The authors of “You didn’t build that” are at it again, and they’ve come up with another slogan that’s sure to be just as much of a PR gem. A video screened at the opening of last week’s Democratic National Convention claimed that, as Americans, our government is “the only thing we all belong to.”

Funny. I was under the impression that we might be part of something larger and nobler, or at least less in debt. The planet Earth comes to mind, as does the human race and—perhaps most politically significant—a community of free, equal, and rational beings with individual rights.

Indeed, the recognition of such a community was one of the major political-philosophical developments of the American Revolution. After all, the line, “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...” is deservedly one of the most famous in US history. And it is significant not just because it played a part in what would come to be the American founding. It is not because it posits the existence of some “Creator.” Rather, it is because it establishes the existence of humans as beings with rights prior to and external from the state.

The theory that people’s rights are given by the state is a dangerous one. It suggests that the state may also take them away. This is why belief in the human community—the community of free and equal rights bearers—is so important. It is a powerful guard against supposed justifications of tyranny, and it is a much-needed refuge for people whose rights have been infringed upon and whose governments refuse to do anything about it.

In fact, without the notion of the human community, the concept of a person whose rights have been violated by his government is not even comprehensible. If government is really the only thing to which we all belong, if we do not possess rights regardless of the whims of government, then the very existence of our rights is subject to those whims.

As a rhetorical tool, perhaps, it seems prudent for the American left to paint the government as the only commonality connecting citizens; but to diminish the bond among citizens to an entanglement in the red tape of government bureaucracy is to derogate the meaning of citizenship, and the meaning of being human.

People are capable of unity even if it is not motivated by common membership in one state. There are, I would venture to say, many things that connect us all to one another. But the human community of rights bearers is one we should certainly not forget, and one whose health we should certainly not neglect.

Lucia Rafanelli is a senior in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at lmr93@cornell.edu.