This July Fourth, We the People should reconnect with the secret of our success — the Declaration and Constitution

“We the People” — we Americans — need to reconnect with the secret of our success. We are fixated on regress.

No, 1619 is not our origin story. Slavery is an old-world inheritance — a top-of-list sin, to be sure, but not a unique one.

Our treatment of American Indians was not our finest hour either. It started before 1619 and continued after the abolition of slavery in 1865.

An Italian wise guy, Machiavelli, said that the origins of all nations involve some amount of “force and fraud.”

What should still have the capacity to surprise (and inspire) an educated person is how the old world changed course and became the new world.

The press release of this new order of the ages was our Declaration of Independence: July 4, 1776. It took another decade-plus to produce its IPO — the Constitution of the United States, which offered to the American people and the watching world “a republic, if you can keep it,” in Ben Franklin’s words, an “experiment” in self-government.