Reflections on Liberty and Equality on the 250th Anniversary of our Nation's Founding.

In the spring semester of my senior year of high school, I took a U.S. Government course. Like many students in 2021, I split my time between the classroom and my bedroom because of COVID-19. We attended school on a staggered schedule—half the class in person one day, the other half the next. It wasn't exactly an ideal learning environment.

Despite the interruptions, one lesson has stayed with me.

My government teacher offered what he believed was the simplest way to distinguish America's two major political parties. To paraphrase, he said that the two most important values in American culture are equality and liberty. Democrats, he argued, generally prioritize equality over liberty, while Republicans prioritize liberty over equality. Much of American history, he said, could be understood as the tension between those competing values.

As an impressionable eighteen-year-old, I thought I had discovered the key to understanding politics. Suddenly, every debate, every social movement, every major act of Congress seemed to fit neatly into one of two categories. Equality or liberty. One had to come at the expense of the other.

The approaching 250th anniversary of our nation's founding made me revisit that lesson. After reflecting on it, I realized my teacher's framework was incomplete.

Equality and liberty are undoubtedly among America's defining ideals. The Declaration of Independence proclaims that "all men are created equal" and that we are endowed with the unalienable rights of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The Constitution was established to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity," and the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees both liberty through due process and equality through the equal protection of the laws.

Our founding documents are far from perfect, and they proclaim ideals that America often fails to live up to. But they did not present equality and liberty as competing principles. They presented them as aspirations worthy of pursuing together.

Somewhere along the way, we began treating them as opposites.

Liberty certainly means freedom from unnecessary government interference. But liberty is also something more profound: the ability to direct your own life. Rights mean little if circumstances leave you with no meaningful opportunity to exercise them.

What freedom does a child truly have if the quality of their education depends on their ZIP code? What freedom does a worker have if losing a job also means losing access to healthcare? What freedom does a family have if every financial setback threatens their housing or their next meal?

Expanding access to quality education, affordable healthcare, stable housing, and economic opportunity doesn't simply make society more equal. It also gives more people the freedom to make meaningful choices about their own lives. Equality, in that sense, doesn't diminish liberty—it makes liberty possible for more Americans.

That doesn't mean every policy advances both values equally, and reasonable people will continue to disagree about how best to balance them. But we should reject the notion that equality and liberty are inherently at odds. Our nation's greatest moments have come not from choosing one over the other, but from expanding both.

As we prepare to celebrate America's semiquincentennial, we should remember that our democracy is a work in progress. Every generation inherits the unfinished task of making the promises of our founding documents more real for more people.

None of us will be here for America's 500th birthday. But each of us has the opportunity and the responsibility to leave our country a little freer, a little more equal, and a little more just than we found it. If we succeed, our descendants won't have to choose between liberty and equality. They'll understand, as our nation has too often forgotten, that America's promise is strongest when we pursue both together.

Kelm Lear

Chair