What exactly are Americans celebrating this Fourth of July?
Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all people possess inalienable rights, we now live under a government that increasingly behaves as though rights belong to the government to distribute, restrict and revoke as it sees fit.
Freedom has become conditional.
Constitutional rights have become political bargaining chips.
Government now claims the authority to decide which religious beliefs deserve accommodation and which may be excluded—a clear violation of the First Amendment’s warning against both establishing a religion and favoring or disfavoring one religion over another.
It insists that some speakers deserve constitutional protection while others may be censored, surveilled or punished—a violation of the right to free speech.
It proclaims itself the defender of unborn life while dismantling programs that protect the health and welfare of children already born.
It welcomes some immigrants with extraordinary speed while denying others the full measure of due process promised by the Constitution.
It pays lip service to equality under law while dismantling programs designed to ensure equal opportunity and root out discrimination.
It invokes the sanctity of children while narrowing which children may claim the birthright citizenship guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
It insists that no one is above the law while expanding presidential immunity and removing many of the traditional checks on executive power.
Rights that the Declaration of Independence described as inalienable are increasingly treated as permissions—granted when convenient, withheld when inconvenient, and interpreted according to political priorities rather than constitutional principle.
That is not merely bad policy.
It is a repudiation of the American Revolution, because the Revolution began with one radical claim: freedom is our birthright.
To listen to those in power, however, freedom is a privilege reserved for a select few: the politically favored, the ideologically acceptable, the obedient, the compliant, the useful.
The Declaration of Independence advanced a very different idea: that all people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.
That was the real revolution.
America’s founders may have disagreed—often grievously and hypocritically—about who qualified as “the people,” but they were united in one essential conviction: our rights do not come from government.
The government exists to serve us.
Government exists to safeguard and protect our inalienable rights—not ration them, redefine them or revoke them.
That distinction matters.
Once government is allowed to decide whose rights count, rights cease to be rights at all.
They become privileges.
And privileges can always be revoked.
For 250 years, Americans have treated the Declaration of Independence as the nation’s birth certificate, but the Declaration was never merely a birth certificate—it was a warning label.
It was written by people who understood that freedom is fragile, power is relentless, and no generation remains free simply because an earlier generation fought for liberty.
It catalogued the abuses of a ruler who had placed himself above the law, treated the people as subjects rather than sovereigns, undermined representative government, obstructed justice, maintained standing armies, imposed surveillance, abused power and waged war against the very people he claimed to govern.
The names have changed. The machinery has changed. The technology has changed.
The danger has not.
That is why the Constitution matters.
The Constitution translated the warnings of the Declaration into law.
Through separated powers, checks and balances, federalism, and a Bill of Rights, the founders sought to bind government down with what Thomas Jefferson called “the chains of the Constitution.”
Yet those constitutional restraints are increasingly being loosened—not by formal amendment, but by precedent, emergency powers, executive practice, bureaucratic discretion and public indifference.
The warnings are no longer theoretical.
Even the judiciary has increasingly become part of that transformation.
Rather than serving as a reliable constitutional brake on concentrated power, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly removed barriers that once restrained the executive branch: presidential immunity, limits on nationwide injunctions, and expanded presidential power to fire independent agency officials.
Each decision may be explained on its own legal reasoning. Together they tell a larger constitutional story: the presidency grows stronger, while the people’s ability to restrain it grows weaker.
The founders would have recognized this danger immediately. They had just fought a revolution against concentrated executive power.
Tyranny today may no longer look like King George III, but it is no less dangerous when it arrives wrapped in the language of national security, public safety, emergency management, border control, religious liberty, law and order, governmental efficiency and executive necessity.
The danger is not simply that government power is expanding. It is that government is claiming the authority to decide who possesses constitutional rights and who does not.
This is how constitutional government is hollowed out.
Not all at once.
Not always with tanks in the streets.
Not always with a formal suspension of the Constitution.
It recedes gradually—emergency by emergency, exception by exception, court ruling by court ruling, executive order by executive order, crisis by crisis.
It disappears when due process becomes optional, habeas corpus is treated as expendable, speech is chilled, surveillance becomes routine, government secrecy expands, religious freedom becomes selective, citizenship becomes negotiable, oversight bodies can be fired at will, and executive power grows while meaningful accountability contracts.
It disappears when “we the people” grow so accustomed to fusion centers, surveillance cameras, geofence warrants, AI-assisted policing, militarized SWAT raids, civil asset forfeiture, government watchlists, facial recognition systems, warrantless tracking, endless wars, executive decrees and perpetual states of emergency that constitutional government becomes little more than a ceremonial ideal.
Every emergency becomes justification for another exception. Every crisis becomes an opportunity to normalize another expansion of authority. Temporary measures become permanent institutions.
This is how you condition a populace to become accustomed to tyranny.
The unfinished work of the American Revolution was never about building a stronger government. It was about preserving a free people capable of restraining their government.
Every generation inherits the Revolution unfinished.
Every generation must decide whether to continue its work—or abandon it.
As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, freedom does not defend itself.
Thus, the question before us is no longer whether America has reached its 250th birthday. The question is whether Americans still believe what made that birthday worth celebrating in the first place.
Preserving that birthright is our responsibility.
Courts will not always protect liberty. Congress will not always defend its authority. Presidents will rarely surrender power voluntarily.
Which leaves only one remaining guardian of constitutional government: We the people.
Reprinted with permission from the Rutherford Institute.
