Hello again all. It is once again the week of July 4th and so, as is customary here, I am going to use this week’s post to talk about the United States. This is going to be a bit more of an open musing than an argument as compared to previous years (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025) because my attention has been turned this way and that over the past few weeks and then just when I thought I’d be able to focus on this, one of home ownership’s many annoyances (a busted pipe) cropped up to consume much of the week.
Nevertheless, the Declaration of Independence turns 250 this year – ratified on July 4, published on July 6, read aloud in public on July 8, 1776 – and I want to muse on it a bit, with some focus to the actual text. Americans revere our founding documents (the Declaration and the Constitution) but I fear we do not read them very often. I was a ‘pocket-constitution’ kind of fellow in college, but one is regularly shocked by how little the average American citizen understands about how their government functioned or what the ideals of the framers were and one is regularly disappointed, but very much not shocked, by the endless parade of political entrepreneurs looking to exploit that gap in knowledge.
I will also note, for my international readers, that I think the exercise of looking at these documents is valuable, for the same reason I’ve made my students read Magna Carta or the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: these are documents of world-historic significance (hardly the only ones, of course, but they make ready examples). At some point, particularly in leftish circles, it became trendy to dismiss the American founding as a mere ‘bourgeois’ revolution in favor of later revolutions in Europe and I think this is a mistake. There quite possibly is no French Revolution without the American one; the cross-pollination of ideas is obvious. The American Revolution (and thus the Declaration) therefore must also play a role in 1848 and it very obvious plays a role in the advance of democracy in Europe after 1945 and again after 1989.
The Declaration of Independence was recognized as a radical, potentially explosive document at the time of its issuance, as we’ll see. And it was explosive: the world of 1775 was one dominated by monarchies with just a tiny handful of traditional republics (which we should not ignore!). It took a long time for the seeds of the declaration to spread, but the world it helped create is one where liberal democracies, while hardly universal (more people have always lived in unfree societies than free ones) represent the most economically and culturally dominant bloc in world affairs – something that had never happened before. The Declaration, in its way, remade not just the Thirteen Colonies, but slowly, surely, as water seeps through the cracks of rocks (or my floorboards, alas), it remade the whole world.
So if you haven’t, go read the text of the Declaration. It isn’t long (but don’t skip!). My thoughts at present don’t necessarily fit together neatly, so we’ll break them down under a few major headings.
A Decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind
When I was growing up, one of the things it was fashionable to argue was that the American Revolution was a ‘conservative’ revolution, in that it did not overturn the social structure of the Thirteen Colonies. Conservatives said this about the revolution to claim it for their own and to distinguish it as the ‘good’ revolution in contrast to those ‘bad’ revolutions in Europe and Latin America. Leftists sometimes did the opposite, terming the revolution ‘conservative,’ unlike ‘real’ revolutions which upended social and economic patterns more completely. And there’s not nothing to this: the revolution did not immediately challenge the socio-economic systems of the Thirteen Colonies (though the notion that the revolution was fundamentally pro-slavery is, at best, quite overstated; it was certainly not an anti-slavery revolution, either, of course).
I think both positions however, are fundamentally wrong, however, in that they miss the inherent radicalism of the principles of the Declaration. Indeed, the framers themselves seem to have only imperfectly understood the course of the rock they were about to set rolling. But they very well understood the momentousness of it.
Now there’s a tendency at this point to jump right to, “We hold these truths…” but let’s start at the beginning.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
The introduction of the Declaration doesn’t begin with self-evident truths, but rather an assertion that the action of the Declaration demands explanation, that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes.” The framing speaks to the radicalism of what the authors (we tend to think of Jefferson as the sole author, but the finished Declaration was very much a creature of committee) are about to do, so radical that decency and respect requires them to explain themselves, not merely to the colonies or to the British Empire but to “mankind.”
The contrast with many similar documents is striking to me. Of course a lot of national declarations declare causes and aims of an action, but in my own – admittedly incomplete – survey, it is quite rare that any imagines that all of mankind needs to be informed. To jump back to the previous examples, Magna Carta calls to witness only John, his subjects and God. The Declaration of the Rights of Man makes its declaration before the “supreme being.” And that makes sense – there is, on some level, no need to inform mankind about those documents, because they pertain only to the people of specific countries (although the Declaration of the Rights of Man clearly has universalist aims).
By contrast, the authors of the Declaration seem very clear-eyed that they are about to make some claims with global, universal significance, that the collection of apple carts they are about to upset is rather larger than just their own. As we’re going to see, they’re right – because they’re not asserting the peculiar rights of Englishmen or British subjects, but rather making an argument about a set of universal rights and principles which might shake thrones and crack crowns the world over. That warning and assumption of responsibility – that the authors understand that the magnitude of their claims here require an explanation – is what leads into the bombshells of the preamble, though the introduction has already tipped its hand to one of them (that a “people” are entitled to a “separate and equal station” and thus able, on their own, to rightly dissolve the bonds that tie them with another).
The Radicalism of the Preamble
That stage-setting swiftly leads us into the Preamble.
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.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security
In the United States, at least, I think we hear these words so often as kids that we lose the sense of their importance and radicalism or even of their plain meaning, the way that if you speak any word enough times over again in a row it starts to feel like gibberish. So what is the preamble saying and why?
Fundamentally, it is building to an argument for the validity of independence in four consecutive points. Notably, whereas today, national independence movements often take it as a granted principle that a people ought to be free to make its own government, ought to be free of the domination of another people (the principle of self-determination), the Declaration assumes its reader thinks the opposite. It assumes a reader who accepts that monarchy and empire are both just and natural, for whom the idea of self-determination is at best dangerous nonsense. And that makes sense – almost none of the peoples in the world the framers knew were self governing (notable exceptions for the Dutch and Swiss). Instead, even when a people had their own country, they were ruled, rather than self-governing – by a king or a closed oligarchy (often a hereditary aristocracy), which often felt little if any cultural commonality with their own commoners.
That system was normal and indeed had been normal since antiquity: self-governing polities are very rare in the pre-modern period. It was not only normal, but normalized: centuries of literature and tradition supported the idea that the right and normal way to organize a society was through authority rather than self-governance. So the Declaration has to go to exceptional lengths to show why this monarchy and this empire have ceded any just claim to govern the colonies. In the process, however, it lays down the argument that leads to that modern assumption of self-determination.
The argument begins with two assertions. The first is a natural law assertion of an equality of rights among men, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” It is a claim of striking magnitude and remarkable finality – indeed, a claim of such magnitude that it very obviously conflicted with the practice of slavery in the colonies, something some of the framers recognized and then most shamefully did almost nothing about. The Declaration could have asserted those unalienable rights are being particular – to British subjects or Englishmen or Christians, perhaps – but it does not. Instead it insists upon their universality through an argument to natural law, a sensible choice for Thirteen Colonies that already had a multiplicity of faiths and ethnicity in them. Again, if that seems normal to us, it was not normal at the time and indeed is not normal now: most countries are not operated with the notion that anyone has unalienable rights (a reminder that at no point in human history have a majority of countries been anywhere remotely close to free).
We should also note that what the Declaration asserts are not collective rights, but rather individual rights, an important component of liberalism, but an enormous break with most pre-modern social assumptions, which tend to be communal, rather than individual. Compare for instance the ancient Greek notions of autonomia and eleutheria – autonomy and freedom – which in a political sense were really collective rights, possessed by the polis. An individual Athenian did not really have any rights that the Athenian demos – the people at large – were bound to respect. By contrast, the Declaration is asserting that all men individually possess key rights, including the ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ which is rather an expansion of Locke’s original “life, liberty and property” formulation – to me it includes not just a right to property but also a right to make one’s own decisions, to pursue one’s own goals, to not be a tool of the community. Again, this is a really radical rejection of the way most societies had been organized – as Patrician Crone notes, in pre-industrial societies, “the individual existed for the benefit of the overall group, not the other way around.” The Declaration asserts the opposite: the group (governments) exist for the individual.
It seems relevant in this context to note that the United States remains, culturally, an extremely individualistic society (arguably the most so) and it is hard not to see that as both cause and effect of the Declaration’s position here.
The second assertion then follows on the first – drawing from John Locke’s theory of the social contract, the Declaration asserts that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This is, as we’ve discussed many times, untrue as a matter of historical fact – states emerge as violence-machines, not as machines for the protection of rights. But as an aspirational statement, that governments and states ought to have the protection of rights as their primary purpose, ought to derive their powers from the consent of the governed, it is a powerful statement.
It was also really radical in 1776, at a point when most states on Earth justified their power not from the consent of the governed but rather by divine right: the ruler was chosen by God, or had the Mandate of Heaven, or was of a divine lineage, and so on. The idea that government was by divine sanction was hardly new – we find it in some of the earliest governing documents that still survive. It seems to have been the governing principle of the earliest states, that the social order – with the king on top – was divinely ordained and thus any attempt to challenge it was a rebellion against God or the gods. One sees strains of this in certain forms of Christian nationalism in the United States, which regard either the American form of government or specific American leaders as divinely ordained, but the irony is that the Declaration is quite directly rejecting this vision. “Their Creator” who is also “Nature’s God” does not ordain rulers, rather he endows rights which earthly rulers may not in justice abridge and which humans cannot alienate – which is to say the rights can never be lost, only violated.
The next two points then serve as conclusions which follow these two initial assertions: if individuals have unalienable rights and if governments exist to protect those rights then (this is the third point) a government which fails to protect those rights loses its legitimacy and may be disestablished and therefore (the fourth point) a “long train of abuses and usurpations” can justify revolution.
In short, a government – and it is striking here that the Declaration uses the king as synecdoche (part-for-the-whole) for the whole British government – which greatly fails in its duty of protecting rights loses its legitimacy. Once again, the authors seem to sense how radical that claim is and so they qualify it, making clear that such a decision isn’t to be taken lightly (and it isn’t likely to be taken lightly). The failure of the government in question to protect rights must be extreme to justify the radical cure of revolution, a position which will set up the bill of grievances that make up the actual bulk of the Declaration’s text (but which everyone skips – we shall not).
But before we move to the bill of grievances, I want to take one more chance to push back against the idea that the Declaration is just something ‘small ball’ or something that only mattered for the United States.
The Declaration was recognized as an incendiary, radical, dangerous document at the time. It was banned or suppressed in some European monarchies – not appearing in translation, for instance, in Russia until 1863 or in Spain until 1868; it was outright banned in Spain’s overseas colonies. And it isn’t hard to see why – the language and ideas of the Declaration, building on European political philosophy that had been ‘in the air,’ so to speak, for some time clearly played a role in the cultural foment that culminated in the French Revolution. A European monarch who worried that the publication of the Declaration might endanger their crown was right to worry.
The Bill of Grievances
Which at last brings us to the bill of grievances. Given the above build-up, you can see why the list of grievances are necessary: the Declaration has tried to establish that if a government is sufficiently injurious to the natural rights of its people, it becomes permissible – even required by duty – for those people to abolish and replace it. But of course then they have to show that the government of King George III was, in fact, so injurious. It is an interesting and clearly deliberate choice to frame the grievances as an indictment against George III in particular, even though the framers knew as well as anyone that many of these injuries were the product of policy set by Parliament. On the one hand, George III could stand in for his government symbolically here, but at the same time, I suspect that part of what the authors of the Declaration are trying to summon rhetorically is the notion of ancient tyranny (thus their use of the word). Of course a tyranny could be of Thirty Men as easily as just one, but the designation of a singular tyrant-king lends the whole list a rhetorical punch. “He has…” is just a lot clearer and more effective than, “the King in consultation with his government and the full support of Parliament has…”
Some of the particular grievances have less relevance today (particularly the incitement of war with American Indians), but many of them remain relevant – it isn’t hard in many cases to see specific parts of the Constitution designed to forbid particular grievances from the list.
There’s a tendency to skip over the bill of grievances when reading the Declaration in dramatic readings or classroom contexts and one understands why: compared to the philosophical firebombs of the preamble or the emotional punch of the conclusion, the bill of grievances is rather long and less exciting. But I think it is important because it provides a sense of what kind of government the framers thought might constitute tyranny.
And I must admit it was in this sense that I have been thinking about this document for the past year, because, as I have argued before, I think we are facing a government not merely that I disagree with – that’s not at all new and democracy must mean losing elections as well as winning them – but rather a government, particularly an executive branch, which does aim for “the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States,” in a way that is peculiar to any administration, democratic or republican, that I can think of.
So I provide below an annotated copy of the bill of grievances, with links to note where our current government is doing many of the very things for which we declared, 250 years ago, that it was not merely right, but a duty to throw off British governance. Of course today we have no need of revolution, because we have elections and so may freely change our leaders or even alter the form of our government without violence.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
As the Declaration itself says, “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
What is the Fourth of July For?
The Fourth of July (for Americans) is more than just a day to shoot off fireworks, have parades and cookouts. It is also more than just a day to reflect on the United States’ achievements, which are considerable.
It is also, importantly, a day to reflect on the United States, a country of ideas and values – not a nation of blood and soil. It is a day to think about what those ideals are and what we owe them, not in the fuzzy, gauzy, vague sense of flag waving and patriotic music (though those are fun), but in the hard, specific way of articulating what our country is for. And it can be hard: it is obvious to anyone studying American history that the United States did not at its inception live up to the notion that all men were created equal – the founders kept slaves and often behaved cruelly towards Native Americans. Their ideals were better than they were. And where the men failed, the ideals succeeded: the framers failed to abolish slavery, but their ideals eventually – fitfully, with too much delay and bloodshed – succeeded. Their ideals animated the movement for women’s suffrage – even when the Declaration was new, Abigail Adams could note that its principles must logically extend to all women, as well as all men – and the movement for civil rights.
The Declaration is a document that declares, after all, that “all men are created equal.” It does not admit caveats. It does not say “all men, except for the immigrants” – indeed, the opposite, it charges George III with the abuse of “obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners.” Someone seeking to defend the Declaration against all immigration or the extension of natural rights to foreigners is trying to defend the Declaration against itself, against its own values; they are actually at war with the Declaration (just as the Confederates were), though they might not admit it.
It does not say, “all men, except for that religion I don’t like.” Indeed, no less than George Washington makes this point clear in the nature of the Constitution – the ‘user’s manual’ for achieving the aims of the Declaration – that it “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” One cannot help but notice that its formulations, “their Creator” and “Nature’s God” are expressly ecumenical – of course quite a few of the framers were deists or otherwise not very religious and it is worth noting that the founders also had no problem respecting Muslims.
Indeed, it is striking to me that while the Declaration in its ideals warmly embraces the immigrant, the fellow with an unfamiliar religion, the families with different lifeways, what is truly foreign to it is the notion that the United States is just some other blood-and-soil nation, that there are ‘heritage Americans’ or that the unalienable rights it asserts do not extend to some people. The authors and signers of the Declaration were brave enough, confident enough in their ideals to say all men; let us be at least half as brave to keep saying all men.
It is a document that demands of us, that demands us to be better, to strive to fulfill its lofty ambitions, to demand our government so strive. To pledge, as the signers did, “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” to its principles and the preservation and expansion of the liberties that and subsequent generations won.
The Fourth of July is a day for us to remember what kind of people we are supposed to be and to rededicate ourselves to coming a little closer, inch by inch, to the grand vision on which our country was founded and in so doing perhaps function as a lighthouse guiding other countries as well to a freer future.
Happy Fourth of July. It has been 250 remarkable years. That tremendous legacy is now bequeathed to us and we are duty bound to see these ideals carried forward for another 250 years. Let us, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, pledge our sacred Honor to that.
The Right to Bear Arms being associated with militias makes sense. The Founding Fathers knew that the nascent United States should not be saddled with army costs, even in peacetime, because those resources would be better spent elsewhere. Plus, having to house soldiers, in war and out of war, rather than have them reassimilate to society, would mean that it would incur greater economic costs for upkeep. And also, a standing army holds allegiance to a sovereign or a superior state, rather than chiefly the people themselves. It’s not hard to see how even with Britain being a parliamentary monarchy, the British, through their figurehead of George III, represented a force of unfair extraction to the Thirteen Colonies after fighting a conflict as expensive and spread out as the Seven Years’ War.
You can see how the United States became a bloated bureaucratic state in the 20th century as it centered itself as the “protector of the world”. The need to keep a vast, highly equipped army with vast amenities like organized army camps and state of the art healthcare all the time means that the taxes of the commoners would only go up. And with the military increasingly being used as a bargaining tool, the potential for it to be abused is always real.
The 2nd amendment is so hallowed by many ordinary Americans because it represents their emergency civic duty: To take up arms when called for the defense of the country. While it is hard to imagine how many millions of scattered commoners can simply take up their arms and try to fight the government as a single force, it is very understandable that like the Americans who fought the Revolutionary War, they sense and feel more of the accumulative livelihood-encroaching overextension of government year by year.
The problem with the idea of only having militias who took up arms when called, was that it often didn’t work all that well.
You invoke the Founding Fathers, so let’s see what a couple of them had to say about militias.
President Washington (about their use in the Revolutionary War): “To place any dependence on the Militia, is, assuredly, resting upon a broken staff. Men just dragged from the tender Scenes of domestic life; unaccustomed to the din of Arms; totally unacquainted with every kind of military skill, which being followed by a want of confidence in themselves, when opposed to Troops regularly trained, disciplined, and appointed, superior in knowledge and superior in Arms, makes them timid, and ready to fly from their own shadows … if I was called upon to declare upon Oath, whether the Militia have been most serviceable or hurtful upon the whole, I should subscribe to the latter.”
President Madison (about their use in the War of 1812): “I could never have believed so great a difference existed between regular troops and a militia force, if I had not witnessed the scenes of this day.” This, of course, was referring to the Battle of Bladensburg (aka the “Bladensburg Races” for the speed with which the militias fled the battlefield), the USA’s loss of which allowed the Burning of Washington.
I’m not, by any stretch, defending the current military-industrial complex that has the US acting as “Team America: World Police.” But the idea that the modern American state could have relied only on militias for national defense into the 20th century is, I think, not very grounded in reality.
I think you’re largely correct that reliance solely on a militia for national defense is unrealistic, but I don’t think the framers were intending for that militia to be the sole defense of the nation. The American armies that fought the Revolution made use of both citizen militias and regular professional soldiers (though many of the American regulars were somewhat new at their profession).
But the Bill of Rights doesn’t have to account for the regular army, just the militia portion. I think the framers realized that an armed populace with the ability to quickly create militias would, in conjunction with regular forces, give America a strategic depth that would make it extremely difficult to conquer.
True.
The American military in the World Wars was, in fact, a much more state-of-the-art one with a core of professional soldiers, but most of the soldiers who fought in that army, in either war, were draftees.
Every time I hear someone describe private gun ownership in the US as a fulfilment of the 2nd amendment, I want to desperately ask what regulations they are following to be classified as a “well regulated militia.”
I feel like one of the most important images in American mythology is the Massachusetts Minuteman hearing the church bell, grabbing his rifle from over the fireplace, and joining his community on the Lexington Green to resist the redcoats. And somehow, in all that, people think the important bit is physically having the gun in your house, and not the communal obligation or political organizing necessary to get those Minutemen to show up at Lexington Green in the first place.
Ten thousand households with privately owned rifles won’t do jack against an invading army if everyone is an individualist who doesn’t talk to their neighbors or trust them. And the inverse, a politically charged community of ten thousand households without rifles can much more effectively resist occupation, either by peaceful means, or by acquiring weapons in bulk and distributing them to the population.
Obviously I’m painting with a broad brush and there are exceptions, but American gun culture feels super oriented around the individual, not community organizing.
When it comes to resisting oppressive governments, block parties and signal chats will likely be more instrumental than having an AR-15 in your closet.
And there is recent historical support for precisely your point. In Saddam Hussein’s oppressive Iraq, every household had an AK-47. I doubt that they would be any more free if the gun were an AR-15.
I think in this regard, Switzerland is perhaps the one western democracy that actually has this well regulated militia nowadays.
(And well, it does also have a professional core, and a non-trivial investment, two world wars engulfed every country around Switzerland and yet nobody thought about invading them, and nobody has since.)
But it involves mandatory military training and service for said militia, and Switzerland detterence also has to do with the “More bunkers space than inhabitants”, “bridges and tunnels can be readily destroyed”.
(Let us not talk about Switzerland invading its smaller neighbour repeatedly though).
Switzerland has a centrally raised and maintained conscript army that maintains a large peacetime reserve with regular military exercises, to keep the draftable population in military shape. In this, its system is not significantly different from, say, the Prussian military of 1870.
The mental connection between gun ownership and liberty seems to be an exclusively American one.
It could be argued that Afghanistan people each have AK-47, and it makes them eventually able to oust foreign invader after two decades.
Indeed, the notion that a bunch of bitter amateurs decked out in camouflage are going to suddenly rally together in huge numbers and then overthrow a tyrannical US government — with a professional military, with artillery, armor, airpower, navies, and a range of mass-effect chemical and biological weapons available — with their popguns is laughable.
As laughable as the idea that some Afghan goat herders can force out the mighty American army and its Abraham tanks, which are indestructible thanks to depleted uranium armor.
If you want to control a country instead of a glass desert you need to decide the matter with boots on the ground, in large numbers.
If that were not the case – in the fantasy world where airpower can hold DC – lets remember what Brett mentions several times in his essay. The majority of humans in history did not live in free countries. Even today, many souls are owned by some unelected elite if not a downright cartoon tyrant like Kim.
Now suppose you live in one of those few free countries and you observe that the population has started slowly ceding its ability to defend that freedom. You’ve agreed to a census, you’ve agreed to a strong military, you’ve agreed to a unified executive, all you need to do is vote for a Caesar. You notice this and you go “pack it up boys, lets hand in the guns and bend over, its a lost cause”? REALLY? Shame on you.
Afghanistan is a nightmare to invade due to its terrains and poor infrastructure. The Talibans did not originate as goat herders as one might naively assume. They originated from religious fanatics teaching a degenerate form of Islam to largely illiterate boys in sex-segregated refugee camps. 20 years of constant war against American soldiers struggling against the landscape itself has not made them that much better people.
Yes, the US lost in Afghanistan because it was unwilling to keep enough boots on the ground.
And in the homeland it has about 100 times as many boots on the ground, while the population is only about eight times larger and land area 14 times.
The comparison does not look favorable for our hypothetical US insurgent.
And these are exactly the arguments I would bring in favor of legalizing automatic weapons and distributing free artillery to keep the government honest and aligned with the citizenry! Bring back the checks and balances!
@Anon Hmm… I wonder how the new report would read about a psychopathic teenager budding school shooter, who, instead of grabbing his father’s AR-15 rifle to shoot up the school, instead steals his father’s M224 mortar and shells his school with 60mm HE rounds.
I assume that there will be nuanced reporting on how vital the 2nd Amendment is to protecting Americans from oppression, plus some relief about him picking a weapon that cannot be effectively used by one person.
The checks and balances are between different branches of the government and not between the federal governments and a supposedly universally armed population.
“100 times as many boots on the ground, while the population is only about eight times larger and land area 14 times.”
False. At its peak, the ISAF deployed over a hundred thousand troops to Afghanistan, most of whom were American, and in addition to that, there were tens of thousands of defense contractors and hundreds of thousands of Afghanis fighting on the side of the government.
In the meantime, the total strength of the US armed forces is approximately 2,000,000 people, and the Army and Marines (y’know, your actual COIN forces) come out to about 1.2 million people. And, in the event of an American insurgency, would have a lot of the same problems that the Afghani forces did with subversion, though they would probably at least avoid the outright corruption.
Not only that, but in the event of an insurgency in America, the insurgents would actually be able to strike at the US military’s logistical base, something the Afghani insurgents could not do.
Further, America’s terrain is even worse for COIN than Afghanistan. The extensive forests of the American east, for example, provide lots of opportunities for cover and concealment, as do those of the lower slopes of the northern Rockies.
I would much rather fight an insurgency in Afghanistan than in the United States.
Have you thought about the US interstate highway system?
Not realising they need to learn to know others to cooperate with them is a fatal flaw in their understanding of society.
Furthermore, during the greatest military build-up in the last fifty years, Ronald Reagan’s government actually CUT taxes.
Nothing new under the sun from the if not before earliest days of civilization.
The 2nd amendment means IMPOV nothing more as give the US goverment a force of basic trained riflemen who d to eqip and train themselves on their own cost.
I am not positive right now about it, I’ve grimm joked to myself that Trump is the equivalent of
Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, so even at its best this too shall pass… well, the next guy will have learned a lot from it.
the first is followed by others after all.
Ah well, you never know. Might be wrong.
We skipped Sulla, and went right to Caesar.
We went right to Nero.
George W Bush was actually on stage with a guitar when the levees broke after Katrinia. TFG is Domitian, maybe?
What was he supposed to be doing?
I mean, if he was playing guitar BECAUSE the levees broke, that’d obviously be Very Bad. But there are several institution that were in place to deal with these sorts of issues, all of whom were operated by people far more qualified than GWB to manage the tasks that needed done. The levees were a known problem–I saw reports in the early 2000s about how they’d break under a big hurricane–and there were procedures in place. What, exactly, would the president add to the situation at that time?
I’ve been on sites where bigwigs showed up. It’s extremely annoying and interferes with the work. It needs to happen–audits are necessary to maintain compliance, and the grunts like to know the boss at least knows what the site looks like–but it ALWAYS interferes with the work. And right then the work didn’t need interfered with.
The place for the president to act is before the event, to put things in place to allow for the event to be managed effectively, and after the event, to take Lessons Learned and prevent recurrence. And even that’s often too much detail; he should be delegating that to lieutenants. Jumping in in the middle of it feels good, but in the event it’s almost always the wrong thing to do.
To be clear, I’m not a huge Bush fan. And I criticized Obama for trying to jump in during the BP oil spill in the Gulf. It’s not a matter of Left vs Right politics, but rather of proper roles for people during disasters. Remember, disasters are by definition chaotic and messy, with communication essentially gone and everyone flailing around for the first while. Adding the burden of VIPs only hurts the first stages of relief efforts.
That credits Trump with many more successes than he ever managed.
Surely Trump is Catiline, not Sulla.
Wait until Drumpf names a horse to the Cabinet, then we’ll reevaluate!
Yeah comparing Trump to Caesar or even Sulla is an insult to both characters who are much more successful
The American political landscape has been effectively captured by a small number of disproportionally influental economic oligarchs, and whoever follows Trump into office (whether by legitimate election, party elite infighting, hereditary succession, or military acclamation) will have done so with the tacit consent and support of those oligarchs.
The Republican party has been kidnapped by individuals not understanding why others should have any rights. Everyone different from themselves not surrendering to them is labelled evil.
18 of 27 items on the Bill of Grievances… and I’m not entirely sure we couldn’t raise modern equivalents to those two items about judges and the judiciary.
There’s been no formal investigation into the rumor that Justice Kennedy was paid to retire, but given how easy and how consequence-free it is to bribe a sitting conservative Justice to be sympathetic, it’s probably true.
a side note:
> the ruler… had the Mandate of Heaven… – was divinely ordained and thus any attempt to challenge it was a rebellion against God or the gods.
Interestingly, my understanding of the mandate of heaven (gleaned primarily through Wikipedia, take of that what you will) is that bad leadership could lead to the monarch losing the mandate of heaven – and thus a rebellion against the ruler is worthy and just, instead of being a rebellion against the heavens.
(and if a rebellion succeeded, that was proof that the previous loser had lost the mandate of heaven)
Obviously, that doesn’t detract from your main point (and I especially like how some of the hyperlinks in the list of grievances are literally white house pages) – I just think it’s interesting to contrast that to the western Divine Right of Kings, which does state that rebellion against the crown is divinely forbidden.
That’s also down to historically China being a strong state. With local governors being regularly punished and replaced due to corruption and incompetence, it was philosophically feasible to extend the principle to the Emperor. Just like the Emperor can assign governors and replace them, so is the Emperor assigned and replaceable by the gods.
It’s also not that rebellions weren’t violently put down and their inciters denounced and executed. But there was more of a space in the political framework to consider a rebellion also as systemic issue, down to bad governance unable to address people’s grievance – which then of course reflected on the Emperor.
It should also be mentioned that the divine right of kings was not that old a concept in Europe by the time the revolutions challenged it.
The idea of a “divine right of kings” largely belongs to the Early Modern Era.
Yeah. I don’t have hard data, but it seems to me like the Divine Right of Kings is more of a philosophical gloss on the rising state power and absolutism of the era than a serious proposal for how the world ought to be structured (although of course the connection between kingship and the divine *has* a long tradition around the Mediterranean). I wonder if there had been a less disrupted path for the European concept of monarchy (first having to be reinvented by Augustus and then having to deal with the no-state political situation past the fall of the empire in the west), it might not have arrived at something similar to the Mandate of Heaven, which is basically a compromise between “The ruler is divine” and “The ruler can be shitty and then shouldn’t be ruler any more”. Instead the Divine Right fruits during the Early Modern and gets basically shut down hard by liberalism and constitutionalism.
That remains opposed to the Declaration. The rebels don’t have the inalienable right to rebel, they have to be given the divine favor that the Emperor has carelessly misplaced somewhere. If an Emperor engages in a regime of unrelenting cruelty and degradation but the state nevertheless prospers overall, anyone who objects to the treatment is against heaven itself.
Yeah everytime I see Mandate of Heaven mentioned, it seems more favorable than divine rights but also liberalism whatever. Essentially, the government has to be competent, if not, rebellion is justified.
I get that the message of this essay is mostly political, and do not want to take away from that. However, I want to add something of purely historical interest which I hope is interesting to someone here.
There is in fact an often overlooked precursor to the Declaration of Independence: The Corsican Constitution of 1755, written by the revolutionary leader Pasquale Paoli. It is – to my understanding, it is very difficult to find a complete text in a language I comprehend – a mix of typical italian city state norms and enlightenment ideas. Its preamble also has some interesting similarities to the american version (although the latter is much more fleshed out): It also assumes the right of the nation to liberty and names the pursuit of happiness of the nation as its goal.
I do not mention this to take away from the Declaration of Independence, but to highlight that the radical ideas of the enlightenment were widespread among intellectuals in Europe at the time and probably only needed a competent leader and a sufficiently outraged population to implement. However, while I think the corsican constitution can be called a “predecessor” of the american one, it probably had at best a very limited influence on the founding fathers. The corsican revolution and its leader were very famous at the time and would have been known by the Americans, but I don’t think the actual text was circulated widely.
As a quick addendum: With a bit of further googling, I just learned that the influence of the corsican revolution on the US was not just likely, but certain: Alexander Hamilton was part of a militia named “The Corsicans”, and the Battle of Paoli is named after the Paoli Inn, which was named after the Corsican Leader. The Corsican Revolution was an inspiration for parts of the american independence movement. Whether the Founding Fathers would have had access to the text of the Constitution as well, I do not know.
Not to turn this into a contest, but if we are going to talk about historical precursors, I owe it to my country to remind you all of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_Abjuration which predates the Declaration of Independence by almost two full centuries, yet is similarly built around the idea that a monarch failing to meet his responsibilities towards his governed people is sufficient grounds for rejecting his right to rule them. I am not a historical or legal scholar, so I will happily grant any and all substantial differences between the two, but I do believe some pushback against the usual exceptionalism unfortunately being displayed in Bret’s otherwise well-writted post is in order.
As an aside, personally I have always considered the fate of the Dutch Republic to be a suitable cautionary tale for the USA. Sure, it had a good run for a century or two by the standards of its time — obviously “good” is not meant in a moral sense here, with all the colonialism, slave trade and whatnot. However, when profits and power increasingly come to dominate all other political considerations, nepotism will undermine the effective governance and public institutions upon which the country relies for its successes, at which point some orange lunatic comes along to proclaim himself king and generously enrich himself at the treasury’s expense. (Yes, I am glossing over the Napoleonic era to make this comparison work — please don’t remind me of the worst episode of my country’s history.)
The USA still has a chance to prevent this backslide, otherwise it may end up suffering the same fate as the Netherlands: becoming a Christian nationalist monarchy still going strong for more than two centuries after it usurped the republic on which it was based, where the right-wing conservatives who have been in charge for more than 25 years straight openly speak of the last majority Labour government from 60 years ago as though it were some Latin American socialist military regime. Sadly, unlike in the USA where this future sounds appealing only to a minority, it has solidly entreched itself as the majority position in the Netherlands — the fact that some foreigners still mistakenly perceive us as a liberal paradise speaks to the power of media disinformation. But I digress!
It seems like Donals Trums starting point in life is that he himself should have everything. Be it economic resources, women or political power. At least a younger female relative clamed their family to have created a monster of greed.
I’ll offer up the declaration of Arbroath in Scotland, 1320, as an even earlier statement that the rights of the people of a realm are paramount.
From: https://www.libertarianism.org/articles/freedom-alone-declaration-arbroath-and-limits-power —
“The most unique element of the Declaration lies in its treatment of kingship. The nobles affirm their loyalty to Robert the Bruce—but only conditionally. If he fails in his duty, they will replace him:
‘Yet if he should give up what he has begun, seeking to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we would strive at once to drive him out as our enemy … and make some other man who was able to defend us our king.’
The king is not sacred; he is merely a servant of the people. His legitimacy depends on his ability to defend the freedom of the realm. If he betrays that purpose, he forfeits his right to rule. The power to judge the king lies with the nobles. While this does not amount to democracy or popular sovereignty in the modern sense, the principle is clear: political authority is conditional, not absolute.”
Also see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Arbroath
As a fellow Dutchman, I mostly agree with what you said. That being said, a few remarks:
– I think you’re quite right in considering the Dutch monarchy to be a Christian, nationalist monarchy, in its early decades at least. I do think the 1848 constitution did a lot to constrain the authoritarianism and limit the then-King and succeeding Kings and Queens in a tight harness, ‘the Secret of Noordeinde’ notwithstanding and beyond that, suffrage has altogether increased, if far too slowly and even if it is still far from perfect where the overseas parts of the Kingdom are concerned. The Republic that came before was not much of a bastion of democracy either and I would say the current system is a considerable improvement over it. I will concede that the decades between the establishment of the Kingdom and 1848 represented a considerable democratic backslide.
– I don’t think you can dismiss the Netherlands’ reputation as a liberal paradise (oversold as it is) just by pointing to the continued political dominance of conservative parties. Both are real aspects of the social and political culture. I think Dutch egotism, stubbornness and greed truly exist as well and have (in)formed both our -perceived?- liberalism and our current, IMO unpleasant political landscape. Dutch people in general want to set their own rules, have limited sense of community and a strong sense of ‘f you I got mine’ and suffer much from Dunning-Kruger effect. This has lead to both considerable support for political parties espousing a more or less veiled egotism readily exploited by the business and personal interests behind any conservative party and to a private sphere of considerable size in which people are inclined to do and think as they please, including plenty of non-conservative activities and interests. This has also bred an attitude of ‘what have you done for me lately?’ regarding political parties and thus limited loyalty. The VVD’s electoral success (diminishing as it is!) is, I think, largely because of general inertia and the efficient channelling of general egotism and greed into a political agenda that is worded in passible respectability, allowing plausible deniability of the rank sentiments underneath it. As a VVD-voting in-law of mine worded it ‘the VVD is the most realistic party’. ‘Realistic’ is a dog whistle, in my opinion, for ‘well-off people do not want change because it might hurt their interests’. I would argue that the Netherlands have generally been a merchants’ nation throughout their history and this is still the case.
– Unfortunately, the attitudes of many Dutch people make them highly susceptible to fascistoid political parties, built as those are on ‘getting what you deserve’, ‘take from others what they don’t deserve and you do’ and a general aversion to self-reflection. We have been lucky, so far, that our fascists are divided in several parties and are generally incompetent in-fighters (crippled by Dutch egotism too, arguably) but their total support among the population is frighteningly large. As worldwide, I am sure that established parties’ inability to deliver meaningful change, reform, justice and strong leadership thanks to kowtowing to business interests directly opposed to societal needs is a significant reason for this, as is mediacracy, meaning that politicians consider the media presence and showmanship rather than political grinding a goal, along with media’s desire for spectacle. I am sure that most would happily televise and enthusiastically report on their own literal crucifixion if it came to that. If fascist success in the last decade(s) should have taught politicians anything, it’s that the electorate wants to be given a cause to believe in and can be inspired by politicians wanting to rock the boat and uninterested in playing ball in the media-tuned, anodyne fashion. So far, unfortunately, few politicians have been able to capitalise on that for a worthy cause, not in the least because of entrenched business interests.
– I would consider the House of Orange-Nassau a company itself, profiting from its political and especially cultural role in Dutch society and itself opposed to meaningful change. I am no fan but I do think they have some stabilising role in today’s politically fragmented and unsteady national landscape. Any port in a storm but I’d rather see the port demolished if we ever find ourselves in better meteorological conditions.
I want to point out that the Corsican Republic only lasted for 14 years. Corsica has been part of France since then although some of the Corsicans still object.
There’s also, rather crucially, the English 1688 Declaration of Right and 1689 Bill of Rights that covers very much the same ground that the Declaration of Independence does, in much the same form.
The Enlightenment movement pretty much started with these.
“Patrician Crone” is a particularly creative typo (I assume)
I feel ‘Patrician Crone’ should be a lost story of Discworld, when Granny Weatherwax took over Ankh-Morpork for a weekend.
Worth noting is that almost all of the surviving copies of the Declaration (which was widely printed in the USA – it was designed as one-page ‘broadsheet’ for easy printing) were found later having been very carefully ‘squirreled away’ in well-concealed locations. Those who received a copy knew very well how incendiary it was, and often sought to hide it (eg. between a painting’s backing frame and its canvas, or, very recently, buried amid other uninteresting correspondence).
Isn’t it more becauss it’s literally an incitement to rebel? I imagine every government would try to seize it even (especially) if the content is mostly about a cult or something.
The reason the Declaration targets George III in particular and not Parliament is, as far as I understand it, that the Americans believed that they only had to only separate themselves from George because they did not ever consider themselves subordinate to Parliament in the first place.
> He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation[.]
This grievance and its sub-grievances are about Parliament, which they consider a “jurisdiction foreign to our constitution”. George, of course, had to go along with Parliament’s assertion of authority because if he didn’t, they’d invite some Dutch guy again and he’d be in trouble. But the colonists viewed themselves as his subjects alone.
In the context of the American War of Independence I consider George III mostly a scapegoat.
I’d suggest that Trump has also fulfilled the complaint “He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.”
Trump has fired administrative law judges (especially immigration judges) who rule in ways he doesn’t like.
And he eagerly inherited the court packing project of the republican party.
As opposed to all of the other presidents who appointed people who they didn’t think were sympathetic to the views of their party.
Oh wait…
Administrative law judges are not real judges.
They do useful/necessary things, but are part of the Executive branch, not real judges. That probably should be fixed, but a competent administrator working for the executive is still (proabably) net positive.
And there was no division into separate branches of government in George III’s Great Britain, but the Founders still saw this as an abuse. Administrative law judges still frequently act in a judicial role, and our laws implicitly expect them to do so impartially. Trump has been aggressively firing immigration judges who have granted bail, even though black-letter law requires it.
There definitely was some separation between Parliament and the King. Among things the army was not royal like the navy or later air force.
I don’t think the judiciary was expected to be independent, which is part of why there were juries.
There were distinctions, but they weren’t separated into different branches in the Montesqieuan (or later american) sense. (even though Montesqieu used Britain as an example)
The king had some judicial powers, as did the house of Lords, Parliament had (via the Prime Minister) some executive powers, etc. etc. These functions were not divided into separate branches with separate mandates.
I think Charles de Montesquieu lacked any better example.
Happy Fourth of July. You really deserved a better president for the 250th anniversary.
I think the Founding Fathers would have said he is incompetent, capricious and mean. If not in the “cruel” sense so at least the “small-mined” sense.
Now there’s a low bar indeed.
Yes, I find most leaders of Western democracies more sympathetic than him.
Let’s not forget that DJT is neither a bolt from the blue, nor a volcanic eruption, nor an invasion of extraterrestrials.
America made him president – TWICE. America knew exactly who and what he was no later than January 6th 2021, and they still wanted him to represent them. America got exactly what they wanted.
It is not a question of whether or not America “deserved” to be punched in the face if they’re the ones doing it to themselves. If anyone didn’t deserve this, it was the rest of the world.
I blame it on near-universal gerrymandering.
The Declaration is certainly interesting, rooted as it is in both the Enlightenment and very traditional western European remonstrances. The latter draw on a common notion that ‘peoples’ are a natural form of political unit, entitled to express their ancient rights (see, eg the Declaration of Arbroath), even against a king, with the fiction often being that the king had been misled by his advisers). The stress on universality probably owed something to the fact that the Thirteen Colonies could not claim to be a ‘nation’ in the accepted sense.
OK, this is not *directly* about the Declaration of Independence, but then again, neither is the very first comment in this thread. And it’s not just about the USA alone – ironically enough, it’s partly about Britain, too. But, that said, the things I’m talking about could probably appear in the first place partly thanks to the spread of some of the ideas in the Declaration of Independence, with their emphasis in individual rights and differences, and the implication of free expression and questioning of established norms. And I think it works as a nice little congratulatory note to, among others, the USA, on their birthday.
So, this is a repost of something I posted on a forum a bit over two months ago:
Ever since back when George W. Bush was President of the United States, some of the more annoying or worse-than-annoying right-wingers in some English-speaking countries have loved to talk about what they call “The Anglosphere”, that is, the world’s wealthy English-speaking countries, and how great these countries supposedly are, and how, together, these countries should form an awesome alliance of superiority. Yuk.
Or really “yuk”? Here’s the thing: I think with a few qualifiers, these people do kind of have a point – just not the point they think they have. That is, there really are some things that are great about some of the world’s major English-speaking countries. It’s just that those are mainly the very things that the “Anglosphere” crowd usually *hates* about those countries.
I am, of course, mainly talking about cultural output. Before you groan, no, I don’t mean all those mindless Hollywood blockbusters. I mean the stuff that’s a bit more off the beaten track, but not that difficult to find if you know where to look.
For instance, the better parts of the mid-budget, middling-levels-of-commercial-success stuff that Hollywood used to churn out, though the lines-must-go-up executives seems to have sabotaged it more recently. A whole lot of British TV shows. The somewhat-less-famous-than-the-most-famous popular music.
And books. Books, books, books. The most successful ones are, of course, the more popular novels, and yes, many of them are pretty good. But I myself am more into popular non-fiction, and it’s there that especially the British shine.
More seriously, all the scientific and scholarly work that informs all those great popular non-fiction books. Lots of brilliant, insightful, and sometimes truly world-changing things there.
Yes, the rest of the world has done some cool stuff in these directions, too, but they usually can’t hit the same sweet spot that balances insights, wit, and accessibility as well. The other cultural sphere that I’m fairly familiar with, the German-speaking countries, usually produces things that are either stupid or boring, because until fairly recently there was near-universal agreement here that everything has to be either stupid or boring, and anything that doesn’t want to be stupid has to prove its non-stupid-ness by being as boring as possible.
I mean, all that stuff is a big part of the reason why I’ve spent so much time hanging out here on [name of forum] over the years.
But the snag, and it’s a really, really big snag, is that most of the stuff in question was and is produced by the less repulsive ones of the people of these countries, and those are exactly the people whom the boosters of the “Anglosphere” concept hate with a burning passion. You can argue that this stuff really is something great about the “Anglosphere” – but if it was up to the very people who talk a lot about how much they love the “Anglosphere”, this stuff wouldn’t exist. In the USA, they’ve already to a large extent shut down the production of new things in that vein, and they might still succeed at shutting it down completely. And they might do the same in the UK in the not-too-distant-future.
And then there are the bad and horrible things in the English-speaking countries, too – genocide, discrimination, oppression, imperialism. But those are mostly local variants of things common across the world. The good parts are closer to being unique.
So, long story short, the Anglosphere would, perhaps, really be almost as great as its proponents say it is – if only it wasn’t for those proponents themselves.
loved to talk about what they call “The Anglosphere”, that is, the world’s wealthy English-speaking countries, and how great these countries supposedly are, and how, together, these countries should form an awesome alliance of superiority. Yuk.
For what it’s worth, when I use the term “Anglosphere” it’s meant to include all countries where English is the mother tongue, and where English culture is the dominant cultural influence. So, I would extend it to include the English-speaking Afro-Caribbean countries as well, most of which are middle income rather than “wealthy”. I would definitely not include English speaking countries in South Asia or (most of) Africa though since they/we obviously have our own mother tongues and cultures which predate colonization.
This isn’t unique to the Anglosphere. There’s a German song telling the right wing, “The West does need saving, not by you, but from you!”
Age-restricted so that I would have to sign in? This is getting out of hands.
In any case, I’m reminded of a recent Bluesky post by Cameron Cummins-Smith:
“the circle that nobody can square outside of this website is that Western Civilization is indeed under attack by barbarous hordes, namely MAGA chuds”
https://bsky.app/profile/cameroncorduroy.bsky.social/post/3mphufcaask24
Those “chuds” could be considered barbarians because they don’t reflect over things. They don’t seem to grasp that they even need to.
Maybe this one will work:
Yes, it does. Thank you.
I looked trough my bookshelves for examples I really like. The ones I found were:
¤ “The Dinosaur Heresis” by Bob Bakker.
¤ “Guns, Germs and Steel” and “Collapse” by Jared Diamond.
¤ “Otherlands” by Thomas Halliday.
¤ “Monsters We Met” by Ted Oaks.
¤ “The Blank Slate” by Steven Pinker.
¤ “Big Bang” by Simon Singh.
¤ “Trick or Treatment?” by Simon Singh and Edward Ernst.
¤ “Where is Everybody?” by Stephen Webb.
These are on subjects like the meaning of deep time, the processes of evolution, how we know modern medicine works and the dangers of accumulated environmental problems.
This pretty much applies to any rich liberal democracy – any kind of nationalism rooted in one of these countries and their alleged superiority is borne by people who hate what made these countries rich and developed in the first place: mass education and political empowerment leading to a greater ability and degree of initiative for the population at large to participate and function in an advanced economy, and the best way to do it is through liberal democracy.
Of course you can half-ass this, with mass education without enfranchisement (the USSR, Iran, or China), or you can cheat (petromonarchies), or you can decide empowerment shouldn’t apply to women, or minorities (the South), but this just leads to your economy and cultural influence being worse and more inefficient than what it could do given its size and resources.
Education is woke, and women and minorities having rights is woke, alas
Those are taking literacy for granted and don’t as themselves how it was originally spread.
As a Canadian I do reserve the right to view the Founding Father’s motivations with suspicion (we were shooting at Benedict Arnold before it was cool down south) but even with that in mind I agree the Declaration of Independence was a highly influential document that was revolutionary for its time. For all that I do maintain a certain contempt for most of the Founding Father’s, the Preamble and the Bill of Rights remain to this day a founding set of statements and ideals that have helped build up modern revolutionary liberalism (and leftism whether they like to admit it or not) to their modern day.
@Matthew,
I’d argue with you about the leftism bit, but certainly one can’t disagree that these documents have been immensely influential, for better or worse.
I think more so than the Fourth of July itself, the American victory over the Confederate South is really a moment where liberals and the left can both feel happy and enthusiastic.
You are free to urinate down the backs of the giants whose shoulders you stand on.
The rest of us are free to point out that that’s what you’re doing.
@60guilders,
He’s Canadian, so in a legal sense he’s not actually standing on their shoulders.
But cartographically he is.
Only if you put up the North!
The Declaration should be viewed with suspicion by Canadians, one of the listed grievances is granting Canadians religious toleration for Catholicism and civil rights rather than letting a small clique of Boston merchants rule over the place like the Yankees demanded.
It’s really only fair that the two people who are singled out as enemies besides the King (French Catholics and Indigenous peoples) get to rightly side eye the document alongside the country the US invaded.
Happy Birthday, America!
As the esteemed professor and our host has already stated, the ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence are inspirational and noble ones – however imperfect and however long it takes to apply them fairly to “all men.”
Ultimately, having both lived in the U.S.A. and observed it from afar at different points in my life, I continue to admire Americans for their passion for politics. Unlike many of your neighbours and allies, many Americans really act like they are part of a living political project – a country they can change and improve! I hope that Americans rally behind the ‘angels of your better nature’ in the years to come and bring back some of the Declaration’s noblest intentions.
Most people, even today, still do not believe in the concept of inalienable rights, least of all in the United States of America: Rather, an individual’s set of rights are contingent on their willingness and ability to conform to a social hierarchy that – depending on their economic and social status, race, sexuality, and ability to conform, will place them in a spot appropriate to their nature and inherent merit as a human being.
You still should not treat those lower down in the hierarch as if they existed only to be exploited by you. To this day people die as consequence of such views and attitudes of others:
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/Why-millennia-old-ideas-still-matter#wbb1
I mean it’s entirely a fiction. A useful fiction maybe, but it has to manifested by an authority which make it very alienable.
I find intrinsical superiority a meaningless concept.
First, I loved this post! Thank you for this information, some of which I didn’t know about.
I decided to post this comment building on your transcription of the “Bill of Grievances”, as multiple grievances were focused on…Canada! America sometimes forgets that Canada exists – or, worse, dimly remembers that Canada exists and decides, once again, that *maybe it shouldn’t* (gulp). But from a Canadian perspective, the ‘Rebels’ were most offended by the emerging British North American compromise effected under King George III’s parliament. Yes, many Americans were guided by Enlightenment principles, republicanism, and a belief that they could create a more just state. But on the ground, many Americans also rebelled so they could continue the military and religious project of seizing control of all of North America – slaughtering or converting any “Indians” and “Catholics” in their way.
(1) Treaty of Paris: The Americans could only rebel after the end of the Seven Years War and the Treaty of Paris, when France lost most of their North American colonies. Before that, the ‘French and Indians’ were America’s mortal enemies. To rebel before then would lose British military and financial support and risk defeat by the ‘French and Indians.’ But once the U.K. had defeated France in the Seven Years War, the British had to get a grip on their fractious and violent colonial frontier. They decided to compromise and the Americans – used to treating the frontier as an opportunity for acquiring land, military glory, and employment/corruption – were furious.
(2) The Royal Proclamation of 1763: The U.K. promulgated a royal decree that, to simplify greatly, banned unregulated European settlement past the existing colonial frontier. It recognized Native Americans as royal subjects with legal protections, required European settlers to lawfully purchase Indigenous land (under royal authority), and if they had not they had to leave. It was going to divide North America (at the time) into the Thirteen Colonies in the south east, New France in the north east, and “Indian Reservations” to the west. In short, it was going to cut American out of the lucrative colonial project of conquering the Ohio Valley, including veterans of the French and Indian Wars like George Washington.
In the Declaration, it’s written as: “He [King George III] has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States […] refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”
In other words, King George was making it harder to take new lands. You can see the original proclamation line on Wikipedia (and how “limited” the Americans would have been): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Proclamation_of_1763
While the Royal Proclamation is still part of historical Canadian law and established Native American land title, the Americans would reject the proclamation utterly and rapidly conquer the Ohio Valley.
(3) The Quebec Act of 1774: Americans had been eager participants in the British attacks on New France and were looking forward to colonizing the northeast. Once the U.K. decided to compromise with their new French subjects, the Americans were, again, cut out and furious. In the Quebec Act, Britain turned New France into the Province of Quebec and granted freedom of religion and refused to overturn French Civil Law.
In the Declaration, it’s written as: “For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies.”
Quebec would have included what is now Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, and others. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_Act#/media/File:British_colonies_1763-76_shepherd1923.PNG
Americans who were eager to reap the spoils of victory after the Seven Years War and homestead in the region were, perhaps understandably, outraged. While the rebels would prevent this ‘imposition’ of supposed arbitrary and absolute rule in America, today the province of Quebec is still the only jurisdiction in North America that uses French and Civil Law and has a unique (and fractious) place in Canada’s constitutional and political confederation.
So, ultimately, a powerful and wealthy group of American founders were motivated to reject King George’s attempts at establishing a stable British North America with room for Native Americans, French, and English peoples. Instead, many Americans wanted the “freedom” to conquer and expand without restraint, reason, or justice for the original inhabitants. After the American Revolution, Americans would would pour over the proclamation line into Ohio and then continue to spread west leading to later genocidal campaigns like the Trail of Tears. America would invade Quebec in 1775 and their blatant anti-Catholicism is probably the only reason British Canada survived, by welding Britain’s new Canadian subjects tightly to the Crown and forcing them to help fight off the Americans. America would try again in 1812, and consider annexing Canada repeatedly right up until WWII.
And now here we are in 2026. Trump and his regime have once again realized Canada exists and continues to prevent the final completion of manifest destiny–one flag and one country from coast to coast to coast. Canada’s bill of grievances continues to grow, from unjust tariffs to usurpations of our laws and rank insults. Canadians can only hope that the better angels of America’s nature prevail, that America remembers that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” – and that Canadians have rejected being governed by America for centuries. Canadians seem to be saying the same thing as Americans in the conclusion of the Declaration: “We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.”
Good you explain the Canadian point of view. I also want to point out what Peter Singer calls “the expanding circle”. What I mean is people’s historically growing tendency care about more and more of their fellow beings. The Founding Fathers may not have cared about the entire humanity. Still, I don’t think they despised Roman Catholics to the point of denying them any rights whatsoever.
I think the US Declaration of Independence skips one of the most important steps. It explains why king George fails to be a good king, but it doesn’t justify the abolishment of kingship altogether.
For example, the Dutch Act of Abjuration from 1581 reads: “And the subjects are not created by God to serve the needs of the prince, to be subservient to him in all that he commands, whether godly or ungodly, just or injust, and serve as slaves; but the prince [was created] for the sake of the subjects, without which he would not be prince[.]” “And when he doesn’t act as such, but instead of protecting his subjects, he seeks to oppress and overburden them, and take away their ancient liberties and privileges, and to command and use them as slaves, he must be considered not to be a prince, but a tyrant, and by right and reason, especially by deliberation of the estates of the land, he may no longer be recognised as prince, but be abjurated and another may be chosen in his stead to serve as head.”
And that last part actually happens later in the document, it appoints the duke of Anjou as the new prince. The Northern Netherlands only became a republic by accident when nobody could be found to succeed Anjou after his death. Rhetorically, I think the 1581 Act of Abjuration and the 1776 Declaration of Independence are remarkably similar, but one of the key differences is that the Act speaks of a ‘prince’, while the Declaration uses the broader word ‘government’. And then it assumes that a republican government is just as valid as a monarchical without really explaining why.
I think our host oversells the novelty of the Declaration of Independence in some important ways. The theory that subjects had a right to remove their king if he violated norms of good kingship had a long history by that time. During the investiture controversy, it was argued that Henry IV had become a tyrant and so the Saxon aristocracy no longer owed him obedience. In 1128 the nobles and cities of Flanders decided to replace their count, saying that the subjects, not the suzerain king of France, had this authority. From 1356 onward, the dukes of Brabant all had to swear an oath with 34 articles which ended with the remark that if they ever violated any article, their subjects owed them no allegiance until the grievances have been redressed; and the Brabantines did expell their duke for a while in 1420-1421. Arlette Jouanna has written a book called Le Devoir de Revolte, in which she argued that the nobility in 16th and 17th century France felt a ‘duty’ to revolt against a king who acted against the public weal and violated ‘fundamental laws of the kingdom’. The universality and individualism of the US Declaration of Independence is perhaps less of a foundation and more of a cherry on top of a theory of resistance that had been in development for centuries, and that may have owed more to relationships between lieges and their vassals than we like to admit.
I think that was intentional.
In 1776, the Colonies hadn’t yet decided whether they wanted a Republic, or a local king. Several prominent Americans (e.g. Nicola, Gorham, Hamilton) wanted the US to return to monarchy, just under a different ruler.
It wasn’t until a decade later, during the Constitutional Convention, that it was decided exactly what kind of executive the Americans wanted in place.
When Benjamin Franklin was asked if the country was going to be a monarchy or a republic he answered:
“A republic, if we can keep it.”
He probably thought of all the past attempts to create a republic which head of state had later become hereditary.
The lesson here is that we should always elect elderly eunuch (/childless) as the first president. Works for Washington, Lenin, and Mao.
Mao Zedong is known to have had ten children. That his position as head of state did not became hereditary probably had more to do with Yuan Shikai’s failed attempt to make himself emperor.
@Lena as far as I read the wiki, seems like Mao Anying is always the only available son left, but then he’s killed in Korean War. This is just like Augustus which did have sons but none when he died.
At least one son named Anquing survived him but he is claimed to have been mentally ill.
Thanks for the reply, that’s something I didn’t know! (and something nobody ever mentions, I wonder why…)
While the Constitution established the office of “president of the United States” in 1787, what formal terms of address to use for said president were left open; during his term as first Vice President, as part of a congressional committee on the subject, John Adams advocated for titles like “Highness” and “Majesty” (as well as “Protector of Their [the United States’] Liberties”) before “Mr. President” was eventually agreed upon.
Comparing anything Trump has done to King George III & Parliament is false equivalency. For one thing, Trump has a mandate from half the country, while the Colonies famously had “taxation without representation”.
Moreover, the founding documents are the Declaration and Constitution, as you said, not the Civil Rights Act of 1964. What is described as “American values and ideas” has only really been prevalent for 60 years, and a very different principle reigned before that.
To explain, America is built on two different pillars: the liberal republic (as described here), and the WASP ethnostate. Thing is, there’s an inherent tension between them, where one has to dominate over the other — either you can have a WASP ethnostate and a circumscribed liberal republic with limited rights, or you can embrace the liberal republic, and let blood & soil be historical baggage. At first, the WASP ethnostate reigned supreme, despite the radical liberalism of the Constitution, which in practice was only for WASP men who owned property. The shift began with Union victory in the Civil War, but it would take another century for this process to fully play out, and be completed by Civil Rights in the 1960s.
So yes, originally America was a nation of blood & soil for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, ie the founding stock of the 13 colonies. So much so, that anyone who differed from this founding stock faced discrimination, including whites who were the wrong kind of white (like my family was). The claim that there was no dominant ethnic group in American history is absurdity — if you accept that premise, our history becomes incoherent. It’s only with the understanding of the two pillars, WASP blood & soil versus the liberal republic, and the balance of power between them, that all this starts making sense. And yes, Trump represents a resurgence of the pillar of the WASP nation, previously thought defeated, but is showing surprising resiliency.
Happy 250th!
Oh, I’d say by now, the WASP ethnostate aspect has almost entirely morphed into a generic white ethnostate aspect. Besides, the kleptocratic and personality-cult and personal autocracy aspects of Trump’s rule go against even what the pre-1960s USA traditionally claimed to stand for.
Good point! In this context I can’t help wondering how many percent of the current American population can trace their biological ancestry to anyone living in the thirteen colonies at the time of their independence. Not that biological ancestry matters to me but it would give and interesting perspective.
Thank you! It might depend very heavily on whether you count *some part* of the ancestry, or *a significant part* (by whatever standard) of the ancestry, or *most* of the ancestry, or *the overwhelming majority* of the ancestry.
@Raphael,
Yes, America outside of some religious groups and immigrant minorities is an unusually exogamous culture (maybe England and other Anglosphere states are similar, I don’t know). So, after a couple of decades “who is ancestrally descended from whom” becomes hopelessly complicated, and in practice the only thing to do is usually just to throw up your hands and let people identify with whatever aspect of their ancestry they choose (Irish, English, Finnish, Portuguese, whatever else as the case may be).
@Raphael,
I guess some European immigrant groups like the Finnish-Americans might actually be less exogamous than most, but that would be because they live in relatively remote and sparsely populated parts of the country (northern MN and Upper Peninsula of MI). Outside of where there are clear geographic or religious barriers, and outside of immigrant groups like South Asians where we have strong traditions of endogamy, yes, American patterns of ancestry get hopelessly tangled up pretty quickly.
The Finnish-Americans would actually benefit genetically from more exogamy. The Finnish people of Europe are measurably inbred as a whole. They have an overrepresentation of hereditary diseases despite cousin marriage being taboo.
There is some truth to this, along with historical precedent — the 1790 Naturalization Act defined citizens as “free white persons of good character”. That, combined with the Declaration’s reference to the “consanguinity” of England & America, provide strong evidence for my claims. Still, the influence of WASPs and their cultural norms should not be understated, and are still with us. In fact, the historical melting pot was not about diversity or multiculturalism, but assimilation to WASP norms.
“Oh, I’d say by now, the WASP ethnostate aspect has almost entirely morphed into a generic white ethnostate aspect.”
It had to. German-American was one of the largest ethnic groups in the USA until fairly recently–the area I grew up in didn’t start speaking English until WWII–and it’s pretty hard to get a bunch of Roman Catholic Germans to fit three out of four of those letters. Some got two out of three (Protestants), but…well, not many Anglosaxons lived in that region.
Today you’d be hard-pressed to differentiate between those of Anglosaxon background and those of, say, German or Irish or Italian or French or Lithuanian or Dutch. I know a few people with Korean ancestry (not too far back, either–living memory) that racists have routinely mistaken for pureblood whites (they think it’s hilarious and a demonstration of the stupidity of the whole thing). There are others with a list of backgrounds as long as my arm–that list I provided earlier in this paragraph comes from one family I know, who traces their ancestry to all of those groups.
Pretty much in order to survive the whole thing had to morph into a generic white ethnostate concept. It’s simply not possible for one race within Britain (I know the Anglos and Saxons came from Germania, but we think of them as British for a reason) to dominate the culture. The ship had sailed long before, and was totally irretrievable after JFK (Irish Catholic) got elected.
The idea has been firmly tied to that of Christian Nationalism as well. To the extent that I frequently see the Christian Nationalist flag. My kids’ school allowed them a field trip to a rodeo last year and they openly paraded the Christian Nationalist flag next to Old Glory–and you can guess how many black people were involved in that ceremony.
“Originally”? The Iroquois, Sioux, Mohawk, Cherokee, Akikara, Apache, Seminole, and Ute, among several hundred others, would like a word with you about “originally”.
The US did in fact originate as an extension of Western Europe into the Americas. And yes, Western expansion displaced and dispossessed the First Nations, who fought valiantly against their fate. Of course, that’s par for the course historically, and it wasn’t that simple — many native tribes sided with the British (in 1776 and 1812), others allied with us. Surely they’ve had some influence on the US, but far less than in Latin America, where a much greater proportion of Native American culture survived and was absorbed.
Yes, we took their land, but we also built up a nation and a world power. It’s possible to understand the positives and negatives of history without self-flagellation.
Mesoamerica and the Central Andes were more densely populated before being conquered by Spain. I think the Mound Builders were the last group of state societies to develop in the Americas because their indigenous crops had so low productivity. People there could not become fully agrarian until better crops had spread there from Mesoamerica.
It could also be argued that America before and after the civil war is an entirely different state.
If so the difference lies in the balance of power between the country’s government and its highest administrative subdivisions.
…”one is regularly shocked by how little the average American citizen understands about how their government functioned or what the ideals of the framers were…”
There are two groups of people in the United States that can be required to study American Government: Persons born outside the United States who are seeking citizenship, and minor children. If you have the right to vote, you *cannot* be compelled by law to learn about the government you are responsible for shaping.
‡Study of certain topics can be part of a plea deal or criminal sentence, and Texas alone of the states does on paper allow parents of 18-year-olds without diplomas to force their children to attend school.
Blood and soil are not something that can just be dictated by some documents or governments. American colonists, following the “ideas and values” of free land grabbing, the took blood and soil from the native Americans – who did not have any Constitution nor Declaration to claim their soil, but still fought for it. The ‘heritage Americans’ have the same mindset toward their soil.
If the government should follow the will of the people, the questions are what is the will of American people, and is that will strong enough to challenge their government.
“If the government should follow the will of the people, the questions are what is the will of American people, and is that will strong enough to challenge their government.”
As I posted a while ago, on the issue of “the people”, and their “will”, I basically agree with the fictional character Sam Vimes:
“There were plotters, there was no doubt about it. Some had been ordinary people who’d had enough. Some were young people with no money who objected to the fact that the world was run by old people who were rich. Some were in it to get girls. And some had been idiots as mad as Swing, with a view of the world just as rigid and unreal, who were on the side of what they called “The People.” Vimes had spent his life on the streets, and had met decent men, and fools, and people who’d steal a penny from a blind beggar, and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he’d never met The People.”
My experience it that individuals strongly identifying with a group tending to be unrepresentative for that very group.
I realize this is only tangentially related to the topic of this post, but one thing that struck me reading War in Human Civilization was how Gat talks about liberal democracy. According to him, the full suffrage liberal democies that emerged in the early 20th century were a genuinely new form of government, and represented almost as much of a break from the liberal (but not particularly democratic) goverments that preceded them as the fascist and communist regimes that emerged around the same time.
I’m curious how common a view this is among historians. The view you present here — that, i.e. the extension of the franchise to a larger and larger share of the population represented the fulfillment of liberal that had previously been only imperfectly realized — was the one I was familiar with from school. However, if Gat is correct, then that extension represented something genuinely new, and perhaps even more radical than the revolutions of the previous two centuries.
Representative democracy where most adult members of all genders have the right to vote is something genuinely new. But it is the combination being new and not its constituent parts.
if that seems normal to us, it was not normal at the time and indeed is not normal now: most countries are not operated with the notion that anyone has unalienable rights (a reminder that at no point in human history have a majority of countries been anywhere remotely close to free).
Without expressing my own normative preferences here, I do wonder how much of the popular appeal of liberalism today is bound up in the fact that America is the most powerful country in the world (and that England, France, etc. are major Great Powers too), and how much it will fade once China is unquestionably the most important country in the world (which looks at this point like it will inevitably happen).
My instinct would be to say “most of it” to both questions, but i guess we’ll get to see in the medium term.
That liberal “democratic” countries (and China) are the economic powerhouses of the world, but it does not seem like people are clamoring to move to China.
Tbf China’s hand is already full for uplifting its own citizen let alone any newcomers. Who needs immigrants when you still have lots of poor rural citizens moving to cities.
Equating not allowing tens of millions of illegal immigrants into one of the largest countries in the world (especially considering modern social programs that had no historical precedent in America back then) with George banning the extension of colonists past certain lines and hailing from certain places is so comically silly.
Thanks for taking July 4th to preach complete straw-men of your enemies. Sometimes I enjoy your commentary about modern politics, but the reality of your echo chamber reveals itself when the Orange Demon comes up.
I am only glad those who wish to destroy my way of life are as incompetent at debate or logic as my own side, otherwise we would be in a loooooot of trouble.
Happy July 4th nonetheless!
Who is wishing to destroy your way of life, and in which ways, exactly?
As far as I can tell, my side of politics, that is, the people whom you apparently mean by those who you say wish to destroy your way of life, except for some fringe idiots, just wants all kinds of ways of life to be available to people as choices. You know, the freedom thing. If your way of life is an attractive way of life which enough people really want to follow, then that way of life should have no problems surviving in an environment in which there are many different ways of life between which people can choose.
There is the specifically American-originated myth that “the others” earn from everything harming “one’s own”:
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/Heritage-of-slavery#wbb1
(Sigh) Thing is, I don’t think your side *wants* to destroy America.
I just think that your tendencies inevitably lead to it. Embracing identitarianism as long as it turns the previous “straight white rich Christian man good, everyone else varying degrees of bad” hierarchy on its head, the failures to actually enforce the rule of law, a weird and bizarre obsession with associating things that lead to economic and personal success with “whiteness” rather than universalizing them, refusing to boot the “no borders, no wall, no USA at all” crowd, treating things Trump does as “unprecedented” even though Eisenhower did then, and treating SCOTUS like it’s illegitimate the moment it stops being a vehicle for progressivism.
And I get that y’all don’t see it this way. You think you’re righting generational wrongs, helping oppressed people, and fighting evil tyrants. But the thing is…you’re not.
It doesn’t help anyone to let violent criminals out on the streets. It doesn’t help immigrant communities when law enforcement doesn’t turn offenders who are illegal aliens over to ICE. It doesn’t help minorities to link habits that lead to success to race and to treat carelessness as an immutable characteristic. It doesn’t further the rule of law when judges bend the wording of the law like a pretzel to get the outcomes they want.
“It doesn’t help anyone to let violent criminals out on the streets.”
No, but you are assuming equal enforcement under the law. Which very much isn’t.
“It doesn’t help immigrant communities when law enforcement doesn’t turn offenders who are illegal aliens over to ICE.”
a) They’re not ‘illegal aliens’, they’re human beings who may have committed a civil violation. b) it very much hurts immigrant communities when “law enforcement” raids their neighborhood, even their homes, looking to arrest someone they care about and care for and who has been contributing to the community.
“It doesn’t help minorities to link habits that lead to success to race and to treat carelessness as an immutable characteristic.”
Da fuk? Citizens commit violent and property crimes at much greater rates than immigrants. If there’s anyone linking habits to success it’s the citizens, and ‘carelessness as an immutable characteristic’? Sounds like that particular accusation is a confession.
“ It doesn’t further the rule of law when judges bend the wording of the law like a pretzel to get the outcomes they want.”
That I will agree with you upon. But it’s not the immigrants twisting the law to wreck the place – it’s the nativists.
I think the type of immigrants the US attracts today are mainly the honest hard-working ones.
“No, but you are assuming equal enforcement under the law. Which very much isn’t.”
Assuming what you’re saying is true to a meaningful degree, that says we need stricter enforcement for those who are favored, not leniency for the disfavored.
“a) They’re not ‘illegal aliens’, they’re human beings who may have committed a civil violation. b) it very much hurts immigrant communities when “law enforcement” raids their neighborhood, even their homes, looking to arrest someone they care about and care for and who has been contributing to the community.”
A. Don’t play word games; B. Go back and re-read what I wrote. I wasn’t talking about people picked up for immigration violations, I was talking about people who committed another offense–like, say, assault or battery–and happened to be illegally present in the United States when they did so.
“Da fuk? Citizens commit violent and property crimes at much greater rates than immigrants.”
That you automatically assumed I was talking about immigrants is a confession.
“Sounds like that particular accusation is a confession.”
(Yawn) Given that I believe that anyone, regardless of race, can learn to be conscientious, I find myself completely unmoved by this accusation.
“That I will agree with you upon. But it’s not the immigrants twisting the law to wreck the place – it’s the nativists.”
Who says I’m just talking about immigration?
Even if we assume for a moment that your description of what’s happening would be accurate, I still don’t see how any of that endangers your, or Oswald Rabbit’s, way of life. How does anything on your list make it impossible to live life the way you want?
“Embracing identitarianism as long as it turns the previous “straight white rich Christian man good, everyone else varying degrees of bad” hierarchy on its head,”
Yeah, that’s one part of current left-wing attitudes that annoys me myself. I’ll note, however, that the people who buy into that stuff mostly aren’t able to do much about their beliefs in that direction aside from shitposting. Under Trump and his larger movements, the people who still very much believe in the old hierarchy of “straight white rich Christian man good, everyone else varying degrees of bad” are able to act very decisively on their beliefs.
“the failures to actually enforce the rule of law”
Some of that on the Left, a lot more, and more explicitly promoted, on the right-wing. The MAGA movement is effectively opposed to anyone in good standing with the MAGA movement ever getting into any serious legal trouble, no matter how many laws they break.
“a weird and bizarre obsession with associating things that lead to economic and personal success with “whiteness” rather than universalizing them”
OK, I’ll assume, because that’s the only way I can make sense of your statement, that you mean the folks in the loopier fringes of academia who call all kinds of things that are useful in life “white supremacy culture”, without even trying to prove their claims in any way. Yeah, they’re idiots. But I don’t see how they keep you from living life the way you want. Neither do I see how they are anywhere near real political or cultural influence.
Besides, I don’t accept your underlying assumption that the things in question “lead to economic and personal success”. As far as I can see the main four things that lead to “economic success” are
1) starting out in a very good position – even people whose political views aren’t left-wing often acknowledge the wisdom of the statement “It takes money to make money”;
2) having the right connections – even people whose political views aren’t left-wing often acknowledge the wisdom of the statement “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”;
3) plain dumb luck – look at the life stories of all too many people who ended up “economically successful”, and you’ll find that many of them owe a lot to having been in the right place at the right time; and
4) a complete or mostly complete lack of a functioning sense of right and wrong – very few people outside the entertainment industry manage it to become very “economically successful” while staying morally and ethically clean, and the entertainment industry has its share of horrific stuff, too.
Out of these four, only the first two are, in the world as it currently exists, connected to white people. The other two can be found anywhere.
“refusing to boot the “no borders, no wall, no USA at all” crowd,”
How should that crowd be “booted”? By waving a magic wand?
“treating things Trump does as “unprecedented” even though Eisenhower did then,”
OK, you might have a point when it comes to immigration. But as for other things Trump did, well…
How often did Eisenhower state that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing any support?
How often did Eisenhower side with a country with a long record of hostility to the United States against a smaller country which that country had invaded?
How much support did Eisenhower get from people who used the most advanced technological methods their time offered for creating and spreading images to create and spread images showing his, or their own, opponents in gas chambers?
How often did Eisenhower, during his post-presidency, state that the Constitution of the United States should be suspended in order to reinstall him as President?
How often did Eisenhower get himself photographed with a man who later turned out to be a serial child rapist, with both of them, in the photo, showing poses that indicate they were clearly good friends?
How many people who, as prosecutors, had gotten serial child rapists sweetheart deals did Eisenhower appoint to cabinet positions?
How many people who had been credibly accused of sexually trafficking underage girls, all while promoting an ideology that effectively states that it’s OK to do so, did Eisenhower get out of jail?
How often did Eisenhower tells his followers to try to interrupt a major US constitutional procedure, and was obeyed?
How often did Eisenhower’s supporters try to murder hundreds of people in the capital, and Capitol, of the United States, failing only because the people whom they targeted had better luck than them?
How often did Eisenhower accept planes gifted by despotic monarchic governments in other countries?
How much richer did Eisenhower personally, and his close relatives, get during his presidency?
How often did Eisenhower, while he was President, sue the US Government for damages, and then have his own appointees in said US Government agree to a settlement?
How many people did Eisenhower appoint to cabinet posts because they had made a good impression on him as hosts of or contributors to TV shows he liked to watch?
“and treating SCOTUS like it’s illegitimate the moment it stops being a vehicle for progressivism.”
I can only speak for myself, but my main problem with it right now is that it makes legal rules out of thin air, like a completely non-existing standard that presidents or former presidents can’t be prosecuted.
“It doesn’t help anyone to let violent criminals out on the streets.”
Completely agree, and, as it happens, that’s probably my own personal biggest disagreement with the Left. That means, however, that I see Trump’s pardons for large numbers of members of an almost successful would-be lynch mob as one of the reasons why it’s so important to oppose him and the larger political movement he belongs to.
“It doesn’t help minorities to link habits that lead to success to race and to treat carelessness as an immutable characteristic.”
Which is precisely what the MAGA movement is doing.
“It doesn’t further the rule of law when judges bend the wording of the law like a pretzel to get the outcomes they want.”
Which is precisely what conservative judges are doing. Except when, occasionally, they don’t even bother bending words like pretzels, and just make words up out of thin air.
Dwight Eisenhower may have been incompetent but he at least realised it himself. Moreover, he was not driven by unmitigated greed for money, gals and political power.
I don’t think “a complete or mostly complete lack of a functioning sense of right and wrong” necessarily has with economic success to do. To me it seems more likely that methods for keeping the rich responsible have stopped to work in the US. Which has resulted in them growing unused to being kept responsible.
You get a serious response here, although I have to condense things a bit, and I may get things out of order. If so, I apologize:
1. Regarding the degree of influence of the crazies, please note that ideas that start with fringe academic wackos tend to leak into broader society–and you’re seeing that happen with things like the recent New York primaries. I also don’t think your side can get rid of those wackos with a magic wand–I would just like it if you would do with them whatever you want the right to do with the white supremacists.
2. Regarding Eisenhower, I should have been more clear–I was referring to deploying troops internally within the United States. I, too, happen to think that Eisenhower was a much better person and president than Trump.
3. Regarding January 6 and the rule of law, many of the pardons should not have been given out and Ashley Babbitt was a good shoot. Also, there were a lot of people who should have been prosecuted for, at most, trespassing. And there’s the issue of a double standard in how, forex, the rioters of summer 2020 got handled, at least in the courts.
4. As to economics, I think we might be talking past each other. I’m not talking about getting rich, I’m talking about being able to support yourself and your family. That is quite attainable without having to compromise one’s morals.
5. As to how all of this prevents people like me from living the lives they want–it really doesn’t. I have money, and so can insulate myself from most of the consequences of misgovernance. But it does prevent other people, many of whom do not, in fact, share my identity characteristics, from doing so. I have a problem with that.
There will always be weirdoes as well as other people using their weird ideas as excuse for egocentricity.
Ibram X. Kendi was an irrelevant distraction for the Internet-going public and a useful boogeyman for the right wing. The left-wingers that followed his every word are now trying to undermine the No Kings Protests and Minnesota Anti-ICE Protests *against Trump* and have proven that they’d rather have a ‘Red-Brown Alliance’ with your sort of folk than actually resist Trump.
Where does the “tens of millions” number comes from? You are sounding too much like European Fascists greatly overestimating immigration of non-Wites to their countries.
“Equating not allowing tens of millions of illegal immigrants into one of the largest countries in the world (especially considering modern social programs that had no historical precedent in America back then) with George banning the extension of colonists past certain lines and hailing from certain places is so comically silly. ”
I agree. Modern-day immigrants are way less violent to the existing population than the colonists were to the Native Americans.
This because they don’t come as conquerors whatever xenophobes may claim. I have read about xenophobes believing recent immigrants to make it into a system to physically attack members of the pre-existing population. What they would earn from that has never been explained to me.
So maybe our host shouldn’t use a pro-conqueror document to support the pro-immigrant cause.
That is not the equivalence. George III interfered with immigration to the Colonies, regardless of which parts of the Colonies those immigrants would have lived in. That has clear echoes in the current Administrations actions today, declaring people who have chosen to settle in and build these United States to be ‘illegal’ and “poison” in the nation’s “blood.” The values that created my country do not allow for the concept of an “illegal immigrant” and anyone who can think otherwise has no American way of life to protect. Take your cowardice back to that “death by slow fire at the stake” that drove all of the peoples of the world to these charnel shores.
Coming from someone who is terrified of inanimate objects, accusing someone of cowardice is truly rich.
*I’m* not afraid of guns, if that’s what you’re referring to with him.
I am afraid of guns being used against me, though?
I would guess I have an above-average fear of cyborgs, but I don’t know where you’re getting the inanimate object thing.
“The values that created my country do not allow for the concept of an “illegal immigrant” and anyone who can think otherwise has no American way of life to protect.”
Also, really? You think we should let literally anyone in who wants in? I sincerely doubt that is so–forex, suppose someone wanted in who had been a member of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, which thought the apartheid regime in South Africa wasn’t racist enough. I think both you and I would say we have quite enough of that sort here, no thank you, find somewhere else.
Yeah, why not? We can walk and chew gum at the same time. If somebody arrives with nefarious intent, we can simply deploy the resources we already use to deal with local-born villains; nothing is gained by having two parallel sets of laws and their enforcement, and indeed the most common real effect of deportation is that someone gets away unpunished for a crime.
In the naughts I met a very old man who had served on the Eastern Front as a combat engineer, he was quite upset about Bush, who he saw as a second Hitler, and he had come to America to escape the society that made him serve the first Hitler. Coming to America wasn’t a reward for or absolution for being a Nazi, it was liberation, and if he had done things in the war that were out of bounds there are few places he could have moved to where that would have been more likely to catch up with him.
Countries need people who want to be their citizens. It may be the case right now that more people who want to be Americans (in the sense of loving the values that make America be America) are living outside the US than inside it, but the solution to that is obviously not to stop people from becoming Americans.
This comment, shorter: “Despite fervently believing that America is a creedal nation, I am totally fine with bringing in more people who don’t believe in the creed and have no intention of adopting it.”
This makes no sense whatsoever.
Well g, you and I do disagree about the creed in question, so that’s going to make it hard for you to understand my point anyway, but your summary is a misrepresentation. I think becoming part of a society that lives up to American values changes a person for the better. That’s a virtuous cycle that should be done as much as possible.
As an intellectual, you probably ascribe to the belief that when people encounter ideas in tension, they consider those ideas and make decisions about what thoughts to keep and what to discard. Intellectuals tend to believe this in spite of the fact that it does not match how people actually work, including themselves. People rarely make up their minds; instead they assimilate expectations from their milieu, proxy decision-making to others, and self-medicate/self-soothe for the unresolved tension of contradictory ideals. This is what happens to immigrants too, they bring their values and gain more values, occasionally they lose some values but mostly they just lose sleep, and they have kids that aren’t alright in exactly the ways that all American kids aren’t alright.
You would? Neat. I doubt Trump or MAGA would – I would expect them to invite these “fine fellows” with open arms.
The thing is, “The values that created” your country were created without considering the opinions of the native Americans – who didn’t like the idea of European colonists keep migrating westward. So how can you be so sure that this idea are agreed by all American nowadays? Or some 18th century ideas (which including no voting for women and non-whites) are so sacred that all modern America must obey them now?
You can never get 100% of a group agree on anything. Human minds vary too much for that.
but the reality of your echo chamber reveals itself when the Orange Demon comes up.
The fact that most of us dislike the Orange Demon doesn’t make this an echo chamber. We might dislike him for very different reasons and from very different perspectives.
Good you pointed out there are many different reasons for disliking Donald Trump.
So… this guy left before he can defend his indefensible assumptions?
This was definitely a “spending your reputational capital” post, but I respect that you’re trying to distinguish between America and Trump, who is probably a would-be tyrant–though I will note that his most egregious attempts at being so have been, generally, scotched by the courts and the legislature. The government is working fine.
That having been said, I must question, at bare minimum, the number of these grievances that are unique to Trump. Forex, anyone remember the Obama drone strikes that hit American citizens? No warrants, no trials, just boom, done. To put it bluntly, Trump is a culmination of an executive branch that has accumulated far too much power over the past several decades and that no one has pruned back because they’re positively salivating over the prospect of using said power to support their friends and destroy their enemies.
(I will also point out that ICE’s hiring problems aren’t unique, unfortunately–every dramatic expansion of a federal agency leads to a massive plunge in the hiring quality. TSA is still dealing with the problem children they got as the consequences of their post-9/11 expansion, and I suspect that had the (probably necessary–the amount of tax fraud that goes on in America is insane, and a good chunk of the reason for our upcoming fiscal crisis) expansion of the IRS under Biden gone through as planned there would have been…issues.)
Prior to Obama, strikes that might have killed American citizens were not reviewed by the President, but authorized at bureaucratic level. It is reprehensible that America started those wars in the first place, but Obama adding a personal review step to some parts of an ongoing war is an increase in accountability. The war was a crime from start to finish, in absolute terms the Obama drone war was vile, but as a replacement for the Battle of Fallujah shit we were doing when he took over, only a dishonest observer could deny it was step in the right direction.
You said it well.
I’ll take “things we both know you wouldn’t be saying about ICE if Trump were personally reviewing deportation orders” for $400, Alex.
Get real.
The way that you see my mind really boggles me. Are you a solipsist? Of course I would prefer individual Presidential review of ICE deportations over the current practice of delegating that authority to the non-appointed level of the bureaucracy. Obama took the moral and political burden of those killings on himself. If Trump were capable of equivalently taking responsibility on deportations, that would make him a better President. And I would prefer that he were a better President, it sucks for everyone that he sucks.
What a thing to spend your reputation on… Where have you been this past decade and a half?
You’ve got a social obligation not to spread this kind of “patriotic” nonsense around. It’s dangerous, practically negligent at this point. Try to do better, for your own sake if nothing else.
Then please disprove what he said in your own blog?
And don’t think we have not noticed how vague you are in your bullying. What next? Another attempt to bully Will Stancil on Bluesky only to fail?
Will Stancil?
Anyway, I’m not sure which part of pointing out that all “American patriotism” whistles whitely (and will be remembered as such) is “vague.”
Safe is better than sorry, is the only acceptable lesson these days.
Ah, yes, because a positive movement can be built on the belief that America was always a damned country and that it is *uniquely* evil.
I’m not even white myself, but are you actually running interference for Trump and his ilk by ignoring how you cannot name any country that’s more than a few decades old much morally better than America (before Trump)?
(Canada also committed genocide against natives, btw.)
Also, way to insult America’s Black, Asian, and yes, Hispanic populations.
Cede all symbols of American patriotism, or patriotism in general, to Fascists and you admit they’re correct.
And while we’re at it, people *want* to come to America for a reason. Most other countries are literally ethnostates or wannabe ethnostates and have enshrined that in law where America hasn’t (yet).
America, for all its flaws, is founded on not being a flipping ethnostate. Nowhere is being an ethnostate mentioned in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.
Please stop ceding ground to people who believe that an ethnostate is the best form of social organization.
You might at least try to educate yourself before you debate bro all over the place.
It’s historical fact that independence was driven strongly if not primarily by the desire to protect slavery from British abolition. That’s from the very beginning, and it’s not remotely up for debate. “White ethnostate” is exactly the right phrase.
Of course Canada is also a racist state. It’s having its own reckoning as we speak. You’ve no right to escape either.
Your rejection of all data and history that contradicts your biased reading is noted, sir.
And yes, it is up for debate. The Declaration of Independence does not even mention slavery or its preservation. There are entire libraries, archives, portraits, letters, and museums about how America was founded on a promise of not being an ethnostate that, although not kept, was fought for by its *nonwhite* populations.
Slavery was abolished in the North precisely because of the contradictions between the Founding Fathers’ beliefs and Reality.
And while I’ve argued before that MLK Jr. is dead and implied that the Civil Rights Movement was incomplete (or even less than incomplete), the fact remained that MLK Jr. and America’s nonwhite populations did not call for America’s dissolution.
Also, what country do you prefer over America, then?
Russia is an ethnostate.
China is an ethnostate.
Ghana literally banned homosexuality and being transgender even if you are a fellow black citizen.
With all due respect, trying to frighten people with threats is not educational.
So go tell me what country is better than America. Go on.
Slavery in the Americas was not much discussed as ethical or unethical at the time the American Constitution was written. The British Empire abolished slavery in its colonies in 1834 which was two generations later.
Just in case you didn’t get my other reply, but I just noticed you spoke of ‘British Abolition’.
Lol, you’re going to defend Britain after Brexit, Keir Starmer’s marginalization of trans people, and the Northern Ireland riots against nonwhites?
Sure, they abolished slavery. But Abolition picked up pace *after* they lost the Thirteen Colonies, not before.
So your timeline is shit.
You should try reading the 1619 Project in NYT. You might learn a few things.
In any case, the abolition of whiteness will continue if you like it and if you don’t. Get out of the way while you can, that’s my recommendation. This isn’t about metaphors or long-form writing.
*1619 Project Mentioned.*
Yeah… No. That got rejected by serious historians.
If you find that convincing, then you’re not as educated as you think.
“Serious historians?” Ah. You’re one of those people who swear they’re not Republican and only watch Fox News.
Goodbye then. We’ll be clearing out your good old boys in Washington after the election. Permanently this time.
Nice to see you’re ignoring my other comments. Is it because you can’t muster a reply to them?
Also, you know what Liberal Currents is, right?
And the No Kings Movement?
And the Anti-ICE Protests in Minneapolis?
What have you done to match them?
As for the November election… so you *are* an American Citizen; probably white yourself.
Lol, the Democratic Party will win because of people who *love* America and *all* races in it, not because of the DSA or Hasan Piker or Graham Planter.
If anything, the far left has hobbled and sabotaged protests against Trump simply because they’re ‘nonviolent’ and their preferred candidates are fans of China and Russia (the latter which is white).
And don’t think I haven’t noticed you avoiding the subject of Ghana’s treatment of gays and transgender folk.
You can’t outlaw homosexuality or transsexualism because these are inborn characteristics. What you can do is outlawing homosexual sex or living as a gender different from sex as birth. As a reasonable utilitarian I find such bans deeply unethical.
Replying here just to make sure that people reading on phone don’t find their paragraphs shrinking.
Calling on people to educate themselves when you cannot get your history right, or even worse, actively prefer the rantings and ravings of Pro-Russian, Pro-Chinese publications that attack America and Canada from a leftward direction while ignoring that Russia isn’t even left-wing and China actively represses other cultures and ethnic groups (or are we arguing that there aren’t Uighur forced laborers/slaves in cotton plantations in Xinjiang?)… You really want to take that road?
Bret won’t bend to the words of a single, moralizing bully whose fellow travelers in [Insert ‘Anti-Imperialist’, ‘Leftist’ Publication Here] would prefer to make common cause with Trump and his cronies over people advocating liberal democracy.
As you’re clearly not acting in good faith, go be irrelevant elsewhere.
Just in case you didn’t get the email notification, lol, no.
You and what army?
No, really, what army?
Russia’s army cannot even overrun Ukraine. Also, it’s white.
China’s army literally has little to no battle experience in modern warfare after the 80s’.
So go on, what army?
Fortunately the Global South does exist, however ignorant of it you may be. You might want to keep an eye on what happens to all the whiteness in Israel, just to get an idea. The history of Haiti may also be informative.
We also study these things in university, but of course not everyone has the privilege of learning other than firsthand.
Ah, so you do endorse genocide. As reprisals for genocide and slavery.
You do realize that Bret works in a University too, right? And while we’re at it, Universities *in* the Global South teach nonwhite students about the atrocities that nonwhites did to each other.
Also, if you’re in a certain type of University and ranting like this, you must be rich too. Actual scholarship students (of color!) prefer to focus on their studies, not fantasy.
Do you even know what a Mizrahi Jew is? Or a Beta Israel Ethiopian Jew? Oh, wait, you’ve made it clear that they’re culturally white, lol.
And the Samaritans, who both have Israeli and Palestinian Authority Citizenship and who mostly stayed in Israel/Palestine arguably longer than most Jews in the country.
I wonder what formulation you’d make to prove that they’re ‘white’.
And while we’re at it, the Global South contains India, with its Caste System, while the *real* persecution in South Africa is of fellow blacks being driven out because they’re migrating from Nigeria and other countries.
Also, again, failure to mention Ghana, and other African countries’ treatment of their own citizens for *daring* to feel same-sex attractions and feeling wrong in their own bodies.
Decolonization by any means necessary, of course. Sometimes I wonder what you people thought justice meant. Oh well.
(But our host does keep an interesting comment section.)
(And accusing the likes of Fanon of having nothing to say to queerness is just funny. Do it again!)
Justice means no unarmed civilians have to die. No women and children. No babies. The killing stops, period. That is justice.
I am not asking Fanon, I am asking you.
Ghana literally put an Anti-Queer bill into law this year.
But you definitely think that Universal Human Rights are a flipping lie even as you live well from the world created by belief in those rights.
Human rights are conditional on not being a fascist, certainly. But I’m really not going to help you start a fight about Ghana. Ghana isn’t the United States.
Justice means healing. It means the children of the colonizers put in the graves their parents dug for them. It means a beautiful violence, a catharsis of the soul. The violence of the colonizer finally reaching round the world and goring them through the back.
“Civilian” is a word the white mask says to the Black body.
Considering your unwillingness to learn from the comments section (how much like the right-wing members here!), it’s quite clear you live in a world where ‘nonwhiteness’ is literal magic.
Also, your approach is that of someone who is white or culturally white yourself, Male, and used to getting what they want through bullying like a spoiled rich child.
Also, you’re fucking racist, not towards whites, but towards nonwhites as an amorphous blob with no distinctions between each other.
You were useful fools for *Trump* then and you’re useful fools for him now.
White or Culturally White Men speaking for Nonwhites and Women. How just!
Just saw your latest comment.
I used to think like you, maybe at some points, still do.
Then I realized that maybe, just maybe, I shouldn’t yield to Rich White Men who barely know anything, whose education in *one* University has made them feel superior to others, and who fantasize about being as cruel as their oppressors.
Amateur.
Kid, you clearly need to read a text on ethics and morality.
You know, you may not like this, but a majority of the world is conservative. All races.
If we regard conservatism as Fascism, then a majority of the world, all races, have to die.
And if that’s the case, what’s your plan?
I’ll go further, actually: You know nothing about Justice or Healing.
You don’t have a long enough view of History to know what a ‘Cycle of Revenge’ is.
What use is a society where the oppressed of today become the oppressor of tomorrow?
What use is a society where it is okay to be cruel and murderous just because of who and what you are?
Conservatism is a dog-whistle for the belief that the strong must rule over the weak and people must be divided into ‘Torturer’ and ‘Victim’.
And the majority of people of all races believe in some form of it.
You believe in some form of it.
You ape the tactics of the right wing in America and expect to win the same ‘victories’ as they have.
You believe in the same belief they have that ‘Evil wins’.
Get help. Mental help.
The people you consider evil don’t think about themselves as such. They believe themselves to be good because of persistent misconceptions about what others can and want. I am trying to explain their actions without justifying them. Moreover, there are widespread misconceptions about demographics which make people believing minorities to be much larger than actually is the case. I have written a blogpost about this issue:
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/How-demographics-works#wbb1
Since then I have realised that I overestimated how genetically mixed Egypt’s population is. If I remember it correctly there is an 80 – 90% genetic overlap between Ancient Egyptians and present-day ones. Their admixture of Sub-Saharan Africans is only 8 – 15%. This gives 2 – 5% admixture from their combined conquerors from the Iron Age and on.
Lol, you talk about ‘abolishing whiteness’ even though you don’t have an army worth the salt.
Or a drone factory.
Or a biological weapons program (granted, Wikipedia says it costs less than $120,000 to reverse-engineer Smallpox from other poxes).
Or maybe, nonwhites will ignore distinctions *between each other* and wish whiteness away, then continue to do so even though whiteness is ‘abolished’.
The idea of “abolishing whiteness” sounds absurd to me. Today people of overwhelmingly European ancestry count in the hundreds of millions. Unless technological civilisation collapses it will remain so for the foreseeable future.
Tell Steve, not me. Steve is prone to magical thinking, if I may say such.
And the fact that he took me on instead of, say, 60guilders, who is right there, is proof that he’s a coward.
You have written so many comments I had trouble finding any better place to write it.
Just to make sure this message does not appear too small on mobile…
Lol. RIch White (or ironically, culturally white) Male (or at least prone to using terms and phrases associated with so-called ‘online masculinity’) thinking they know better than Nonwhites.
Also prone to the fantasy belief that they can get the majority of fellow whites to vote to ‘abolish whiteness’ in a country that has whites as the largest single group, if not the majority.
This, combined with a willingness to whitewash (lol) current ethnic tensions and massacres of Nonwhites against and by other Nonwhites.
And massive assumptions about the educational background and wealth of those who don’t believe in the same things he believes.
Why are you even here anyway? Are you even interested in the other offerings of the blog?
You know, I recommend you read actual news sites from Nonwhite Countries.
The Asahi Shimbun has an English version.
Rappler is from the Philippines and also has an English version.
Also, get a political history textbook and look up ‘Liberalism’ as distinct from ‘Leftism’.
And an archeology textbook that shows that both Jews and Arabs *originated in the Middle East*.
Declaring victory.
Almost got me there, btw; no serious left-winger or nonwhite in America would ever boast about their educational attainment and thus heap hatred on the working classes, including black and brown men (and women).
You’re not a left-winger or Anti-Trump at all. You’re a right-wing, white Trumpist who’s trying to sow discord by faking being part of the left.
Almost convincing.
Whoops. You got me. My name is Bob Dole and I’m part of Trump’s NSA master plan to make people who play Paradox games more racist than they already are.
Don’t you have some Paradox games to be playing, then?
(* as an agent of the government I was legally required to post this under maritime law. It doesn’t have the little gold thingy because we haven’t worked out how to do those over the Internet yet. Sorry.)
I said you were a right-winger posing as left-wing, not a fed agent provocateur.
Go take your ridiculous violent rhetoric somewhere else.
Also, go read Liberal Currents; they’ve resisted Trump more than your public identity ever will.
Also, your methods don’t work. Go whine to Hasan Piker or Graham Platner (who’s white, you’ll like him!) or whoever.
As it is, you and whoever you side with will be irrelevant compared to the people who actually build things.
Look up actual Liberalism. Look up The Reconstruction Papers. Look up how actual nonwhites live in actual nonwhite countries.
We have a program and you have a few thugs who may or may not have guns.
We will create a multiracial, multicultural paradise on the bones of your movement (whether MAGAt or whatever Platner and Piker are calling their movement) and children of all colors will be happy.
*You* get out of *our* way.
I notice you haven’t threatened our host with violence, big guy. Nor the *actual* MAGAts who openly repeat Trump’s views like parrots.
Scared? Or just looking for an excuse to bully and belittle only the people you think you can take on?
Btw, it was we ‘libs’ who got ICE out of Minneapolis *without violence*. Not you. You would have ruined everything.
Face it, I won this discussion. You’ve ran out of anything but petty insults and stereotyping.
You are a massive failure whose methods didn’t work. Not in Trump’s first term, not in his second, and your methods will continue to fail.
Then you’ll rant and rave that the multiracial, multicultural, very queer society we have is ‘imperfect’ because it has a few pale-skinned people in it.
But by that time, you’ll be irrelevant.
*we have set up on the bones of both the MAGAts and whoever you are
Also, again, @Steve, your methods don’t work. Extreme left, right, reactionary center, your methods are utter failures in building a place where people can actually, you know, be happy.
You cannot create a garden that grows.
You cannot create a structure that can stand the test of time.
Your so-called beautiful, cathartic violence will spend itself and leave behind nothing, even for you and the people you claim to represent (assuming you’re not a MAGAt troll who poses as a living stereotype or maybe even if you are).
Try learning from the utter failure of your movement to actually deliver on their promises. You know which ones.
Fanatics never ask themselves if their own methods work. They take them working for granted and refuse to listen to anything else.
I used to be one. Could still be one if sufficiently provoked.
Then I examined my methods and went, “Is this really working?”
I have read “How to Cure a Fanatic” by the Israeli author Amos Oz. So I have some grasp on people ceasing to be fanatic and becoming more moderate.
As Noah mentioned in a prior comment, the declaration focused on the king because the colonists argued that parliament had no jurisdiction over them. See for example:
A Summary View of the Rights of British America by Thomas Jefferson:
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/jeffsumm.asp
“but we would shew that they cannot give a title to that authority which the British parliament would arrogate over us, and that they may amply be repaid by our giving to the inhabitants of Great Britain such exclusive privileges in trade as may be advantageous to them, and at the same time not too restrictive to ourselves. That settlements having been thus effected in the wilds of America, the emigrants thought proper to adopt that system of laws under which they had hitherto lived in the mother country, and to continue their union with her by submitting themselves to the same common sovereign, who was thereby made the central link connecting the several parts of the empire thus newly multiplied.”
“Not only the principles of common sense, but the common feelings of human nature, must be surrendered up before his majesty’s subjects here can be persuaded to believe that they hold their political existence at the will of a British parliament. Shall these governments be dissolved, their property annihilated, and their people reduced to a state of nature, at the imperious breath of a body of men, whom they never saw, in whom they never confided, and over whom they have no powers of punishment or removal, let their crimes against the American public be ever so great? Can any one reason be assigned why 160,000 electors in the island of Great Britain should give law to four millions in the states of America, every individual of whom is equal to every individual of them, in virtue, in understanding, and in bodily strength?”
“That these are the acts of power, assumed by a body of men, foreign to our constitutions, and unacknowledged by our laws, against which we do, on behalf of the inhabitants of British America, enter this our solemn and determined protest; and we do earnestly entreat his majesty, as yet the only mediatory power between the several states of the British empire, to recommend to his parliament of Great Britain the total revocation of these acts, which, however nugatory they be, may yet prove the cause of further discontents and jealousies among us.”
The Declaration of Colonial Rights by the First Continental Congress in 1774:
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/resolves.asp
“Resolved, 4. That the foundation of English liberty, and of all free government, is a right in the people to participate in their legislative council: and as the English colonists are not represented, and from their local and other circumstances, cannot properly be represented in the British parliament, they are entitled to a free and exclusive power of legislation in their several provincial legislatures, where their right of representation can alone be preserved, in all cases of taxation and internal polity, subject only to the negative of their sovereign, in such manner as has been heretofore used and accustomed: But, from the necessity of the case, and a regard to the mutual interest of both countries, we cheerfully consent to the operation of such acts of the British parliament, as are bonfide, restrained to the regulation of our external commerce, for the purpose of securing the commercial advantages of the whole empire to the mother country, and the commercial benefits of its respective members; excluding every idea of taxation internal or external, for raising a revenue on the subjects, in America, without their consent.”
I’m glad you acknowledge that we do not need a violent revolution at this time. I wanted to respond to the various grievances you think Trump has committed. Some I disagree with, some I agree with. Here goes:
“He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.”
The POTUS is perfectly within his rights to veto any bill he deems fit. Congress can also override that veto.
“He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people,”
I have to agree with this charge. Not good to refuse aid based on voting patterns.
“He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.”
Seems like the main issue is with Mike Johnson. Do we know he’s acting under orders from Trump The linked article says the Trump admin is trying to get grand jury proceedings unsealed, so it’s not like they’re doing NOTHING, and unless the remaining documents name actual perpetrators, or at least the people who can give those names, I don’t see the point in beating the Epstein drum any further.
“He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither,”
The Supreme Court struck down the executive order denying US citizenship to babies born on American soil. I don’t agree with their decision, but it is what it is, and to my knowledge, Trump has never defied the courts when they overruled him. I don’t agree with cancelling naturalization ceremonies solely based on country of origin, not if they’ve already been allowed through the whole process and no red flags came up. As for “white refugees”, while it does appear the increased deaths of Afrikaners is an exaggeration, the linked Mother Jones article links to a NYT article which concedes that Afrikaner land is being seized without compensation. My principle is that IF white people are fleeing persecution in Africa, they have as much claim on refugee status as any other group fleeing persecution.
“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.”
I’ll grant that hiring before doing background checks is a bad idea in any profession, but I believe our immigration laws actually should be enforced, and the sheer volume of illegal immigrants currently residing here necessitates more hiring.
“He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.”
Are they being forcibly quartered in civilian homes or on civilian property? As long as they are enforcing existing law, and doing so in a professional manner, I don’t have an issue with mass deportations.
“He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.”
As you acknowledged in Collections: The American Civil-Military Relationship”, this is not unique to Trump.
https://acoup.blog/2026/07/04/collections-on-the-declaration-of-independence/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=collections-on-the-declaration-of-independence
“He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws;”
When one country seeks an extradition from another country, is the country receiving the request always to follow due process before handing them over, even if the individuals in question are not citizens of the country they’re residing in? And if we should not be subject to “jurisdictions foreign to our constitution”, what does that mean for international law?
“For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:”
Again, are they being forcibly quartered in civilian homes or on civilian property? If the objection is that their mere presence is unwarranted, that’s an objection of policy, not principle, IMHO.
“For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit”
While I believe Alex Pretti should not have struck an officer with her vehicle, I agree that Minnesota’s investigation should not have been blocked.
“For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:”
Passing judgment on whether the tariffs are a good or bad idea is beyond me, though I can appreciate good faith arguments that they’re not good for the economy.
“For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:”
Again, haven’t seen him actually defy court orders.
“For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:”
I can agree that deporting Garcia was a mistake, and I’ll grant the Trump admin dragged their feet on getting him back, but they did bring him back.
“For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:”
I will grant that while I’m an advocate for enforcing the law (including immigration law), such enforcement should be done in a professional manner, with mistakes rectified ASAP. I don’t see why it should take more than 24 hours to verify citizenship, or even less, if the person has his driver’s license or Social Security card on him. That being said, I don’t see the issue with sending US born children with their parents when the latter are deported. Should they not stay with their parents? Or should they be put in foster care? If you think the children being born in the US should entitle their parents to stay, you are conceding they are in fact, anchor babies.
“For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:”
I don’t see how protecting election integrity is “taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws…” etc.
“He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection”
Unlike the previous example of disaster relief, I don’t believe Trump is being petty in this case. It makes sense that blue states, having declared themselves hostile to the Trump admin and everything it does, and, arguably, encouraging riots the way Trump arguably encouraged the Jan. 6th riot, that Trump would be hesitant to dig them out of the hole they dug themselves, and not send help unless it would actually be welcomed instead of opposed.
“burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.”
No actual town burning in the cited example. BTW, what town burning was the actual Declaration referring to? Anyway, while I can sympathize with the Haitians who feel like the rug was yanked out from under them, “Temporary Protected Status” means TEMPORARY, as in, don’t bet on it being permanent.
“He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us,”
I would call it an insurrection if the actual military laid siege to the Capitol. This did not happen, and there was no way a bunch of rioters were going to overturn the certification process all by themselves. I agree the riot should not have happened, and while Trump had urged them to protest peacefully, I believe he shouldn’t have urged them to protest at all. That being said, it was a riot, not an insurrection.
Your comment deserves a point-by-point treatment and I apologize for not having time to do that, but I can do one point quickly. How do you square “Trump has never defied the courts when they overruled him” with the blanket pardon he gave to all the people convicted of supporting him in an insurrectionary riot?
He has the legal power to do that, whether we like it or not. It’s not. The courts CAN’T overrule that.
I’m glad you acknowledge that we do not need a violent revolution at this time.
I’m not going to endorse revolution, but I will go much further than Bret and say that in a better world, we’d throw liberalism out the window and have mass reprisals against the Trump regime, those who serve in it, those who enabled it, and even some of those who voted for it. Reprisals harsh enough that people would still be talking about them in hushed terms a hundred years from now. We’re not going to GET vengeance and reprisals, but that doesn’t alter the fact that that’s what we *should* have, in a better world. I was never much enthused with small-L liberalism to begin with, but the second Trump presidency has definitely sharpened my sense of its pure moral inadequacy.
Sounds like you’d become what you’re trying to fight. All the more evidence that those with Trump Derangment Syndrome are as unworthy to run things as the alt-right. When Obama and Biden were in office, I hated the direction they were taking this country, but I would never dream of “reprisals” against anyone.
How are you not the Alt-right?
If I was then I WOULD favor reprisals.
And yet, you’re quick to regard us as morally equivalent to the ones regularly using state violence and minimizing/denying the harm state violence causes or making out the victims to be legitimate targets for cruel and unusual treatment.
He said “in a better world” we’d have reprisals for Trump voters. How am I SUPPOSED to read that?
And people who believe in a different ideology from Trump aren’t suffering reprisals *now*?
I did say that only sending aid to states who voted for him was wrong.
And while we’re at it, you seem to be an Evangelical, to the point where you mentioned the Babylon Bee as something you frequently watch/look at. And I must say, there is a fundamental incompatibility between “Love your neighbor as thyself”, “Do unto others,” and “Love one another (platonically)” and the traditional cultural/sexual morality and gender norms promoted by the Christian Right.
Your way of life is unappealing and even actively harmful to many people. Your theology, which backs your way of life, is based on denying the Reality that according to it, God created. Your disdain for other ways of life that exist leads to dark paths, and quite frankly, your behavior here is no better than mine; I am more honest, for one thing.
Your attempt to promote an intellectual and cultural cage is stifling, your politeness, false grace.
I spent more than a decade immersed in devotional literature; I know the mindset you are trying to bring. I’ve read the Scriptures you claim to be the inerrant source of truth, yet merely say that they are ‘sufficient for salvation’ and not a guide to geology, botany, and yes, biology.
The fraud of Intelligent Design bases itself not on truth, but on the baseless fear that Human Life is meaningless if Humanity was not literally created from clay. It preys on people who seek purpose in life and causes them to reject Science, Reason, and Logic as a danger to meaning, belonging, and a cosmos where you are special.
Due to technology and modernity, we are now capable of practicing “Do Unto Others” to all of Humanity, not just a few. Same for being able to love your neighbor as yourself. Due to liberalism, reason, and logic, we are now able to disprove the barriers people in power put up, including in Scripture, to bar certain categories of people from being under The Golden Rule.
We are able to practice *true* Compassion, Cooperation, and Altruism now, because we’re not worried about limited resources and we have a social order that can survive bad actors in it.
But apparently, you’d rather believe in the gilded, padded cage of a corrupt theology that actively prevents people from going out and doing good simply because of their neighbors’ sexual and cultural behaviors just to privilege themselves, while also neglecting the truths of Creation and the natural rules and laws set by a Creator/The Creator.
You are wrong, you are as bad as I have been, but in a different way, and I’d rather not see you act as a missionary for the Church of Hate and Lies (TM) in a server ran by someone who actually believes in what the flipping’ Gospels say about treating other people.
People like you have inflicted spiritual harm on me, people like me, and mental/psychological harm besides.
So what else do you have to contribute?
Hate preachers don’t try to live according to the Golden Rule. They are CONDEMNING the rest of humanity for doing things they don’t even try to avoid themselves. What they display is a slave-owner’s attitude to their fellow beings.
Was this reply even meant for me? If it was, that’s a heck of a strawman you’re beating up. I never said I “frequently” watch the Babylon Bee. I had to run a Google search on this to find out what the heck you were talking about, and I posted one video that was a joke about Iran quickly replacing their leaders, in reply to Darkest Yorkshire’s wry observation that a dead leader’s replacement will remember how he got promoted.
And I said nothing about religion in my point-by-point response. I eagerly await an intelligent rebuttal from Endy or anyone else who can argue in good faith.
Yes, that reply was meant for you, but it seems I assumed your beliefs too hastily.
Nevertheless, my criticisms cover vocal members of Trump’s support base who do exist and have influence over his policy.
That’s basically how middle age Europe discovered religious tolerance. Punishing people for wrongthink works when you are in the overwhelming majority. When half the population tries it against the other half, you get the Thirty Years’ War.
The Thirty Years War was in the 17th century which is not considered part of the Middle Ages. You should have called it Early Modern instead.
In a better world Donald Trump would not have became president in the first place. Your sense of ethics seems to have been taken over by desire for revenge.
A lot of the things you said are factually false.
You also conflated Renee Nicole Goode with Alex Pretti and genuinely believe that the former was guilty of the (false) charges against her.
I will wait for Endy’s reply to this, but if you’re not here to engage with Bret’s views in good faith, then what are you here for?
This is not a missionary station for whatever (presumably Evangelical) Church you belong to.
Yes I mixed up Goode with Pretti, thanks for pointing that out. Goode was ordered to leave the area but initially refused, only leaving when they tried to arrest her. I stand by the belief she shouldn’t have done that, but on reflection, I concede the officer should not have shot her. And the Alexi Pretti shooting was even less justifiable. I saw the video where the ICE agent seemed to be just randomly shoving people, then Pretti told him to knock if off, then he got piled on, and got shot when someboy yelled “Gun!” Unacceptable.
Whoever it is that hurt you, I’m not one of those people. I’m TRYING to have a dialogue in good faith. If I get facts wrong, point out where. If you think I’m missing something, say so. I’m open to ernest attempts at persuasion. I’m NOT open to being strawmanned, called a liar, or criticized without foundation.
All right. Well, right now, I am stressed out at Internet Drama and I’ll need time to touch grass.
And thanks for admitting you got some facts wrong.
That is not what happened. Goode was engaged in lawful assembly while operating a vehicle, was given conflicting requests from multiple agents, and ultimately complied with the request to move her vehicle when a different agent reached into her car and placed his hand on her steering wheel (not an arrest, not any kind of attempt to communicate), whereupon an agent who she was turning her vehicle away from moved forward into her path while firing multiple shots. The murderer filmed these events on his own cell phone, intentionally, and proudly expressed a negative opinion of the victim after killing her, which speaks to both premeditation and motive on the part of the killer. None of Renee Goode’s actions were unlawful, none of her actions were unreasonable, and once her killer involved himself in the incident there were no actions she could have taken that would have prevented her death.
Alex Pretti was attacked by a mob of agents when he tried to help a woman who had been knocked down; one agent removed his gun, which he had not drawn nor otherwise threatened anyone with, and upon being informed that he was disarmed the CPB agent who had been pointing his gun at the altercation fired on the subdued man. These shots inspired panic in the agents holding Pretti down and inspired another CPB agent to draw his own weapon and fire several shots into the dead body. This was also not a random killing, federal agents had put Pretti in the hospital with a broken rib the week before and either recognized him or recognized his role as a keystone protestor.
Overrepresentation as victims of robber-murder is not genocide.
If this is in reference to the Afrikaner refugee question, I agree, but is threatened genocide specifically a requirement for refugee status?
No, but the South African government does not tangibly punish Whites just for being White. That such cruelty occurs and has occurred in other contexts is unknown to far too many European Americans.
Then why aren’t Nonwhites being given the same rights, Gamereg?
No-one has a “right” to refugee status, unless you think we can literally take in an unlimited number. That being said, I know you think I’m lying everytime I criticize Donald Trump, but I actually agree that there are people in greater need than the Afrikaners, and it’s a mistake to ignore them.
See, the ‘unlimited number’ thing is a strawman. America is the third-largest country on Earth, technology is improving to allow maximal use of living space, and the demographic transition is resulting in a decline in population globally.
Bret has a suggestion in his X and Bluesky accounts: Build More Houses.
Also, maybe people in America should stop selling guns to Latin American Drug Cartels for cocaine, then, as those guns are used to force people out of their homes and *to America*, then.
And maybe raise foreign aid instead of cutting it because, surprise, foreign aid keeps people from becoming refugees who go to America and Europe.
Also, Trump isn’t ignoring the people in greater need than the Afrikaners, he hates them and frequently expresses his contempt for them in his speeches.
The world’s population is not currently shrinking whatever conspiracy talkers might imagine. Its growth is only slowing down because more people are consciously choosing to have two or three children instead of five or six.
@Lena Synnerholm, that does not alter my point, which is that America has plenty of space, perhaps more if it builds more houses and infrastructure.
@Bret,
Somewhat off topic, but I just wanted to say, although we disagree on politics and normative views a lot (including on the merits of the nation state), I really liked your 2021 Fourth-of-July piece on “America Is Not a Nation”. Shared it on my social media today, in fact.
“at no point in human history have a majority of countries been anywhere remotely close to free”
This is hyperbole. There’s a link that goes back a prior post that mentions at no point in human history have a majority of countries been classified as “free” by Freedom House, but I think at least a decent fraction of countries classified as “partly free” by Freedom House are in fact “anywhere remotely close to free”. Like Freedom House currently Ukraine and Hungary as “partly free”, and while freedom is very much under assault in both countries it’s not dead yet (especially with Orban getting the boot).
Victor Orbán does not seem to understand the point of people different from himself having rights.
Hello Dr. Devereaux,
Happy 4th of July. I hope you and your family had a good day celebrating.
I know this post was not meant to be an extended treatise on medieval and early modern political philosophy, but I think you give short shrift to the degree to which the concepts mentioned in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence-natural human equality, individual natural rights, the social contract, and the right of resistance against tyrannical governments-were deeply rooted in pre-liberal and pre-Enlightenment thought. Harold Berman, Brian Tierney, Francis Oakley, and many others have detailed this at length. Many of the British on the other side would have agreed with them to some degree since as you most likely well know they prided themselves on the freedom of their system of government. I also think the dichotomy you draw between divine sanction and consent of the governed is overdrawn-many medieval and early modern theologians would have said that there was a sense in which both were true.
To be honest, this is true. The Medieval, and yes, Christian roots of liberal thought are often overlooked.
Disclaimer: political opinion interjected, following: And the time may soon come again when sensible states seek to dissolve the Union and make their own future on their own terms, and who could blame them? Better secession than submission to Trumpist tyranny.
If he had not been an utter and complete idiot his dictatorship and the resulting secessions would already have taken place.
It’s not lost on me that one of the colonists’ pet peeves was that the Crown was not allowing them to steal land belonging to the American Indians or continue to migrate east of the Appalachian boundaries set after the French & Indian War.
Native Americans have little to celebrate about the Declaration, frankly. It either ignores them entirely or treats them as mere “savage” annoyances that needed to be destroyed because they were in the way of settlers and “progress.” .
Should it not be west of the Appalachian boundaries?
I actually agree with Bret in this, and I envy the fact that he is so patient with his critics.
Also, eye81/ey81 seems to be gone. It seems he has had enough of people telling him his idea of what the ‘American Enterprise’ is, is incorrect.
Before anyone accuses me of hypocrisy in my words, I’ll repeat what I said months ago:
“My enemies made me who I am.”
If that’s true, then you also made your enemies who they are. To claim such responsibility only goes one way would be quite the hypocrisy in your words.
Question: from a military-historical perspective, why is “American Revolution” the preferred term?
Context: while it doesn’t particularly matter in casual usage, it’s long been my belief that, if one is being precise, there’s clear value in distinguishing between wars of independence (subsidiary territories seeking statehood and independent governance), secession (core territories seeking statehood and independent government), and revolution (territories seeking to remove and replace the current government), not least because it determines the the stakes for the current government. By this rubric, the 1775-1783 war is clearly a war of independence; the colonies were not core territory, and a change of British government was not seriously on the cards. So the original question: why “American Revolution” rather than “American War of Independence”?
I don’t really know, but I assume that the name “American Revolution” predates the official meaning of revolution.
The current meaning of the word “revolution” comes from the unprecedented French one.
I prefer the later term.
It’d be interesting if for the list of grievances, you list all violations USA do themselves throughout its history. In fact it’s be very funny to highlight things they violate from Day 0, like your slavery example. This could drive home the Trump point harder, if he does violate it much more than any president of previous 248 years. Instead right now, it seems like an unnecessary reputation spending.
Abolition picked up pace after the British lost the Thirteen Colonies, not before.
And there’s an entire Civil War about abolishing Slavery, or did that get memory-holed?
Dunno, feels like USA is fighting tooth and nail to keep slavery while other Anglophone “easily” abolish it. Canada, an English colony nearby, abolish it much much earlier. It could be argued that USA independence slows slavery abolition in the region.
Which in turn was because the Cotton Gin gave Slavery a leg up and made it profitable for the planter class.
If Britain kept the South, they would have kept Slavery and violated their promises of abolition.
If there’s one good thing about British empire of that period, it’s that they consistently disrupt slave trading, even when they can still profit from it (?). I think if thirteen colonies remained British, slavery would not go as long as it did. Though this really needs an alt history analysis.
And as you said, we do not know that for sure.
I think it would already have been abolished by the time early socialists attracted attention to the conflicting goal between employer and employee.
This is one of the problems with discussing the USA–it’s such a diverse country, with so many people and ideas in it, that we’re often doing multiple contradictory things at the same time. Abolition movements stated in the 1600s, for example, and slavery was banned in multiple colonies. People were actively campaigning against slavery before the nation was formed, while it was being formed, and emancipation efforts continued during and after the Revolutionary War, up through the Civil War. Benjamine Franklin served as president of one of the early bodies pushing for abolition (the Pennsylvania Abolition Society). The place where slavery really hung on was the South, where archaic agricultural practices and a focus on cash crops like cotton made slavery more appealing. Cultures like the North and England, which were more industrial, and areas with more modern (for the time) farming practices focused on crops other than cotton saw slavery diminish.
The fact that the various colonies were independent made wholesale abolition more difficult. It must be remembered that the Constitution was very much a product of compromise. To get the military support they needed the Continental Congress needed to make concessions. It was a “If the Devil would fight the Nazis we’d give him the pitchforks” situation.
Further, I doubt the issue is as simple as you present it (granting that this is a comments section and you’re no doubt glossing over a lot of complexity that you’re well aware of). I’m reminded of the various military agreements, against land mines and cluster munitions and the like. Europe and other groups can sign these with a clear conscience because they know the USA is NOT a signatory to those agreements and the USA has no problem using such weapons if the situation requires. These nations pretended to take a moral stance (views are shifting thanks to Russia’s invasion) precisely because they relied on us doing the thing they thought evil. A similar situation was likely happening with slavery. There were whole trade networks that relied on slave labor (cotton in the South, molasses and rum in the Caribbean, a bunch in the Eastern Mediterranean, etc). It would be simple enough to set up a situation where you profited from the slavery but were not involved in the actual slave trade. That way you can both feel morally superior and get the benefits of slavery.
The American Declaration of Independence and Constitution had to be compromises because the Founding Fathers were of such different opinions. Then you can’t create common documents without compromising. Denying the need for compromise is assuming a degree of pre-existing agreement which simply don’t exist.
I am trained as a mathematician, and there’s an old joke among mathematicians that there are three types of proof: proof by deduction, proof by induction, and proof by vigorous
assertion. A while back t struck me that one of the most famous “proofs by vigorous
assertion” is in the Declaration of Independence: Literally all of the points listed as “self-evident” were a radical departure from the traditional thought of the times.
I think those were the ones the authors of the Declaration of Independence could easily agree upon.
Welp, tbh, time to get going; the ‘high’ of arguing with people fades after a while…
So tired of my enemies wasting my time…
The French Revolution broke out spontaneously for socio-economic reason particular to France. Despite slowing population growth during the previous decades the country was nearing the limits of what its inefficient agricultural methods could sustain. When harvests failed in 1788 – 89 the French Revolution became inevitable. Without American independence it would still have happened provided the weather triggering it had happened. But it would have happened differently.