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Jared Golden of Lewiston represents Maine’s 2nd Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. This piece was originally published on June 30 in “ Dear Mainer,” Golden’s Substack. It is reposted here in its entirety, with permission.
In just a few days, America will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
I was recently invited to speak on a panel in the United Kingdom, alongside a journalist and two historians, to discuss whether the Declaration of Independence was still relevant today. It’s not a new question. Americans have spent centuries debating whether we were living up to the ideals set forward in that founding document.
Almost certainly, the answer has always been that we are not. The important thing, though, is that Americans remain in agreement that the declaration is a visionary document, setting a standard toward which we should strive.
So, of course, the declaration still matters today. The important question to me isn’t whether the document is still relevant: It’s how we can best direct our energies to meeting its high expectations.
What the founders feared
The framers of our republic were extraordinary but nevertheless flawed, mortal men. The primary and only necessary example is their cognizance of the hypocrisy inherent in declaring that “all men are created equal,” while so many of the signatories to that lofty statement held other men, women and children in bondage.
Nevertheless, they committed themselves to a vision of self-governance that presupposed liberty as a necessary foundation for self-governance.
While the framers believed in natural rights, they were skeptical of human nature. John Adams warned that power was inherently corrupting. James Madison echoed other founders’ fears that good leadership was not guaranteed, writing that “enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.”
The defense against this threat, they believed, was the deliberate and sustained cultivation of virtue among citizens.
The truest friend of liberty
“Virtue” as a key feature of American political identity has fallen somewhat out of fashion. To the founders, it was central. In “First Principles,” the scholar Thomas Ricks noted that the revolutionary generation discussed virtue in their writings and correspondences even more than “freedom.”
Our founders inherited their understanding of virtue from antiquity and the Enlightenment, and understood it as the willingness to subsume personal interest for the common good. They viewed virtue as the opposite of corruption, and virtuous citizens as a prerequisite to self-governance.
They believed virtue should be a cornerstone of public education and civil institutional design. They were explicit that it was just as important to our success as laws designed to prevent corruption. Decades before the declaration, Samuel Adams wrote: “Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. He therefore is the truest friend of the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue.”
Other leaders throughout our history have sought to emulate the spirit of virtue and instill it within the public. President Abraham Lincoln appealed to the “better angels of our nature.” President Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings about the military-industrial complex were about the fear that private interests were undermining the public good. And in his farewell address, President Barack Obama said “it falls to each of us to be those anxious, jealous guardians of our democracy; to embrace the joyous task we’ve been given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.”
Where virtue lives
The biggest question today isn’t whether the vision of liberty and self-governance in the Declaration of Independence is still relevant, but whether we can sustain the robust culture of civic virtue that has always been necessary for it.
There is no question that our systems of self-governance are strained today. Our institutions were built as bulwarks against corruption, but the founders always knew that absent virtue, they may break.
The good news, I believe, is that virtue is not as far from our politics as it may seem. Like our founders, Americans remain deeply distrustful of power. This is in our DNA. I hear it in nearly every conversation with constituents, who look askance at politicians, billionaires and tech CEOs. This skepticism of power, and the belief in our agency to resist and constrain it, is a throughline from our founding to today.
At the national level, it can seem like our political culture puts the interest of parties — and within the parties, factions — ahead of the common good. Our economy is tilted in favor of ever-growing shareholder profits and a distribution of wealth toward the top, rather than toward shared prosperity. Our culture, overrun by the influence of big tech and social media, tends to highlight and exacerbate division. President John F. Kennedy’s challenge to “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” seems like a distant memory.
But if you look in the right places, we still see Americans embodying virtue every day.
Go to any corner of our state and you will find Mainers dedicating themselves to the public good, in small ways and large ones. We see it in the kindness of one neighbor plowing another’s driveway. We see it in the youth coaches who show up, unpaid, on evenings and weekends after a full workweek to teach our kids the importance of teamwork. We see it in the men and women who volunteer as poll workers who facilitate the central mechanism of our democracy. Put me at a table with Americans from all over the country, of any political stripe, and I am confident I could draw out countless other examples like these.
I think there’s no better way to celebrate our 250th Independence Day than gathering near home, with your neighbors, celebrating the ways that Americans devote themselves to each other, despite our many differences.
Witnessing the American virtue in others, and committing to it ourselves, is the antidote to division and narrow self interest that stress test our highest ideals. That’s how we can honor and sustain the vision of the Declaration of Independence.