This article ran in the Tallahassee Democrat on July 2, 1995. It was also carried by the Charlotte Observer and other papers in California and Florida.

Over hot dogs and soda this Fourth of July, there will be inspiring remarks from community leaders praising the political tradition embodied in the Declaration of Independence. But many of these picnic-table patriots would be unsettled to know the revolutionary values they're commemorating on Independence Day.

Actually, whether they realize it or not, on the Fourth nearly all citizens pay tribute to the ideals of our conservative Constitution rather than the more radical Declaration. The holiday confusion is a result of two competing doctrines in American political culture that were already present early in our national history.

The first outlook, associated with Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence, was suspicious of tradition. This conviction was wary of beliefs handed down from past generations, since those values would only stifle and repress ideas in the present. Paine believed that the hereditary system had crushed freedom in Europe, and he wanted to leave future generations of Americans unbound by history. Past laws and rules were fine to study and learn from, but history was not to throw its confining shadow on today. So Paine's was the history to end all history. "Mankind have lived to very little purpose," he remarked, "if, at this period of the world, they must go two or three thousand years back for lessons and examples."

These worries about the dangers of inherited beliefs and power were natural for a colonial culture trying to free itself from the values of its European past. American independence was described by Paine as a pure new birth. The colonies were abandoning their tie to a corrupt Europe. "The time hath found us," Paine wrote in a prophetic tone, as though the hand of God were on our collective shoulder. In his mind we were a nation engaged in an experiment.

Not merely saying goodbye to Britain, Paine saw America entering a bold new stage. Our children, he predicted, would create their own experiment in government and society. So Paine concluded that we shouldn't bind our offspring with our rules, legal codes, and constitutions. To be truly independent, a generation could not be bound by those who had come before. "Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the ages and generations which proceeded it," he warned. "The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies."

Sharing Paine's radicalism toward the past, Jefferson worried about chaining the present to historical precedent. In the Declaration of Independence he proclaimed the right to revolution if political conditions became intolerable. Like Paine, the benefits of perpetual revolution seemed obvious to Jefferson. He wrote Madison that "a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical." Further, if one of the 13 states had a rebellion every 11 years, that would add up to only one rebellion per state every century and a half. "No country," Jefferson advised, "should be so long without one."

The right of continuous revolution meant that long standing constitutions were oppressive. He told Madison that "no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation." So Jefferson suggested that "every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, while emphasizing culture more than politics, agreed with Paine and Jefferson about the need for a continuing revolution. Emerson, in the mid-nineteenth century, suggested that each individual had the divinity of God and nature within. So in each divine individual the universe was recreated anew. What each individual believed from moment to moment was suffused with divinity and holy truth. Therefore Emerson encouraged a perpetual revelation--a continuing, constant rebirth of truth and divinity in the human soul--that was parallel to the perpetual revolution proposed by Paine and Jefferson in the political arena.

Clearly, in this first doctrine there has been a continuing radical, revolutionary spirit that elevates the present over history and the rule of constitutions. After all, since Emerson suggested that each individual is the universe created all over again, what does history even mean? And it is this radical doctrine that stands behind our hallowed midsummer July Fourth celebration.

This radical outlook can still be found today on both the political right and left. Newt Gingrich and the Republican 104th Congress are revolutionaries of the right who want to break with tradition and forge an America consistent with their view of the present. And there is an attempt to draw the nation away from its centrist inertia and toward the political left by those such as Congressman Ron Dellums, novelist Gore Vidal, and Jesse Jackson.

Yet most Americans, moderate as they are, reject radical beliefs, even those revolutionary values held by some of the Founding Fathers. Most moderate Americans, that is, would find distasteful the core values expressed in the revolutionary ideology of American independence. These centrist citizens commemorate a second, alternative national doctrine on July Fourth.

This second tradition embraces law and order, and recognizes that people can learn by history, inheritance, and tradition. It admires stability and continuity. At its most benign, this outlook promotes fairness and harmony. At its worst it frets about the "little people" becoming too involved in democratic government since that can produce instability.

In the late 1700s, representatives of this more conservative outlook, such as Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, argued strongly in favor of our current Constitution--as an arrangement that would replace the weak Articles of Confederation with order, fairness, balance, and strength. Contrary to those radicals who had little use for history, John Adams, Hamilton, Madison, George Washington, and John Marshall believed that constitutions and continuity helped encourage more integrity and virtue in a society. Fittingly, the U.S Constitution, designed under the influence of this second tradition, is a conservative document that funnels all government decisions through a process of compromise, negotiation, and consensus.

Let's face it. America is a conservative country that adores the status quo. We treat the Constitution as though it's a holy counterpart to the Bible. In judicial arguments--on the right to bear arms, for example--we search furiously for the original intent of the authors of the Bill of Rights, instead of caring about what is more suitable for the present generation and circumstances. Our reverence for our constitutional scriptures reveals a national ancestor worship that is practically Oriental in its intensity.

So most Americans are too conservative to celebrate the radical doctrine that undergirds Independence Day. And again this year, in speeches and benedictions around the country, the words of Jefferson and Paine will be replaced by the images of Washington and Hamilton.