In 1776, the Declaration of Independence, formally “The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen States of the United States”, was adopted by the Second Continental Congress. The Declaration did not merely bring into being a new state. It did not merely announce an abstract but revolutionary self-evident truth that “all Men are Created Equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain Unalienable Rights that amongst these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”. From that improbable Republic would emerge a force that would transform civilisation itself.
Observers struggled to name the core characteristic of America. The enigmatic word they kept circling back to was “energy”. Edmund Burke described religion itself as a “principle of energy” in the colonies. But it was not a conventional religion. It was what he called the “dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant Religion”, almost as if it was a surplus of saying “no” to authority or command that defined America.
This excess of resistance had no inherent moral direction. It could be appropriated by the slave owner as much as the partisan for freedom; it could sustain a violent society that defended the right to bear arms in the name of liberty. Alexis de Tocqueville, on one count, uses the term “energy” more than 50 times in Democracy in America. Alexander Hamilton counted “energy” in the executive as a leading marker of good government. Henry Adams, in a way that foreshadowed the American Century, converted physical energy into a religion. The dynamo was a true symbol of “godly infinity”. The worship of material expansion was not so much about the objects it created, but the underlying energy it reflected. It is often said that the final draft of the Declaration of Independence removed explicit references to slavery and brought in references to providence. Yet this idiom of providence was never related to piety. Its measure was always going to be energy: Unleashing the capacities of a people to transform the nature of power in the modern world and becoming an object of universal desire.
In the American imagination, freedom became inseparable from power, from the energies it could release and the capacities it could enlarge. It was not simply a doctrine of individual dignity, but a deep faith in the limitless expansion of human possibility. But this energy had a double character. On the one hand, it would unleash an incredibly creative individualism, new forms of associational life, technological innovation, constant experimentation, unmatched material prosperity, mastery over nature, openness to novelty, and a capacity to most fully absorb, even distort, ideas from anywhere in the world. On the other hand, this civilisation and its furious energies were also imperial, violent, constantly expansionary, and destructive. No moral frame could easily contain that impulse. After all, even the Declaration of Independence was not merely about containing American power. One of its grievances against the Crown was that the Crown was, as it were, restraining the colonists from denying sovereignty to Native Americans.
But America in 1776 was already, almost providentially, born powerful. Which nation gets to buy the conditions that allow it to geopolitically pacify its own neighbourhood? In a very typical act of American nation-building, in the Louisiana Purchase, America buys sovereignty over a million square miles, gives a fillip to continental expansion, intensifies the dispossession of indigenous peoples, and creates conditions for the expansion of slavery. Republican freedom as non-domination and a bulwark against arbitrary power was a cornerstone of the political theory of the founding. Never has a conception of freedom been so eloquently and forthrightly articulated. But it was matched by an imperial, energetic freedom, reflected in the mastery of space and the subordination of others. It is the freedom to command and organise the world. These are not two contradictory impulses as much as different ways of discharging an energy that constantly chafes against any limits. In America, freedom and empire are not antithetical; they are both expressions of the same underlying energy.
America is not a nation that has, to date, known a lack of power in ways that are threatening, relative to its adversaries. It is an astounding fact that America has never known powerlessness. This is what underwrites its exceptionalism from all “opinions of mankind” in international law. America’s power has allowed it so far to absorb the cost of failure without denting its dominance. An astonished Burke had already noticed in 1776 that “the appearance of a new state, of a new species in a new part of the globe… has made as great a change in all the relations, and balances, and gravitation of power, as the appearance of a new planet would in the system of the solar world”. Two hundred and fifty years later, this firmament around which geopolitics revolved is being tested. One enduring paradox of American power is that one of the least threatened nations in history is often in search of enemies it can present as an existential threat — from communism to jihadism — as a pretext for mobilising its power. The second is that it has never really had a challenger. Soviet power was an ideological and military rival. But it never came close to displacing the United States as the central gravitational power of the world system. China has a very different political system and may yet falter on its own contradictions. But for the first time, America confronts a rival animated by a similar relentless logic of global power and material transformation: The ambition not merely to defend sovereignty, but to organise global geopolitics around itself.
But as always, the main challenge to power that the Declaration unleashed will be internal. Abraham Lincoln knew that even in America, there was nothing self-evident about the self-evident truths of the Declaration. They were, as he put it in a letter to Henry Pierce in 1859, dismissed as “glittering generalities”; or “self-evident lies”; and “still others insidiously argue that they apply only to ‘superior races’”. Race and inequality remain America’s original burden, the unresolved contradiction between its universal promises and the appalling hierarchies through which its power was built. Pessimists have always seen these as braided with American freedom. Even if one argues that race and inequality are not the essence of American freedom, they are not incidental to its history. They have been an important axis on which freedom’s promises were allocated unequally and its energies politically organised.
The central challenge of American constitutionalism has always been how to channel immense energy into stable institutional forms; how to discipline power without inhibiting the dynamism that generates it. At the heart of divisions in contemporary America, there remains a contest over two competing visions of freedom that come from the Declaration. The 1789 United States Constitution does not resolve this tension so much as contain it. Its proceduralism seeks to discipline the fires of American energy, converting its glittering truths into staid laws. Yet two rival visions of American constitutionalism persist. One channels that fire into the common promise of self-government with a concern for the internal link between freedom and equality. Another version celebrates the discharge of that energy as rugged individualism, with freedom including the freedom to dominate, unleashing an almost Darwinian power struggle within the frame of democracy. At the heart of American constitutionalism is not a contest between two principles but between two ways of organising power. Each vision accuses the other of betraying the promise of 1776. It is this mutual claim to authentic inheritance that helps drive American polarisation. Is each of these ways of organising power capable of maintaining the dream of limitless material expansion that has defined modern civilisation through America? Are they capable of solving concrete problems, of mass incarceration, alienation, inequality, and services? The question is whether the civilisation that was once defined by inexhaustible energy gets exhausted by its own polarisation.
In a letter written to Roger C Weightman in 1826, at the 50th anniversary of the American founding, Thomas Jefferson asserted the universality and revolutionary character of the American founding: “May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.”
In 1945, Ho Chi Minh’s Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi opened with the 1776 American Declaration of Independence. This invocation, doubtless, served rhetorical purposes. But it has been invoked by dozens of states, sometimes as an assertion of sovereignty and independence rather than individual freedom. It may not seem that way in an age of rising authoritarianism, but the conflict between arbitrary power and individual dignity, between imperialism and self-government, between the quest for self-definition and defined hierarchies has indeed become universal. The irony is that, at this moment, these conflicts have escaped their modern origin story in America, as it itself becomes an exemplar of what it sought to deny: Imperialism and authoritarianism. The Declaration will always remain universal and revolutionary. America may not.
The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express
