MORNING GLORY: A summer of celebration followed by a fall of mourning
The next four months are anniversary heavy.
Before the fireworks of the 250th Fourth of July begin, try with family and friends to agree on what we are celebrating, and try as well to articulate why and how we defend what our country has long been committed to on paper and for 250 years in actual and expanding practice.
While the Semiquincentennial is upon us in a month, we are also only three months and an handful of days away from the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda on the United States.
The great and the awful anniversaries are connected by that which the first proclaimed and which the second attempted to end: freedom.
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The Declaration asserted the existence of "rights" of individuals that exist before any government — no matter its form — comes into being:
"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. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
The great day of the fourth is, from beginning to end, about love of our country because our country defends our individual rights, rights inherent in the way we are formed by God and nature. While there are several ways to enumerate our natural rights, the founders of the country thought them all sufficiently important to risk everything to declare and fight for those rights. That is the core of what we celebrating next month: our freedoms.
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We ought also to spend part of this celebration in reflecting on admiration for the courage of the not just those who voted "yes" on the Declaration and who would actually sign their names to it on August 2, 1776. They did the voting and the signing in the face of overwhelming odds against their success as the American colonists were choosing war with the mighty British Empire. As Justice Neil Gorsuch’s recent book for children and young adults — Heroes of 1776 — made clear, the sacrifices and suffering of our founding families were extreme and their deprivations bitter during the long war that followed.
(A celebration of the day of the actual signing of the Declaration will be held on August 2 at Perry's Victory & International Peace Memorial on the shores of Lake Erie, adjacent to the town of Put-In-Bay, Ohio. There is no more appropriate place as it was there that the Revolution announced on the 4th of July in 1776 and sealed on the 2nd was actually made enduring with the defeat of the squadron of British ships by the American Navy that effectively turned the second war with Great Britain — the War of 1812 — in America’s favor.)
That first of America’s long wars ran from April 19, 1775 in Lexington and Concord where the first shots were fired until September 3, 1783 when King George’s representatives signed the Treaty of Paris recognizing the establishment of the United States as an independent and sovereign nation. The second war with Britain begun formally in 1812 followed decades of tensions between our country and its motherland. Real peace with the United Kingdom was not achieved until February, 17 1815 when the Treaty of Ghent was ratified by the United States Senate, and what was effectively 40 years of conflict with Great Britain came to a close, and the rights of Americans secured from foreign entities even as the long work of perfecting them for all Americans would take up more than another 150 years and encompass a vast Civil War and our entry into two world wars as well as numerous Amendments to the Constitution and federal laws to make the example of a free people more perfect.
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The Declaration became a touchstone of "the West," with more than half of the 192 countries now represented at the United Nations having a founding document that can be called a "Declaration of Independence." The origins of the Declaration reach far back in history, to both "Jerusalem and Athens," to Ancient Israel and Ancient Greece. One could even argue that Ancient Persia has a hand in forming "the West" as it was Cyrus the Great who repatriated the Jews to Jerusalem and his son-in-law Darius who endorsed the rebuilding of their Temple there. Without the return of the Jews from their exile the West could not have developed as it did.
The Declaration perfected the mission statement of "The West," the long work of drafting of which can be understood to have begun with England’s Magna Carta, sealed by King John of England at Runnymede on 15 June 1215. The United States Constitution, when ratified in 1789, and amended to add the Bill of Rights soon thereafter, established the Republic that has successfully protected the rights demanded by the Declaration in theory, but only made real for all citizens only after a vast Civil War and decades of amendment and legislation.
The American Republic remains the model of successful governance through the rule of law protected by the separation of the powers of government both vertically between the state and federal governments and horizontally within those governments that divide legislative, executive and judicial branches into equal branches of those federal and state governments.
The First Amendment prohibits the establishment of an official religion in the United States while also protecting the "free exercise" of all faiths or none.
One of the motivating hatreds of fanatics for America — like those who attacked in 25 years ago in September and those we are fighting today in Iran and its proxies — is that Americans refuse to declare one religion to be the "true" religion. All faiths or none at all are protected here. This refusal to establish a national faith — whether religious or secular — is the source of the hatred held for us by many of our enemies.
Defining the extent of "the West" is difficult. America sets the standard for individual liberty, but many countries aspire to reach that level of ordered liberty. The West should be understood as any country in which the expansion of liberty and literacy is ongoing and where the rule of law controls life, not the rule of one or a few powerful people. If personal freedoms and literacy are on the rise in a country, that nation is either a part of or aspiring to join "the West."
Many nations around the world have "established" religions, including Israel and all of its neighbors. (The Pew Research Center counts 80 counties that either have an official religion or favor one or more religious groups over others.) That a country has an "established religion" doesn’t exclude it from "The West." Any nation that protects religious minorities in the exercise of their faith and the right of citizens to speak freely is clearly part of "the West."
Many counties are on the path towards classically liberal ideals. As our own journey took almost two centuries to complete even in theory (with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act or 1965) so too other nations in the world are on their own paths towards joining wholly with "the West."
America’s 250 years of independence is the standard by which other republics are measured. The enemies of the "American system" are many and varied but they share in common a hatred of pluralism, of freedom of speech and belief, press and assembly, and ultimately self-government.
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When America celebrates this summer, our friends around the world will applaud our progress and our role as the deliverer of the world from its would-be totalitarian rulers in the 20th century, and as the great protector of freedom of the seas and enemy of absolutism in all of its forms in the 21st.
When we celebrate on the 4th of July and the 2nd of August, we ought to keep in mind that only a few weeks later we will mourn the awful anniversary of the worst attack on America by foreigners in history. Absolutist fanatics drove the terrible events of 9/11. The fanaticism which led to the equal of the darkest of days in modern times insisted on exclusive claims of truth, claims that could not compete with those fundamental structures of the West which allow free peoples the rights of conscience.
Totalitarians can be secular or sectarian. What they always must be, however, is absolutist in their truth claims, and oppressive of anyone or country that asserts freedom of thought.
Which is why we ought to see both the "hot war" with Iran and its proxies, as well as the relatively new Cold War 2.0 with the People’s Republic of China and its allies, as part of the never-ending struggle of free peoples against those who would subjugate them. Ukraine and Israel are our allies in fact and usually in name because they embrace the fundamental commitment to the individual’s freedom. Their enemies are our enemies because their enemies want to snuff out the freedom the peoples of those country enjoy. Though their modern "foundings" are more than a century younger than ours, they have embraced the right path and are heading in the right direction. They are part of the West as is, for example, the United Arab Emirates and increasingly other countries in the Middle East and across the Pacific which are gradually modernizing their understanding of the rights of their peoples and the crucial need for the rule of law.
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We all ought to hope that 50 years hence on our tricentennial the great people of Iran and other counties throughout the Middle East have joined the Abraham Accords, and that our commitment to freedom of the individual has spread throughout our hemisphere.
We ought also to hope that the police state that is the People’s Republic of China has evolved to a government that lifts their people up and protects their freedoms rather than persecuting them for trying to exercise their natural rights Americans have long recognized and fought and died for.
This brace of anniversaries should remind every American that ours is a unique and enduring commitment to human liberty and that many in the world fear such ordered liberty and always will. But if the framers could endure on-and-off battles with the planet’s greatest power for 40 years beginning in 1775, every generation ought to know they have it within themselves to carry on that commitment to the country’s first principles.
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show" heard weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives Americans home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
