It's Not Called 'Dependence' Day

[Geee]

Human Events:

Is the Fourth of July a right-wing holiday?

When asked by a conservative, the question is self-serving; by a liberal, self-knowing. As it happens, two Harvard University professors not only ask the question but answer in the affirmative.

Their new study claims that “there is a political congruence between the patriotism promoted on the Fourth of July and the values associated with the Republican party.” The professors worry that the more intensely patriotic celebrations may “socialize children into Republicans.”

The professors aren’t the first Americans made uncomfortable by America’s birthday.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the signers of the Declaration of Independence affirmed, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Fifty years later, on July 4, 1826, Welsh industrialist Robert Owen issued a “Declaration of Mental Independence” at the New Harmony commune that he started in Indiana. “I now declare to you and to the world, that man up to this hour has been in all parts of the earth a slave to a trinity of the most monstrous evils that could be combined to inflict mental and physical evil upon the whole race,” Owen declared. “I refer to private property, absurd and irrational systems of religion and marriage founded upon individual property, combined with some of these irrational systems of religion.”

So enthused by Owen’s address were the inhabitants of New Harmony that they declared a new era: Year 1 M.I. (mental independence). So enraged by the grievances articulated by Jefferson were the inhabitants of the thirteen colonies that they founded a new nation. America celebrates its birthday today. The commune the Owenites started never made it to Year 2 M.I.

Why did the United States make history while New Harmony became a mere footnote to history?

The results of each experiment are fairly easy to interpret. Capitalism works for men who do. Socialism works for men who don’t.