Last year, and in 2017, I put up posts about the universalist principles of the Declaration of Independence, and their continuing relevance today. The points made are no less relevant this year. So, this year's July 4 post adapts much of the earlier material, with some new additions:
One of the striking differences between the American Revolution and most modern independence movements is that the former was not based on ethnic or nationalistic justifications. Nowhere does the Declaration state that Americans have a right to independence because they are a distinct racial, ethnic, or cultural group. They couldn't assert any such claim because the majority of the American population consisted of members of the same groups (English and Scots) as the majority of Britons, and spoke the same language.
Rather, the justification for American independence was the need to escape oppression by the British government – the "repeated injuries and usurpations" enumerated in the text – and to establish a government that would more fully protect the rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The very same rationale for independence could just as easily have been used to justify secession by, say, the City of London, which was more heavily taxed and politically oppressed than the American colonies were. Indeed, the Declaration indicates that secession or revolution is justified "whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends" [emphasis added]. The implication is that the case for independence is entirely distinct from any nationalistic or ethnic considerations.
To be sure, the Declaration does refer to "one people" seeking "to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another." But in this context, "people" does not refer to a culturally or ethnically distinct group. The Americans were not distinct, in that respect, from the people of Britain. The "people," in this case, is simply a group that voluntarily comes together to establish a new nation.
As critics from 1776 to the present have delighted in pointing out, the revolutionaries often failed to live up to their own ideals. But it would be a mistake to devalue the Revolution's significance for that reason.