So it has been from the beginning and throughout our history. Every generation has experienced an iteration of that struggle, some more dramatically than others, and have dealt with it in their own ways. Yet despite the viciousness of anti-democratic forces that have always lurked in our national experience, in the long arc of America history the ideals of equality and justice have ultimately prevailed. Our ancestors repudiated slavery with abolition, they repudiated the institutional suppression of women with the Women's Suffragist movement, they repudiated the Gilded Age with the establishment of organized labor, and they repudiated segregation with the Civil Rights movement.It's our turn now.
Today the ideals of equal rights and opportunity enshrined in the Declaration of Independence are not threatened by a particular institution so much as by an economic paradigm. It's simply the idea that corporate profits rather than democratic ideals should be the organizing principle of our society, turning us from a government "of the people, by the people and for the people" into a government "of a few of the people, by a few of the people, and for a few of the people." The results have been, and continue to be, hugely damaging in the lives of millions of Americans and others as well.
Today, on July 4th, let's consider very deeply what all this means - to us as individuals and as a nation. The American experiment does not perpetuate itself; it must be kept alive and protected by those who love it most, generation after generation. Today, our most precious ideals are being assaulted not so much by foreign enemies but by forces within our own society - indeed, within our own government - for whom the radicalism of the equality of all men goes against their grain. We know who they are, and now we need to decide who we are.
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