The Wager Is Won by Fidelity, Not Reinvention
A response to Harvard's Self-Evident Truths: The 250-Year Pursuit of Human Rights in the United States of America
Read the original: Self-Evident Truths (Harvard Kennedy School) →
This July 4th, the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School published Self-Evident Truths, a collection of roughly forty essays from faculty and fellows across Harvard reflecting on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It is serious scholarship, clearly well thought through, and it is worth your time. The contributors write with rigor and, in several cases, real passion. Mathias Risse, the volume's editor, closes with a framing I intend to hold him to — that the Declaration was never a description of a society already achieved, but a wager that a political community could organize itself around standards higher than its present practice. America at 250, he writes, has neither won nor lost that wager. It is an interesting view of the foundational truths the founders based our democracy on. But I would add, aren’t all big ideas a wager? For another paper maybe.
He is right about the wager, in many respects. Where I do not agree, is how it is won. That disagreement — not any single essay — is what this response is about.
As we cede to the progress of time, our Nation's history is full of lessons about rights and self-governance. What we now see as right, what was clearly wrong in the past. What we should have done differently and what we have corrected for now. Many of the themes our founders spent volumes of deep thought on do not surrender to the kind of reasoning now attempted — often at great national cost — in the effort to rewrite history. As a new nation, there was no history to rewrite then. America was born in the tension of many ideas.
The founding's universalism is real and powerful. James Dennison argues that the colonists, lacking English custom to appeal to, had to justify their rights in universal terms — turning a local crisis into a global template. Deirdre Bloome notes that bold principles transcend their moment but guarantee nothing. Both points are fully compatible with the tradition of American excellence: principles strong enough to outlive their authors and demanding enough to require every generation's fidelity.
The modern work of self-governance still navigates the pecuniary framing of all things — the vast and expanding industrial complexes funded by taxpayers, where headlines about million-dollar toilets challenge the average person's view of government leaders' competence. That erosion of confidence is not a talking point. It is the daily experience of the citizen footing the bill.
Which is why one essay in this volume stands out. Government must earn civic trust through competent service. Taxpayers have sharp eyes to self-dealing and they extract justice in elections. Elizabeth Linos argues — well — that democracy is experienced in everyday interactions with public institutions, that trust is in dire need of rebuilding, and that rebuilding it requires investment in professional public service. I would sharpen the point: trust is rebuilt through accountability, performance, and treating citizens as customers — not primarily through more funding. The taxpayer is the customer, and we should use every mechanism, every tool, every method to structure the machinery of governing stanchioned to that truth. This taxpayers understand all too clearly.
The founders understood this in their bones. In the struggle against the yoke of British taxation without representation — the Stamp Act of 1765 chief among the grievances — early Americans were not going to stand by while corrupt bureaucrats defrauded them of their futures.
Anticorruption is a founding value. Jake Sullivan's essay reads the Declaration as an indictment of corruption, and the conservative view — then and now — imbues that reading with great truth: the founders' remedy was structural. Separated powers. Limited government. Because concentrated power corrupts regardless of who holds it.
Here is the choice underneath all of it. We either entrust citizens with their inalienable rights — to review, interpret, and operationalize their own interests through policy and law — or we consider them incapable. This cyclical recrudescent view among academics, elites, and politicians is never far off. Never dormant long. Its recurring theme — that citizens' judgment of what is best for them should be abrogated to those who would do no better than tax them as unfairly as the Stamp Act did in 1765, all for the purpose of representing them — is where the rubber meets the road. It is why conservatives resist the idea.
And we see that theme in this volume's dominant move: the pivot from rights as constraints on government to entitlements requiring government provision. To be clear, to assume the writers of those essays do not know this, is a bad bet. The essays deserve the credit I gave them as scholarship — and that is precisely the problem, because scholarship written for other academics is tone-deaf to the citizen navigating this week's bills. With that requisite ring kissing out of the way, it bears saying, it is the long-standing “hustle” that is part of academia to make a brilliant observation on paper that holds little or no water in the daily lives of regular citizens. No organizing mandate, no practical legislative solution that could garner support. No working elevator pitch that makes sense to the vast population working to create opportunities for themselves and their families. These essays are — in great measure — written for other academics.
Sara Bleich argues health should have been a foundational right. Amitabh Chandra calls the lack of universal coverage a “moral evasion.” James Carras frames capital access as “rights infrastructure.” Anders Jensen makes taxation a precondition for rights. Daniel Schneider calls hourly-work scheduling “tyrannical private government.”
It is an old, well-studied truth they are pressing against: the Declaration secures unalienable rights against government precisely because rights granted by government can be withdrawn by it. Say that three times and put this note in the margins.
Prosperity, health, and opportunity are goods a free society produces — conflating them with rights dissolves the very concept that made America exceptional. They are important. That is not in dispute. How they are attained and managed is what matters: does the individual citizen, endowed with unalienable rights, secure and manage them within the collective of fellow citizens and for the benefit of fellow citizens — or does a collective of officials, many of them unelected, mandate and strong-arm compliance?
Nona Mamulashvili's essay makes the strongest case against the volume's own unrepentant drift. Writing from Tbilisi, she recounts how the Declaration's ideas traveled across the Iron Curtain in contraband books — because they proclaimed rights no government grants and none can take. That is the version of America small democracies on the edge of the map staked their freedom on. It is not the entitlement-issuing version. It overlooks how many self-made Americans staked their futures on business ideas they developed and made work because of this great nation, not in spite of it.
Jamie Keene argues the moment demands “not restoration but reconstruction,” because the pre-existing framework was simply too fragile. This is an important distinction, and worth answering directly: the framework is not the problem. Fidelity to it is the unfinished work. Similarly, Arthur Applbaum's claim that “consent of the governed” is a beautiful metaphor rather than an achievable condition invites a defense of how consent is actually operationalized — federalism, elections, enumerated powers. This is a repeated thematic framing throughout the volume, and a view that, when crafted from the ivory tower, is unlikely to resonate with working Americans navigating this week's bills and next week's hopes.
Several essays — Ingram on the Court's “expiration dates,” Mazzola on Dobbs, Schneer on gerrymandering — frame recent decisions as rights backsliding. But returning contested questions to the people and their elected representatives is self-governance. What is the alternative, not returning the issue to the people? The Declaration's remedy for grievance was representation, not judicial permanence. These questions should be viewed carefully, and constitutionally.
A number of essays straddle multiple positions while sharing a single theme: someone in government should direct private industry. Latanya Sweeney's proposed “Digital Bill of Rights” and Olivier Alais's argument that tech giants exercise “quasi-governmental power without constitutional obligations” overlap substantially with conservative concerns about concentrated private power over speech and information. The concern is legitimate. It is the implementation that does not make rational sense against the backdrop of smaller government — the answer to unaccountable concentrated power is not greater government intervention. Célestin Monga's critique of “negative social capital” — associational life retooled to produce tribalism rather than the bridging trust democracy requires — echoes strong conservative civil-society thinking from Tocqueville through Robert Putnam's successors.
Gloria Ayee's call for formal “transitional justice” for the United States, and the recurring framing of American history as structurally criminal — McCarthy's “greatness and criminality” — present a contrast worth naming: America's distinction is that it is the rare nation whose founding documents contained the standard by which it corrected, and continues to correct, itself. Abolition, suffrage, civil rights — all argued from the Declaration, not against it. Frederick Douglass's work and accomplishments, for example, stand as witness here. And notably, the excluded voices this volume itself celebrates made exactly that move: they took the Declaration's authors promises very seriously, and they won the argument on the founders' own terms. This is the kind of democracy envisioned.
Returning to Risse's wager, framed honestly and deserving of an honest answer.
The wager is not won by reconstructing the framework. It is not won by converting liberty into a schedule of entitlements administered by officials the citizen never elected and cannot fire. And it is not won by treating 250 years of self-correction as evidence of a system too broken to keep.
The wager is won the way it has always been won: by citizens. Yes, say it with me, by citizens. Citizens first. Citizens' self-advancement first. The free individual — reviewing, interpreting, and operationalizing his own interests, in community with his neighbors, under a government structured to serve him and stanchioned to the truth that the taxpayer is the customer. The taxpayer is the customer. Not a nanny-state solution that mistakes dependence for dignity and management (or mismanagement) for representation.
The distance between America's promise and America's practice is closed by regular people insisting on the promise — not by institutions replacing it. The founders bet on the citizen. Two hundred fifty years on, so do we.
The author is the Founder & President of the Jetmir Center for Policy Leadership and Innovation (JCPLI). Learn more at jcpli.org.
Research, events, and insights on leadership, workforce modernization, and the AI era — delivered as each issue publishes.
