When America’s Founders wrote the declaration that gave birth to the new nation, they began by saying that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes.” Other nations had been born out of conquests or rebellions, many based on tribal or religious identities. But the United States was born out of an ideal, which they proclaimed in the next sentence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
These truths became the creed that bound a diverse group of pilgrims and immigrants into one nation. For people of many different beliefs and backgrounds, it defined Americans’ common ground.
Even in the work that went into composing that one sentence, we can see the quest to find this common ground. “We hold these truths to be sacred,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in his first draft. Benjamin Franklin, who was on the five-person drafting committee with Jefferson, crossed out “sacred,” using the heavy backslash marks he had often used as a printer, and wrote in “self-evident.” Their declaration was intended to herald a new type of nation, one in which rights are based on reason, not the dictates or dogma of religion.
But the sentence goes on to invoke “their Creator.” In Jefferson’s first draft, he wrote that men are created equal, and “from that equal creation they derive rights.” That phrase was crossed out and replaced with “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Thus we see, in the editing of just one sentence, the Founders balancing the role of divine providence and that of reason in determining rights.
I remember researching this one evening when I was working at CNN years ago. At an editorial meeting the next morning, someone reported that an Alabama state judge, Roy Moore, had put a monument of the Ten Commandments in his courthouse. A federal judge had ordered him to remove it, and a clash was about to occur. “Great,” I remember saying. “Who should we have arguing for and against displaying the Ten Commandments?” That evening, it struck me that Jefferson and Franklin had carefully balanced the role of religion in American society in order to unite people, and that now politicians, and we in the media, were using the Ten Commandments, of all things, to divide them.
As the country approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, its people are embroiled in polarized debates about policies regarding health care, housing, immigration, and the role of religion in society. One way to restore stability to America’s politics is to look at issues through the ideal that underlies the declaration’s key sentence: common ground.
The concept of common ground has always been part of humanity’s struggle to create a good society. Its simplest manifestation was a physical space: the land that was designated as “the commons”—that’s where the word commoners comes from. In England, that was the land where commoners could all graze their herds. When the first English settlers came to America, such space was set aside in their towns, as with Boston Common and Cambridge Common.
Even the concept of private property, and the pursuit of property, grew out of the existence of common ground. John Locke, in his Second Treatise of Government—which deeply influenced Jefferson and Franklin—declared that humans can create private property by combining their labor with things they take from nature. But he included a famous limitation, known as the Lockean proviso: only “where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.”
The idea of the commons was not just about land. Societies have always put certain basic goods into the commons, such as schools, libraries, police, and fire protection. These are called the communiter bona, the “goods in common.”
In colonial Boston, the Puritan minister Cotton Mather wrote a popular book called Essays to Do Good, which said that people could best serve God by creating institutions that benefit the common good. Franklin, influenced by Mather’s book, set up in Philadelphia a “leather-apron club” of tradesmen and small-business owners that launched a street-sweeping corps, volunteer fire and night-watchman corps, a hospital, a library, and the Academy for the Education of Youth, which became the University of Pennsylvania.
The library served as a commons where both poor tradesmen and wealthy merchants would come to read books. The spread of libraries, Franklin later wrote, “made our common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries.”
Creating this type of common ground, where people were treated with equal dignity, was the best way, he said, to serve the Creator. As he put it in the motto that he wrote for the library, Communiter Bona profundere Deum est: “To pour forth benefits for the common good is divine.” But common ground also served a more practical purpose: It nourished the conditions for democracy in a free-market system.
Alexis de Tocqueville, who wins the award for being the most quoted but least read author about America, made an assertion that I think is wrong. He argued that there was an inherent contradiction in America between two opposing impulses: the spirit of rugged individualism versus the spirit of creating associations and common grounds. In fact, the two strands are woven together, the warp and woof of the American fabric. Fiercely independent individuals were equally fierce in their devotion to their community and its commons, and they voluntarily came together in barn raisings and knitting bees and militias and social-aid societies to serve the common good.
Juxtaposed against the commons is a person’s right, important for a healthy economy, to also have property that is private. In Locke’s time, Britain’s Parliament passed a series of laws known as the Enclosure Acts. They allowed some people to build fences to enclose portions of the common land for their private use. These enclosures led to more efficient production, eventually an agricultural revolution that greatly increased the nation’s wealth.
Both freedom and economic growth require that we allow individuals to reap the benefits that come from their labor. The American system does, and should, give ample rewards to builders and entrepreneurs and those who work hard, take risks, and even just have good luck.
But the idea of the commons still provides great moral and practical value. Back in feudal times, the existence of common grounds to which everyone had the same rights helped stabilize a society with wealth disparities by giving people a stake in the social order.
The same principle can hold today in a free-market system that allows the accumulation of great wealth. By making sure there remains, as Locke said, enough in the commons, we not only show our moral compassion to others who are less fortunate, but we also nurture the social bonds that temper resentments, political polarization, and populist backlash.
Much of American political debate these days is over which goods—health care, housing, schools, police—should be provided, and to what extent, in the commons. The answers require balance, an art that the country is lacking these days.
Franklin and Jefferson understood balance. They were part of the Enlightenment era, which embraced the scientific method of testing and revising beliefs based on evidence. Both of them studied the work of Isaac Newton, who explained how contending forces could be brought into equilibrium. Their goal on contentious issues was not to triumph but to find common ground, metaphorical this time, based on the right balance. Compromisers may not make great heroes, Franklin liked to say, but they do make great democracies.
The commons serves another purpose: It enables opportunity. That is the moral purpose of the commons. It forms the foundation for creating a land of opportunity and the American dream.
That phrase was popularized by James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book The Epic of America. The American dream, he wrote, “is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”
The example Adams used would have pleased Franklin: a library. He described the grandeur of the Library of Congress, open to all, and declared:
As one looks down on the general reading room, which alone contains ten thousand volumes which may be read without even the asking, one sees the seats filled with silent readers, old and young, rich and poor, black and white, the executive and the laborer, the general and the private, the noted scholar and the schoolboy, all reading at their own library provided by their own democracy. It has always seemed to me to be a perfect concrete example of the American dream.
America puts a lot of goods and services in the commons, including libraries and national defense, police and firefighters, road building and street sweeping, some education, and health care. But there has also been a process of enclosure that has been eroding the country’s common ground. The philosopher Michael Sandel calls this the “skyboxification” of America, whereby places and practices that used to be in the commons are now roped off. Everyone used to sit in the stands together at the ballpark; they went through the same entrances and bought the same beer and soggy hot dogs. But now there are VIP entrances and skyboxes. At airports, people wait in different security lines. More neighborhoods are gated. And rare is the local public school that is shared by kids of different economic backgrounds.
The same has happened with media and information and ideas. People go to their own cul-de-sacs online, dive down different rabbit holes on the internet, listen to opposite ends of the talk-radio dial, and let algorithms turn their social-media feeds into echo chambers. The technology that promised to connect us, to be the public’s common ground, found a better business model in dividing us.
This shrinkage of the country’s commons led to the erosion of the American dream’s core principle, which is that America should be a land of opportunity for all: If you played by the rules, there would be good jobs, decent schools, safe streets, and—most important—the prospect of an even better life for your children.
For the past 40 years, the country pursued economic policies based on a belief in free trade, free movement of capital, and free movement of people. This led to offshoring jobs, closing factories, and having immigrants do low-paying work. These policies were, for the most part, intended to fuel economic growth, and in that regard they succeeded. They led to a fast-growing globalized economy that produced more overall wealth and consumer goods.
These policies also led to the rise of a meritocratic elite in America based on educational credentials. The economy’s rewards were geared toward those who went to college; the 62 percent who never finished college ended up feeling resentful, or were made to feel that it was their own fault that they were left behind.
Jefferson would have understood the trend toward a meritocratic elite. He favored creating what he called a “natural aristocracy” to replace the hereditary aristocracy that existed in England. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, he advocated for a school system in which the brightest students would be “selected, and continued six years, and the residue dismissed. By this means twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and be instructed, at the public expense.”
The approach of raking an elite from the rubbish and dismissing the residue did not turn out well. The entrenchment of a meritocratic elite came at the expense of community and the American dream. The globalized economic system increased wealth, especially for the elite, but it reduced opportunities for those who used to have secure, working-class jobs.
It created an economy where people can buy a flatscreen television very cheaply at Walmart on a Sunday night, but on Monday morning, they are no longer able to take the bus to a job at a local factory. Their grandparents, on a single income, could have a house, a car, and two or three kids. But they can’t afford even a house. In 1970, a house cost about 1.7 times the average salary; in 2022, it cost about seven.
Most problematic, such globalization led to an economy in which people can no longer believe that their kids will be better off than they were. It used to be easy for Americans to climb the economic ladder. Eighty percent of kids born in 1950 went on to earn more, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than their parents had earned. But for kids born in the 1980s, there is less than a 50 percent chance of achieving the same financial success as their parents. Less than 50 percent. No wonder there has been a populist backlash.
Franklin correctly saw the danger of creating a meritocratic aristocracy. His proposals for what became the University of Pennsylvania were designed not to filter a new elite but to provide opportunities and enrichment for all young people to succeed as best they could, whatever their level of talent. He aimed at what he called “true merit,” which he defined as “an inclination joined with an ability to serve mankind, one’s country, friends and family, which … should indeed be the great aim and end of all learning.”
Given the resentments and polarization that afflict the country today, Franklin’s wisdom should lead Americans to ask a basic question: What is the purpose of an economy? To increase wealth? Yes, that’s good. Growth? Yes, good too. But the purpose of an economy is also something deeper. Its purpose is also to create a good society. A good, stable society where individuals can be free and flourish and live together in harmony. That requires nurturing the sense that Americans share common rights, common grounds, common truths, and common aspirations. Democracy depends on this.
At the official signing of the parchment copy of the Declaration of Independence, John Hancock, the president of the Second Continental Congress, wrote his name with his famous flourish. “There must be no pulling different ways,” he insisted. “We must all hang together.” Franklin replied, alluding to what would happen to them if their Revolution failed, “Yes, we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
As Franklin pointed out, America’s life-or-death challenge as a nation, whether it be in 1776 or 2026, is this: When there are so many forces dedicated to dividing us, how can we best hang together?
One way is by reflecting on the country’s fundamental principles, those proclaimed in the declaration’s great sentence. Take any issue that is being debated around dinner tables or at city hall or in Congress. What policies can we adopt, what balances can we strike, that will strengthen our common ground?
In an era without universal military service, what institutions can instill a sense of shared patriotic service across class lines? What policies can help give every kid an equal opportunity? And when it comes to the country’s media and daily discourse, how can we create news outlets, social-media platforms, public discussions, personal conversations, algorithms, and chatbots that seek to connect us rather than inflame our resentments, engage us through enraging us, and harvest clicks through sensationalism?
In short, we can try to be more like Franklin. He not only helped Jefferson write the sentence that defines our common ground. He lived it. He organized police, fire, and street-sweeping corps; a public library, hospital, and school; a widows’ pension fund; and a mutual-insurance cooperative. He ran a newspaper that was dedicated to publishing a wide variety of opinions and following no party line. He bequeathed a revolving loan fund for young people to start enterprises. He donated to the building funds of each and every church in Philadelphia, and he helped lead the fundraising for a new hall that would provide a pulpit to visiting preachers of any belief, “so that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.” And on his deathbed, he was the largest individual donor to Congregation Mikveh Israel, the first synagogue in Philadelphia. So when he died, 20,000 mourners watched his funeral procession, which was led by clergymen of every faith, including the local rabbi, walking arm in arm.
That’s the ideal of common ground that our Founders fought for 250 years ago. And that’s what Americans must continue to fight for today so that we can preserve, for ourselves and our posterity, the rights and aspirations that we all value, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
This article has been adapted from Walter Isaacson’s forthcoming book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written.
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