Introductory
Jonathan Ayling wrote an article in the Herald published on 2 July 2026. He questions whether the promise of the American Dream will survive and that it must renew itself, returning to the truths of its founding.
I have written elsewhere about how it is that Jefferson wrote of his self-evident truths and why there has not been a similar mission statement in New Zealand.
In this article I attempt to answer some of Jonathan’s concerns, suggesting that the American Dream is a work in progress and that the road is still being built. Like all great works there are stumbles on the way.
Before we start let me declare an interest. I am unashamedly “pro-American”. And I write this article as one who knows and loves America.
I spent a year – a wonderful year – at a very formative stage of my development going to school in the US (in the great State of Minnesota) and enjoying what America in the mid-1960’s had to offer.
I saw the great monuments in DC and the copies of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It was many years later that I saw Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration (of which more later).
I love not so much what America is (although there is a lot of that – the roaring, bustling, noisy business that is the US) but what it is meant to be. For sure I have had my disappointments and the dream has stumbled. Every time 22 November rolls around a metaphorical shadow crosses the sun. And that troubled President whose sin was a cover-up. Just to mention a couple.
But there have been moments of joy. I get a thrill when my feet touch the ground at LAX. I adore looking down 5th Avenue and see the tower of the Empire State Building seeking the sky. And Old Glory flying proudly from the staff puts me in mind of the Pledge of Allegiance from which I was exempted when at school but which I later adopted -
Jefferson’s promise.
And if there were any American I would like to sit down to dinner with – apart from a number of friends who are still with us – it would be the Sage of Monticello. My first visit to Monticello was the fulfilment of a dream. The second visit was a joyful bonus. Thomas Jefferson – for all his faults and failing – articulated the American Dream.
So this article is the Halfling’s View of the promise of Jefferson’s self-evident truths – spoken in his first person plural American voice.
In June of 1776, Thomas Jefferson sat in a rented room on Market Street in Philadelphia and made an editorial decision that would echo for two and a half centuries. The formula he was working with was already in the air. Locke had written of “life, liberty, and property.”
George Mason, only weeks earlier, had drafted a Virginia Declaration that spoke of “pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Jefferson had both texts, in effect, on his desk. And he chose neither. He struck out property, declined Mason’s promise of obtaining, and wrote instead: the pursuit of happiness.
It is tempting to read that choice as a flourish — the poet in Jefferson lifting a lawyer’s phrase into music. But the revision was deliberate, and the words meant something more exacting to their author than they do to us.
The eighteenth-century vocabulary Jefferson inherited from the classical and Enlightenment traditions gave “happiness” the weight of the Greek eudaimonia: flourishing, a life well-lived, the deep satisfaction that comes from virtue and from taking part in governing oneself.
It did not mean pleasure, comfort, or private amusement. “Pursuit,” likewise, meant something closer to a practice or a vocation — the way one pursues medicine or the law — than to a chase after something forever out of reach.
The self-evident truth Jefferson set down was not that each of us has a right to entertain ourselves. It was that human beings are made for flourishing, and have a right to the conditions of it — a claim that, as the scholar Danielle Allen has argued, binds personal flourishing to the collective work of self-government. The two were never meant to come apart.
Hold that original meaning in mind, and the familiar question — have we lost our way? — begins to answer itself, at least in part. A culture that quotes the Declaration every Fourth of July while equating happiness with consumption, distraction, and individual gratification has, in a real sense, already mislaid the ideal it is celebrating.
The words survive; the meaning has drifted out from under them. We recite Jefferson’s sentence and hear something he did not write.
But there is a second, harder, and more honest way to frame the question of loss, and it begins with a fact that sits at the document’s origin like a fault line: Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal” while owning human beings – a frequent criticism of Jefferson designed to veto everything he wrote.
But there were words that Jefferson wrote in the first draft which conveyed an entirely different message and give the lie to the veto statement. There is an entire paragraph condemning the transatlantic slave trade in the strongest terms. Jefferson refers to slavery as “war against human nature itself,” a violation “of the most sacred rights of life & liberty,” an “assemblage of horrors.”
The wording is as follows:
During the Continental Congress’s revision process to Jefferson’s draft, they removed the bulk of the paragraph and reduced it to a veiled reference against slavery, complaining that King George incited “domestic insurrections among us.”
Later, Jefferson claimed that some delegates from northern and southern colonies (especially Georgia and South Carolina) had objected to the original paragraph and prompted its removal.
The effort to realise the promise that all men are created equal has its own lineage, as distinguished as the founding itself.
Frederick Douglass, invited to celebrate Independence Day in 1852, stood before his audience and turned the Declaration into an indictment — asking what the Fourth of July could mean to the enslaved, and answering that the nation stood condemned by its own creed.
Lincoln, a few years later, read the document differently but no less demandingly: as an aspiration deliberately set beyond immediate reach, a standard erected precisely so that the country would always be straining toward it.
A century after that, Martin Luther King called the Declaration a promissory note that America had yet to honour.
Three readings, one insight: the question was never whether we have fallen from a golden age, because there was no golden age to fall from.
The question is whether we are still doing the work — whether we treat the self-evident truths as a standard that judges us, or a slogan that flatters us.
If we are honest, though, “we’ve lost our way” is not one complaint but several, and they point in different — often incompatible — directions. The diagnosis determines the cure, so it is worth listening carefully to who is speaking.
The conservative and communitarian voice says that liberty has decayed into atomized license, and that we have hollowed out the institutions the founders simply took for granted — family, faith, local association, the daily civic habits that Tocqueville identified as the real engine of American freedom. On this account, freedom was never self-sustaining; it lived in a thick ecology of belonging that we have thinned nearly to nothing.
The progressive voice answers that liberty and the pursuit of happiness are merely formal words for people who lack the material security to exercise them, and that concentrated wealth has quietly captured the machinery of self-government.
This is the tradition of Roosevelt’s “second bill of rights,” which insisted that necessitous men are not free men — that freedom without economic footing is a phrase, not a fact.
The libertarian voice locates the loss elsewhere entirely: in the growth of state coercion itself, the steady expansion of government into domains the founders meant to leave to free people.
And cutting across all three runs a civic-republican worry that may be the deepest of them: that what we have actually lost is the capacity for self-government — the patience to deliberate with people we disagree with — worn away by polarization, by an attention economy that profits from our agitation, and by plain disengagement.
On this view, the crisis is not in our laws or our economy but in us, in the civic muscles that atrophy when unused.
These diagnoses do not resolve into a single answer, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But follow any of them far enough and certain threads reappear, running through them all.
The first is the recovery of the older sense of happiness. A free people has to want flourishing, not merely comfort — and has to build the conditions in which flourishing is possible: decent work, real community, unfragmented time and attention.
No diagnosis of decline makes sense, and no recovery is imaginable, so long as we mistake gratification for the thing Jefferson named.
The second is that liberty and equality were never meant to be at war. This is the founding insight most often forgotten in our era of choosing sides: the two require each other.
Liberty for the powerful alone is simply privilege wearing liberty’s clothes; equality without liberty is tyranny administered evenly. The Declaration yoked them together in a single sentence because neither survives long without the other.
The third thread is the most demanding. Self-evident truths do not realize themselves. They were promissory from the first day — an unfinished argument that each generation either continues or abandons. Douglass understood this. So did Lincoln, and so did King.
The Declaration is not a monument to a moment when Americans arrived. It is a summons to the work of arriving.
Which suggests, finally, that the question “have we lost our way?” may be slightly the wrong question, because it imagines a road we were once on and have since departed.
The truer picture is of a road still being built, by hands that have always been imperfect, toward a destination the builders themselves described but never reached.
Recovery, if it comes, will not come from nostalgia. It will come from rejoining the construction — from treating the pursuit of happiness as our forebears meant it, as a practice, a vocation, a shared and unending labour. That labour, in the end, is what self-government is.
David Harvey is a former District Court Judge and Mastermind champion, as well as an award winning writer who blogs at the substack site A Halflings View - Where this article was sourced
I spent a year – a wonderful year – at a very formative stage of my development going to school in the US (in the great State of Minnesota) and enjoying what America in the mid-1960’s had to offer.
I saw the great monuments in DC and the copies of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It was many years later that I saw Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration (of which more later).
I love not so much what America is (although there is a lot of that – the roaring, bustling, noisy business that is the US) but what it is meant to be. For sure I have had my disappointments and the dream has stumbled. Every time 22 November rolls around a metaphorical shadow crosses the sun. And that troubled President whose sin was a cover-up. Just to mention a couple.
But there have been moments of joy. I get a thrill when my feet touch the ground at LAX. I adore looking down 5th Avenue and see the tower of the Empire State Building seeking the sky. And Old Glory flying proudly from the staff puts me in mind of the Pledge of Allegiance from which I was exempted when at school but which I later adopted -
“I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
Jefferson’s promise.
And if there were any American I would like to sit down to dinner with – apart from a number of friends who are still with us – it would be the Sage of Monticello. My first visit to Monticello was the fulfilment of a dream. The second visit was a joyful bonus. Thomas Jefferson – for all his faults and failing – articulated the American Dream.
So this article is the Halfling’s View of the promise of Jefferson’s self-evident truths – spoken in his first person plural American voice.
In June of 1776, Thomas Jefferson sat in a rented room on Market Street in Philadelphia and made an editorial decision that would echo for two and a half centuries. The formula he was working with was already in the air. Locke had written of “life, liberty, and property.”
George Mason, only weeks earlier, had drafted a Virginia Declaration that spoke of “pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Jefferson had both texts, in effect, on his desk. And he chose neither. He struck out property, declined Mason’s promise of obtaining, and wrote instead: the pursuit of happiness.
It is tempting to read that choice as a flourish — the poet in Jefferson lifting a lawyer’s phrase into music. But the revision was deliberate, and the words meant something more exacting to their author than they do to us.
The eighteenth-century vocabulary Jefferson inherited from the classical and Enlightenment traditions gave “happiness” the weight of the Greek eudaimonia: flourishing, a life well-lived, the deep satisfaction that comes from virtue and from taking part in governing oneself.
It did not mean pleasure, comfort, or private amusement. “Pursuit,” likewise, meant something closer to a practice or a vocation — the way one pursues medicine or the law — than to a chase after something forever out of reach.
The self-evident truth Jefferson set down was not that each of us has a right to entertain ourselves. It was that human beings are made for flourishing, and have a right to the conditions of it — a claim that, as the scholar Danielle Allen has argued, binds personal flourishing to the collective work of self-government. The two were never meant to come apart.
Hold that original meaning in mind, and the familiar question — have we lost our way? — begins to answer itself, at least in part. A culture that quotes the Declaration every Fourth of July while equating happiness with consumption, distraction, and individual gratification has, in a real sense, already mislaid the ideal it is celebrating.
The words survive; the meaning has drifted out from under them. We recite Jefferson’s sentence and hear something he did not write.
But there is a second, harder, and more honest way to frame the question of loss, and it begins with a fact that sits at the document’s origin like a fault line: Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal” while owning human beings – a frequent criticism of Jefferson designed to veto everything he wrote.
But there were words that Jefferson wrote in the first draft which conveyed an entirely different message and give the lie to the veto statement. There is an entire paragraph condemning the transatlantic slave trade in the strongest terms. Jefferson refers to slavery as “war against human nature itself,” a violation “of the most sacred rights of life & liberty,” an “assemblage of horrors.”
The wording is as follows:
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
During the Continental Congress’s revision process to Jefferson’s draft, they removed the bulk of the paragraph and reduced it to a veiled reference against slavery, complaining that King George incited “domestic insurrections among us.”
Later, Jefferson claimed that some delegates from northern and southern colonies (especially Georgia and South Carolina) had objected to the original paragraph and prompted its removal.
The effort to realise the promise that all men are created equal has its own lineage, as distinguished as the founding itself.
Frederick Douglass, invited to celebrate Independence Day in 1852, stood before his audience and turned the Declaration into an indictment — asking what the Fourth of July could mean to the enslaved, and answering that the nation stood condemned by its own creed.
Lincoln, a few years later, read the document differently but no less demandingly: as an aspiration deliberately set beyond immediate reach, a standard erected precisely so that the country would always be straining toward it.
A century after that, Martin Luther King called the Declaration a promissory note that America had yet to honour.
Three readings, one insight: the question was never whether we have fallen from a golden age, because there was no golden age to fall from.
The question is whether we are still doing the work — whether we treat the self-evident truths as a standard that judges us, or a slogan that flatters us.
If we are honest, though, “we’ve lost our way” is not one complaint but several, and they point in different — often incompatible — directions. The diagnosis determines the cure, so it is worth listening carefully to who is speaking.
The conservative and communitarian voice says that liberty has decayed into atomized license, and that we have hollowed out the institutions the founders simply took for granted — family, faith, local association, the daily civic habits that Tocqueville identified as the real engine of American freedom. On this account, freedom was never self-sustaining; it lived in a thick ecology of belonging that we have thinned nearly to nothing.
The progressive voice answers that liberty and the pursuit of happiness are merely formal words for people who lack the material security to exercise them, and that concentrated wealth has quietly captured the machinery of self-government.
This is the tradition of Roosevelt’s “second bill of rights,” which insisted that necessitous men are not free men — that freedom without economic footing is a phrase, not a fact.
The libertarian voice locates the loss elsewhere entirely: in the growth of state coercion itself, the steady expansion of government into domains the founders meant to leave to free people.
And cutting across all three runs a civic-republican worry that may be the deepest of them: that what we have actually lost is the capacity for self-government — the patience to deliberate with people we disagree with — worn away by polarization, by an attention economy that profits from our agitation, and by plain disengagement.
On this view, the crisis is not in our laws or our economy but in us, in the civic muscles that atrophy when unused.
These diagnoses do not resolve into a single answer, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But follow any of them far enough and certain threads reappear, running through them all.
The first is the recovery of the older sense of happiness. A free people has to want flourishing, not merely comfort — and has to build the conditions in which flourishing is possible: decent work, real community, unfragmented time and attention.
No diagnosis of decline makes sense, and no recovery is imaginable, so long as we mistake gratification for the thing Jefferson named.
The second is that liberty and equality were never meant to be at war. This is the founding insight most often forgotten in our era of choosing sides: the two require each other.
Liberty for the powerful alone is simply privilege wearing liberty’s clothes; equality without liberty is tyranny administered evenly. The Declaration yoked them together in a single sentence because neither survives long without the other.
The third thread is the most demanding. Self-evident truths do not realize themselves. They were promissory from the first day — an unfinished argument that each generation either continues or abandons. Douglass understood this. So did Lincoln, and so did King.
The Declaration is not a monument to a moment when Americans arrived. It is a summons to the work of arriving.
Which suggests, finally, that the question “have we lost our way?” may be slightly the wrong question, because it imagines a road we were once on and have since departed.
The truer picture is of a road still being built, by hands that have always been imperfect, toward a destination the builders themselves described but never reached.
Recovery, if it comes, will not come from nostalgia. It will come from rejoining the construction — from treating the pursuit of happiness as our forebears meant it, as a practice, a vocation, a shared and unending labour. That labour, in the end, is what self-government is.
David Harvey is a former District Court Judge and Mastermind champion, as well as an award winning writer who blogs at the substack site A Halflings View - Where this article was sourced
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for joining the discussion. Breaking Views welcomes respectful contributions that enrich the debate. Please ensure your comments are not defamatory, derogatory or disruptive. We appreciate your cooperation.