Tag Archives: American Revolution

Patriots’ Day 240

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Today, in Massachusetts it’s Patriots’ Day, a holiday on which this year we mark 240 years since the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775 — depicted with some artistic license in the Capitol frieze currently featured at the top of this website.

For those of you not fortunate enough to be from Massachusetts, that was the day that the great and democratic people of this state decided to liberate the rest of the dithering colonies from Great Britain, over a year before everyone else could be bothered to sign the Declaration of Independence.

You’re all welcome.

Now here’s a photo I took last 4th-of-July Weekend of a cow next to Battle Road in Lexington. This cow is wholly unimpressed by your lack of Massachusetts-centric patriotism today.

Credit: Bill Humphrey for Arsenal For Democracy

Photo Credit: Bill Humphrey for Arsenal For Democracy

Conservatives can hate Massachusetts all they want, but that doesn’t change the fact that we shot first at the monarchy.

As a native, I can assure the rest of the country that we definitely haven’t forgotten about any of the early events leading to the Revolution. Massachusetts took a lot of the brunt of the British response before and during the American Revolution. Things like the Third Amendment are mostly about how we really don’t want British troops living for free in our houses in Boston. The American Revolution is a big part of Massachusetts history classes from grade school through high school, and the historical sites are literally all around us.

Contrary to the snide remarks of conservatives in many other states, I think we Bay Staters have a pretty solid handle on what the American Revolution was about and what unreasonable government oppression looks like. Nevertheless, Massachusetts folks by and large seem pretty happy with the progressive agenda they’ve been voting their representation into office to enact. If it were tyranny — or even mildly inconvenient, as in the case of tea taxes passed without legislative representation — we would have noticed by now.

Oped | American Unexceptionalism & The Republic

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The real story of the origins of the U.S. political system. Composite oped from two new essays (here and here) in The Globalist.

You’ve read the story before. A number of loosely aligned, merchant-dominated offshore territories of a European empire begin chafing at their distant monarch and the high taxes he imposed without giving them a reasonable say in their own governance.

Predictably enough, their mounting dissatisfaction is met with an increasingly overbearing response — including military deployments. That strategy is pursued until the provinces reach a breaking point.

They declare themselves free of the faraway king and initiate a rebellion. Not all the territories are persuaded to join. Some prefer to remain loyal to the crown.

The rebellion binds together a small collection of sovereign entities into a union, equipped with a weak, loosely formalized provisional government. Its purpose is to direct the union’s foreign policy and manage the rebellion.

Government after monarchy

Having declared themselves without a king, the newly independent elite must devise a replacement system of government for the continued union.

For a time, they consider the possibility of bringing in another member of the European nobility to serve as king. Such an invitation or election of an outsider as king was common in Europe for centuries, from Poland to Sweden to the Holy Roman Empire. Even the papacy is an elective monarchy.

But eventually the merchant elites and past commanders of the rebellion decide they have been doing fine without a royal. They are now content to continue to strengthen the temporary system as it is.

The exceptional story takes shape

These elite gentlemen look around at other precedents for other self-governing states without kings. Smaller free states — such as Florence and Venice — had previously installed non-hereditary systems of rule by the commercial elites and major families. They had called them “republics,” after the elite-run classical “Roman Republic.”

Elections in such systems are highly indirect and susceptible to manipulation. They are also restricted to a very small number of participants. Essentially, the only voters are members of the propertied, male elite — usually white.

After all, they make no secret of the fact that this exclusionary voting franchise suits the new country’s leaders’ aims anyway. They are not interested in creating a democracy. Rather they are keen to establish a republic insulated from the passions of the mobs.

It is then agreed that under the new union of rebel provinces, each member republic would send delegations to the union’s government, but they will be answerable to their home governments. This further would keep the regular people away from any major levers of power.

Finally, they devise an elaborate system of checks and balances. The ostensible purpose is to preserve the sovereignty of the member republics within the union. The bigger purpose is to prevent the “tyranny” of a central government and an executive. The union will have weak powers of taxation — only enough to mount a common defense of the member republics.

This is, of course, the story of the Republic of the Seven United Provinces in Netherlands and their departure from Spain — about two centuries before the United States constitution was ratified by thirteen former British colonies.

So much for America’s origin story being exceptional, as claimed for so long.

The Dutch precedent was a model, both to be emulated and avoided, for the framers of the U.S. Constitution and those advocating for its adoption. Far from being an “exceptional” idea, the original version of the United States was just the latest iteration of an existing system. It is what came after that that made it exceptional.

Almost before the ink had dried on the U.S. Constitution, the United States and its citizenry — indeed, even its government officials — began adapting the document in other directions the framers had never intended or anticipated.

That is probably for the best, from the world’s perspective, and from the country’s, since rule by a narrow slave-owning elite is not exactly a paragon of excellent governance for the world to follow.
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The Philadelphia Coup of 1776

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US-flag-13-stars-Betsy_RossThe common narrative in the United States surrounding the Declaration of Independence is that everyone was so appalled by the British crackdown in Massachusetts and the lives lost at Lexington and Concord in April 1775 that all the leaders (and the majority of the populations) of the other colonies were swept up in a united front demanding the rejection of British rule (over a year later).

In reality, it was far more complicated than that. Many of the people were largely apathetic toward the whole matter one way or the other. But among those who were politically engaged, there was nowhere close to unity on the issue between the thirteen colonies (and that doesn’t even get into all the other British colonies in North America that flat-out refused to entertain the idea of joining even a conference to discuss recent events).

The lack of support for independence was so strong in coastal Georgia, for example, that the state’s leaders tried to un-sign from the Declaration of Independence and re-join the British Empire during the war. By war’s end, even after the Battle of Yorktown, the Province of Georgia was fully re-occupied by the British until it was handed over by the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Paris that formally accepted U.S. independence. New York City, similarly, was fairly solidly in support of continued British rule (to protect its trade interests and keep the other colonies from controlling its internal affairs) and also remained in British control until handed over by the treaty.

In certain colonies, such as Massachusetts, the local assemblies were suspended by the British or replaced by puppet governments, and they lacked local support — often to the point of having none of the laws followed by anyone. So in those cases, it’s fair to consider the self-proclaimed “Patriot” assemblies to be the more legitimate governments of those colonies for the purposes of declaring independence. But in other colonies, such as New York, the patriot faction was so deep in the minority that even the real local governments representing popular opinion were never going to go along with plans for independence. This being inconvenient, New York patriots simply formed their own assembly when the real assembly refused to send delegates to the Continental Congress.

That’s a bit iffy, to say the least, but it’s nowhere near as questionable as the decision by the Second Continental Congress to take matters into their own hands to impose the same on the Province of Pennsylvania. The elected local government there was insufficiently supportive of the position of a majority of the rest of the provincial delegations meeting at the Continental Congress, so those other states simply voted to “totally suppress” the government of Pennsylvania, to allow themselves to move ahead with plans for an official Declaration of Independence. Read more

Constitutional rebellions

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Constitutional-Convention-slider
Should constitutions include an official principle of the people’s right to rebel against their governments?

There has always been a bit of (or a lot of) tension between those who believe the right to revolt is natural and inalienable at all times versus those who believe all transitions must be orderly, legal, and constitutional.

As a pressure valve for self-preservation, the latter camp tends to adopt constitutional systems (formally or informally) that allow for regular turnover, either by frequent election or by scheduled leadership changes. Britain’s modern parliamentary system, for example seeks to keep rebellion in check by making it relatively easy to bring down governments that are messing up, via orderly no confidence votes and early elections. In another example with similar motivations, the current Chinese government leadership has five year terms now between internal party elections and has age limits, to guarantee turnover.

The U.S. model tends to release the pressure through a combination of semi-frequent elections (though no early elections for the presidency, ever) and very formalized removal procedures for misconduct. So, civilians can remove other civilians constitutionally from power and transfer the power down an established chain without elections, and it’s not a coup d’état.

Still other systems allow for less turnover but implicitly favor mass demonstration as the best way to express opposition. The various French Republics, descending from the awkward marriage of a powerful central executive (originally the king) and multiple revolutions, managed to arrive at a strange compromise under De Gaulle’s 5th Republic after 1958. That compromise was to have (more or less) a nearly omnipotent president elected to seven year terms (with more than one term permitted), almost no formal way to express opposition (e.g. no early elections, weak parliament, etc.), and then to just continue to let unions, students, and other protesters go wild in the streets (or at least go on mass strikes) when they became sufficiently furious over something. As in all 15 French constitutions, the one implemented in 1958 included a “right to resist oppression.” This compromise setup posed various problems for the 5th Republic, but it’s certainly been more stable and stronger than the third or fourth republics, which basically collapsed under their own inefficacy. (Both the first and second ended in fluid transitions into dictatorship.) Eventually, though, they did moderate it down to five year terms at the beginning of this century.

In the United States, of course, there’s been lots debate since 1776 (or even before) about whether (and when) people can overthrow their governments. Through repeated use of military force domestically by the government, as well as consistent court decisions, the consensus has been achieved that it’s pretty much not ok to overthrow or take up arms against the U.S. government… unless you count that last time when they waged a war of separation against the British Empire and various loyalist populations. So, had any of those later insurrections — whether in Appalachia, Western Massachusetts, the Confederacy, or among the American Indians — prevailed, I guess it would have been a different story. (And indeed, that one uncomfortable, local armed coup d’état in North Carolina in 1898 went largely ignored by the U.S.) But at the very least, it has been made clear that there is no legal or constitutional right to overthrow the government of the United States, even if perhaps there is a Jeffersonian-style “natural” right to give it your best shot and see what happens.

But there’s also a very curious compromise in a number of countries, occupying a middle ground between the “transition must be legal” faction and the “revolution is a natural right” faction. A study by Daniel Lansberg-Rodriguez, Tom Ginsburg, and Emiliana Versteeg (discussed here after the recent Thailand coup) found that 20% of countries today (up from 10% in 1980) with formal constitutions in effect have adopted constitutional provisions explicitly protecting the right of the people to rebel, revolt, or otherwise topple their governments. Some of them are as vague as the French provision I mentioned above. Others, under the Turkey model, are much more explicit in carving out a role for the country’s military to intervene against the civilian leadership when it oversteps (or is perceived as overstepping) against the people or “democracy” or secularism or whatever.
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Alt-history novelists have got nothing on Cliven Bundy

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Cliven Bundy, anti-government rancher and political theorist extraordinaire, has been releasing videos with even more information on his extremely “unique” view of American — and indeed Western — history and the American social contract. Buzzfeed collected some of the “best of” made-up facts from Bundy’s video.

My favorite is:

They [the Pilgrims] had a central government, which was Europe. Was the strongest army in the world. And they ruled with unlimited power. And there was a point that they decided they wasn’t going to live that way any more. And so they had a revolution.

 
This and others are so amazingly off-base I’m not sure I could have intentionally made up alternative history this great as a joke. (Long-time readers may recall my extensive alt-history-based satire, before this site or SBBS existed.)

To recap: This man — who is trying to argue based on an arcane and incorrect legal theory that the Federal government can’t make him pay to graze cattle on Federally-managed public lands — literally believes the 1620 Pilgrims had a revolution (in 1776? — unclear) and flat-earth-sailed to America, because they needed to escape a totalitarian government that ruled over all of Europe with a massive army. And somehow, despite a total lack of knowledge on the country’s actual history to the point of not knowing facts the rest of us learned in elementary school, he is a “patriot.”

Somewhere in the afterlife, Oliver Cromwell (England’s real-life dictator from 1653-1658, long after the Pilgrims had left and long before King George III reigned) is silently weeping at the thought of how much phenomenal power he would have had in the 17th century Bundiverse.

1651 Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan" on the English Civil War and the proper form of government.

1651 Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ “Leviathan” on the English Civil War and the proper form of government.