The Declaration of Independence didn’t just declare a breach between the American colonies and Britain. It also laid out concrete principles ranging from the profound and timeless notion that the purpose of government is to preserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, down to more granular and prosaic considerations about how a free people ought to be governed.

The Founders’ complaints against King George III could be read as a brief “how not to govern” guide, and those complaints helped shape our Constitution 13 years later. Today, 242 years after the Declaration, we are closer than is comfortable to replicating George’s offenses that Thomas Jefferson outlined in the Declaration of Independence.

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