Staying True To The Declaration Of Independence - Harvard Study Proves Republicans Really Are More Patriotic

A recent Harvard study found what most Republicans intuitively know: Republicans are more patriotic than Democrats. Actually, the Harvard study reported that the July 4th parade, the annual, quintessential celebration of America’s founding, tends to turn kids into Republican adults, energize only Republicans, and boost turnout for Republicans on Election Day. No parallel effect was found for Democrats or Democrat politicians.

Why the connection between July 4th and Republicans? Is it fair to say that Republicans stay truer than Democrats to the vision of the Declaration of Independence?

Independence Day reminds Americans every year about the importance of the ongoing battle for freedom from tyranny, the core idea behind America’s Revolutionary War. Even deeper, our attention is drawn to the principles underlying our Declaration of Independence. The unique nature of a nation founded on ideas (in contrast to being founded on military victory by an invading army or on establishment of a royal family) is reflected in these words from the Declaration adopted on July 4th, 1776:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Earlier versions spoke of the pursuit of property, and that idea permeates our Founders’ writings. Two other especially momentous statements in the Declaration are that governments are instituted to “secure these rights,” and that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

America was blessed by Founding Fathers who were great and humble thinkers, who saw what we still know today---that there is immeasurable value in freedom, and that it is worth fighting for. They wrote two of the most precious documents in the history of the world’s search for freedom and stable society, the Declaration and later the Constitution.

The freedoms and rights from our Creator recognized in the Declaration, along with the brilliance of the structure of government set forth in the Constitution, and the resolve to protect individuals from government as set forth in the Bill of Rights, led to the development of the freest and most prosperous nation in all of the history of mankind. Those documents served as steel girders that held us in place as we faced down and defeated the horror of slavery in the 19th century, and furthered our society’s advancement in the civil rights acts of the 20th century. Free markets, individual liberty and responsibility, and the notion that government must be limited so that freedom can flourish, set this nation on a track that is simply unparalleled in human history.

Crucial to the strength of our nation’s wellbeing was and is the honoring of the rights and responsibilities of the individual, not the state. The Declaration’s most famous passage speaks of the rights given by God to men, not to the government.

In the time of the Founders, the tyranny came from King George and an overbearing government in England, in the form of taxation without representation. The colonists who saw the problem had to decide to fight against what was at the time their own government.

In America in 2011, we face an unspoken yet overt tyranny in the form of a national government whose actions and stated goals are directly in conflict with the Founders’ fight for freedom and individual rights.

Today’s Democrat Party, through its Far Left leaders in Washington:

• Led the government takeover of the nation’s entire healthcare system, despite the protests of millions, and despite numerous polls and surveys that showed that Americans overwhelmingly opposed and still oppose socialized medicine, because it destroys the freedom of the individual to choose and control his own healthcare. 
• Favor the “card check” system that snatches away the freedom of the individual worker to choose whether to support or oppose unionization.  
• Support the incremental efforts at the NLRB to impose “card check” even though Congress would not dare pass it because Americans overwhelmingly oppose it.  
• Champion the EPA’s ongoing efforts to regulate CO2 without direct Congressional authority, knowing that Congress declined to pass that legislation because Americans overwhelmingly oppose it, and despite the crushing of the private sector’s manufacturing base that will inevitably result. 
• Condone the takeover by the federal government of private businesses in America, an insidious intrusion into the free market system, which inured to the benefit of the union bosses who donated to the Democrats, and cheated the individual American bond and stockholders who trusted the American system. 
• Avow redistribution of wealth as a legitimate basis for setting tax rates, in Lenin style reasoning, and propose endless tax increases on those already paying most of the taxes collected, (and money paid in taxes is property) 
• Advocate for never-ending increases in social and welfare style payments from the federal government, diminishing the independence of the individual and increasing reliance by the individual on the government. 
• Regulate to the point of strangulation the development of our nation’s natural resources in ANWR, Texas, the Gulf Coast and elsewhere, whose development could lead our nation to reduced reliance on our enemies for oil, and create thousands of new jobs, yet at the same time support and enable Cuba and other foreign nations to develop and exploit our oil reserves. 
• Grow exponentially and at every opportunity the scope and power of the centralized DC government—which is a hallmark of the socialist and communist systems that we used to more clearly recognize as our nemeses in the world of political ideas. From what light bulbs you are allowed to have to what kind of cars you can drive, the Democrat Party seems to know no bounds in its over 40-year spree of ever increasing intrusion into the freedoms Americans have historically enjoyed.

And this is only a partial list.

Through their own actions, Democrats in DC are telling Americans that they don’t think their powers are derived from the consent of the governed (the healthcare takeover, the circumvention of the legislative process in the EPA and NLRB). Democrats are telling America that they reverence the power of the unions that donate to and support them over the rights of the individual (card check). And that they do not support the continued freedom and prosperity represented by the development of our own natural resources, which represents the most fundamental pursuit of happiness, property and freedom.

In short, Americans no longer believe that Democrats in DC are even trying to live and govern in accord with the founding principles, or even in the best interests of America’s continued freedom.

We need to know tyranny when we see it. It is not good enough for patriotic Americans to accept the Far Left Democrats’ policies and explanations for them with unthinking and undeserved deference. Drawing an absolute line that separates legitimate government responsibility from unacceptable government overreach may not be possible, but we are well past the point in America when we can simply ignore the shift away from a nation founded on freedom and individual rights.

While neither major political party is blameless, the very core of the Democrat Party’s beliefs, as evidenced by their actions in Washington over the last decades and most especially in the last two and a half years is unmistakably un-American.

So this is why Americans respond to the celebration of the birth of America’s freedom by embracing the Republican Party—because the values of today’s Democrat Party, as measured by the actions of their leaders in Washington, are diametrically opposed to the ideas on which our great nation was founded.

Celebrate July 4th—Celebrate Freedom! Be among the Americans who see the problem and are willing to fight! And then go out and participate in the battlefield in today’s world---in the battlefield of political ideas.