draft — v1, April 2025
Is America flourishing? Is she at ease within herself, with peace and egalitarianism shared among her members, who were at birth created equal? Are her people happy — their needs met and their passions pursued? Are they in touch with their humanity, trusting of their neighbors, joint contributors to full and vibrant communities? Do they sleep well — free of the tyranny of anxiety and loneliness? Do they retain, at least, their dignity?
America was founded on the idea that a few truths were self-evident — the equality of all, their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the responsibility of government to secure these rights, and the responsibility of the people to alter or abolish their government if it failed to do so. Two hundred and fifty years later, she is neither happy nor equal; she has all but forgotten her courageous truths; she now asserts her success as a nation in starkly different terms. She has a world-leading Gross Domestic Product. She toils the hardest, creates and consumes the most technology, commands the largest bombs.
When a nation strays far from its founding truths, when it, whether by malice or pure negligence, fails to secure the self-evident rights of its governed — its citizens are bound by the authority of such truths to reimagine and renegotiate their governance, to reassert their standards and together orient themselves to the project of ensuring their own human flourishing.
We hold that the perceived failures of the present administration are only the ugly culmination of the slow decay of a once-sensible system of government which has aged well beyond its natural expiration. The issues which now threaten to topple us are not new; they have been building for many decades, if not centuries. America, the first capitalist democratic republic, was meticulously crafted by and for our 18th century forefathers; and though their designs were impressive, it is beyond evident today that they are insufficient to secure our flourishing. Our abdication of the responsibility to make an America of our own has led us to endure numerous perpetual injuries which have steadily grown to the point of comprehensive national crisis. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world:
In the history of our nation,
We have managed no truly effective solution for the undue and persistent imbalance of political power towards the wealthiest members of society — its property owners, its financial managers, and its business executives.
Our political and legal systems have consistently been defined by the interests of this tiny minority. Our political parties are dominated by a small class of elites, who are funded and lobbied by the wealthy. Our laws find their fundamental basis in property rights which prioritize the security of capital over the humanity, dignity, and flourishing of citizens.
Meanwhile, the right to human flourishing for the poorest members of society — its care, retail, service, and contract workers; its disabled and its disenfranchised — has not been embedded with our political and legal systems as the Declaration of Independence once demanded. It has been all but ignored by them.
Rather than rewarding those who give the most to our nation’s success; we have always tended to reward those who take the most from others.
In the history of our nation,
We have established no sane and humane system of foreign policy, with the goal of ensuring human flourishing and dignity both at home and abroad.
Our economic and military action has instead been historically unconstrained, inconsistent, and volatile; depending too heavily on the whims, biases, and appetites of the most powerful actors in government, rather than constrained by the collective interest and values of the American people — who pay the consequences of its wars, bear the cost of its tariffs, and ensure the security of its communities.
Similarly, the only constant of our immigration policy has been its inefficiency, barbarism, and arbitrariness; a reality which has always served to exacerbate rather than resolve racial and ethnic tensions at and within our borders.
In the history of our nation,
Though we have established systems which effectively spur the accumulation of capital, we have established no systems which provide an effective check on the hoarding of capital by individuals to the detriment of the nation, nor any which effectively spur its efficient use and constrain its waste.
We have consistently failed to reinvest our accumulated capital into human capital and the flourishing of our communities; and the consequence has been that every advancement in technology has led us not to increased life, liberty, and happiness, but to increased division and social isolation, and closer to our own extinction. Though this is an unnecessary and reversible failure, our current form of society has consistently proven itself insufficient to reverse it, and indeed appears only capable of accelerating it.
In the history of our nation,
We have continuously failed to accept the full dignity and absolute shared claim to America’s resources of the Chief Providers of her wealth and success:
These communities have given the most to the American project, and therefore claim the self-evident right to her success, her dignity, her rights, and her wealth. Yet our laws and our measures of success have failed to defend or even define this claim.
For the whole history of our nation, we have attempted to redress these and other clear injustices through normal party politics and legal cries of appeal to our forefathers’ constitution, and yet the fundamental issues persist. These are problems which confound the constraints of our legal and political systems, and which call for new principles, new ideas, new intelligent and human-centered designs.
When the failures of a government lead to the forfeiture of its people’s liberty and happiness, when its inadequate protection threatens to rob them of their lives, there naturally comes a point at which its people cry enough!, and recognize that within their own hands lies the capability to build for themselves a better one. To refuse to do so would be to forfeit our own unalienable Rights, and to embarrass our forefathers, who saw no validity in a system of law which prevented their flourishing, no authority in any paternalism which amounted to unjust or unreasonable servitude. We are their descendants only if we too take the responsibility to replace failing government with government that leads to our flourishing.
We, the living people of America, the Independent and Interdependent members of her many Communities, Cities, and Towns, are the true and sole guarantors of her safety, economy, and wealth. We alone wield the power to uphold the social, economic, and political systems which inadequately bind us, or to instead reject them in favor of newer forms of self-governance built upon mutual dependence and agreement; ones informed by centuries of accumulated wisdom, knowledge, and philosophy; ones built by and for a modern, diverse, and participatory populace; ones which distinguish between human and economic welfare, between capital and labor, between robustness and excess, between giving and taking; ones which affirm us as individuals by engaging us in brotherhood and sisterhood; ones more humanizing and more robust.
This power lying solely in the hands of our local communities, we hold that the path to the renewal of self-determination and the pursuit of human flourishing must necessarily originate not within our highest levels of government, which have ossified, but within our closest ones: our cities, our localities, our towns, our neighborhoods. We have thus begun a shared contributist project of the political definition and assertion of the right to human flourishing at the local level — towards the end of establishing and applying a radical and sensible new social, political, and legal framework across our nation that carries the legitimacy of self-determination.
We, therefore, find it necessary to declare anew, that these United States are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that the Powers of Government belong solely to those who bear the consent of the governed; that while we represent a minority of those governed, we submit wholly to the incumbent Constitutional order; that, however, because we take seriously our responsibility to the unalienable Rights of our members and all Americans, we commit ourselves to the immediate implementation of the contributist project within our diverse Localities, and to the eventual design and dissemination of an improved Constitutional order across our States and our Nation. And for the support of this Declaration, we as American individuals mutually pledge ourselves to the contributist commitments, we as American communities mutually pledge ourselves to the contributist blueprint, and we as contributist framers mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.