The declaration of Independents: meet the future of American politics.

• Author: Welch, Matt

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WHEN WAS THE last time you read the Declaration of Independence? Go ahead and call it up; give it a quick scan. Don't focus on the detailed bill of particulars against King George ("He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant"), disregard completely the bit about "the merciless Indian savages," and concentrate instead on the two majestic, throat-clearing paragraphs at the top. Particularly this, the most influential English-language formulation of liberty in the 18th century: "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."

Note what Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston did not include on the short list of unalienables. They did not write, "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of politics." No: The men chewing and gnawing at the crown's leash elevated above all other pursuits the quest for happiness, as defined by each individual, by his own lights. It was a declaration within the Declaration, an announcement that existential meaning derives neither from the whims of a sovereign nor from enlistment in some grand national project but from the most atomized level of being: the personal, private, idiosyncratic human heart. Liberty was both a means and a destination--a process and a goal worthier than specific policy outcomes.

In 2011 we still do not equate happiness with politics; the mere juxtaposition of the words feels obscene. Politics, as John Adams' great-grandson Henry famously observed, "has always been the systematic organization of hatreds" Every election cycle (and we are always in an election cycle), we are urged to remember that deep down inside we really despise the opposing gang of crooks. We hate their elite (or Podunk) ways, their socialist (or fascist) economics, their reliance on shadowy billionaires with suspect agendas. In a world where mutual gains from trade have lifted half a billion people out of poverty in just the last five years, politics is one of the few remaining zero-sum games, where the victor gets to spend everyone else's money in ways that appall the vanquished until they switch places again after the next election.

We instinctively know that our tax dollars aren't being spent efficiently; the proof is in the post office, the permitring offices at City Hall, or the nearest public school. We roll our eyes when President Barack Obama announces a new national competitiveness initiative in his State of the Union address just five years after George W. Bush announced a new American Competitiveness Initiative in his, or when each and every president since Richard Milhous Nixon swears that this time we're gonna kick that foreign-oil habit once and for all. And yet the political status quo keeps steering the Winnebago of state further and further into the ditch.

A growing majority of us has responded to the stale theatrics of Republican and Democratic misgovernment by making a rational choice: We ignore politics most of the time and instead pursue happiness. We fall in love, start a home business, make mash-ups for YouTube, go back to school, bum around Europe for a year or three, play fantasy baseball, or trick out our El Caminos. Through these pursuits we eventually find almost everything that is wonderful and transformative about our modern lives: the Internet, travel, sports, popular (and unpopular) music, the spread of freedom and prosperity around the globe. People acting peacefully, mostly left to their own devices and not empowered by the state to force others into servitude, will create riches far more meaningful and vast than the cramped business of tax-collecting, regulation-spewing, do-as-I-say-or-else governments.

Yet as robust and infinitely varied as our private universes may be, they no longer provide a reliable refuge from the destructive force of politics. Today there is only one real policy issue facing the country, and unfortunately it threatens each and...