On July 4, 1821, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams stood before Congress and read the Declaration of Independence in full. Before he began to read, he polemicized against the British Empire—an empire that “from a small Island in the Atlantic Ocean, had extended their dominion over considerable parts of every quarter of the Globe,” and in whose theory “man had no rights. Neither the body nor the soul of the individual was his own.” The American colonists, as independent presidential candidate Diane Sare reminds us in a statement issued this week, declared their independence not merely from a king but from that whole system and its ideology—the Malthusian death-creed of the British East India Company, whose policies starved eighty million in India. Against it, thirteen colonies held a truth the kings and mitred priests of the Old World found unintelligible: that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights.
Measure the present against that standard.
“Might makes right,” or, as it is marketed today, “peace through strength,” Sare says, “is incompatible in every way with the conception that every human being has been created equal.” The Epstein files merely confirmed what the moneyed class has always believed: that the weakest are the playthings of the strongest, to be used and discarded. That is why a Congress drowning in special-interest money has proven incapable of halting a genocide it instead finances; why the architecture of American war policy is now handed to financiers and a foreign government’s lobbyist; why the Secretary of State stands at a podium to bless a coming civil war in Lebanon even as Israel’s defense minister vows to surrender “not a millimeter” of occupied ground; and why NATO openly designs new weapons to keep the Ukraine war grinding on. On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, our nation has reached a depravity its founders could not have imagined.
The same death-creed wears a green mask in Europe, where a civilization that will not cool its hospitals as a record heat wave kills thousands acts as the spiritual heir of Malthus, and where energy collapse and overregulation drive industry abroad rather than fostering it at home.
And yet, “in this dark moment,” Sare writes, “when the world wondered whether anything good might again come from the United States,” an American was elected to the Chair of Peter. Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, has written an encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, more faithful to the Declaration, she argues, than anything uttered by a U.S. president in sixty years: “Each generation inherits the task… of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted, and fraternity is made possible.” Do these words of the Pope not echo the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution? On July 3 he receives the Liberty Medal in Philadelphia by video from the Vatican, having already quoted the founders back to the U.S.: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”
Sare insists that to make those truths real “we also need physical economic policies that allow people to live in peace and security”—the program of Lyndon LaRouche. And today’s intelligence tells of exactly such an alternative being built. The Global South presses its demand to reform the IMF, the World Bank, and the UN Security Council; Belarus and China map out joint development, from cancer cures to heavy industry; and the same human mind that resolves sixty million stars in the galaxy’s heart is told that it cannot feed the hungry or help the stranger. The answer to migration tensions—from the street camps of Durban, South Africa, to the borders of the West—is not walls but development, the closing of the gap between rich and poor nations. It is, in this 250th year, to bury colonialism and revive what Adams said the Declaration’s principles were always meant to become: “the cornerstone of a new fabric, destined to cover the surface of the globe.”
That fabric is not yet woven. The fight is on for the soul of America. On July 3 the Pope addresses the assembled nation and the International Peace Coalition meets; on July 5, Diane Sare holds her event in Philadelphia, “America 250: A Re-Dedication.” This is our time. Will we rededicate ourselves to the truths on which the republic was founded—or let them pass into history as the potential the world once glimpsed, but which we let fall?
