Who Owns the Declaration of Independence?

Breaking History

The Free Press

History

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 27 May 2026

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As America approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding, a quiet war is being waged over what the Declaration of Independence really means — with some on the new right dismissing it as globalist fantasy and some on the left reducing it to a document written by slaveholders. Writer and former national security official Michael Anton joins Eli Lake to examine the ideas of Harry Jaffa, a Brooklyn-born philosopher who spent his career insisting that the Declaration's truths are not relics of the 18th century but eternal facts about human nature. Jaffa's argument was unfashionable when he made it and it's contested now, but Anton thinks it's never been more urgent. Along the way, Michael and Eli take on the new right's growing rejection of the ideas that made the founding possible, the left's long abandonment of the Declaration, and how both sides have managed, in their own way, to get America's origin story completely wrong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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