The question to ponder on Independence Day is, simply: Where do our rights come from?

In any system of government ultimate authority, or sovereignty, must be located somewhere in the system for it to function. For most of history, in most places, sovereignty has been located in the ruler: the king or queen, warlord, military commander, party chairman, or the like.

Where sovereignty is located in the ruler, the personal embodiment of legitimate state power, the rights of individuals have been understood to be little more than the malleable artifacts of the ruler, with their scope and substance and tenure entirely dependent upon the ruler’s determinations and dispensations. The economic and social status of persons, their property, their liberty, their very lives are understood to be contingent upon their relationship with the ruler.

In 1776, our Founders turned this traditional concept of state sovereignty, and the relation of the ruler to the people, upside down. For the first time in history, a nation was founded on the proposition that the people themselves were sovereign, endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights that the government was bound to recognize, respect, and protect.

With their property and person protected by a Constitution enacted to secure the natural rights affirmed in the Declaration of Independence, the creative genius of a free American people produced unparalleled progress and prosperity.

Americans should understand the meaning of their own founding documents and history.  The type of government contemplated by the founders prioritized “self-government,” one that obtains the “consent of the governed” by its nature.  The current regime is a progressive-era holdover, an undemocratic managerial state ruled by putative technocrats and experts.

Progressive era managerialism claims legitimacy because it imagines the discovery of verifiably correct public policy.  Having discovered technocratically correct policies, these policies may be advanced without regard to public opinion.  After all, if the policies are correct, any expression of opposition is mere “misinformation” serving no purpose.  Thus, the administrative state’s managerial heads will ignore, deceive, and manage public opinion to pursue policies that they have determined are the fruit of authentic political and managerial science.

There is more than one type of threat to liberty.  Just as foreign occupation is incompatible with independence, rule by homegrown aliens, with whom one does not share the same interests, values, and pieties, can threaten independence as well.  Arguably, the distance between ordinary people and the Washington D.C. government sector is more profound today than that of the American colonists from the English in 1776.

And, like those colonists, we live under a kind of occupation, complete with a new flag.

Captain Levi Preston, a minuteman who fought at the Battle of Concord, demonstrated the power of sentiment to spur one to action. Many decades after the battle, historian Mellen Chamberlain asked him, “Why did you go to the Concord fight?” Why did this Massachusetts farmer decide to leave his plow, pick up his musket, and join the fight against the British? Chamberlain suggested possible motivations, each of which Preston denies. Was it “intolerable oppressions”?

“Oppressions?” asked Preston. “I didn’t feel them.”

The Stamp Act? “I never saw one of those stamps.”

The tea tax? “I never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard.” Chamberlain then mentioned the great seventeenth-century philosophers. “I suppose you had been reading Harrington or Sidney and Locke about the eternal principles of liberty.”

Preston’s reply: “Never heard of ‘em. We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watts’s Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanack.”

Perplexed, Chamberlain then asks, “what was the matter? And what did you mean in going to the fight?”

Preston’s answer: “Young man, what we meant in going for those red-coats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.”

Preston’s instinctual attachment to self-government drove him to fight to defend it. Chamberlain considers Preston’s statement “the ultimate philosophy of the American Revolution,” writing that, “the attitude of the colonists was not that of slaves seeking liberty, but of freemen—free men for five generations—resisting political servitude.” Preston had no knowledge of the American Revolution’s legal and philosophical underpinnings and had not suffered from the “long train of abuses and usurpations” that Jefferson describes in the Declaration. He chose to fight out of loyalty to his community’s self-government and was willing to die to preserve it.

As we think about July Fourth, we should remember that America was first in human history to establish a free and independent constitutional republic based on two political and moral principles. First, the government was required to protect its citizens’ inalienable God-given freedom and rights, which would later be formalized in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. Second, it was the first country to establish that the legitimacy of government resides exclusively in the people, who elect their leaders.

Modern Americans need to remember that prior nations around the world for thousands of years were undemocratic and hierarchical, with rulers and their inner circles at the top having the power and privileges while people at the bottom had few rights. Before America was established, freedom and rights as we understand and experience them simply did not exist. We must never forget the courage, determination, and godly principles that were necessary to establish the United States.