The Meaning of Independence

At the clip, the finale from Saturday night's fireworks at Pechanga:

That was on of the better fireworks shows I can recall. A full video is here. The show was twenty minutes long and the finale was just spectacular.

And check out this essay from E.J. Dionne at the Washington Post, "What our Declaration really said":

Our nation confronts a challenge this Fourth of July that we face but rarely: We are at odds over the meaning of our history and why, to quote our Declaration of Independence, “governments are instituted.”

Only divisions this deep can explain why we are taking risks with our country’s future that we’re usually wise enough to avoid. Arguments over how much government should tax and spend are the very stuff of democracy’s give-and-take. Now, the debate is shadowed by worries that if a willful faction does not get what it wants, it might bring the nation to default.

This is, well, crazy. It makes sense only if politicians believe — or have convinced themselves — that they are fighting over matters of principle so profound that any means to defeat their opponents is defensible.

We are closer to that point than we think, and our friends in the Tea Party have offered a helpful clue by naming their movement in honor of the 1773 revolt against tea taxes on that momentous night in Boston Harbor.

Whether they intend it or not, their name suggests they believe that the current elected government in Washington is as illegitimate as was a distant, unelected monarchy. It implies something fundamentally wrong with taxes themselves or, at the least, that current levels of taxation (the lowest in decades) are dangerously oppressive. And it hints that methods outside the normal political channels are justified in confronting such oppression.

We need to recognize the deep flaws in this vision of our present and our past. A reading of the Declaration of Independence makes clear that our forebears were not revolting against taxes as such — and most certainly not against government as such.

Dionne so badly misses the point on the tea parties, to say nothing of the Declaration of Independence, that I feel bad for him. Keep reading at the link. Anyone can cherry pick the founding documents to find passages and quotations to fit their agenda. Progressives like Dionne are depressed that it's been conservatives and libertarians who've been much more successful in capturing and representing the spirit of individual liberty animating our political culture. I keep seeing progressives argue that the founding documents called for the expansion of government. I mean, c'mon: Dionne is arguing that opposition to taxation is not an element of the Declaration of Independence. But history disproves it, for the ability to tax is the ability to destroy, so to understand opposition to taxation is to realize that government extraction from the people destroys liberty. But again, I feel sad for people like Dionne, because they're getting worried that Americans have awoken from the slumber of affluence and industry, and taken a closer look at how the political class is destroying our very foundations.

In any case, Jeff Jacoby offers the big picture, "Philosophy, faith and the Fourth of July."