America’s 250th birthday is right around the corner. One conservative commentator argues that there is a simple fact often missed about our founding: it was a big deal.
That is the argument columnist Jonah Goldberg made in a piece for his news outlet The Dispatch. He recently joined Drew Mariani for a conversation about the importance of America’s founding.
Regrettably, Goldberg argues in his piece, the radical nature of the founding has been cast aside in favor of the American Revolution as instead “an intra-British bourgeoisie squabble.”
In Goldberg’s view, the American Revolution was significant for several reasons. First, he told Drew, “It was the first successful colonial revolt in history in a truly significant sense.” Thus, it had a ripple effect throughout the Western world. “On the geopolitical level, it was just massive,” Goldberg said. European newspaper outlets covered the Revolution and even reprinted the Declaration of Independence. “They followed it like it was the most important event in the world.”
Second, Goldberg says the French Revolution would not have happened if not for the American one. “For a long time, left-wing historians kind of wanted to deny this,” he told Drew. They wanted to begin “the long 19th century” with the French Revolution. However, in the early phases of the French Revolution, “when what they wanted was representation with taxation, when they wanted democracy…that was all influenced by the American Revolution,” Goldberg said.
Third, the American Revolution introduces the idea that the people of a nation are sovereign. “In America, the American Revolution ushers in this idea… that here the people rule, and the leaders…work for us,” Goldberg said.
American Sins
One of the most obvious critiques of the American founding was that it did not live up to its own ideals. “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…” reads the Declaration of Independence. Yet, many of the founders were themselves slaveowners.
To many historians, Goldberg says, “The only usable history of America are all the bad things. And we did bad things.” That version of history, though, obscures the moral progress America has made.
Goldberg cites the Gettysburg Address and Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington speech as examples of public figures calling on America to be better. Lincoln’s address called for an “increased devotion” to the cause of liberty, and that the nation will have a “new birth of freedom.”
King, in his famous speech, “was using rhetoric to appeal to the highest and best versions of ourselves to say that we need to reconcile ourselves with the things we say about ourselves,” Goldberg said.
In both cases, Lincoln and King cite America’s founding Declaration to spur on their fellow citizens to the cause of freedom.