Like any scholar of rhetoric, Jeremy Engels admires the Declaration of Independence for its artistic and powerful use of classical appeals to accomplish a revolutionary goal and establish the core principles of American democracy. The document that “announced to the world that this new nation was independent of British colonialization” has, he says, been copied and rewritten multiple times, and its foundational principles have inspired many, including abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the Suffragette movement, and the United Nations charter.

Through the centuries, Engels says, more Americans have fought—often at great cost—for the Declaration’s three inalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. “I think that’s what’s truly inspirational about the text,” he says, “that it isn’t just the elites that have these rights and the opportunity to have a say in the country we live in and how it’s governed. Everyday people have those rights, too.”
But in this 250th year of the nation’s independence, Engels also thinks it’s important for Americans to reflect on “the things we haven’t gotten right, that are still lacking in our pursuit of happiness and the destiny that we’ll ultimately have.” The current political climate is fractured, he says, and the decline in institutional trust has led to civic despair and a culture of us-and-them binaries that limit both individual and group potential. “Ultimately, we’re all human beings,” Engels says. “We all suffer, we all want to be happy, and we need each other for that. To be effective citizens, we need to put the binaries aside and understand how we’re tied to each other in terms of our pursuit of happiness and our shared destiny.”

To that end, Engels’ latest book, On Mindful Democracy: A Declaration of Interdependence to Mend a Fractured World, offers a solution. It preserves the form, mirrors the rhetorical techniques, and hits the exact same word count as the original Declaration of Independence to convey the importance of understanding and listening, of connection to and compassion for our fellow humans. The book imparts Engels’ belief that true democracy is not a battle of political wills but a communal practice, embodied in everyday human interactions.

“I’m most interested in ways that we can practice hope,” he says, “and inspire people to care for each other in spite of their differences to build a stronger community.”