As America approaches her 250th anniversary, President Donald J. Trump honored a foundational moment that still echoes through every courthouse, classroom, and town hall.
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On June 12, 1776, the Old Dominion’s leaders gathered in Williamsburg and issued the Virginia Declaration of Rights. That document did not beg for freedom. It was penned largely by founding father George Mason. The text proclaimed that all men are by nature equally free and independent, endowed by their creator with rights no government can strip away.
It placed power squarely in the hands of the people, demanded separation of powers, protected free speech and a free press, guaranteed trial by jury, and safeguarded the free exercise of religion.
These ideas are rooted in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of ordered liberty. They draw from thinkers like John Locke. They inspired Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence weeks later and James Madison’s Bill of Rights years afterward. They formed the bedrock of a republic where government serves citizens, not the other way around.
Today those same principles stand in sharp contrast to a very different worldview that dominates the Democrat party.
This ideology, often called wokeness, represents a fundamental break from the Enlightenment values that built the country. According to scholar James Lindsay, wokeness means awakening to a specific “critical consciousness” shaped by Critical Social Justice theory. It teaches people to view society not through individual merit, evidence, or shared fairness, but through immutable group identities locked in struggles of power and oppression.
Dominant groups supposedly maintain hidden systems that keep others down. The purported solution demands constant left-wing activism, deconstruction of Western norms, and equity of outcomes rather than equality under law. This framework rejects open debate as complicity and treats traditional American ideals of color-blind justice and individual rights as part of the problem.
In the early-to-mid 2010s, Democrat leaders increasingly embraced this ideology to consolidate power. Activist movements like Black Lives Matter gained traction after the 2014 Ferguson riots. Blue figures and institutions aligned with narratives of systemic oppression and group-based hierarchies. What began in academia moved into mainstream politics through social media, corporate incentives, and special-interest campaigns.
By 2020, this embrace became unmistakable. Democrat officials supported dangerous protests, calls to defund police, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) mandates across government and business.
The party moved away from older commitments to evidence, universalism, and incremental reform. It embraced a transformative vision that sees every institution through the lens of oppressor and oppressed. Lindsay correctly describes this as a cultural revolution dynamic that turned grievance into fuel for leftist collectivism while maligning individual rights.
This transformation built on deeper changes among Democrats.
From the 1970s onward, so-called New Liberals gradually reshaped the Democrats from a broad working-class coalition into one centered on highly educated professionals and identity politics. By the Barack Obama years and especially after 2016, cultural radicalism and purported social justice issues took center stage over class-based economics.
Trump’s first victory was interpreted not as a rebuke of elite policies but as proof of widespread bigotry, intensifying the focus on so-called systemic racism, rampant transgender ideology, and alleged victimhood frameworks. Under Biden-Harris, this produced federal pushes for equity over equality, institutional DEI programs, and lawfare that redefined disagreement as harm.
The result was Democrats prioritizing retribution for alleged victim groups over broad material interests that once united Americans.
Christopher Rufo and scholars at the Manhattan Institute have documented how, throughout the 2010s and into the 2020s, Democrats platformed critical race theory concepts. Blue theories pit an ever-expanding array of claimed victim blocs against their purported oppressors. This happened in education, government, and corporate life. Campus activism ballooned into national policy demands.
After 2014–2016, blue leaders defended “anti-racism” curricula, gender policies in schools, and bureaucratic mechanisms that enforced conformity with trendy leftism. This culturally socialist approach emphasized perpetual vigilance against supposed systemic injustices rather than Bill Clinton-era pragmatism or Franklin Delano Roosevelt-age class solidarity.
While that energized an increasingly leftist Democrat base, it also created visible fatigue among voters who grew weary of speech restrictions, attacks on merit, and constant division. In the mid-2020s, the blue institutional core in academia, media, and nonprofits remains committed even as harsh electoral realities mount.
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Indeed, the Democrats’ self-understanding is tightly bound to anti-Western, anti-male, anti-capitalist, anti-Israel, and anti-white convictions as core markers of moral clarity. This leaves them less responsive to working-class, and even some minority, voters who care more about jobs, safety, and their children than radical chic signaling.
The human cost of this divide shows up in startling numbers.
A recent Elon University/YouGov survey American adults whether there is another country they would rather live in than the United States. Among Democrat respondents, 55 percent said yes. Only 10 percent of Republicans felt the same, with the overall figure at 35 percent. The poll reveals an eerie partisan gap in national attachment at the very moment America reflects on her founding.
As America’s semiquincentennial approaches, Democrat responses reflect staggering alienation from the country herself, even as Republicans show firmer commitment to their homeland.
The Virginia Declaration’s vision of self-governing citizens with inalienable rights clashes directly with woke ideology. Most Democrats see the nation’s traditions, borders, achievements, and first-world success as structures of oppression to be dismantled.
A blue base that largely prefers living elsewhere signals limited investment in America’s future. If empowered, such sentiments would pressure elected officials toward policies that weaken the very superpower status, and ordered liberty, that allow prosperity and freedom to flourish.
The irony is thick: woke lefties who express this discontent come from the world’s most successful experiment in liberty. Yet they offer little, if anything, that would qualify them for citizenship in the foreign nations they idealize.
For those who still believe in the founders’ framework of individual rights, limited government, and American greatness, the lesson is urgent.
Midterm elections this November represent a critical checkpoint. The Democrat party’s devolution into a vehicle for this anti-liberty ideology poses a genuine risk to the republic’s inheritance. Voters motivated by a clear-eyed defense of the principles that made America exceptional have every reason to turn out in force.
The stakes involve nothing less than whether the 250th anniversary becomes a celebration of renewal or a melancholy reminder of what was lost when Democrats turned away from their own country’s foundational truths.
The Virginia Declaration of Rights did not promise utopia. It promised a framework where free people could pursue happiness while checking power’s natural appetite for control. That framework delivered unprecedented liberty and opportunity.
Today’s alternative blue worldview has an unabashedly woke, collectivist grievance bent. Blended with this are third-worldist ideas designed to weaken America, for the sake of equity with poorer, more unstable, non-Western countries. Beyond doubt, the Democrats offer a different path than anything which leads to American greatness.
Their dead-end road has already shown its immense capacity to divide, demoralize, and erode confidence in the American people. As the nation marks an impressive, historic milestone, the choice before voters could not be clearer.
Preserving the flame lit in Williamsburg requires rejecting the forces that would extinguish it.
Dr. Joseph Ford Cotto is the creator, host, and producer of News Sight, delivering sharp insights on the key events that shape our lives. He publishes Dr. Cotto’s Digest, sharing how business and the economy really impact us all. During the 2024 presidential race, he developed the Five-Point Forecast, which accurately predicted Donald Trump’s national victory and correctly called every swing state. Cotto holds a doctorate in business administration and is a Lean Six Sigma Certified Black Belt.
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