Independence Day is a Conservative Holiday

Today we celebrate our nation’s founding. Whether you call it the “4th of July” or “Independence Day” we celebrate the brave and forward thinking founders who pledged their “lives, fortunes and sacred honor” to create our nation.  We remember the words and concepts that underlie our nation and which are embodied in the Declaration of Independence.

Forget the words? Here is an all-star reading of the preamble of the Declaration of Independence:

It is hard to imagine a more conservative holiday than one that not only celebrates our nation’s independence but the ideas of God given rights and liberties enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

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In describing the Ten Conservative Prinicples, Russell Kirk identified the following:

Conservatives sense that modern people are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, able to see farther than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time. Therefore conservatives very often emphasize the importance of prescription—that is, of things established by immemorial usage, so that the mind of man runneth not to the contrary. There exist rights of which the chief sanction is their antiquity—including rights to property, often. Similarly, our morals are prescriptive in great part. Conservatives argue that we are unlikely, we moderns, to make any brave new discoveries in morals or politics or taste. It is perilous to weigh every passing issue on the basis of private judgment and private rationality. The individual is foolish, but the species is wise, Burke declared. In politics we do well to abide by precedent and precept and even prejudice, for the great mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man’s petty private rationality.

When we remember and honor not only the sacrifice but the time tested ideals of the founding fathers, as we do every Independence Day, we are affirming the we 21st century Americans stand on the shoulders of giants.  We recognize the wisdom of the ideas contained in our fouding documents and, in doing so, eschew the “brave new discoveries in morals or politics” offered by those on the Left.

So keep that in mind while we celebrate Independence Day, the ultimate conservataive American holiday.