THEIR RACISM REQUIRES THAT THEY DISREGARD THE DECLARATION:

America dates its nationhood from the Continental Congress's adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. That document affirmed that the United States had a right to "the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them" because the British king had violated Americans' natural rights. Its famous words -- "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" -- are not only the inspiration for oppressed people around the world ever since. They are the foundation of who Americans are as a people.

But the national conservative statement never mentions the idea of human or natural rights. Indeed, it implicitly rejects the core American notion when it claims that each nation "should chart its own course in accordance with its own particular constitutional, linguistic, and religious inheritance."

The document makes specific statements about the signatories' belief in limited government, self-government and recognition of minority beliefs. Its avoidance of any clear statement that the citizens of those nations have rights that a just government must recognize to be legitimate, however, sunders those beliefs from any firm grounding. They become mere preferences, which a national majority can ignore in the self-proclaimed national interest. Black Americans whose ancestors lived in the Jim Crow South understand the fault of that thinking.

If a nation's "particular inheritance" is not democratic, for example, then a self-governing nation could legitimately form a nondemocratic government -- much as Russian President Vladimir Putin openly draws inspiration from his nation's despotic, czarist past. National conservative principles would apparently have nothing to say against these tyrannical pursuits.

Abraham Lincoln made this distinction deftly. In a letter in 1855, he criticized the Know-Nothings, a party that campaigned against Catholic immigration, for reading the Declaration as "all men are created equal, except negroes, foreigners, and catholics." He said he would rather emigrate to Russia, "where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of [hypocrisy]," than live in a country that pretended to love liberty but in fact oppressed its people.

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