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The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges. 

Monday, April 21 is Patriots' Day, a Massachusetts state holiday that commemorates the opening battles of the Revolutionary War of April 19, 1775. That day is also considered the first day of the siege of Boston, which ended on March 17, 1776, after Henry Knox brought heavy artillery captured from the British at Fort Ticonderoga in Upstate New York. Once installed on Dorchester Heights, the cannon threatened to blow British ships in the harbor area out of the water. The British opted not to run this risk, and evacuated Boston. Shortly after, on July 3, 1775, George Washington took command of the colonial militia on Cambridge Common, the moment of birth of the American military. The nearby Sheraton Commander his named after this commander, reminding us that Cambridge is both home to America’s oldest university and the place where its military was founded.  Patriots’ Day is a good day to reflect on the role of the Boston area in American history, also in light of current news. Patriotism has meant many things to many people, but at the core of the patriotism celebrated on Patriots’ Day in the Boston area is the value of nondomination. Patriots’ Day belongs to all those who speak out on behalf of nondomination, regardless of political affiliation or immigration status. The original day in 1775 was about resisting the king. As it happens, in the Boston area, the week leading up to Patriots’ Day 2025 has increasingly made it about resisting   The “king” just reminded the world of the spirt of his reign in .

In these 250 years since 1775 the spotlight rarely has been as specifically on the Boston area as it is now when it comes to defending the value of nondomination. As Alan Garber, Harvard’s president,  on April 14, in response to excessive demands by the federal government:

The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.

Those events around Boston back in 1775 made success of the revolution a genuine possibility. This victory over the most powerful empire set the stage for the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. It would take years of hardship to end royal domination over the colonies, but the Boston area has ever since been the home of American patriotism. Harvard has always done its part, also and especially in the miliary domain. Harvard has the  (18) of any university except the Military Academy at West Point and the Naval Academy at Annapolis.  who made the ultimate sacrifice, including Memorial Hall (alumni who died serving in the Union Army during the Civil War), and Memorial Church (alumni who died in service during World War I). Harvard alumni gave their lives in large numbers in America’s wars beginning with the Revolutionary War. All those who are currently spreading nonsense about present-day Harvard that obtains newsworthiness only because we live under a government that operates on gaslighting should bear this in mind. That they are not sincere anyway is clear because what many of them say about Harvard  more rapidly than a university possibly could.

In 1894,  declared April 19 Patriots’ Day, celebrated on the third Monday of April. It is a peculiar holiday, each year confusing not only to newcomers but to many who have been here a long time. It is not a federal holiday, so you can count on mail delivery. Banks are open. But it is a state holiday in Massachusetts, as well as in a motley group of other states including Maine (once part of Massachusetts), Connecticut, Florida, Wisconsin, and North Dakota, where current Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, . Patriots’ Day is unevenly and unpredictably observed in Massachusetts. Many people are out and about on business, but it is not quite a normal day. Harvard by and large follows the federal calendar regarding holidays, and thus as such does not observe Patriot’s Day. I would guess, though, that most affiliates would want for the university to observe it, if only so that students and other affiliates can experience some of the celebrations ranging from watching reenactments of the approach of the British on Lexington and Concord to pouring into Fenway for a Red Sox game and of course watching or possibly participating in the Boston Marathon. Numerous affiliates do some of these things anyway. 

About the Marathon: 

Inspired by the modern re-start of the Olympic Games, Boston . The marathon is not just a demanding run but presumably the sports event of the most explicit political significance. It commemorates the Greek victory over the Persian army at the city of Marathon in 490 BC: 42 km is the distance the runner covered to bring the news to Athens, upon whose delivery he collapsed and died. 

On Patriots’ Day 2013, two bombs exploded at the finishing area of the Boston Marathon near Copley Square, in the heart of Boston. The bombs killed three spectators and wounded more than 250 others, often so severely that limbs had to be amputated. For the next several days the two brothers who had planted the bombs were on the run. For a brief interval basically everything was shut down and Governor Deval Patrick asked people to "shelter in place." It was a surreal experience for those of us who lived here then. The week ended with the death of one brother and capture of the other in Watertown. The 2016 movie Patriots Day, featuring Boston-born Mark Wahlberg, brings these events to the screen. 

The Declaration of Independence is the foundational formulation of American values, and there would have been no such Declaration without the events in the Boston area commemorated on Patriots’ Day. Accordingly, one good thing to do on Patriots’ Day is to recall the values articulated in the Declaration. The fundamental value indeed is nondomination. It will take a close look at a few sentences in the Declaration to make this point, but this is worth our while given how much is at stake now around this value. Nondomination was at issue when the siege of Boston occurred, and nondomination is at issue now that the Boston era again deals with someone who think of .

The Declaration famously mentions unalienable rights said to include “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” However, by the time we reach this phrase (in the second sentence), some other ideas have already been introduced. The first sentence is as follows: 

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

As we learn here, the Declaration was written owing to “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” The kind of change that concerns everybody – like dissolution of political bands at the envisaged scale – entitles humankind to an explanation. The presumption is that if no good explanation is available, the measure should be dropped. This cosmopolitan starting point is worth emphasizing in light of the unilateralist tendencies in contemporary America. The Declaration acknowledges an already interdependent world in which we have obligations across boundaries. Among them, one would think, in the present age there is a duty not to change things like visa policies capriciously, for individuals or collectively.

This first sentence also presents a notion of equality. The Declaration explains in that very sentence that the new country means to claim its “separate and equal station” among other states, leaving behind a status of domination. The theme of equality reappears in the second sentence, which, however, does not explain it further. That means the only understanding of equality the Declaration provides is in the first sentence, where equality is about nondomination.

The second sentence reads as follows: 

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. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

So by the time we reach “unalienable Rights,” we have encountered equality twice and have reason to understand it as being about nondomination. Rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness thus presented should be understood in ways that advance mutual nondomination. As political theorist Danielle Allen – whom I follow in this approach to the Declaration – states succinctly, the Declaration’s central argument is that “equality has precedent over freedom; only on the basis of equality can freedom be securely achieved” (Our Declaration, 2015, p 275). 

Since equality is understood as nondomination, nondomination is the central value in the foundational document of the United States of America. It is in order to realize freedom on the basis of equality understood as nondomination that government exists at all. A government that rules through gaslighting and plain cruelty is not up to this task.

British philosopher and contemporary of the Revolution Jeremy Bentham referred to the revolutionaries as “ who had to be restored to the allegiance they were breaking. But at the end of the Declaration, these ingrates pledge themselves to something truly extraordinary. The Declaration leaves all pledged to it through its signing with far-reaching commitments to put nondomination into practice:

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor. 

That is how important creating a commonwealth shaped by nondomination was to the founders: they pledged to it their lives, fortunes, and honor. The Declaration left the new nation with the task of spelling out what exactly nondomination is. Each generation has had to assess what rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness mean among equals.

What seems clear enough is that mutual nondomination requires the government to act in ways that advance citizens’ standing in society, including in regard to their economic status, to such an extent that they can live up to their roles as equal participants in the commonwealth. The egregious economic inequality in the U.S. today makes it hard to create a state of mutual nondomination. The wealthiest , and serious debate about inequality is barely possible now in light of the all the turmoil this administration is creating. And although 18^th-century thinkers would not have conceived of nondomination in terms of gender emancipation, the ideal of nondomination as such also resists any discrimination in that domain. Similarly, appeals to religious liberties could not be used to authorize actions that would enable or perpetuate domination of some over others; this would comprise the exclusion of LGBTQI+ people from participation in certain aspects of public life or from the reception of certain legal benefits. And indeed, while efforts under the heading of diversity, equity, and inclusion might well need corrections in certain instances, they are manifestations of an endeavor formulated in the Declaration of Independence: to realize the ideal of nondomination. It requires the level of gaslighting deployed by the current administration with all its distortions to create an understanding of reality in which efforts at advancing nondomination are depicted as wrongful discrimination. 

Strikingly, the Declaration of Independence captured a stronger ideal of equality than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights does a century and a half later, in 1948. The former states without reservation that “all men are created equal.” The latter refers to “equal and inalienable rights” in its preamble, states that all human beings are “born free and equal in dignity and rights,” and insists that discrimination in terms of its usual categories (race, religion, sex, etc.) is impermissible. That is, while the Declaration of Independence attributes actual equality of status as given by creation, the Universal Declaration merely says that, to the extent that persons have rights, they have them equally. The latter’s spirit is captured by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s four freedoms outlined in the UDHR preamble: freedom of speech and belief, and freedom from fear and want. But the ideal of equality as nondomination goes further. There is profound irony in the fact that this ideal was articulated when there was no political will among liberated Whites to extend freedom to enslaved Blacks, or, for that matter, for male citizens to emancipate women. These contradictions at the country’s conception reveal how big a challenge it is to take seriously the ideal of nondomination. They also reveal that, for the Declaration to address contemporary concerns, we must see it as a living document: it must be unmoored from the hypocrisies of its own era, and new interpretations must guard against hypocrisies of later ages. The hypocrisies of our age find expression in governmental gaslighting and cruelty.

On Patriots’ Day 2025, let us honor those who gave their lives for the values captured in the Declaration of Independence, including and especially Harvard alumni who have thereby manifested the patriotism that has its home in the Boston area.  Alongside them, let us salute and honor everyone who works for a society and indeed a world characterized by mutual nondomination. Many of them – visa-holders, green card holders, citizens – are currently under threat because they do this work. Patriots’ Day belongs to all who hold up the value of nondomination, who resist kings and “kings,” and to all who stand with those who speak out on its behalf. This week Harvard has reaffirmed its commitment to the value of nondomination. On Patriots’ Day 2025, I feel proud to be a part of this institution. 

Mathias Risse, Faculty Director, Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights