As America marks its 250th birthday on July 4, I want to make a radical suggestion: All Americans should read the Declaration of Independence.

Maybe it's the English major in me. But there's something to be said for reading these words yourself. Not enough of us are.

An alarming number of Americans have lost touch with our founding in 1776 and the principles of freedom and liberty our Founding Fathers laid out in the declaration ‒ principles later fortified in the U.S. Constitution.

You can't love or preserve what you don't know.

My concern is that as Americans lose that connection with why we became a country in the first place, we'll become more tempted to change it in fundamental ways. The growing popularity of socialism is one example. More on that shortly.

'We are a unique nation'

"It's really hard to be supportive of a country or your system of government if you don't understand it," Judge Michael Warren, who sits on a Michigan circuit court, told me.

Warren recently wrote a book, "The Revolutionary Words that Forged America: The Definitive Guide to the Declaration of Independence," offering a line-by-line analysis........

© USA TODAY