When Revolution Stops Sounding Radical

Reflecting on the Declaration of Independence

“The American Dream Is a Nightmare“ by badlyricpolice is licensed under CC BY 2.0. Cropped.

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Through the 4th of July CELDF will be challenging dishonest narratives about America’s past and how those lies distort our lives in the present. This essay is part of a four-part series of reflections on the Declaration of Independence from CELDF’s staff.

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By Christine Schoenberger

The crumbling of the American Dream is radicalizing the people to whom it was once promised. They are not activists or people who think of themselves in terms of left or right, but mostly people who have avoided politics altogether and assumed the system basically worked, even if imperfectly.

But something interesting is happening in online discussions. You don’t have to look long before the patterns emerge: people, especially younger adults, describing unemployment or wages that don’t cover rent, having to work two jobs and still needing roommates well into adulthood, or medical debt that will never realistically be paid off. It’s not unusual to hear of people encountering ads for jobs requiring graduate degrees for entry-level work, or sending hundreds of resumes and receiving only silence. You may be surprised at the number of people in their forties who have quietly accepted they will never retire and doubt Social Security will exist when they need it. Parents describe how their entire paycheck disappears to cover childcare, but they can’t stay home with the kids because the family will lose health insurance if they don’t work.

Commenters from other countries respond in disbelief that this is life in the United States. But something is shifting among people who once rolled their eyes at politics. They’re using words like “systemic,” “billionaire class,” and even “revolution” that they would have avoided even five years ago. And it’s not for dramatic effect; they’ve arrived at this conclusion on their own.

It reminds me of this line from the Declaration of Independence:

“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations [comes from the government]…it is [the people’s] right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government…”

We tend to treat that sentence as sacred or an artifact from an earlier time, but today it reads more like a directive. The Declaration did not simply announce independence from Britain. It said that when power consistently harms the people it governs, it loses the right to exist. This idea was explosive in 1776 and remains so now.

Did the Declaration’s aspirations come to fruition? Politically, the Revolution succeeded in that a new nation was born. But economically and socially, power reorganized itself. The British pointed out the hypocrisy of claiming liberty while maintaining slavery. So-called “liberty” coexisted with property requirements for political participation, exclusion of women, and dispossession of Indigenous nations. Poverty, as always, remained concentrated among those already denied power.

For generations, instability could be framed as someone else’s problem. The American Dream functioned as proof that the system worked, if not for everyone, at least for some. Even partial access kept the larger promise intact.

But what happens when supposedly secure Americans begin to feel the same precarity long familiar to marginalized communities? What happens when the gap between the fairytale and the lived experience becomes impossible to ignore?

What made the Declaration dangerous wasn’t that it asked for too much, but that it normalized resistance. It treated revolt as a rational response to sustained harm and even a duty, an idea that does not fade simply because a new government takes power.

For a long time, calling something “radical” was enough to shut people up. Insults like “commie,” “extremist,” “terrorist” carried fear and stigma, warning others to stay quiet.

But fear starts to lose its grip when experience becomes collective. There is only so long you can get away with these labels before they lose their impact.

If we are willing to look honestly at our history, revolution is not outside of the American story, but one of its central chapters. The Revolution was ordinary people deciding that the system had broken its contract with them.

Maybe the Declaration didn’t fall short because it was unrealistic, but because it was always uncomfortable for those with wealth and power. Once you tell people they have the right to resist sustained harm, that idea does not stay contained in one century. Revolution isn’t an interruption in our history; it is one of its foundations. And maybe what unsettles some people now is not the word itself, but how appropriate it is beginning to sound.

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Christine Shoenberger is a grant writer for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). She holds a Master of Health Science degree from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and resides in Maryland with her family.