The Restoration of America

People wave U.S. flags in Oakland, Calif., on March 25, 2024. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

Commentary

Early in September 2024, the National Archives reported on the launch of Declaration250.gov, a website designed to help U.S. citizens celebrate the forthcoming anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Unlike the 1789 Constitution and Bill of Rights, the 1776 Declaration of Independence never became legally binding. But that did not diminish its significance. President Abraham Lincoln called the document “a rebuke and a stumbling-block to tyranny and oppression.” The principles it advanced inspired freedom-loving people around the world.

Early Unity

The original United States of America was a remarkably homogenous country. Descendants of the colonists shared a frontier experience that went back some 150 years. Historians have estimated that 85 percent of them were of British origin. Most were also practicing Christians. On the eve of independence, other ethnic and religious groups were demographically negligible.

Early Americans were united by all the components that contributed to the formation of modern nations—history, geography, custom, religion, and language. They declared their independence from a powerful empire that over-regulated commerce, blocked their territorial expansion, and taxed them without proper representation.

Americans sought the same rights that Englishmen had acquired during the 17th-century “Glorious Revolution.” They wanted national sovereignty, representative democracy, freedom of speech and assembly, religious liberty, habeas corpus, due process of law, impartial justice, private property, and free enterprise.

For decades after the revolution, U.S. patriots remained unified. British loyalists moved north and developed the Dominion of Canada. Waves of new immigrants chose assimilation into the U.S. melting pot.

Over the first 150 years, slavery was the central issue that threatened U.S. solidarity. In 1860, anti-slavery Lincoln was elected president and seven states left the union. Lincoln refused to recognize their secession and civil war ensued.

As a result of the war, slavery was abolished, and the union was preserved. Eventually, most in the United States became reconciled to the view that the conflict was a justified struggle to achieve the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

A Century of Discord and Betrayal

Tragically, slavery was not the final threat to the nation’s unity.

In the early 20th century, world events produced a deep source of division in the United States. The disruptive consequences of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia shook Western civilization to its core. Like their European counterparts, U.S. intellectuals became infatuated with a utopian vision that promised to end war and produce economic equality.

The launch of the Soviet Comintern and the Communist Party USA spawned a long era of world division. The Marxist blueprint for social transformation inspired legions of U.S. elites. They rejected traditional values and aimed to produce a new world order.

The tenets of the Bolshevik Revolution undermined the country’s unity. Academics and schoolteachers, militant union organizers, radical journalists, entertainers, liberal church leaders, progressive New Dealers, Communist Party USA members, and fellow travellers began a long march through the nation’s formative institutions.

While the U.S. Congress was taking steps to heal the divisions caused by slavery, militant intellectuals provoked an ideological civil war. The United States’ New Left advanced an agenda that called for the end of capitalism and a permanent socialist revolution. Political violence became a common part of urban U.S. life.

Another Chance for the US

Demographically, the United States is not the same country that declared independence in 1776.

Today, the United States is a multiethnic, multiracial society. A recent Gallup poll indicated that three in four U.S. citizens still identify with a religious faith, but only 45 percent say religion is “very important” in their lives. In the 2020 census, only 46.6 million respondents claimed English origins.

And yet, judging by the 2024 election results, a new majority wants to reunite the country around principles held by its 18th-century Founding Fathers. Patriots are looking at events from a historical perspective. George Washington created the union, Lincoln preserved the union, Marxist elites tried to destroy the union, and President Donald J. Trump is seeking to restore the union.

U.S. citizens are looking forward to a transition of power at all levels of cultural influence—one that rejects totalitarian temptations and truly restores the ideals enshrined in the 250-year-old Declaration of Independence.

In a recent book titled “In Defense of Civilization: How Our Past Can Renew Our Present,” Canadian scholar Michael Bonner pointed out that every great revival of civilization has been inspired by the past.

“Rebirth comes not as the result of random experiments that happen to turn out well, but the deliberate imitation of what has worked before,” he wrote.

The United States’ long dominance by the left is over. As celebratory cannons roared on Jan. 20, the world sensed the coming of a second American revolution.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.