America: Devolution, Revolution, or Renewal?
By David Eisenberg|January 16th, 2023|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Conservatism, History, Politics, Revolution
The truth is that for all its failings, America has provided more opportunity, security, and freedom to a group of people more diverse than any other nation in history. It is not because America is systemically rotten; but because it is foundationally good. Justice for all calls for those foundations to be defended, not destroyed.
The following essay is occasioned by the question, can there be a conservative revolution? I am aware, as I presume are those who would dismiss the query with the wave of a hand or the roll of an eye, that the phrase is firmly fixed in our lexicon; that without irony or ambiguity, books and articles announce the existence of such revolutions; that a number of historical episodes bear the designation. So yes, nominally, there can be a conservative revolution. Nonetheless, I would rejoin that what typically are characterized as conservative revolutions, e.g., the royalist revolt in Vendée in the late eighteenth century, are really counter-revolutions. And that counter-revolutions, as the name suggests, have an aim that is antithetical to revolutions. They are anti-revolutions and hence, no revolutions at all.
A little historical and etymological mining will help disinter the distinction I would like to make. Etymology first. Re is a prefix appended to words to indicate a backward motion or that something will be done again. Retrace, replace, refresh. The Latin root of revolution is volere (to roll), so that elementally, the word signifies a rolling back or turning again.
Though the word predominantly has a political connotation today, initially it was used to describe events that took place in the physical or natural realm rather than the political or social one. Copernicus’s seminal work, On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, exemplifies the word’s original application. Here what revolves are planets and other celestial satellites around the sun (not the earth as most everyone at the time supposed), as they turn again and again in a circular—or as Kepler later would demonstrate—elliptical motion.
Precisely when the word acquired its political connotation is unclear, but there can be no doubt that it possessed one by the seventeenth century. Thus, toward the end of that century, the dethroning of James II was dubbed by its supporters the Glorious Revolution.
In its political usage, revolution acquired a nuance that it formerly did not convey. A literal rendering would have it that a political revolution is the rolling back of a governmental power; less literal and more helpful, we would say the overturning or—better yet—overthrowing of that power. But on that reading, revolution also intimates an upward movement, one that does not appertain to the rotation of heavenly spheres or the turning and returning of seasons. Amidst the revolutions that riddle nature, nothing really changes. The world turns on and on and on… But with a political revolution, at the risk of overstating it, everything changes. It is not just an endless rolling back and forth, an eternal rotation, but a rising up; that is, an uprising.[1]
Obviously, there were uprisings before the word revolution entered our political vocabulary and people were not at a loss as to what to call them. Before there were revolutions there were rebellions. The distinction between the two is worth noting and preserving. A rebellion, to define it, is an organized (and typically armed) resistance to an established authority. It shares a prefix with revolution, but here the Latin root is bellare (“to wage war”) from the noun bellum (“war”). The words belligerent and bellicose ought to come to mind. Literally, then, a rebellion is a renewal of war or the taking up of arms again.
Of the two—revolution and rebellion—the latter was considered well into the eighteenth century to be the more momentous and nefarious upheaval.[2] On this understanding, rebellion was tantamount to treason, so that a glorious rebellion was almost a contradiction in terms. Revolutions, on the other hand, far from being treasonous, were rightful, effected to preserve, in the words of Edmund Burke, a people’s “ancient indisputable laws and liberties.”[3] That Burke could write favorably of revolutions—and he did[4]—suggests that the word’s import shifted appreciably in the centuries that succeeded him. Prior to that shift, rebellions were destructive; revolutions, restorative. As Bernadin Saint-Pierre put it, “Rebellion is the subversion of the laws, and Revolution is that of tyrants.”[5]
That understanding of revolution no longer obtains. Indeed, Burke and Saint-Pierre’s remarks were, for all intents and purposes, anachronisms the moment they were made. For the two words were fated to trade places. Rebellion was to become the lesser disturbance. The Russian Revolution could not be reckoned a rebellion any more than the French résistance could be a revolution. The French, of course, had a revolution (more than one, to be fair); a revolution so seismic and sweeping, that it set the stage for all subsequent revolutions in a manner that cannot be said of England’s Glorious Revolution or America’s own; a revolution that would forever change what it meant to be a revolution. There is a wonderful anecdote that has it that the day the Bastille fell, King Louis the XVI, having retired to bed early after a hunting expedition, was awakened by an attendant who alerted him to the events that had taken place in Paris. “Is it a rebellion?” the king is reputed to have asked. “No, Sire,” his attendant replied, “It is a revolution.”[6]
What made the uprising in France in the final decade of the eighteenth century a revolution—paradigmatically so—and not a rebellion, and what impels me to wonder if there can, strictly speaking, be a conservative revolution, was its raison d’être, incarnated in the throngs who longed implacably and labored indefatigably to wipe the slate clean; to expunge the past and start anew.
As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “In 1789 the French made the greatest effort ever undertaken by any people to disassociate themselves from their past, and to put an abyss between what they had been and what they wished to become.”[7]
To cleave history and rend the social fabric; to erect a new order, one that does not arise naturally or organically out of the previous, but instead is purposefully sundered from it—a new regime to repudiate and rectify the old—that is the target of all veritable revolutions. Inasmuch as conservatism is committed to preserving the past—the glories and triumphs of it; the old and tried rather than the new and untried, as Lincoln had it[8]—there can be no conservative revolution
But all this is mere preamble. My goal is not to incite a linguistic insurrection. I simply lay the groundwork to establish the following claim: The left in America today inclines toward revolution. I do not mean the far left, the radical left, anarchists and communists, separatist feminists and militant environmentalists, but the mainstream left, represented by the Democratic Party. Liberals of the modern or post-modern stripe, who, to distinguish them from their classical antecedents (with whom they should never be confused), are more concerned about liberating government from its constitutional restraints than securing the rights of the people against unrestrained government.
To be sure, today’s government is not, and has not been for some time, your Founding Fathers’ government. An ever-expanding federal bureaucracy and the profligate spending required to maintain it no doubt would trouble the sleep of those bygone sages who, with such profound prudence, apprehended not only the inestimable value of liberty, but the perennial threats to it. Yet however incongruent it may be with their original design, that bureaucracy need not amount to an abrogation of it. One could, for example, defend the welfare state or America’s hegemonic military as a natural or logical development; as a reasonable, and perhaps unavoidable, response to a rapidly changing world and America’s place in it. Though the transformations he wrought were monumental and, it seems, irrevocable, I would be loath to call FDR a revolutionary, precisely because the essence of the American republic, and no less importantly, reverence for it, were preserved.
What I claim here is that the left today is predisposed to preserve neither — neither essence nor reverence. What the left advances, wittingly or otherwise, is a new order, a regime change; a birth, not of freedom, but—to advert their principal objective—of equality (or of its fashionable and insidious corollary, equity).
As to the merits of this motive, I withhold judgment for the time being and not because I think judgment cannot be rendered. Those who would proscribe value judgments from the social sciences in a vain attempt to make them more predictive and scientific cling to a noxious delusion. If reason left any room for doubt on that score, history was less forgiving. As Arnold Brecht ruefully observed, the “inability morally to condemn Bolshevism, Fascism, or National Socialism in unconditional terms was to become the tragedy of twentieth-century political science, a tragedy as deep as any that had ever occurred before in the history of science.”[9]
If I reserve judgment here, and I think it will be apparent where my sympathies lie (and likely already is), it is because my ambition is not to deliver a diatribe, but to give a diagnosis. I do not seek to denounce, so much as make aware; to lay bare the revolutionary underpinnings of the left so that one—whatever his or her partisan allegiance or political disposition may be—would be compelled to accept as much. What people do with that awareness, I leave to them.
But back to revolutions. The point I would like to make can be brought to light by another distinction, one that suggests that the American Revolution was just that—a revolution—and that a conservative revolution is no mere chimera or oxymoron, the distinction between, as Friedrich Gentz formulated it, an offensive and defensive revolution.
The American revolution was from beginning to end, on the part of the Americans, merely a defensive revolution; the French was from beginning to end, in the highest sense of the word, an offensive revolution.
This difference of itself is essential and decisive; upon it rests, perhaps more than upon any other, the peculiar character, which has distinguished these two revolutions.[10]
Per the narratives of the historically stunted, America’s revolution began when a palely-complected, cisgendered, Y-chromosome carrying, slave owner declared independence. But the events that precipitated that declaration had been set in motion over a decade prior, when the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act—that “new, and hitherto unexampled system… of raising in North-America a tax for the treasury of England.”[11] Prior to this, “the colonies… had paid no other taxes, than those, which were necessary for the internal administration; and these proportionably insignificant charges had been prescribed and assessed by the several representative assemblies of each colony.”[12] In the minds of the colonists—minds that are remote from our heavily and acquiescently taxed ones—this act, almost trifling on the face of it, amounted to a violation of their most sacred birthright: their liberty.
The events that followed need not be recounted here in any detail; I simply wish to stress that by the time independence was declared, the people of the colonies had been deliberating for over a decade—publicly, spiritedly, disputatiously—about what ought to be done. The decision—to divorce themselves from the mother country—was taken neither rashly nor lightly.
And it was taken only after other avenues had been exhausted. The Declaration was the issuance of the Second Continental Congress, convened in 1775 for the purpose of, like the first a year prior, petitioning the king for a redress of grievances. As Jefferson instructed the VA delegates to the First Continental Congress, they were “to propose to the said congress that an humble and dutiful address be presented to his majesty, begging leave to lay before him, as chief magistrate of the British empire, the united complaints of his majesty’s subjects in America.”[13] This is hardly a revolutionary impulse.[14] Indeed, we understand, as did our forefathers before us (and theirs before them),[15] that the right to petition our government for redress is fundamental. In substance, then, such undertakings were lawful. It was only after it was clear that no redress would be forthcoming that the fateful step to declare independence was taken.
All of this serves to illustrate the revolution’s defensive and, one might add, conservative character. It was a revolution to defend government, not overthrow it; a revolution to conserve a way of life; to preserve the rights and freedoms to which the people of the colonies had so long been accustomed, not to fabricate novel ones whose sole basis and exclusive guarantor would be some arbitrarily and artificially constructed state.
An offensive revolution is oriented differently. Its mission is not to defend but to offend—to destroy. The French Revolution illustrates this as well as any. Its sine qua non was the razing of the ancien régime. It was not enough to depose a king and take his head. The nobility had to be decimated; the church dispossessed. Even time had to be undone: stopped, recalibrated, and restarted. Upon the ruins of the ancien régime, a new order would be established, one that had no historical grounding nor tenable footing in reality.
To this one might object that like the Americans before them, the French were merely defending their rights, in their case, the right to be free from oppression. But there was no such right, however much that may unsettle our hyper-sensitive sensibilities. Oppression was the norm; presumably still is. The canaille had as much of a right to be free from oppression as they did to be free from disease or want or bad weather. The facts of life, the disagreeable ones not least among them, tend to be stubborn.
The problem with the ancien régime—there were many—was not that it was oppressive, but that it was illegitimate. The privileges to which the nobility clung were no longer tolerable in the eyes of the people whom the nobility had all but abandoned. The proof of this is that in those parts of France where the nobility remained rooted to the soil and tied to its people—in Brittany, for example—the upper and lower classes stood together, not as revolutionaries, but as counterrevolutionaries. There peasants fought beside nobles, not as unwilling participants, but as ardent and often leading combatants, to preserve a stratified social order whose bottom rungs they were predestined to occupy.
With consummate selectivity, many on the left today, seeking to validate the tumults that have convulsed the country of late, are keen to recall the unrest that attended the birth of this nation.[16] That the deeds of white slave-owning men might be used to excuse or legitimize the actions of today’s social justice warriors is an irony lost on those who proffer such defenses. But what also is lost is the incongruity—irreconcilability, really—between the spirit of law abidingness that prevailed then and that of lawlessness that preponderates today.
Violence accompanies all revolutions, be they offensive or defensive. But the nature or magnitude of violence differs between the two. There was no Reign of Terror in the American Revolution; no gulag, no secret police, no show trials, no mass killings. All war invites excess, but offensive revolutions engender a different degree and kind of excess.
The reason for this is not difficult to descry. A defensive revolution aims to preserve an order—or order simply. Assuming nihilism or sadism is not the order of the day, certain rules and boundaries will be abided. If preserving the old order requires the gratuitous slaughter of large numbers of people, a defensive revolutionary is likely to concede the order itself is not worth preserving.
But in an offensive revolution, there is nothing to preserve. Everything must go and hence anything goes. The norms that might have constrained a side from committing atrocities—not isolated ones, but wholesale ones—are no longer in play. Those were the norms of the old order, the very order they are bent on subverting. When someone says that sacrificing fifteen to twenty million lives to reach “the radiant tomorrow” is justified, you can be sure that it is an offensive revolutionary at heart who speaks. (And so it was, in this case, the unrepentant Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm.[17])
A couple of historical examples to drive home my point. There were no beheadings in the American Revolution; or, to be fair and more effective in making my point, barring an isolated instance,[18] whenever there were beheadings, they were always in effigy.[19] During the French Revolution, some 16,000 people lost their heads,[20] not effigially, but physically, anatomically; and that was only during the year-long Reign of Terror. But as any student of that revolution knows, it was not with the Terror that the beheadings began, but with the Revolution itself.[21] In that opening salvo, the Bastille’s warden and Paris’s chief municipal magistrate lost not only their lives, but their heads. In a macabre sign of things to come, the mob that took them paraded from the Bastille to the Palais Royal, a distance of some two miles, carrying proudly and high above them all along the way, the cephala they had severed and piked.[22]
Another comparison, to bring this closer to home. When the Sons of Liberty boarded three ships in Boston Harbor on the night of December 16, 1773, they destroyed nothing but the tea (tens of thousands of pounds of it, admittedly) and a padlock belonging to one of the ship’s captains. So great was their respect for the sanctity of private property that they replaced the padlock the following day.[23] When the sons and daughters of victimhood plundered cities across the country during the summer of 2020, so great was their disdain for private property that they indiscriminately damaged some 2 billion dollars of it.[24] Typically, that wanton destruction was condoned, if not celebrated, by those on the left.[25]
Permit me here to return to my central claim: those on the left in America today tend toward revolution and the type of revolution toward which they tend is offensive. I do not mean to suggest that their revolution would approach the enormity of the French; that the Democratic Party’s rank and file will become twenty-first century sans-culottes, spreading terror and mayhem with gusto and sanguinity. Of course, my disinclination to presume such eventualities should not be mistaken for a refusal to entertain such possibilities. Revolutions are capricious and unpredictable affairs, ones that often mock the best intentions of those who direct their opening acts. The revolutionaries of 1789 did not anticipate the carnage for which they had paved the way and that, in but a few short years, would consume so many of them. The novelty of the event may excuse their myopia on that score. No one today enjoys such an excuse.
But terror or no terror, the offensive character of the left’s revolution is made evident when one puts before them the simple question: what do you wish to defend? What they wish to dispense with is clear. The Electoral College—gone. Some 60% of Americans are in favor of eliminating it. A majority of you might say, well good riddance. But the internals are revealing. Roughly 20% of those on the right favor getting rid of it, while nearly 90% of those on the left do.[26] Of course, abolishing the Electoral College is not exactly on par with deposing a monarch. But it goes far beyond how we elect our presidents.
An independent judiciary? What good is that when it defies the will of the majority; when it defies progress? To be fair, there is much greater ambivalence about packing the court than there is about sending the Electoral College packing. Still, polls have indicated that a majority of those on the left support it.[27] At the very least, given the studious indifference to the Democrat’s position on this matter during the 2020 election, it seems reasonable to infer that the left is, if not firmly in favor of packing the court, largely untroubled by the prospect, a stark contrast to the outcry that FDR’s machinations once provoked from both the right and left.[28] Speaking of undermining majorities, the senate—that upper and archaic chamber that flouts the democratic dictum: one person, one vote—has outlived its purpose, if ever it had one. What all of this portends is that the Constitution itself, the document that constitutes this republic, with all its antiquated and undemocratic institutions and designs, will need to be scrapped as well.
And with that founding document goes the founding itself. America has no king to unseat, but with patricidal glee, the left has been toppling the nation’s founding fathers one by one. Even the incorruptible ones, those human paragons who once commanded awe and reverence, are, in the minds of the left, no longer fit to occupy a place in the public square. One does not honor individuals who sinned as they did. Some crimes are unpardonable; some men irredeemable. Those males, long dead and too white, comprise a sordid and sorry lot that one should look down on, not up to.
Not only must the monuments to those erstwhile heroes go, the very title they once enjoyed—which honored their singular feat—must be stripped from them as well, for as it turns out, they were no founders at all. The nation we once celebrated them for having conceived had been birthed a century and a half before their hour upon the stage arrived. The approach of the French Revolutionaries had been to expunge the past and start from scratch. Year One signaled the dawn of a new age, the old having been dismantled and buried in the dust heap of history. The approach of today’s revolutionaries is not to blot out the past, but to rewrite it. Calendars will be preserved, days and weeks left unaltered. But new dates will be elevated in the collective consciousness, while old ones will be depreciated and consigned to oblivion. One can learn a lot about a people from the dates they choose to memorialize; it bespeaks something of their identity. A change of dates can signify a change of identity. Following the Bolshevik Revolution, a Soviet calendar was adopted; it commemorated occasions that aligned with the Party’s revolutionary and communistic ideology (e.g., the Paris Commune and the October Revolution). When Lenin passed, the anniversary of his death was made a national holiday.[29] The choice to honor the memory of Lenin says a lot about a regime, not least that liberty holds no special place in it.
To re-date the founding to 1619 is not just to rewrite the past but to reframe the present and redirect the future. As ideals, 1619 and 1776 are antagonistic and mutually exclusive. A nation cannot on the one hand be “conceived in liberty, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”[30] and, on the other, be born from human bondage, dedicated to the conceit that some men—some races of men—are created and will forever remain unequal. This is not the place to probe that perfidious project. Suffice it here to ask, if, as the authors contend, “out of slavery—and the anti-black racism it required—grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional,”[31] why are there not many more Americas out there? Why was Brazil’s literacy rate in 1950 half of America’s?[32] Why did Argentina not play an indispensable role in defeating fascism in the 20th century? Why do people from other lands flock to America—as they have done for virtually all of her history—while so many countries to her south annually turn out more people than they bring in?[33] Why has no country in Latin America sustained a continuous democratic government since gaining independence in the early nineteenth century?[34]
Slavery in America was execrable; from a global and historical perspective, it was not exceptional. Conceiving a nation in liberty and dedicating it to the proposition that all men are created equal was exceptional, unprecedented even. The left’s fixation on America’s sins, sins that are emphatically unoriginal and of which virtually all nations are, to varying degrees, guilty, blinds them to America’s virtues, which if not peerless, are—to reemploy that felicitous word—exceptional.
The point that bears repeating is that America cannot simultaneously be founded in 1619 and 1776, and not because it is a chronological impossibility, but because it is an ideological one. The 1619 project constitutes a refounding; a reconceiving of America not in liberty but in servitude. It amounts to an ideological regime change.
None of this is in keeping with the spirit of a defensive revolution. When you have disassembled the system, discarded the constitution, defamed national heroes, rendered a principled founding a reprehensible one, what is left to defend? Even the animating reasons for revolution betray its offensive character. Defensive revolutions are, in essence, lawful revolutions. They no doubt defy the laws of the state they are directed against, but they accord with a higher law, one that the state is guilty of transgressing.
Founded on the consent of the governed, governments are instituted to safeguard the unalienable rights with which humans are naturally endowed. Whenever a government becomes destructive to this end, the people have a natural right to alter or abolish it, because it has contravened the foundational good it was established to effect. There is nothing arbitrary about this right. It is exercised lawfully only when a state has neglected its fundamental charge, and even then, only after there has been “a long train of abuses and usurpations.”
What long train of abuses could the left possibly adduce to justify its revolution? The predictable rejoinder would be the abuses of discrete and insular minorities. But the reality is that the long train has not been one of abuses but of amends. An increasing number of prominent seats in America’s halls of power are occupied by members of the very groups of people America once enslaved and disenfranchised. As David Hackett Fischer noted, “Through the span of four centuries, every American generation without exception has become more free and has enlarged the meaning of freedom and liberty in one way or another.”[35] To be sure, it is no perfect union—presumably none exists, nor ever will—but with respect to those who historically have been mistreated and marginalized, it certainly has become a more perfect one.
But not only has there not been a long train of abuses to vindicate the revolution the left aspires to bring about, the government has not abdicated its solemn responsibility—the protection of those unalienable rights; or at least, that indictment is not being leveled by the left. Indeed, insofar as the left toils to enlarge the state at the inevitable expense of the individual, its concern is not that those rights have been infringed upon too much but that they have not been curtailed enough. Hence the exuberance with which the left has celebrated the spate of regulations that the Biden administration unleashed in its opening days.[36] Unalienable rights grow less secure the less limited government becomes, a verity the left seeks not so much to dispute as dismiss. Before an ever-swelling regulatory state, liberty cannot but recede.
The central grievance of the left, it seems, can be gleaned from the items it desires to do away with, adumbrated in small part above. The problem with the system is that it is undemocratic. But it is undemocratic by design and a change in the design is no mere reform but a revolution; one not to defend or restore, but to undo and build anew.
The extent to which the left harps on about democracy these days is illuminating, because it betrays both their future longings and historical illiteracy. Last year, a highly touted book for young adults was released with the title You Call this a Democracy?[37] To which the appropriate retort is no, I call it a republic and so should you.[38] The framers were wary of democracy and for good reason. Having long contemplated the lessons of history and meditated deeply on the nature of man, they grasped that democracies incline—of their own volition, as it were—toward tyranny; that, in the words of Madison, “democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”[39]
A republic then would be more effective at ensuring stability and guaranteeing the liberties of the people, not least those who belonged to no majority. But for the left, liberty is at most, an ancillary concern; the real concern is equality. So long as inequalities remain an intractable feature of the republican design—and they do so by design[40]—the arrangement no longer can be brooked. For the framers, the solution to the problems of democracy was to temper democracy. For the would-be new framers, “the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.”[41]
Either America is a country worth preserving or it is not. Where my sympathies lie on this question I trust by now is plain. But again, my aim is not so much to defend America as it is to show that the orthodoxies of the left cannot be squared with the view that America is worth defending. To a number of those I have alluded, but perhaps none makes this more clear than a conviction that is now de rigueur for those on the left to affirm—and not just those on the left: the conviction that America is systemically racist.
The rashness with which this position is embraced is bewildering, not so much because of the preponderance of evidence that controverts it,[42] but because of what follows logically from it. If America is systemically racist in 2021, the obvious and ostensibly irrefutable inference to be drawn is that America has always been systemically racist. And that means on the question of whether America is worth preserving, the only correct answer—morally correct—is no. How can a country that has been systemically racist for its centuries-long existence—how many centuries hardly matters at this point—be worth preserving?
It cannot. And with that, an offensive revolution is rationalized. This is no call to arms. That call is made with far too much regularity and frivolity these days—on both sides of the proverbial aisle. Revolutions, even the defensive ones, are messy affairs with very uncertain outcomes; they foment antipathies that too readily give way to atrocities and advance remedies that often are worse than the diseases they are intended to combat.
The founders’ forbearance—not those pseudo-founders who brought slavery to the New World but the true ones who established a union that ensured slavery would, in time, be banished from it—should serve as a guide. They called for revolution only after enduring a long train of abuses and usurpations; only after it was clear that the redress they lawfully and dutifully petitioned for would not be forthcoming; only after it became necessary to dissolve their political bonds; only as a last resort.
No, this is a call not to violence, but to vigilance; to wakefulness—itself a far cry from wokefulness, which is at bottom a very deep and dogmatic slumber. For those on the right, let there be no illusions about what the ideals of the left entail. Anyone who professes to love a country that is, and always has been, systemically racist is either duplicitous, deluded, or himself deeply racist. As for those on the left, for whom this also is a call to wakefulness, I suspect there are many who do not think through the consequences of their convictions, who do not see what results from the pronouncements they reflexively espouse. Systemic racism has become an article of faith; a dogma that is intoned with ritualistic madness and mindlessness. I recognize that some parrot this gospel because they are frightened to do otherwise. Sadly, their fear is all too legitimate. But truth has always demanded courage from its defenders and ever is in danger of being lost without it.
The truth is that for all its failings, America has provided more opportunity, security, and freedom to a group of people more diverse than any other nation in history. There is a reason why people come to these shores, why they risk and sacrifice so much in doing so, and why they have been doing so for centuries. It is not because America is systemically rotten; but because it is foundationally good. Justice for all calls for those foundations to be defended, not destroyed.
This essay was based on a talk given at the Center for Political and Economic Thought at St. Vincent College on March 30, 2021, and published in its annual review Citizens and Statesmen: An Annual Review of Political Theory and Public Life, Volume XIII, 2021, 1-20.
[1] For a discussion of the changing meaning of the word revolution, to which my exposition here is indebted, see Raymond Williams, Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society (London: Fontana, 1984), 270-4.
[2] Williams, 71-2. See also Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage, 1979), 51-2.
[3] Edmund Burke, Edmund Burke: Selected Writings and Speeches, ed. Peter J. Stanlis (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1997), 527.
[4] Wills, Inventing America, 52.
[5] Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Studies of Nature, vol. 3, trans. Henry Hunter (London: C. Dilly, 1799), 668.
[6] Christopher Hibbert, The Days of the French Revolution (New York: Quill, 1981), 87.
[7] Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, vol. 1, trans. Alan S. Kahan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 83.
[8] Abraham Lincoln, “Cooper Union Address” in Abraham Lincoln: Great Speeches (Mineola, NY: 1991), 44.
[9] Arnold Brecht, Political Theory: The Foundations of Twentieth Century Political Thought (Princeton 1959), 8.
[10] Friedrich Gentz, The Origin and Principles of the American Revolution Compared with the Origin and Principles of the French Revolution, trans. John Quincy Adams (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2010), 53.
[11] Gentz, 20.
[12] Gentz, 17.
[13] Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 2, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1904), 63.
[14] As a further attestation to the lawful restraint that inhered in these measures, Jefferson’s language was rejected by the Virginia delegation for being “too harsh.” Wills, Inventing America, 57-8.
[15] The right, enshrined in the English Bill of Rights (1689), can be traced back to the Magna Carter (1215).
[16] See, for example, Stacy Schiff, “The Boston Tea Party was more than That. It was a Riot,” New York Times, August 13, 2020; Anna Purna Kambhampaty, “How American Power Dynamics Have Shaped Perceptions of Looting, From the Boston Tea Party to Today,” Time, June 11, 2020; Steven W. Thrasher, “Proportionate Response: When destroying a police precinct is a reasonable reaction,” Slate, May 30, 2020.
[17] Quoted in Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 11.
[18] An isolated case involved a former slave who was caught “spying for high-ranking British officials…. The [American] rebels beheaded him and mounted his head on a stake near the Greenland swamp—the gruesome way marker a deterrent for escaped slaves daring, still, to support the Crown.” Holger Hock, Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth (New York: Crown, 2017), 330. Other cases involved the beheading of American soldiers by Native Americans, among whom the practice was “well-established.” Hock, 287, 320.
[19] Gentz, Origin and Principles, 54.
[20] Donald Greer, The Incidence of Terror During the French Revolution: A statistical interpretation (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1966), 143.
[21] David Andress, The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 4-5.
[22] François Furet, Revolutionary France: 1770-1880, trans. Antonia Nevill (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 68.
[23] “They were so careful not to damage anything other than the tea that they swept the ship’s decks and even replaced a broken padlock. The boarders even called up the ships’ mates ‘to report whether every thing (except the tea, of course) was left as they found it.’ Even [Thomas] Hutchinson had to admit that the whole affair was ‘conducted with very little tumult.’” Benjamin L. Carp, Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 130.
[24] Brad Polumbo, “George Floyd Riots Caused Record-Setting $2 Billion in Damage, New Report Says. Here’s Why the True Cost Is Even Higher,” Foundation for Economic Education, September 16, 2020.
[25] See, for example, Jesse E. Myerson and José Martin, “9 Historical Triumphs to Make You Rethink Property Destruction,” Rolling Stone, May 29, 2020; Natalie Escobar, “One Author’s Controversial View: ‘In Defense Of Looting,’” NPR, August 27, 2020; R. H. Lossin, “In Defense of Destroying Property,” The Nation, June 10, 2020.
[26] Megan Brenan, “61% of Americans Support Abolishing Electoral College,” Gallup, September 24, 2020.
[27] Linley Sanders, “Washington Examiner/YouGov Poll: By 47% to 34% voters oppose court packing,” October 7, 2020. On the question of court packing, 60% of democrats were in favor, 22% undecided, and 18% opposed.
[28] William E. Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 157-61.
[29] Irina Shilova, “Building the Bolshevik Calendar through Pravda and Izvestiia,” Toronto Slavic Quarterly, no. 19 (Winter 2007).
[30] Lincoln, “Gettysburg Address,” Great Speeches, 103.
[31] Jake Silverstein, “Editor’s Note” in “The 1619 Project,” The New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2019.
[32] Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “Literacy,” Our World in Data.
[33] “Net Migration Rate,” The World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency.
[34] Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 357.
[35] David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 722.
[36] See, for example, Kevin Robillard, “The Game-Changing Biden Order You Haven’t Heard About,” HuffPost, January 24, 2021.
[37] Elizabeth Rusch, You Call this a Democracy? How to Fix Our Government and Deliver Power to the People (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
[38] “The honest and serious students of American history will recall that our Founding Fathers managed to write both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States without using the term ‘democracy’ even once. No part of any one of the existing forty-eight State constitutions contains any reference to the word. Such men as John Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson and others who were most influential in the institution and formation of our government refer to ‘democracy’ only to distinguish it sharply from the republican form of our American Constitutional System.” Clarence E. Manion, The Key to Peace (Chicago: The Heritage Foundation, 1951), 49-50.
[39] James Madison, Federalist 10, in The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: Mentor, 1999), 49.
[40] As Madison spelled out in Federalist 10, owing to “the diversity in the faculties of men,” a free people necessarily will be, in terms of outcomes, an unequal one.
[41] H. L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy (New York: Dissident Books, 2009), 29.
[42] “Whereas all other racist regimes in history openly proclaimed their racism, America has pulled off the amazing feat of purging its laws, institutions, and culture of racism—all in the interest, of course, of perpetuating racism.” David Azerrad, “On the Peculiar Character of American ‘Racism,’” The American Mind, October 7, 2020. As Glenn Loury points out, “there is a deep irony in first declaring white America to be systemically racist, but then mounting a campaign to demand that whites recognize their own racism and deliver blacks from its consequences. I want to say to such advocates: ‘If, indeed, you are right that your oppressors are racists, why would you expect them to respond to your moral appeal? You are, in effect, putting yourself on the mercy of the court, while simultaneously decrying that the court is unrelentingly biased.’ The logic of such advocacy escapes me.” Glenn Loury, “Unspeakable Truths about Racial Inequality in America” Quillette, February 10, 2021.
