The Real Radicals

 

The Real Radicals

 

July 4, 2026 — the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence

 For two and a half centuries, Americans have debated taxes, spending, rights, regulations, wars, elections, courts, presidents, parties, and public controversies of every kind. Beneath all of those debates, however, lies a more fundamental question:

What is government for?

Most people assume the Founders were radicals because they rebelled against a king. That is true, but it is not what made them truly radical. Many people have rebelled against kings. Many people have overthrown rulers. Many people have replaced one regime with another.

The truly radical idea was not simply that the colonies rejected a king. The truly radical idea was that they rejected the oldest political arrangement in the world: concentrated power in the hands of the few.

That arrangement has worn many costumes: monarchy, imperial rule, dictatorship, socialism, communism, fascism, and the modern administrative state. Sometimes power is held by one ruler. Other times it is spread across a party, a bureaucracy, or a ruling class. How many hold power changes. What they call themselves changes. But the structure remains: the many are subject to the will of the few.

The oldest idea in politics is not monarchy. It is concentrated power.

Not freedom. Not limited government. Not rights that exist before the state. The old idea is that society should be managed from above by people who claim the authority, wisdom, morality, expertise, or necessity to arrange life for everyone else.

The Founders rejected that.

They rejected the deeper pattern beneath it all: the belief that the people should live under power, instead of power being made to answer to the people.
They did not reject government itself. That distinction matters. They were not anarchists. They understood that civilized societies require law, courts, defense, public order, and the protection of rights. But they also understood that government is different from every other institution in society.

Government is force.

It commands, compels, taxes, prohibits, and punishes. Even when that force is necessary, every expansion of it narrows the space where free people can act.

That is the beginning of political wisdom: government is necessary, and government is dangerous.

The Founders knew government had to exist. They also knew it could not be trusted with unlimited power. They had read history. They had studied failed republics. They had seen monarchy up close. They understood ambition, faction, corruption, and fear.
They understood human nature.

The Founders did not merely say, “This king has too much power.” They broke from history by insisting that power itself must be limited and placed beneath the rights of the citizen.

That was radical.

For most of human history, the state stood above ordinary people. They were subjects. They existed to be managed, taxed, commanded, enlisted, punished, licensed, and ruled. Their freedom depended on the permission of those above them.

America’s founding idea reversed that relationship. The country was designed around the freedom of the citizen, not the supremacy of the state. Government did not exist to serve itself. It existed to secure the rights of the people. Government was necessary, but it was limited by design: divided, checked, and made to answer to the people.

That idea was radical in 1776.

Somehow, it’s even more radical now.

Every young generation is attracted to radical ideas. That is not the problem. The problem is that many young people today mistake the oldest idea in politics for a new one. More government is not radical. It is the oldest idea in politics.

Socialism, communism, monarchy, empire, and dictatorship all share the same basic instinct: move power upward so the few can manage the many.

Some versions are brutal. Some are polished. Some are sold in softer language. Some are brilliantly repackaged for modern audiences. But the central demand is familiar: give more power to government, more authority to officials, more control to planners, and more discretion to experts. Move power upward and turn citizens into subjects. That is not new. It is the oldest political idea there is.

This ancient temptation rarely announces itself as tyranny.

Today, it comes with a noble sales pitch: give us more power over more of your life, and we will make society fair, protect the vulnerable, defend the marginalized, uplift the oppressed, correct injustice, prevent harm, punish hate, and build a better world.

The Founders offered something different. They did not believe society becomes stronger when every problem is routed through political power. They did not believe freedom survives when government becomes the first tool, the final answer, and the moral center of national life.

They believed in a different arrangement: rights before government, power divided by design, authority limited by law, and government strong enough to perform its essential duties but limited enough for citizens to remain free.

That is the American idea.

America’s strength has never come primarily from Washington. It has come from free people building lives, families raising children, businesses creating value, communities solving problems, churches and charities serving neighbors, and citizens doing the daily work of civilization without waiting for permission from the state.

Government has a role. A serious role. A necessary role. But government is not society. It is not the source of every solution. It is not the parent of the citizen. It is not the highest expression of American life.

At its best, government protects the space where free people can act. At its worst, it invades that space, regulates it, taxes it, commands it, and then calls the expansion progress.

The Founders knew what power does when it is left alone. They knew what rulers become when no one can tell them no. They knew liberty is not lost only through conquest. It can also be surrendered slowly, policy by policy, crisis by crisis, promise by promise.

On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the task is not to discover a new political idea. It is to recover the old one. The American one.

The great political question of our time is not whether America can invent some entirely new theory of government. The question is whether America can remember the one that made it exceptional: a limited government.

That was the truly radical idea.

It still is.

That is why Freer America exists: to help rebuild a freer, stronger country by carrying America’s founding principles back into public life.