Two visions of society: 1776 and 1789. By Gerson Moreno-Riano at First Things.
1776:
America’s 1776 revolution was a revolution of covenant. The Declaration’s claim that all men are “endowed by their Creator” with unalienable rights is not decorative; it is the load-bearing pillar of the entire structure. Rights precede government because they come from God, not from the state.
That is why the American experiment could limit government at all: if rights were the state’s gift, the state could just as easily be their author and their undertaker.
Even the American Revolution’s radicalism — breaking with a king, disestablishing churches — was a revolt against a specific institutional arrangement, not against the idea of a transcendent moral order standing above human will. The Founders dismantled a throne; they did not dethrone God.
1789:
France’s 1789 revolution dismantled both. Lafayette’s constitutional-monarchist moment was real, but it did not hold the field. Within four years the revolution he helped launch had passed through the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Cult of Reason enthroned in Notre Dame, and into the Reign of Terror. That trajectory is not a betrayal of 1789’s logic; it is its executor.
When rights are re-grounded in the “general will” rather than a Creator who stands above the state, the general will becomes infinitely elastic — and, in Robespierre’s or any revolutionary’s hands, infinitely lethal.
This is always the outcome of any mass political movement that dethrones God and the dignity of human life. …
America at a crossroads in 2026 :
The American order rests on a specific anthropology: human beings as both image-bearers and sinners, incapable of the perfect virtue utopian schemes require, yet possessed of a dignity and possibility for renewal no government or human actor may licitly cancel. That is why the Declaration of Independence is a call to renewal, and the Constitution builds in checks, balances, and federalism.
The French revolutionary tradition, and the socialist and Marxist movements it fathered, rest on a different anthropology: human beings as infinitely malleable, sin — if it exists at all — as a structural defect of unjust systems rather than the human heart, and the state as the proper instrument for re-forging both. …
Mamdani, NYC mayor, is the 1789 future
When American activists describe rights as whatever the collective currently wills, or treat institutions as illegitimate simply for predating the revolution’s verdict, they are reasoning in 1789’s destructive revolutionary tradition, not 1776’s — whatever their intentions.
hat-tip Stephen Neil