Two hundred fifty years on: has the Republic kept faith with itself?

Reason magazine, on the occasion of America's 250th birthday, reaches for Alexis de Tocqueville — a man who came to this country as a visitor and left as its most penetrating diagnostician — and lifts a sentence that deserves to be carved above every legislative chamber in the land: 'A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.' I did not live to read Tocqueville, and I will not pretend otherwise; but the observation is of a kind I would have written myself, had I thought of it so cleanly. It is, in a word, correct.

The Declaration I drafted in 1776 was not a deed of gift from the powerful to the powerless. It was a statement of fact — a philosophical proposition that all persons are created equal and that government exists only to secure the rights that equality implies. The anniversary of that declaration is worth celebrating. What is not worth celebrating, and what I would counsel any honest citizen to examine without sentimentality, is the distance between the proposition and the practice over two and a half centuries.

I must name my own failure plainly here, because the occasion demands it: I wrote that all men are created equal while holding enslaved people on my own land for the whole of my adult life. That contradiction was not a minor footnote; it was the central moral catastrophe of my existence and, for many decades, of the Republic itself. A nation that tolerated that contradiction in its founding generation had to fight a catastrophic war — one I could not foresee but could, in my darker moments, imagine approaching — before it began to close the gap. The gap is not yet fully closed. Any reckoning with 250 years must begin there.

And yet Tocqueville's warning points at a second danger, subtler and permanently in season: the danger that citizens will grow so fatigued, so contemptuous of one another, so persuaded of their neighbors' incapacity, that they will hand their self-governance to whoever promises relief from the burden of it. I spent much of my public life arguing — against Hamilton, against those who would concentrate authority in a national bank, against those who treated the federal government as the natural sovereign of all things — that dispersed power and an educated, self-sufficient citizenry were the only reliable guarantors of liberty. Power consolidated is power that will be abused; I said it then, and the proposition has not aged badly.

The Reason article (by inference from its lead, since I have only the headline and that single Tocqueville quotation before me) appears to ask whether the next 250 years will belong to the Republic's best impulses or its worst. I think the answer is what it has always been: it depends on the citizen. An educated citizenry — one that reads, that argues, that knows its history including the shameful chapters, that insists on a free press and a solvent treasury and the diffusion of economic opportunity — is the only government that cannot be corrupted from within. A citizenry that is contemptuous of itself, or that has traded that education for the comfort of being governed, is already halfway to the condition Tocqueville feared.

So on this anniversary, I would offer neither uncritical celebration nor fashionable despair. The Declaration's premise is as sound as the day I wrote it. The work of making it true — for every person, in every condition — remains unfinished and urgent. That is not cause for shame; it is cause for effort. A republic is not a monument. It is a practice, renewed or abandoned by each generation in turn. Choose renewal.