By Timothy Harper
Sunday, June 21, 2026
One hundred years ago, to celebrate America’s 150th
birthday, President Calvin Coolidge gave a now severely
underappreciated speech in which he responded to the new political movement of
the time: progressivism. Progressives argued that social progress required
abandoning the — as they viewed them — outdated principles of the Declaration
of Independence and the Constitution. Coolidge responded that those principles
were universal and final.
“If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are
endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their
just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final,” Coolidge said. If
one were to abandon the Declaration’s principles, “the only direction in which
he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when
there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.”
Justice Clarence Thomas, in a recent speech celebrating the 250th anniversary
of the Declaration, summarized Coolidge’s point: “Progressivism . . . is
retrogressive.”
Yet members of today’s progressive left, echoing their
communist and socialist 20th-century forefathers, continue to promise that, if
granted power to implement their preferred policies, they will usher in utopian
improvements to American life. And now, a new progressivism, ostensibly of the
right, is forming, too. Rather than promising movement forward, this “new
right” seeks to return the nation to an imagined past.
Whether promising progress toward Utopia or toward Eden,
these two groups agree that America’s founding principle — the fundamental
liberty and equality of every individual — is an obstacle to their agenda.
While the futures that these two groups promise are superficially different, in
practice the outcome would be the same: regression to the principles of a time
before widespread liberty and prosperity.
Unlike today’s progressives — who either yearn for a
return to an imagined past or seek to establish a secular heaven on earth —
America’s Founders used their understanding of historical reality to guide the
creation of a government that would ensure human dignity, equality, and
liberty. When Thomas Jefferson wrote 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,” he was not engaging in strictly
abstract philosophy. He was expressing the principles derived from millennia of
human experience. These principles were true — and the evidence for this was
that societies that did not respect them decayed into violence, destruction,
poverty, and suffering. Thus, when Jefferson and the other signers of the
Declaration mutually pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes, and
their sacred honor, the principles they espoused were real and personal.
“Governments are instituted among men,” according to the
Declaration, to “secure” the God-given rights of all people. Thus, years later
when the First Congress met and considered constitutional amendments that
became the Bill of Rights, its members drew again on their experience of
history.
The First Amendment, for example, protects the “free
exercise” of religion against government abuse. Why? Because the members of the
First Congress knew the history of religious persecution in Europe, including
in England, where religious wars killed countless people over the centuries.
They knew that religious persecution destroyed peace and prosperity.
Article I of the Constitution, drafted earlier in
Philadelphia, likewise prohibits the states from passing laws “impairing the
Obligation of Contracts.” Why? Again, because, from experience during the
pre-constitutional period, the Framers knew that state legislatures could and
would use the power to nullify or undermine contracts to the benefit of some at
the expense of others for political gain. The Framers saw not only the
fundamental injustice of such laws but their deleterious effects on state economies.
The Framers knew from experience, too, that a society
that recognized the dignity of all people required legal structure and
processes that recognized and protected that dignity regardless of identity.
Human dignity, in short, required a just legal system that ensured equal
liberty and justice for all.
To accomplish this goal, the Constitution divides the
powers of the federal government among three branches. The Founders agreed with
Montesquieu that “there can be no liberty” where the powers of the government
are exercised by the same person or body. As James Madison would later explain
in Federalist No. 47, it was “facts,” specifically the British
constitution, “by which Montesquieu was guided” to this conclusion.
In looking to the British constitution for lessons,
moreover, Montesquieu and the Founders were looking to history in practice. The
British constitution, unlike America’s written Constitution, was and is a set
of legal principles that grew out of centuries of human experience and
reflection.
Similarly, the Founders looked to the experience of the
classical societies of Rome and Greece to further inform their understanding of
human nature and its relationship to government and liberty.
The men who drafted the Declaration of Independence, the
Constitution, and the Bill of Rights had learned from history and experience
that a government not founded on liberty is a government that crushes human
dignity.
Today, Americans are asked to abandon not only the
principles of the Declaration and the Constitution but to forget the history
that informed those world-shaking documents. In exchange, they are promised
either progress toward a perfect future or regress to an Edenic past. But as
Coolidge knew and Thomas clarified, whatever the guise, an invitation to
abandon our constitutional principles is an invitation to retrogression — to a
world of less peace, less prosperity, and less human dignity.
The true past is a guide, and it leads to liberty. The
false past is a siren song. America’s Founders and the Framers of the
Constitution understood the past as it was and experienced historical events
themselves. That experience allowed them to create for us, the dreamed-of
“Posterity” of the Constitution’s preamble, a shining city on a hill. We would
be foolish to abandon it.
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