The Idolatry of Origins: America at 250 Years

by Melvin L. Rogers, Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor, Brown University

When we hear the words “origin stories” these days, we find ourselves thinking about comic books. This is what Marvel or DC gives to its superheroes and villains. But there is an insight in these cultural productions. Origin stories are about fate and destiny. In this lies their power because they speak to our existential desire for meaning and purpose. This is also their flaw; origin stories feel inescapable because they are perceived to be irrevocable. At 250 years, the United States has not escaped this logic. It has built a civic life around it.

Nations are held together by their history, and through the telling of that history, they forge an identity or believe they have discovered one. At this very moment, we are in the business of telling such stories with special urgency. The celebrations will be grand. But the question that should occupy us is not how to celebrate what we were, but how to reckon honestly with what we are.

Three stories compete for our national soul at this anniversary. All three, I want to suggest, fail us. They all emerge from a similar form, but they are not troubling in equal degrees.

Refusal and Withdrawal

Reflecting on the horror of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, abolitionist Martin Delany was beside himself with disappointment. That same year, he was dismissed from Harvard’s Massachusetts Medical College because he was Black. The dismissal and the law mingled in his mind as two expressions of the same animus. And in his extraordinary text of 1852, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, he insisted that Black people must seek emigration. It became clear to Delany that whatever else Black people might be in the United States, they were certainly, as he put it, “politically, not of [their white counterparts], but aliens to the laws and political privileges of the country.”¹

Delany did not stay with this position, but it became powerful all the same. The first story is the story of refusal. It tells us that the nation’s foundational commitment was not to freedom but to anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and native dispossession. We hear echoes of it today. In this story, the horror exacted on Black and indigenous bodies has ironically propelled liberal democracy toward an improvement that never arrives, leaving Black and indigenous people as modern-day Sisyphean characters. The system, we are told, is working as intended when it harms non-whites. Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution is our inheritance. It is our deception. In its extremes, this leads either to withdrawal from democratic life or visions of revolutionary overthrow, both of which share the belief that the United States offers only unfulfillable promises, and that complicity in pursuing them is itself wrong.

It would be inaccurate to say that such a view is without merit. From wealth to employment opportunity, from police contact to incarceration rates, we see sustained examples of inequity that point to structurally enforced patterns of discrimination. To this we can add the recent Supreme Court decisions that erode the Voting Rights Act. So, there is truth here. That is not the point. The real issue is whether it merits the characterization attached to it; whether it ought to function as an irrevocable origin story that forever stains the nation and denies efforts to realize a multi-racial and ethnic democracy.

The Story of Recovery

The second story is one of recovery. It is, perhaps, our most dominant national story. Abraham Lincoln told it when he insisted the Founders set up “a standard maxim for a free society” to be “constantly approximated,” if never perfectly attained. He was responding to the Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court decision of 1857.² The case itself was enormously influential. At bottom, the question was whether a Black man (Dred Scott) had legal standing to bring suit in a federal court in favor of his status as a free citizen. The answer to that question, the Court maintained, depended on whether those of African ancestry were included in the category of the people as specified in “We the people” of the Constitution. The Court was clear that the people referred to a limited class of persons as understood by the Founders. The “question before us is, whether the class of persons described in the plea in abatement compose a portion of this people, and are constituent members of this sovereignty? We think they are not.”³

Lincoln argued that the Supreme Court was mistaken in its decision. The Court should have noticed, he insisted, the moral vision fueling and shaping the Constitution. They should have recognized the prophetic power of the Declaration of Independence. For Lincoln, the Founders defined “with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal—equal in ‘certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’.”⁴

Frederick Douglass shared this sentiment. In his famous July 5, 1852 address, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” he called the Declaration of Independence the “RINGBOLT to the chain” of the “nation’s destiny.”⁵ The nation’s direction can remain true, if it remains fastened to its moral foundation. And more than a century later in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. insisted that when we lose our way, those words can carry “the whole nation back to the great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.”⁶

King could be very critical of the United States, but it is his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, however cliché, that captures this vision of recovery: “Instead of honoring this sacred obligation [of the Declaration of Independence], America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.”⁷ Why? King never doubted the moral and political funds were there, waiting to be honored. As Eric Sundquist later asked of King’s speech: “What did it mean for the nation to return to itself, to return to its true home?”⁸

They were all great rhetoricians, but these were not flatteries. They asked us to be political archeologists, removing the political dirt to recover the path that was once properly laid. Throughout American history, this narrative of seeing the Declaration as the foundation of our civic religion, a sacred text, has remained powerful. It has sustained democratic struggle under conditions of exclusion, from abolitionism, women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights, etc. You pick your American struggle against exclusion, and you will find people seeking to recover what they believe they were wrongfully denied.

However powerful, there is an unfortunate tendency in such appeals. When we locate moral authority in a buried origin, even our most critical appeals to the founding can unwittingly displace political judgment from the present onto the past, forcing us to measure our success by how well we are aligned with our civic ancestors. In this we miss something important about our past. History may well enable us in the present, but it can never function to redeem the wrongs committed in the nation’s name. If the story of recovery encourages democratic advancement, it often does so by pretending that the answer was always there and that proper deployment of it can heal us in some final way.

Ethno-Nationalism and Sovereignty

On the evening of July 5, 2025, Vice-President J. D. Vance addressed the Claremont Institute’s Statesmanship Awards Dinner. His topic was the future of American citizenship. “America in 2025,” he said, “is more diverse than it has ever been. And yet the institutions that form culture are weaker.”

He did not stop there:

“[I]f you were to ask yourself in 2025 what an American is, very few of our leaders would have a good answer. Is it purely agreement with the creedal principles of America? That definition is overinclusive and underinclusive. It would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of foreigners. Must we admit them tomorrow? But, at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people the ADL [Anti-Defamation League] would label domestic extremists, even though their own ancestors were here at the time of the Revolutionary War.”⁹

The logic of the argument is striking. Citizenship is no longer tied to creed or principles. Increasingly, in this view, it is tied to descent and historical lineage. Because the nation’s recognized political ancestry has historically been tied to white lineages, the Vice-President’s appeal to descent invariably privileges those over others. All this can be said without ever invoking race. Once political belonging is tied to blood rather than creed, the nation becomes something closer to an inherited possession rather than a shared political project by those who inhabit it.

Here, we have the origin story of white ethno-nationalism, and it sits at the center of the presidency. The importance of ancestry thus justifies a philosophy of sovereign ownership. This philosophy has a long tradition in American law and political culture. You can find it in the Naturalization Act of 1790 that sought to limit citizenship to “free white persons.”¹⁰ The belief in sovereign ownership fueled the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan in 1865 in response to the Civil War and its subsequent rebirth and expansion in 1915. And it led to the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 that put in place quotas to preserve the ideological power of white Americans.

In its current form, white ethno-nationalism explains what might otherwise appear to be a series of disconnected policy positions from the executive branch, from its rejection of immigration to its attack on voting rights to its denial of birthright citizenship. Consider, for a moment, the last of these. The Fourteenth Amendment is unambiguous: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

Although the President was recently unsuccessful in overturning birthright citizenship, the slim majority of the Supreme Court in favor of the Fourteenth Amendment should give us pause. So it remains worth noting that to challenge birthright citizenship is not a constitutional argument in any recognizable sense. It is an origin story attempting to assert itself against the law. It says, in effect, that the sovereign people—understood as white people—retain authority that no amendment can finally extinguish. Birthright citizenship offends this philosophy. It treats membership as a fact of nativity rather than a privilege dispensed by those who imagine themselves the nation’s original and rightful owners.

The first two origin stories are troubling because they deform our civic motivation. In the first, our civic powers turn away from the nation, while in the second those same powers are at once diminished and exaggerated. Diminished because we think about our agency only in relation to how well we can channel the Founders. Exaggerated because in channeling the Founders we believe we can settle the gravest of mistakes. The third is of a different and far more dangerous kind. It wields state power to make its fiction legally real. It aims to suppress the civic energies that would challenge it and demand its accountability. It is anti-democratic in form and scope.

On Trust and the Declaration

For all their differences, they share something. They each ask us to stop trusting one another. This will be difficult to accept, especially regarding the second redemptive story that has so often led to what we rightly see as moral and political advancements. But consider the matter with care. The first counsels permanent suspicion. The second mistakenly displaces trust onto generations long dead, hoping that through their words, rather than our shared labor and understanding, we will form a more perfect union. The third decides in advance who is worthy of it at all. Do these origin stories not find themselves in the news, on social media, or in the classroom, shaping how we see one another?

What is lost in all this? Trust. It is the invisible institution of democratic life.

James Baldwin understood this with an urgency that still unsettles. When he insisted that we must tell the truth about our racist past, he did not mean it merely for truth’s sake. Honesty, he understood, is the precondition for believing that we can rely on people to act on our behalf. In other words, that we can trust them. This is why he argued that national storytelling is about more than historical accuracy. It is about who matters and why. If you are not truthful about your past, you cannot be honest about your present, and the result will be more pain and suffering visited upon those you otherwise claim to protect. To honestly accept one’s past, Baldwin thought, “is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.”¹¹ The white nationalist origin story cannot afford this honesty. It requires, as a condition of its existence, a systematic dishonesty about what the Fourteenth Amendment means, what the history of citizenship in this country has been, and who has always been here, always been working, always been building what others have claimed as exclusively their own.

Here is what the Declaration, at its best, can still teach us about trust and citizenship. Before we get to the word “liberty” in its second paragraph—“Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”—the word “equal” has already appeared twice. It appears at the very outset where the colonists say that they must assume “among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them…”. It arrives once again with the more important words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”.

Liberty, in this document, gains its direction from the equality it must affirm. And a form of freedom that treats equal standing as optional, rather than the very ground of its own security, will not remain free for long. .

This view of equality is not something that was necessarily known at the founding; it is something we have come to earn through our history. The word was there, but the fullness of its meaning slowly accrued to it through shared work. The abolitionists, the suffragists, the civil rights actors, all of them, authored equality’s meaning. But how? Because they placed their trust in one another. Trust is not merely a feeling; it is a practice in which we decide, struggle, and imagine together what equality must mean for us. To trust each other is also to trust that we can care for one another through the values that we give to ourselves and that will direct our political society. To trust each other is also to believe that we can be better than our civic ancestors by creating for ourselves forms of living they could never imagine.

When you approach the nation from this angle, it is no longer a possession to be inherited by some and withheld by others. The United States is not merely land and inheritance. It is a choice. Will we enrich its meaning far beyond what was imagined, or will we leave its words small, narrow, and tied only to a few?

~

Melvin L. Rogers is the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brown University, where he co-directs the Democracy Project. He is a 2026 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and the author of the The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023).

1. Martin Robison Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (New York: Arno Press, 1968), 158.

2. Abraham Lincoln, “The Dred Scott Decision,” in Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, ed. Roy P. Basler (New York: World Press Company, 1857/1946), 361.

3. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393, [1857].

4. Lincoln, “The Dred Scott Decision,” 361.

5. Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” (1852), in The Essential Douglass: Selected Writings and Speeches, ed. Nicholas Buccola (Indianapolis: Hackett Press, 2016), 53.

6. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” (1963), in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. James M. Washington (New York: HarperCollins, 1986), 302.

7. King, “I Have a Dream” (1963), in A Testament of Hope, 217.

8. Eric J. Sundquist, King’s Dream (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 151.

9. J. D. Vance, “American Statesmanship for the Golden Age,” The American Mind, July 14, 2025: https://americanmind.org/salvo/american-statesmanship-for-the-golden-age/

10. Naturalization Act of 1790, ch. 3, 1 Stat. 103 (March 26, 1790).

11. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), 81.