The 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence is a good time to remember that the American Revolution wasn’t inevitable. It took a series of tremendous acts of courage.
Spend any time with the historical accounts of the Continental Congress, and you realize they were a ragtag group of lawyers, farmers and merchants who had the courage to challenge the unchecked power of a lawbreaking tyrant.
Many of the threats facing colonists more than two centuries ago are again confronting Americans today. Both legal rights and the rule of law are under assault — not from a monarch 3,000 miles away, but from an authoritarian president who has weaponized the federal government to punish rivals and silence dissent.
We know the list by now: The president has illegally used emergency declarations to impose global tariffs and declare war. He’s accepted questionable gifts from foreign countries, engaged in conflict-ridden business deals, trampled on individual rights to punish his perceived enemies and spread conspiracy theories about elections.
Most Americans today say they no longer trust their government to do the right thing. Our grand experiment in democratic self-governance is at a pivot point.
Democracy requires a robust defense against tyranny. During the revolution, ordinary farmers with modest resources prevailed over a clearly superior British Army. Today’s federal overreach faces resistance from neighbors blowing whistles during ICE raids and legions of lawyers filing legal briefs.
It sometimes, if too rarely, also faces pushback from officials in public office. But in our polarized political climate, political courage seems to be the commodity in shortest supply.
“Most Americans view public office as a place where we have a tremendous lack of courage,” says Rye Barcott, author of the book Courage Can Save US: Ten Extraordinary Americans and the Fight for Our Future.
His book offers a flash of hope. In profiles of five Democrats and five Republicans, Barcott details how they have demonstrated acts of moral courage — the kind that risks “one’s reputation, career, or sense of belonging,” he writes.
His list includes Indiana Republican Senator Todd Young, who initiated the CHIPS and Science Act with Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer to invigorate semiconductor manufacturing; New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill and Massachusetts Congressman Seth Moulton, both Democrats who were early in calling for former President Joe Biden to drop his re-election bid; Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat who participated in a 2025 video reminding troops that they had not only the right but also the duty to disobey illegal orders; and Nebraska Republican Representative Don Bacon, who defied Trump in extending Affordable Care Act tax credits, providing aid to Ukraine, supporting Greenland and shielding Haitian refugees from deportation.
Barcott, a veteran of the Marine Corps, is the co-founder and CEO of With Honor, an organization that recruits bipartisan military veterans to run for office. The operating principle of the group, Barcott told me, is to recruit and support individuals who “have the courage to work across party lines and put service above self-interest.”
Barcott’s organization screens hundreds of candidates each year to decide whom to endorse, elevate and support financially through its political committee. “What we often look for is just somebody that has a view of this assignment as a hardship post,” he told me.
Many of the public officials he profiles in his book have faced threats of violence or dealt with acts of government hostility because they defended their principles. Kelly, a retired astronaut and naval officer, was repeatedly targeted by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who threatened him with a court-martial, a demotion in rank and reduction in retirement pay. Bacon, a former Air Force brigadier general, told Barcott that he faced so many threats that his wife took to sleeping with a loaded gun within reach.
In 1776, colonists also watched as their government divided the populace and betrayed many of the very principles on which its authority depended. Citizens, who had once pledged loyalty to the Crown and spent years beseeching the British government to acknowledge and peacefully resolve their grievances, saw their rights violated as the British closed Boston Harbor, dissolved colonial assemblies and established martial law.
In the summer of 1775, King George III formally declared the colonies to be in “open and avowed rebellion” and urged “all loyal subjects” to suppress the uprising. The king had become a tyrant, and defiance would become a capital offense.
Not every colonist became a rebel. Some agreed with the king. Others saw rebelling as too risky. British citizens lived under what was then the most powerful government on earth. Their education, social standing, political power, prosperity and even their health were at stake. Why would they gamble it all on a radical experiment in self-government?
Many of the new leaders, inspired by Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke, offered an explanation. They argued that governments exist to protect natural rights and may be overthrown when they fail.
When the members of the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, they embraced that theory. “When a long train of abuses and usurpations” forces people to live under “absolute Despotism,” the Declaration states, “it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Today, because of the wisdom and courage of this founding generation, we still have rights — speech, assembly, religion, petitioning government, the press. We can use them to oppose tyranny forcefully, but peacefully.
As we reflect on our nation’s founding this year, we would be wise to remember that protecting our rights is in our DNA, and resistance is always going to take courage. But courage is also a choice. Let’s expect more of it.
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