As the United States approaches the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, a troubling paradox has emerged. The nation born out of resistance to concentrated power now flirts with its return. Many Americans—out of frustration, fear, or nostalgia—openly express admiration for strongmen, for decisive rule unencumbered by deliberation, and for the myth of the benevolent autocrat who can “fix” what democracy has broken. It is striking, and deeply ironic, that this yearning for authority resembles the very system our founders risked everything to escape.
I. From Subjects to Citizens
The first settlers who left Europe for the New World were not seeking a new king. They sought relief from religious persecution, economic oppression, and arbitrary rule. They came to establish communities where the conscience of the individual, not the command of the crown, would be sovereign.
A century and a half later, the signers of the Declaration of Independence gave political voice to that spiritual and moral exodus. “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” was not a declaration of superiority but of equality—the claim that the right to govern oneself was not a privilege conferred by a ruler but a condition inherent in humanity.
The Constitution later gave this principle its institutional form. It did not merely create a new government; it created a new kind of government. Its genius lay in distributing power so that no one could claim to be the government. Every branch was limited, every officer bound by oath, every act subject to the supreme law of the land.
II. The Oath and the Revolution of Responsibility
Unlike the Old World monarchies, where allegiance was to the crown, the framers required allegiance to the Constitution. This Oath represented a revolution in moral and political responsibility. It declared that fidelity to law, not loyalty to men, was the foundation of legitimate power.
Every officer of the United States—civil or military, elected or appointed—swears this Oath. It is the invisible thread that holds the republic together. It transforms power from a personal possession into a public trust. When that trust is violated, the act is void—not merely illegal, but without constitutional existence.
Chief Justice John Marshall understood this when he wrote in Marbury v. Madison that “an act repugnant to the Constitution is void.” His point was not to expand judicial power but to reinforce the supremacy of constitutional responsibility. The Constitution is not self-enforcing; it lives through the fidelity of those who have sworn to uphold it.
III. The Temptation of the Old World
Yet today, that fidelity is under strain. Many have come to equate freedom with disorder and order with domination. They view democratic debate as weakness and constitutional limits as obstacles. In their impatience, they seek salvation in strong personalities and sweeping powers, forgetting that the Revolution itself was a rejection of that very impulse.
To adopt the habits of the Old World would be to forget that the American Revolution was not a war for conquest but an act of separation from a system that placed rulers above the ruled. It was an experiment in self-government, not a rebellion for power. The founders’ goal was not to enthrone new masters but to dissolve mastery itself.
The Constitution they drafted is not a monument to power but a manual of restraint. Its checks and balances are not symptoms of dysfunction; they are the machinery of liberty. The deliberate pace of lawmaking, the independence of the courts, the accountability of elections—these are not flaws in the design but features of a system meant to protect us from our own worst instincts.
IV. America250 and the Renewal of Constitutional Memory
As America prepares for its 250th anniversary, the commemoration risks becoming a pageant of patriotic nostalgia. But true remembrance requires more than flags and fireworks. It demands that we recall why we became a nation and what we vowed never to become again.
The founders’ rejection of monarchy was not merely political—it was philosophical. They understood that the concentration of power in one person or faction is incompatible with the dignity of free citizens. They believed, as James Madison warned, that “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands…may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
If we have learned anything from our history, it is that liberty does not perish in a single act of oppression but through a gradual forgetting—when we cease to see the Constitution as a living covenant and begin to treat it as an obstacle to our desires.
V. A Call to Constitutional Fidelity
America250 should be a moment of renewal, not regression. A time to remember that power in America is not self-justifying—it is accountable. That no oath is to a person, party, or ideology, but to the Constitution itself. That the experiment in self-government continues only as long as we, the People, remember that we are both its subjects and its stewards.
We are heirs to a Revolution that replaced submission with responsibility. The founders did not fight for the right to rule but for the right to be ruled by law. To forget that is to betray not only their memory but our own future.
The world will be watching in 2026. Whether we present a republic faithful to its founding or a people nostalgic for its undoing will depend on whether we remember that the Constitution’s greatest strength is not its age but its timeless truth: that sovereignty resides in the People, and that all who govern do so only by their consent.
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