect registering with a federal investigation, protect election workers whose names have been demanded, erase the department’s written claims that elections in refusing states cannot be presumed fair, or stop the grant conditions waiting to go out.
So, how many states is enough? To steal an election, the infrastructure needs only three things: enough voter data, cooperation from states that hold the competitive races, and an official reason to dispute the results everywhere else. Texas alone supplied the first two: 18 million records handed over, a signature on the 45 day removal agreement, citizens with canceled registrations, and competitive House seats inside its borders. The Justice Department’s own court filings supplied the third. The answer is one, and it has already happened.
Want to do something about it? Well it’s our job at the Existentialist Republic to address exactly the issue this article outlines and then hand people tools to make change because when the federal government and a large fraction of states have abandoned fairness, freedom, and democracy, we need a plan.
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From the archive, an Independence Day message from the Founder of The Prosperos.
Introduced by Heather Williams
Recorded July 5, 1981 Approximately 44:00 minutes
Thane explores the philosophical / religious underpinnings of the American revolution and the founders and identifies challenges of his day – the opening year of the Reagan administration – with insights that resonate in our own time.
Marianne Williamson Jul 3, 2026 This year should be a mindful, not a mindless celebration Subscribe to Marianne’s Substack: MarianneWilliamson.Susbtack.com
Heather Cox Richardson Streamed live 6 hours ago In which I try to answer a different set of questions, today…. Topics covered in today’s Politics Chat: Declaration of Independence 250th anniversary, natural law and unalienable rights, consent of the governed, grievances against the King, dissolution of allegiance to the Crown, birth of a new nation.
In April, Viktor Orbán, the long-ruling former prime minister of Hungary, and his ruling party were finally defeated. The new July issue of the Journal of Democracy features a special package of essays detailing how Péter Magyar and his Tisza party achieved a victory that once seemed impossible and what it will take to restore Hungary’s democracy.
Plus: What is “freedom philanthropy,” and why is it so important for global democracy? When does polarization devolve into violence? And how will the liberal international order survive America’s retreat?
When Polarization Turns ViolentDemocracies have always sparked conflict, disagreement, and deep ideological divisions. Polarized politics are hardly rare in democratic life. So under what conditions does polarization turn violent, and how can this danger be contained?
By Jeffrey S. Kopstein
Can Péter Magyar Restore Hungary’s Democracy?He did the hard work of defeating Viktor Orbán. But Hungary’s new prime minister faces the harder task of undoing the damage his predecessor wrought. Can he do it while avoiding the traps Orbán left in his wake?
By Kim Lane Scheppele
How Civil Society Defeated OrbánViktor Orbán was ousted by an innovative, grassroots, nationwide campaign run by local civic groups called Tisza Islands. Their success offers a new playbook for civic mobilization against aspiring autocrats.
By Hanna Folsz
Why Oppositions Lose Together and Win AloneIt was long thought that, to be successful, oppositions needed to form broad-based alliances ahead of elections. But Hungary and Turkey show that a single challenger has real advantages against a would-be autocrat.
By Edgar Șar and Pelin Ayan Musil
The Democratic DrainGlobal migration is quietly altering democratic politics in the places people leave behind. It is not just a shift in labor; it is a shift in democratic values. It may be gradual, but it can become a hidden demographic underpinning of authoritarianism.
By Justin Gest
The Power of Freedom PhilanthropyLess than one percent of philanthropy is directed to democratic freedoms. Yet freedom is essential for everything—health, education, climate—philanthropy tries to accomplish. It is the most underpriced asset, and we are due for a market correction.
By Tim Reynolds and Álvaro Salas-Castro
Why the IRGC Is the War’s Biggest WinnerThe U.S.-Israeli war in Iran has elevated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from the regime’s chief coercive tool to the regime itself. Expect an Iran that is more aggressive abroad and more repressive at home.
By Saeid Golkar
Can the Liberal Order Survive America’s Retreat?No other democratic power will be able to uphold a new international order. Autocrats and illiberal coalitions are already rushing into the breach, and if they go unchecked, the damage will be lasting.
By Christina Cottiero, Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, Stephan Haggard, and Christina J. Schneider
How to Combat Transnational RepressionAuthoritarians actively threaten, intimidate, and murder exiles and opponents wherever they find them. While justice for victims is hard won, it is possible. Here is how democracies can push back.
By Siena Anstis and Marcus Michaelsen
How the CCP Outsources SurveillanceBeijing knows digital surveillance of the world’s most populous nation is technologically demanding. So the Party has hired corporations to occupy the “public-opinion battlefield” and spot the trouble before it spreads.
By Lynette H. Ong
Democracy in an Age of Networked ControlThe coercive tools of modern autocracies are highly integrated, with an ability to monitor, restrict, and shape behavior at scale and in real-time. It is time for democratic movements to adapt and respond with a decentralized resistance of their own.
By Leopoldo López
Eritrea’s Democratic FailureEritrea is one of the world’s most implacable dictatorships, led by an octogenarian who shuns any hint of accountability. The country’s democratic path was never genuinely open, and it now poses a grave risk to the Horn of Africa.
By Kjetil Tronvoll
The Danger of Democratic Backsliding in East AsiaJapan, South Korea, and Taiwan are typically seen as democratic stalwarts, on par with older established democracies. But all three countries face growing pressures that threaten its political foundations.
By R. Ayité Okyne, article from The Drumbeat July 2026*
I watched the fireworks from a rooftop in Hollywood last July, surrounded by men I love, and I thought about the particular quality of silence that falls over a group of gay men when the national anthem plays.
It is not disrespect.
It is something more complicated: the body bracing itself against a story that was never quite written for us.
We are taught, all of us, to feel a swell of pride on the Fourth of July. Independence. Self-determination. The right to pursue happiness on our own terms.
But that story has always had missing chapters.
This country declared freedom while people were still enslaved. It celebrated liberty while Black bodies were bought, sold, separated from families, and worked to exhaustion. It spoke of equality while women could not vote, Indigenous people were displaced, immigrants were demonized, and generations of gay, queer, and trans people learned to survive by hiding the very parts of themselves that most needed tenderness.
So when some of us feel complicated on Independence Day, it is not because we hate joy. It is because we know what it means to be handed a promise and then told to wait.
For many of us in this community, the pursuit of happiness has come at the cost of family dinners we were not invited to, jobs we quietly left before anyone could ask questions, hometowns we now visit as tourists in our own childhoods.
I think often about the men who write to me after a workshop or session, men in their fifties and sixties who still flinch when a hand brushes theirs in public. Not because they are ashamed. Because forty years of conditioning does not dissolve the moment a law changes.
Independence, for us, was never declared once and settled. It has been negotiated in increments: a marriage ruling here, a city ordinance there, a workplace policy there, a fragile sense of safety that still depends too much on which state line, family system, church, workplace, or neighborhood you happen to be standing in.
(view.flodesk.com)
And we are seeing, even now, how quickly rights can be questioned, narrowed, delayed, or taken for granted. Voting rights are still being contested. Racism still shapes whose bodies are treated as threatening, whose grief is believed, whose history is taught honestly, and whose pain is dismissed as “divisive.” Queer and trans people are still turned into political talking points by people who have never had to live inside the fear they casually create.
There is a particular loneliness in that kind of freedom. It arrives unevenly, and it arrives late, and by the time it reaches you, you may have already built a whole architecture of self-protection. Freedom on paper and freedom in the nervous system are two very different inheritances.
So what does it mean to celebrate a freedom you have had to win in pieces, in private, often alone?
I do not think the answer is cynicism. I think it is something closer to clarity.
The fireworks are still beautiful. The barbecue is still good. The laughter still matters. But there is a version of patriotism available to us that holds the contradiction without flinching from it.
We can love a country and still name the parts of it that did not love us back.
We can celebrate independence and still grieve the enslaved people who were denied it, the Black citizens who had to fight for the vote long after freedom was supposedly granted, the queer elders who did not survive long enough to marry, hold hands, transition safely, or be seen without shame.
This is not an argument for withholding joy. It is an argument for a more honest joy. The kind that does not require us to pretend the road here was simple. The kind that lets a man sit with his discomfort during the anthem instead of performing enthusiasm he does not feel. The kind that makes room for the brother still not out to his mother, alongside the one throwing a party with a rainbow flag on the porch.
Independence was never a single moment for us.
It is a practice.
Something we keep choosing, body by body, conversation by conversation, year after year, long after the fireworks have stopped.
That, to me, is worth celebrating.
*The Drumbeat, a monthly newsletter of the Black Brothers of the Desert, Palm Springs California
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