Voters Reject GOP “Power Grab” Referendum Measures in Kansas and Missouri

GOP-sponsored measures in both states went “down in flames,” observers of the elections noted.

By Chris Walker , 

Truthout

August 5, 2026

Voters fill out their ballots while voting Tuesday afternoon, Nov. 7, 2022, in Kansas City, Missouri.Rich Sugg/The Kansas City Star/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

On Tuesday, voters in Kansas and Missouri overwhelmingly rejected ballot measures proposed by Republican lawmakers that aimed to restrict their democratic and human rights.

In Kansas, proposed Amendment 1 would have required direct elections for state Supreme Court justices. The measure was introduced by Republicans in the state legislature to counter the process for appointing jurists to the state’s highest court, which has protected reproductive rights over the past decade despite efforts by the GOP to pass laws restricting abortion.

As of 9 am Central Time on Wednesday, that measure was losing, with 61.3 percent of voters rejecting the idea. Several counties in the state, including in rural areas that have traditionally sided with Republicans, voted against it as well.

The rejection of the measure comes just four years after Republicans sought to reverse the state Supreme Court’s abortion protections in a different ballot measure in 2022.

Missouri voters also rejected a measure aimed at curtailing voters’ right to self-determination at the ballot box. Proposed Amendment 4 would have changed the ballot initiative process altogether. Instead of simply requiring a majority vote in the state to pass changes to state law, it would require a majority vote in every congressional district in the state. Such a measure would allow lawmakers to gerrymander the state’s political lines in order to prevent voters from passing ballot initiatives.

Op-Ed |
Missouri Ballot Measure Attempts to Undermine Voters’ Influence Over Policy
If passed, Amendment 4 could make it substantially more difficult for citizen-led constitutional amendments to succeed.
By Constance Harper & McClain Bryant Macklin , Truthout  August 1, 2026

As of Wednesday morning, more than 80 percent of voters opposed the proposal by GOP lawmakers. A majority in every county in the state voted against the measure, meaning that, even by the standards that the proposal was trying to enact, it would have been rejected.

The outcome is significant because voters in Missouri have used the ballot initiative process to bypass obstructionist Republicans in the state government on issues relating to abortion, Medicaid expansion, the minimum wage, and required paid sick leave for workers.

“These decisions were made directly by Missourians,” wrote Constance Harper, vice president of Strategic Impact and Innovation at the Deaconess Foundation, and McClain Bryant Macklin, chief policy and impact officer at the Health Forward Foundation, in an op-ed for Truthout earlier this month. “They determined whether more families could access health care, whether workers could earn higher wages, whether someone could stay home sick without losing a paycheck, and whether Missourians could exercise greater control over deeply personal decisions. These are the kinds of questions that shape the health, stability, and vitality of communities.”

Several political observers celebrated the rejection of the measures.

“Voters in Kansas saw through a blatant political power grab and sent a message — our courts are not for sale,” the Bluesky account for the American Civil Liberties Union wrote.

“Republican power grabs in Kansas and Missouri are going down in flames,” Stephen Wolf, contributor for The Down Ballot, opined in a social media post.

“This is a TOTAL repudiation by Missouri voters of a core agenda of state GOP leadership,” wrote Quinton Lucas, mayor of Kansas City, Missouri.

By 60-Point Margin, Missouri Voters Reject GOP Push to Make Ballot Measures Harder to Pass

Voters also rejected an amendment that would have gradually eliminated the state’s income tax in what one Democratic mayor said would benefit the wealthy “while raising costs on hardworking families.”


Pamela Dear leaves a voting booth on July 23, 2026 in St. Charles County, Missouri.
(Photo by Christian Gooden/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Aug 05, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

The Democratic mayor of Kansas City, Missouri was among those celebrating what he called the “TOTAL repudiation by Missouri voter of a core agenda of state GOP leadership” on Tuesday night after the state voted by a 60-point margin against Amendment 4, a measure backed by the Republican governor which would have weakened voters’ ability to pass citizen-sponsored ballot initiatives.

“We took over control of the state of Missouri tonight, repudiating absolutely atrocious ideas,” Mayor Quinton Lucas said in a video message addressing voters as election results came in. “Against millions of dollars, lots of special interests, Missouri voters are trouncing Amendment 4, which was going to take away our initiative petition rights, eliminate our ability to make sure we can get things done.”

The Republican supermajority in the state Legislature and Gov. Mike Kehoe supported Amendment 4, which was spurred by the passage of a ballot initiative in 2024 that had added the right to abortion care to the Missouri Constitution.

The addition of the amendment to the constitution would have required a majority vote in each of the state’s eight congressional districts in order to pass any future citizen-sponsored amendments, instead of a simply majority of voters across the state.

With more than 95% of votes counted on Wednesday morning, 80.3% of voters had rejected Amendment 4, while 19.7% had supported it.

The amendment would have created the highest threshold in the country for passing ballot initiatives like others that Missourians have passed in recent years, including ones that have legalized marijuana, raised the minimum wage, and expanding Medicaid coverage.

Opponents warned that under Amendment 4, an initiative could fail to pass even with as many as 95% of voters across the state supporting it.

The St. Louis American reported that the election result could signal voters’ coming rejection of Amendment 3 in November, which would ban abortion in Missouri in most cases.



The state GOP suffered a similar defeat for Amendment 5, which would have gradually eliminated the state’s income tax and replaced it with expanded sales and use taxes. Opponents warned the new tax scheme would have cost working families and lower-income Missourians more, with the average resident paying $500 more in taxes annually, according to the nonpartisan Missouri Budget Project—as high-income residents would have been required to contribute less to public spending.

“Tonight’s rejection of Amendment 5 is not only an immense failure for statewide leadership, but also a sign to out-of-state billionaire special interests that Missourians and most Americans have no interest in voodoo tax schemes that would spare civic responsibility for a few elites while raising costs on hardworking families in our state and our country,” Lucas said Tuesday night.

Mark Jones of the Missouri National Education Association—part of a broad coalition that opposed the amendment—told the Missouri Independent that “fundamentally, Missourians rejected the idea that they should pay for tax breaks for billionaires and then not be able to change to correct the legislature, not only on this issue but forever.”

The Independent reported that Missouri Promise political action committee (PAC), which did not report any contributions from individual donors, raised $17.2 million in favor of Amendment 5. Opponents of Amendment 5 were outspent 4-to-1 on broadcast ads.

Another PAC, Protect Election Integrity, raised $132,100 and spent $28,653 through July 23 in support of Amendment 4. Freedom Principle Missouri/Missouri First PAC, also reported spending $45,551 in support of the measure.

State House Minority Leader Ashley Aune (D-14) said Missouri voters had “made clear they won’t let Republicans rewrite the rules to protect their own power and line the pockets of the ultrawealthy.”

Referring to the abortion rights amendment that will be up for a vote in the general election, Aune added, “In November, voters have the chance to send another powerful message to Jefferson City Republicans: If you mess with Missourians’ rights, you will pay the political price.”

Antivaccine legislation is rising rapidly in US states, driven primarily by GOP push

A new study revealed that Republican lawmakers were responsible for 86 percent of antivaccine bills introduced across state legislatures after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, raising concerns about public health

Boston University School of Public Health

Despite overwhelming evidence on the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, vaccine hesitancy intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic and has fueled skepticism towards other life-saving vaccines for children, adults, and pets.

A new study led by Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) researchers has revealed another worrying trend: the antivaccine sentiment once reserved for individual beliefs and public discourse has transformed into actual legislation across the US that could undermine vaccine uptake and pose a threat to the public’s health. 

Published in the American Journal of Public Health, the study shows that proposed bills aiming to reduce vaccine access, weaken vaccination requirements, and increase vaccine exemptions increased dramatically in state legislatures from 2021-2023, at times exceeding the number of bills seeking to strengthen vaccine access and mandates. At least 40 percent of bills introduced in each full legislative cycle after the start of the pandemic have been antivaccine-related. 

Partisan polarization is clearly driving this legislation: Republican lawmakers sponsored 86 percent of the antivaccine bills introduced during this period. Democratic lawmakers, meanwhile, introduced 54 percent of provaccine bills, which are bills that supported an increase in access to, or funding and promotion of, vaccines across state legislatures. 

“Our work shows that state lawmakers affiliated with the Republican party are responsible for the overwhelming majority of antivaccine bills introduced in recent years,” says study corresponding author Dr. Matt Motta, who authored the study with Dr. Timothy Callaghan, both of whom are associate professors of health law, policy & management at BUSPH. “While the majority of these bills do not actually pass, it’s important to remember that we live in an increasingly connected and globalized world—one in which low vaccine coverage in one part of the country can get people sick thousands of miles away. Weakening vaccine regulations in one state puts everyone’s health at risk, as the current measles outbreak demonstrates.”

Furthermore, a sizable amount of antivaccine legislation—24 percent—during this period did receive enough state legislative support to become law. Several states enacted laws that expand religious or personal belief exemptions for childcare and school immunizations, and measures that prohibit employers from mandating certain vaccinations in the workplace. 

“These antivaccine bills not only signal the discontent that some have with vaccines, but also the more hostile policy environments towards vaccination,” Dr. Callaghan says. As the US approaches the November midterm elections, “who society chooses to elect in 2026 could shape vaccine policymaking for years to come,” he says.

This analysis is the first to explore these partisan differences among vaccine-related bills proposed before and after the pandemic. For the study, Dr. Motta and Dr. Callaghan, along with a team of student and alumni researchers at BUSPH, systematically categorized partisan changes in 1,513 vaccine-related bills introduced in state legislatures between 2019-2023. The team utilized preliminary data of all vaccine-related proposed bills in state legislatures from 2019-2023 via the State Vaccine Policy Project (SVPP), a first-of-its-kind initiative created to understand and inform policies that address the politicization of public health. The SVPP is housed under The Politics and Health Lab that Dr. Motta and Dr. Callaghan direct at BUSPH. 

In 2021, a total of 1,154 vaccine-related bills were introduced in state legislatures, compared to just 386 proposed bills in the 2019 legislative session. Over the four-year period, nearly 82 percent of bills proposed by Democrats were provaccine, compared to less than 10 percent that were antivaccine. Comparatively, more than 65 percent of bills proposed by Republicans were antivaccine, compared to 28 percent that were provaccine.  

The spike in antivaccine legislation may be attributed in part to election-seeking GOP lawmakers who are eager to appease antivaccine Republican constituents who frame themselves as champions of medical freedom, individual autonomy, and parental rights, rather than opponents of vaccines. But health experts also emphasize that vaccine hesitancy is the result of the widespread misinformation, evolving public health guidelines, and broad distrust in science that has persisted in the US during and after the pandemic.  

“Nobody likes being told what to do. But our government has the ability and obligation to take actions that protect public health,” says Dr. Motta. “To the many people who ground their opposition to vaccination in deeply held values, political views, religious beliefs, and more, I would say: infectious disease has no sense of morality or religious creed. Taking action to protect yourself and others is one of the safest and most effective actions you can take to live your life the way you want it. Vaccination is a way to take your freedom back from the pathogens that have caused sickness and death for all of human history.”

The team says their findings also underscore the importance of voter engagement in local elections and the need for continued efforts to improve communication about vaccines to the general public.

“We need to recognize that the reasons people lack trust in science are multifaceted, and that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution that will work in restoring trust,” Dr. Callaghan says. “We must also recognize that messengers matter as much, if not more, than the message. For public health, that also means recognizing that public health officials are not always going to be the right messengers to encourage vaccine uptake. Identifying the correct messages and messengers will take considerable investment in vaccine communication research, which is currently severely underfunded.”

In future research, the researchers intend to expand the SVPP dataset to analyze vaccine legislation over a larger period of time, as well as explore how public experiences with vaccination have shaped legislation and vice-versa. They will also examine health policies related to other subjects, including gender-affirming care, reproductive health, and water fluoridation.

“Our hope is to provide researchers with a large, up-to-date database cataloging health policy legislative activity across the states, so that we can study how changes in our social and political worlds impact health policy, and how changes in health policy impacts public health,” Dr. Motta says.

*

About Boston University School of Public Health 

Founded in 1976, Boston University School of Public Health is one of the top ten ranked schools of public health in the world. It offers master's- and doctoral-level education in public health. The faculty in six departments conduct policy-changing public health research around the world, with the mission of improving the health of populations—especially the disadvantaged, underserved, and vulnerable—locally and globally.

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Journal

American Journal of Public Health

DOI

10.2105/AJPH.2026.308535 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Quantifying the Polarization of Vaccine Policymaking Across State Legislatures

Article Publication Date

16-Jul-2026

Op-Ed 

The Anti-Indigenous Slur in the Declaration of Independence Speaks Volumes

The US Declaration of Independence frames Indigenous resistance as aggression and colonial violence as self-defense.

By Johnnie Jae , 

Truthout

July 4, 2026

Joe Craig, a park volunteer, holds a copy of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 2025, at the Saratoga National Historical Park in Stillwater, New York.Jim Franco / Albany Times Union via Getty Images

Every Fourth of July, the Declaration of Independence is the cornerstone of the U.S.’s celebrations. It’s read aloud in radio, television, and public celebrations. But it carries a contradiction expressed through a slur that Native people have never been able to ignore — a scathing reference to “merciless Indian Savages.” Even as the framers promised a nation of equality and liberty for all, they also made it clear that Indigenous people are not included in their notion of “all.” So, within Native communities, the yearly invocations of the Declaration Independence are also a reminder of how long we have been struggling to resist, survive, and defeat every effort to silence, erase, and eradicate us.

While most public readings of the Declaration of Independence include the full passage, others read around its anti-Indigenous slur or omit that line entirely. The omission says just as much as the words themselves. The U.S. wants the Declaration’s promises without its confession, its dreams of liberty without regard for the people it dehumanized and oppressed, and its proclamation of independence without any acknowledgment of the crimes against humanity that made it possible for the U.S. to exist.

The commemoration of this country’s founding every July 4 asks the public to celebrate a United States that begins with the myth of a nation born of nothing but courage and liberty, on lands not yet tamed or developed. Native people know another beginning. Our nations were already here, with governments, laws, languages, and infrastructure.

The United States is only the latest nation to exist on these lands. As it celebrates 250 years of “independence,” it still has not rescinded or made an effort to correct the violence and policies that followed from the framing of Native people as “merciless Indian Savages.” Instead, it has expanded the strategy of using dehumanizing language against migrants, trans people, anti-fascists, and other targeted communities in an effort to reframe their resistance as “antithetical to freedom and the American way of life.”
“Merciless Indian Savages”

The phrase “merciless Indian Savages” isn’t just an unfortunate remnant of a different time; it was an intentional and strategic political move that set a precedent for anti-Native ideology and policies that persist today.

Related Stor

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500-Year-Old Slave Revolt of 1526 Redefines Freedom as US Turns 250
Before 1776 or 1619, enslaved Africans seized freedom in 1526 on land that would become the United States. By Jesse Hagopian , Truthout May 2, 2026

Historian and member of the Yamasee Nation Donald Grinde Jr. described the phrase as political rhetoric used to justify frontier wars and the taking of Native land. The phrase collapsed hundreds of Native nations into a new enemy and stripped them of their humanity. If Natives were “merciless savages,” their resistance could be framed as aggression, and colonial violence could then be positioned as self-defense, maintaining the optics of innocence and exceptionalism as the newly formed republic looked to build its empire.

“Merciless Indian Savages.” These three words set into motion centuries of brutal anti-Native policy from the Indian Removal Act of 1830 to the Dawes Act to the reservation and boarding school systems — every policy carrying the weight of those three words into every new era.

How the Phrase Impacts Natives Today

The intent and danger of the phrase “merciless Indian Savages” is alive and well. It’s threaded through our contemporary realities every time the federal government treats Native people, land, water, and treaty rights as acceptable casualties of profit and so-called progress.

Donald Trump’s first administration made that painfully clear almost immediately. In January 2017, he issued a memorandum to expedite the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, despite the massive Native-led protest at Standing Rock, in which Water Protectors were subjected to military-style counterterrorism tactics and compared to terrorists. That same year, he revived theKeystone XL Pipeline that had already met with years of organized resistance from Tribal Nations, environmental organizations, and local ranchers and farmers, who were labeled extremists for efforts ostensibly impeding U.S. jobs and energy independence. By December 2017, his administration had moved against Bears Ears National Monument, cutting it by roughly 85 percent and weakening protections for a landscape that Tribal Nations had spent years fighting to protect.

In a commencement speech to the U.S. Naval Academy’s class of 2018, Trump praised settlers who “tamed a continent” and declared that: “We will not apologize for America.” His words appeared to do the same work as the phrase “merciless Indian Savages.” They dehumanize us, making Native people and lands sound wild and dangerous, while settlers are remembered as courageous. His administration carried that attitude into policy when the Interior Department moved to revoke the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe’s land-in-trust status, pushed oil and gas leasing near Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, and treated treaty rights and federal trust responsibilities as barriers to development. In 2020, border wall construction near the Tohono O’odham Nation and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument caused lasting environmental and cultural damage. During the COVID-19 crisis, tribes were left fighting each other over access to the $8 billion CARES Act tribal relief fund and then having to sue the government for the funds to be released, while the Native American Health Center reported receiving body bags instead of the personal protective equipment (like masks and gloves) it had ordered.

Trump’s second term has taken it a step further, increasing the danger to Native communities. Federal freezes and proposed cuts have threatened programs tied to treaty and trust obligations, including health care, education, housing, public safety, and social services. Reporting on Trump’s fiscal 2026 budget exposed proposed cuts of more than $700 million from Bureau of Indian Affairs programs and $239 million from tribal housing programs. His administration’s attack on birthright citizenship dragged Native citizenship back into public debate, forcing Native legal advocates to remind the country that Native people born in the United States are U.S. citizens and that tribal citizenship cannot be erased by federal political panic. Immigration raids have also raised alarms in Native communities, where Native citizens have reportedly been questioned, detained, or targeted because agents racially profiled them due to appearance, language, or proximity to the border. The legacy behind the three-word slur in the Declaration of Independence has not changed since 1776, and Trump’s administration has taken them to heart in its glorification of Manifest Destiny.

Ahead of the semiquincentennial, Trump leaned into the revival of national mythmaking and exceptionalism. In May, the White House released a statement celebrating the 222nd anniversary of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, praising it for fulfilling Manifest Destiny and carrying “prosperity” across the continent.

The Lewis and Clark story is personal for me. My people, the Otoe-Missouria, were the first Native people to hold council with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. On August 3, 1804, near present-day Fort Calhoun, Nebraska, tribal leaders met the expedition at what became known as Council Bluffs. The official story treats that meeting as a diplomatic milestone. Lewis and Clark arrived in full military display, made some speeches and promises, gave some gifts, and showcased the technologies of the time: an air gun, a magnet, a spyglass, a compass, and a watch. But despite the pomp and circumstance, they didn’t really accomplish much beyond establishing a routine for future councils on the expedition.

For my people, the U.S.’s westward story does not begin with wonder nor does it end with conquest, the way the U.S. would like the world to believe. We are not a conquered people. We’re still here and still resisting the narratives and violence that have followed those three words from 1776 to our present day.

Who Have the “Merciless” and “Savage” Ones Been?

The semiquincentennial celebrations urge us to turn westward expansion into a patriotic stage set, but Native people know what gets left outside the frame: truth. Before the celebration moves on from the Declaration of Independence to the fireworks, the U.S. needs to acknowledge the gravity of the words the founding fathers chose for us — “Merciless Indian Savages” — and to recognize the brutality of colonialism.

When we look at history, who have the actual cruel ones been? Who was “merciless” and “savage” when Native communities were massacred? When treaties were signed and broken? When children were taken to residential boarding schools, and when their graves were found on those same school grounds? When sacred sites were destroyed, and pipelines were forced through our lands?

Who is “merciless” and “savage” now, as immigration raids tear through communities and as families live under the threat of detention, disappearance, and deportation? Who is acting with cruelty when federal troops are sent into cities in response to protests against immigration enforcement? When the genocide in Gaza is streamed in real time and the lives of Palestinians are treated as negotiable?

Who is “merciless” and “savage” when disabled people are threatened by policies that force institutionalization and punish people for needing support? When the trans community is targeted by executive orders, health care restrictions, school policies, prison restrictions, and public campaigns built to erase trans people from law and daily life? When women and pregnant people are forced to fight for bodily autonomy while reproductive health care is attacked across the country?

The words “merciless Indian Savages” taught the U.S. how to turn targeted people into threats. The authors of the Declaration of Independence called us “merciless Indian Savages” because they needed a justification for the violence and death upon which the U.S. was founded, for the violence and death that would continue to structure this nation. After 250 years, the phrase still carries the weight of that violence. This country needs to answer one question before asking anyone to celebrate: Is this legacy of violence really what we want to continue building on and celebrating for the next 250 years?


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Johnnie Jae

Johnnie Jae (Otoe-Missouria and Choctaw) is a writer, speaker, and founder of Red POP! News and the late A Tribe Called Geek. Known for her journalism, mental health advocacy, and digital activism, she is dedicated to amplifying Native voices through storytelling, media, and art. You can find her in the Bluesky and Instagram.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy

 

The Contradictions of America 250

A socialist perspective on the semiquincentennial

By Peter Shapiro

July 3, 2026

Source: The New Liberator

Black Lives Matter protest, Chicago, 2020. Photo: Joshua Mellin, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Major anniversaries of the Declaration of Independence have a way of coming at inconvenient times. When the bicentennial took place, the United States had suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam, Congressional investigations had revealed massive FBI spying on US citizens, and Richard Nixon had just resigned in disgrace. Public confidence in the government was at a low ebb.

The centennial in 1876 was even worse. The federal government was about to abandon its commitment to Reconstruction, pulling troops out of the South to bribe Florida electors into voting for a Republican presidential candidate who had, in fact, lost at the polls. Nearly a century of Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, lynchings, and Klan terror would follow. In the South, a brief experiment in biracial democracy abruptly ended; in the North, robber baron capitalism was in full swing. Within a year, a largely spontaneous railroad strike prompted pitched battles across the country between federal troops and street protesters enraged by the depredations of the railroad barons.

The 250^th anniversary of the Declaration is a few days away. For many, the current occupant of the White House bears a striking resemblance to the sniveling monarch in the hip-hop musical Hamilton. The real King George was supposed to be ruling by Divine Right; Donald Trump seems to think he is as well, turning his ICE brownshirts loose on city streets, using his office to enrich himself and his family, flouting laws, and starting wars on a whim only to become bored with them weeks later. Despised by much of the population, he clings to his diminishing mass base with naked appeals to white racism and male supremacy. He plasters his name on every public venue he can think of and honors the nation’s founding with a cage match on the White House lawn.

So what are we supposed to celebrate? The men who signed the Declaration were hardly heroes. Most were wealthy merchants and/or slaveholders. They had an agenda that reflected their class interests. The revolution they led left slavery intact, accelerated the dispossession and outright murder of Native peoples, and reserved political power for a narrow slice of the population. After 250 years, we are still dealing with these contradictions.

But revolutions, even conservative ones, have a way of taking on a life of their own. The American Revolution could not have succeeded without the support of ordinary people whose interests did not neatly align with those of the Founding Fathers. And once the revolution was over, the Declaration’s afterlife exceeded the intentions of its authors. Its promise that “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed” and its assertion that “all men are created equal” would be taken up, again and again, by people the founders would never have imagined as political equals: enslaved Africans, workers, women, and anti-colonial revolutionaries around the world.

Founding Fathers, or Deadbeat Dads?

The contradictions that confronted colonial society on the cusp of the revolution were real enough, but nowhere near as momentous as Thomas Jefferson’s soaring rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence would suggest. “No taxation without representation,” the battle cry of the revolution, hardly seems like the sort of demand that would arouse the masses. Measured against the popular grievances in British colonies like India and Ireland, where the economic stakes were greater and the human cost far higher, the “long train of abuses and usurpations” cited by Jefferson look like small potatoes.

But the leaders of the revolution, Jefferson among them, had class interests to protect that distinguished them from most colonists. They saw British trade and taxation policies as detrimental to their businesses, and many of them feared that Crown-appointed colonial administrators lacked the resources and the wherewithal to protect them should the masses of people show any signs of restiveness.

Jefferson identified with the philosophers of the European Enlightenment, who challenged hereditary rule by royal families and a landed aristocracy. For them, and for much of this country’s revolutionary generation, political power properly flowed not from bloodlines but from property. The Declaration’s famous line about governments “deriv[ing] their just powers from the consent of the governed” is widely seen as a call for democracy, but it was also a defense of private property—including property in slaves. Significantly, there was already a growing debate in England about the morality of the slave trade, and American slaveholders regarded it with deep unease.

Jefferson himself was deeply ambivalent. Born into the Virginia aristocracy, Jefferson disliked the idleness and self-indulgence of the planter class; he believed that slavery not only robbed enslaved people of their natural rights but also corrupted the slaveowners. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” he would write in 1782. But he was too burdened with debt to consider freeing his own 600 slaves—even after he fathered several children with one of them. And politically, abolishing slavery outright was a bridge too far. A denunciation of slavery in the original draft of the Declaration was left on the cutting room floor, replaced by a specious claim that King George had “forced” it upon the colonists.

The “chosen people”?

If Jefferson thought the Southern planters were morally compromised, he pinned his hopes on the white yeoman farmers whom he considered “the chosen people of God.” He envisioned a democracy of small producers and hoped that the settlement of the frontier would allow their emergence as the dominant social class in the new nation. They already made up a majority of the population of colonial America.

But wealth in the colonies was concentrated in the hands of a few whose fortunes were tied to transatlantic trade, mainly shipowners and large planters growing crops for export. For anyone else, the largely unsettled west held out the best hope of an independent livelihood.

Lacking access to markets in the coastal cities, farmers in the interior produced mainly for their own use. What business they engaged in was apt to involve barter with their neighbors. If taxes imposed by the Crown affected them, it was because without access to currency they had no way to pay them. Tax collectors on the frontier sometimes came in for rough treatment.

What really rankled, though, were British restrictions on settlement west of the Appalachians. After a long, grinding war, Britain had wrested formal control of the area from the French, but it was still wilderness, and for all practical purposes it remained Indian land. Occupied with expanding and defending its empire in other parts of the world, Britain had no stomach for colonizing the Mississippi Valley, much less policing it. But people still defied the British ban on settlement, and they resented that the government would not protect them from Indian resistance, or even provide them with authorization and resources to protect themselves.

It was an issue that united hardscrabble yeoman farmers of the West and wealthy land speculators from the East. In deference to their interests, Jefferson would include the Second Amendment when he drafted the Bill of Rights 10 years later. The “right to bear arms” enshrined by our current Supreme Court was originally about Indian removal, a process that would continue a century longer as the nation expanded westward.

Black lives mattered

Yet if the Declaration meant property rights and political independence to the founders, and land and local autonomy to frontier settlers, its promise of equality took on a very different meaning in Black hands.

The much-quoted passage in the Declaration that “all men are created equal” seems truly revolutionary even today. With a few exceptions, the Founding Fathers never suggested that the Declaration’s embrace of equality applied to Black people. But that did not stop Black people from acting as though it did. The Declaration actually served as an inspiration for Gabriel’s revolt, an aborted slave rebellion that occurred in Virginia 25 years later. The abolitionist movement repeatedly invoked it. In a famous Fourth of July speech in 1858, Frederick Douglass excoriated white America for betraying its promise. In the Gettysburg address, Abraham Lincoln—his own racism notwithstanding—said the Civil War was being fought to defend it. Every struggle against racism in this country, every effort to extend democracy in the face of capitalist power, has found the idea indispensable.

By the same token, antebellum slaveowners found it increasingly hard to swallow. At the time of the Revolution, they typically defended slavery as a necessary evil and viewed their slaves mainly as a source of cheap labor. But as the abolitionist movement gained steam, drawing strength and moral authority from Frederick Douglass and others who had escaped bondage and fled North, they stopped apologizing and started justifying their ownership of human property as a good thing, indispensable to civilization’s survival. In the South Carolina low country, where Blacks outnumbered whites by as much as eight to one, the perceived threat of rebellious slaves loomed as large in the minds of slaveowners as the fabulous wealth being wrested from their labor.

In 1822 a well-organized conspiracy led by a free Black carpenter named Denmark Vesey probably would have seized control of Charleston had it not been betrayed at the last minute. Nine years later, in tidewater Virginia, Nat Turner led a bloody slave uprising and remained at large for weeks until he was finally caught and executed.

The Southern slaveocracy concluded that any talk of abolition was a menace and had to be stopped, lest it encourage further rebellions. South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, their leading voice in Congress, took the Senate floor to declare that the Declaration’s assertion of equal rights was “the most false and dangerous of all political error.” Other spokesmen for the planter class insisted that slavery was not simply a labor system, it was “the step-ladder by which civilized countries have passed from barbarism to civilization.”

After slavery was finally abolished, Jim Crow laws were justified with the same language of social control, though the term “separate but equal” paid cynical lip service to the Declaration. In 1896 the Supreme Court offered its blessing to the charade in Plessy vs. Ferguson. Nearly six decades—marked by often bitter struggle—would have to pass before the high court finally acknowledged that segregation and inequality were functionally related.

Consent of the governed?

The Declaration of Independence has another abiding message today: its affirmation of the right of revolution. The mere fact that the American revolution occurred encouraged a succession of anti-monarchical and anti-colonial uprisings in Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean that were more socially transformative and often far bloodier. In 1946, when the people of Vietnam had defeated Japanese occupation and were preparing to resist recolonization by the French, the Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh would draft a national constitution taking entire passages word for word from Jefferson’s text.

At a time when too many politicians reflexively talk about the “right to exist,” it’s worth noting a central premise of the Declaration: states derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” No government possesses an inherent right to exist, independent of popular will. Governments do not have rights; people do.

Jefferson believed in the rights of the individual and insisted that there are some areas of our lives where the government has no business going. This tradition has yielded important gains. Jim Crow laws that dictated where Black people could live, work, and go to school have fallen. More recently, movements have challenged the state’s ability to dictate whom people can marry, whether women should have children, or how people live their private lives.

But the right of revolution goes beyond rejecting government intrusion in our personal lives. It’s not only about how we are treated as individuals, but about our collective destiny.

The Black liberation struggle—indeed, the struggle of any oppressed people—is all about making that distinction. Martin Luther King Jr. famously observed that the right to sit at a desegregated lunch counter doesn’t mean much if you can’t afford the price of a hamburger; he spent his last years challenging the class contradictions that kept people from affording it. Malcolm X didn’t pontificate about a “color-blind” society; he called for an end to white people’s power over Black people. The Ten Point Program of the Black Panther Party didn’t demand equal treatment and an end to discrimination; it demanded “the power to determine the destiny of our Black community.” A Latino leader of the Third World strike at San Francisco State College in 1968 summed it all up nicely: “We don’t want equality, we want self-determination.”

Implicit in the call for self-determination is Jefferson’s argument that governments that rule without “the consent of the governed” should be overthrown. He spoke of “the tree of liberty being watered with the blood of tyrants” and at one point mused about the need for a revolution every 20 years.

Mao Tse-tung, who pinned his hopes on the rising national liberation struggles in the Third World, believed that their fate was inextricably linked to that of the Black liberation movement in the United States. He pointed out that colonialism and imperialism had their roots in the African slave trade, and the capitalist system grew and flourished on the backs of enslaved African American labor. Viewed in that light, Black people’s confrontation with the ambiguous language in the Declaration of Independence is truly a global one.

For 250 years, Americans and people around the world have been fighting over the meaning of 1776. They still are. The Declaration of Independence has always contained profound contradictions. Simultaneously a defense of slavery and an inspiration for slave revolts, a justification for settler expansion and a touchstone for anti-colonial liberation, the Declaration remains contested terrain.

Revolutions may be defined by the class outlook of those who lead them, but they invariably hold out the promise of something bigger, a vision of human liberation. When they fall short, they inspire us to keep struggling—in ways that no cage match can contain.

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Peter Shapiro is a longtime labor activist living in Oakland. Many years ago he studied US history at UC Berkeley. More recently, he wrote Song of the Stubborn One Thousand: The Watsonville Canning Strike 1985-87 (Haymarket Books).

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This article was originally published by The New Liberator; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.

How Dissent Shaped America

By Ralph Young

July 3, 2026

Source: Barn Raiser

Protester holds a placard saying, ''All power to the workers'' during a rally. Photo by Karla Cot

Dissent is one of this nation’s defining characteristics. Every decade since the earliest days of colonization, Americans have protested for just about every cause imaginable, and every time they did, defenders of the status quo denounced the protesters as unpatriotic and in more recent times as un-American. But protest is one of the consummate expressions of “Americanness.” It is patriotic in the deepest sense.

Even before the United States was conceived, there was dissent. During the 17th century religious dissent played a significant role in the planting and development of the English colonies. In the 18th century political dissent led to the open rebellion that resulted in the birth of the United States. In the 19th century dissenters demanded the abolition of slavery, suffrage for women, fair treatment of Native Americans, and the banning of immigrants. And they protested against the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War (on both sides), and the Spanish-American War. In the 20th century dissenters organized to prohibit alcohol but also demanded workers’ rights, women’s rights, African American rights, Chicano rights, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ+ rights. They also protested against every war (declared and undeclared) fought by the United States. In the 21st century dissenters have protested against abortion, NAFTA, globalization, the Iraq War, the PATRIOT Act, the National Security Agency, bank bailouts, and out-of-control deficits. Most recently dissenters have mobilized to protest against systemic racism, sexual harassment and assault, and Congress’s inability (or refusal) to enact meaningful legislation to address climate change and gun violence. And then there are those who, despite their real grievances, having fallen for the widespread disinformation circulating on untrustworthy internet sites, raise their voices in protest on the basis of conspiracy theories, lies, and a distorted view of American history. Clearly, dissent has many faces.

On the broadest level, dissent is going against the grain. It is speaking out and protesting against what is (whatever that is), most often by a minority group unhappy with majority opinion and rule. However, history has shown that dissent is far more complex, that it comes from all political perspectives and in a variety of categories: mostly religious, political, economic, and cultural/social. Religious dissent is the insistence that everyone be allowed to worship according to the dictates of conscience and not according to the rules of an established religion. Although most religious dissent occurred during the colonial period, when individuals insisted on religious liberty, and during the early national period, when the new nation endorsed the principle of separation of church and state, the demand for religious autonomy persists to this day. Religious dissent was expressed when new sects such as the Shakers, the Mormons, or the Branch Davidians were formed, and it is still being expressed on a different level in the debates over school prayer, intelligent design versus evolution, abortion, capital punishment, and the right to die.

Political dissent is a critique of governance. As the United States grew from a fledgling nation into a world power, political dissenters expressed dissatisfaction about the way those who were in charge governed, and usually (but not always) they provided a plan or recipe for redressing what they perceived as wrong. Most often they used the nation’s founding documents as the authority to legitimize their protest. Antebellum abolitionists demanded the end of slavery, declaring that holding persons in bondage was contrary to the principle that “all men are created equal.” In recent years hundreds of thousands of Americans protested the decision to invade Iraq, proclaiming that doing so transforms the United States into an aggressive imperial power and that by embracing imperialism the United States is renouncing its democratic birthright.

When the economy crashes, economic dissent comes to the fore. People take to the streets protesting economic injustice and inequality. And as distress and suffering expands from the lower classes to the middle class, so too does protest. One thinks of the Richmond bread riots during the Civil War, the violent labor disputes of the 19th century, the Bonus Army’s encampment at the Capitol in 1932, the militant labor activism during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s liberal presidency, the tax revolts of the 1970s, the occupation of Zuccotti Park in 2011.

Cultural and social dissent is a rejection of the predominant attitudes, beliefs, and behavior of mainstream society. Utopian groups in the 19th century defied the conventional values of their time and established communities where all men and women would be treated equally. “Beatniks” and “hippies” in the mid-20th century rejected the conventional middle-class morality of their time, urged their fellow Americans to “do their own thing,” and influenced millions to reevaluate their views of race, gender, and sexuality.

But this is only part of the story. There is significant and frequent overlapping of religious, political, and cultural/social dissent. For example, many dissenters, such as temperance activists in the early 20th century and the Christian right today, can be labeled as political, religious, and social dissenters. The 1960s counterculture’s challenge to American values was also intricately tied up in the political protests against the Vietnam War and the struggle for racial equality. Furthermore, there are economic and psychological factors that often play roles in dissent movements.

There are some decades that are relatively quiet dissentwise and others when significant problems intensify so rapidly that tens of millions of people get involved in the discussion to find solutions. During these periods we see a sharp rise in dissent, and that dissent can take many forms as different groups propose different solutions. Some dissenters are reformers who wish to fix the problems through a process of reform. Some are reactionaries who seek to address the problems by returning to the policies that existed before the problems arose. Some are radicals or even revolutionaries who propose to solve the problems by smashing the system and starting over. The debate over slavery and the events leading to the Civil War, the Progressive era, and the 1960s, and the present day are periods when dissent, in all its diverse forms, exploded.

There are several levels or stages of dissent. At the beginning individuals might simply disagree with a policy or a law or an issue. Perhaps they are willing to tolerate a wrong or an injustice for a while, but when it becomes less tolerable, the next step is to become active. Individuals might write a letter or an article, give a speech, lead a protest march, or conduct a demonstration. Dissent and protest carried to a higher level entails resistance, civil disobedience, breaking laws, or even participating in a riot or insurrection.

The methods and forms of dissent are wide-ranging. Many protesters express dissent through petitions and protest marches. Some use music or art or theater or comedy to articulate their message. Some engage in acts of civil disobedience, willfully breaking laws to put pressure on the system to force those who have political and economic power to acknowledge and address the issues. They are often marginalized individuals and groups that lack power but have a legitimate grievance against the way things are. Most times these types of dissenters have criticized the United States from the left. They have sought more equality, more moral rectitude, more freedom. They have demanded that America live up to what it had committed itself to on paper at the Constitutional Convention. Many of these dissenters have viewed the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as binding contracts between the people and the government and protested when they believed the government was not fulfilling its part of the contract.

Dissenters often have a keen sense of history and build on the experiences and methods of earlier dissenters. It is not unusual to see dissenters quote those who have gone before as well as draw on the successful tactics and strategies of earlier dissent movements. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s employed many of the tactics of the labor movement of the 1930s, while antiwar activists adopted the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement in their protests against the war in Vietnam and later the Iraq War. Dissenters with a vision for the future look to the past for inspiration.

But there are some dissenters who have a sketchy understanding of American history who want to return to an imagined past that never existed. For example, those who protest against immigration in order to keep America white, not realizing that the country has always been a nation of diversity, peopled by immigrants of all ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds. The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s opposing anyone who was not “One Hundred Percent American” and the Unite the Right protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 chanting “You will not replace us!” are examples of this.

Individuals and groups that protest against the protesters are also expressing dissent. Reactionaries have frequently resisted change and fought to maintain the special privileges and supremacy of their class or race or gender. Some have wanted to maintain the status quo and prevent change, while others have sought to turn back the clock to a “simpler,” more “trouble-free” time. When abolitionists denounced slavery, antiabolitionists argued just as passionately to preserve the institution. When women demanded equality, millions of Americans reacted with hostility and formed antisuffrage associations.

Although most dissent springs from those who lack political power, there are instances when a dissent movement is part of the power structure—the temperance movement and the Know-Nothings of the 19th century; the anti-tax ideologues of the 20th and 21st centuries. There are also notable individuals who fought entrenched interests from a position of political power—Senators Robert M. La Follette and Margaret Chase Smith, for example, spoke out against what they believed was a usurpation or misuse of power on the part of the federal government.

Over the years dissenters achieved varying levels of success. Some got in trouble. Some were arrested. Many were beaten. Some were killed. But they kept hammering away at the powers that be until those powers began to listen. As a result, public opinion was swayed, laws were enacted or repealed, slavery was abolished, unions were organized, women got the right to vote, the Jim Crow laws were invalidated. In fact, many dissenters who were maligned, vilified, and even demonized as unpatriotic and anti-American by their contemporaries are now considered heroes. Some dissenters never achieved the change they were seeking, but though their goals were dismissed, they raised new questions and had an influence on the political discussion.

For the most part dissenters have embraced lofty ideals and have a moral purpose. And most of them believe they are acting to ensure that the United States lives up to its promise to secure Americans’ natural rights. But there are dissenters whose goals are not well-intended or virtuous and who use questionable means to attain their goals—they are not in it to grant equal rights to a downtrodden minority but to restrict rights or to promote their own narrow interests at the expense of others.

During times of heightened passions—the Antebellum period, the Progressive era, the Great Depression, the Vietnam War—dissenters have protested from liberal, conservative, and radical standpoints. In the debates about the war in Vietnam, for example, there were those who believed that America was acting as an imperial power and that the capitalist system should be toppled. There were those who opposed the war primarily on ethical grounds because the United States was acting immorally. And there were those who opposed the war simply because the United States was losing it and thus argued that if the government was not going to go all-out in its effort to destroy communism in Vietnam, then there was no point in being there. In the end, for completely different reasons, radicals, doves, and hawks all came to protest the war in Vietnam.

Obviously not all dissenters are created equal. Nor are the consequences of their efforts necessarily positive or socially useful. There is a difference between dissenters whose goal is to create a more just society by expanding the rights of the disempowered, and those who are self-aggrandizing troublemakers interested only in disrupting society or denying rights to others. Historian Eric Foner, in The Story of American Freedom, points out that “freedom” is a “contested concept.” So too is “dissent.”

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This article was originally published by Barn Raiser; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.Email

Ralph Young

Ralph Young is Professor of Instruction in History at Temple University. He is the author of Dissent: The History of an American Idea, and the editor of Make Art Not War: Political Protest Posters from the Twentieth Century and Dissent in America: The Voices That Shaped a Nation.