and enumerated structure. Described by Lincoln as the “picture of silver” to the Declaration’s “apple of gold,” the Constitution established our system of government, embraced the prin- ciples of federalism, and later articu- lated Americans’ most fundamental God-given legal entitlements in the Bill of Rights, which was adopted in 1791. Just as significantly, however, is the Constitution’s elevation of the rule of law as a cornerstone of polit- ical life. Within the American consti- tutional framework, all people and all rulers are answerable to the same law and the same guiding principles a radical break from the political struc- tures that dominated Europe in the centuries prior to the American founding. Manifest Destiny and West- ward Expansion Could anything truly be more Amer- ican than the concept of Manifest Destiny the idea that our nation was destined by God to advance the cause of liberty and expand the principles enshrined in our found- ing documents from coast to coast? This frontier spirit sits at the heart of the American idea: venturing into the unknown, taming the wilderness, and spreading the sacred causes of freedom and self-government across the entire North American continent. Although leftists will be quick to point out that our nation’s treatment of Native Americans was at times less than perfect, it is impossible to imagine America without our expan- sion westward. “It’s always been my belief,” Ronald Reagan said more than a century later in a 1983 speech, “that by a divine plan this nation was placed between the two oceans to be
sought out and found by those with a special brand of courage and love of freedom.”
Victory Over Fascism in World War II
Decades after crushing slavery, the United States once again defended the cause of liberty when hundreds of thousands of Americans gave their lives to ensure Europe did not fall to a fascist empire. Like slavery, the global spread of Nazism and fascism posed an existential threat to Amer- ican self-government. But, with the full might of the American military and the American People, the United States once again showed that free- dom was worth fighting for and that totalitarianism was no match for the strength of the American spirit.
Defeating Slavery
Many on the left are also eager to cite the practice of slavery as a means to invalidate America’s prin- ciples and assert that our founding was entrenched in evil. Of course, slavery was and remains wholly anti- thetical to the American creed and a challenge to our most fundamental principles. What leftists generally fail to recognize, however, is that tens of thousands of patriotic Americans gave their lives to end slavery on our shores and that troves of Ameri- cans, including many of the Found- ers, recognized that slavery was an affront to, rather than a fulfillment of, our founding principles. Addition- ally, contrary to narratives promul- gated by left-wing contrivances like the “1619 Project,” slavery was by no means a uniquely American phenom- enon. Rather, it had been practiced globally for centuries and was engrained in the economic, cultural, and political life of many nations. But, even so, Americans took up and succeeded in the tremendous chal- lenge of expelling it from our land. In his 1863 Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln beautifully articu- lated that the stakes of the Civil War extended far beyond just saving the union. In reality, the Civil War was about saving the cause of liberty itself. “[W]e here highly resolve,” Lincoln said, “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Civil Rights Movement
Despite America’s eradication of slavery with the passage of the 13 th Amendment, the forces of racism sadly persisted in the decades that followed. But, guided by the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who famously said that he hoped Americans one day would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by
the content of their char- acter,” the American civil rights movement purged segregation and other forms of race-based
discrimination from federal law another fulfillment of America’s founding
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