Today is the Fourth of July, which means while I enjoy hotdogs, watermelon, and fireworks, neo-reactionaries and swarthy European nationalists have called a one-day truce with communists to retcon the American Revolution as “liberal”, based upon “Enlightenment values”, “whiggish”, or “egalitarian.”
Looking at the Declaration of Independence, the reasons for revolution are very clear:
“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
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 dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
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 erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
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 taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
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.”
There is no ideological reason for revolution to be found in this document. What is to be found is an enumeration of instances in which the King violated the historic rights of Englishmen. Why were these grievances listed? Because they were violations of the basic understanding between governed and governor that existed in England since the Middle Ages. Our Founding Fathers attempted to reconcile themselves to the Crown through redress, as seen in the following paragraph:
“In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. 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.”
Yet, despite the attempts by the colonists and the faction in the House of Commons led by William Pitt, the above violations continued and thus it was incumbent upon the colonists to revolt if they wanted to preserve their inherited rights. Defying a tyrant is a duty put upon all Christians and was modeled by Saint Basil when he resisted Julian the Apostate. Basil tells us, "“If the heart of the king is in the hands of God (Proverbs 21.1), then he is saved, not by force of arms, but by the guidance of God. But not everyone is in the hands of God, but only he who is worthy of the name of king. Some have defined kingly power as lawful dominion or sovereignty over all, without being subject to sin.” And again: “The difference between a tyrant and a king is that the tyrant strives in every way to carry out his own will. But the king does good to those whom he rules.”1 King George did not have the authority to violate the rights of his subjects, for kings do not have the authority to harm whom he rules. If the Founding Fathers were wrong to oppose King George via revolution, so was Saint Basil who preached against Julian the Apostate and prayed for his defeat at the hands of the Persians.2 I bring up Saint Basil here to squash any idea that opposition, even violent opposition, to a tyrannical king is, in any way, “modern” or “liberal.”
“What about Jefferson saying all men are created equal?” You mean the man who owned slaves and who helped form a government in which only white landowning men of good character could vote for representatives (implicit here is the idea that there is a leadership class from which the public could choose from). However you want to interpret the opening clause of the Declaration, it clearly did not mean to either Jefferson or his contemporaries what the left of 2022 wants it to mean.
“Okay, but what about the reliance on John Locke? Don’t you know that he is the founder of liberalism?” Interestingly enough, the idea that Locke was a liberal appears quite late…as late as the 1950s. Duncan Bell, professor at Cambridge tells us,
“The Lockean narrative was consolidated in Britain and the United States between the 1930s and the 1950s, as liberalism was reconfigured as the ideological other of “totalitarian” ideologies, left and right. This was achieved through two key discursive moves and across two main chronological phases. The first move deepened the retroactive extension of the liberal tradition that had already begun in both Britain and the United States. The early modern account moved from being a minority report to the dominant narrative. The second development was, if anything, even more significant: the emergence and proliferation of the idea of “liberal democracy.” As representative forms of political order came under sustained fire, intellectuals propagated an all-encompassing narrative that simultaneously pushed the historical origins of liberalism back in time while vastly expanding its spatial reach. For the first time, it was widely presented as either the most authentic ideological tradition of the West (a pre-1945 storyline) or its constitutive ide- ology (a view popular after 1945). This story began to coalesce during the 1930s, in a context of radical anxiety about the fate of liberalism.”3
Against the threats of Fascism and Communism to the Anglo-American order, an ideology was fabricated and thinkers, no matter how opposed, were pulled under this new umbrella. Seneca, Thomas Aquinas, Montaigne, and Locke were all said to be representatives of the liberal order. While there did exist the Liberal Party in Britian, the liberalism of liberal democracy came about in the 1930s,
“Barely visible before 1930, in the ensuing decade it began to supplant existing appellations for Euro- Atlantic states. During the 1940s and 1950s it became a commonplace. As a global conflict over the proper meaning of democracy raged, the modifier “liberal” simultaneously encompassed diverse representative parliamentary systems while differentiating them from others claiming the democratic title, above all Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union. The year after Hitler assumed power, Ernest Barker observed that the “issue of our time is hardly a simple issue of democracy versus dictatorship. Dictatorship itself claims the quality of democracy; indeed it claims the quality of a higher, a more immediate, spontaneous democracy.” This was, then, a clash between “two types of democracy—the parliamentary type . . . and the dictatorial type.”4
Liberal democracy, we see, is oppositional to dictatorial democracy. To go further would be a separate article and at that point it would be better for you to read Duncan Bell yourself.
“So far so good Rose, but what about all those quotes from people like Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin who appear to be atheists? Further, what do you do with freedom of religion?” First off, whenever you see, a quote being used to buttress a point, especially an ideological one, be sure to ask for the source. Context matters. Often enough, these quotes have no source because they are made up or when seen in their context you see that they are saying the opposite. Most of the Founders were devout men, and while they might adhere to your religious persuasion it is unfair to ding them as atheists on this account.
Now, what about this freedom of religion thing? Every state in the union had an official religion, and some, such as Massachusetts had, and still has, blasphemy laws. This does not contradict freedom of religion, as the Constitution was only intended to restrict the powers of the federal government. Given the population of the colonies, having everything from Anglicans and Catholics on one hand to Quakers on the other, it was seen as prudent by the Founders to allow each state to establish its own official religion, with each state in the union, with their differing religions and laws, united together for common defense and trade.
America was not founded on contemporary egalitarian ideals, nor was it a secular endeavor by atheists, and it was certainly not an ideological project. What July Fourth is about is this: the American people were being abused by their king, they tried to redress their grievances through diplomacy and their allies in the Commons, and when all else failed they rose up against tyranny, as is Christian tradition. To spin this any other way is, if not simply regurgitating sloppy history, an attempt to justify:
-the current leftist agenda (what we are doing is in line with the founding)
-a techno-merchant dictatorship (America needs to be saved from its originary Whiggery…so give technocrats unlimited power)
-a Papal dictatorship (America was atheistic since its founding and only Catholic integralism can save her)
In other words, unless you are talking to someone who has only gotten the post-1950s assessment of America’s founding, you are talking to an ideologist who thinks it is okay to twist America’s history until it fits his libido dominandi.
St. Basil, quoted in Fomin, S. & Fomina, T. Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem (Russia before the Second Coming), Moscow, 1994, pp. 66, 102.
Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History, III, 19.
Bell, Duncan. What is Liberalism? From, Political Theory 2014 Vol 42(6). Sage Publications. 699
Bell, Duncan. What is Liberalism? From, Political Theory 2014 Vol 42(6). Sage Publications. 703
Great read! I just finished reading Sandbatch and you guys are really hitting the nail on the head. Cheers!