I hope everyone had a nice and safe July 4th celebration last night. We spent some time with some neighbors, playing with some small noisemakers and chatting. It was a good low key evening.
I just wanted to add a quick reminder, after yesterday’s post on my complicated feelings about this holiday. It is good to remember that, in the context of the American Revolution, the alternative to the flawed and limited republic envisioned by the Founders was monarchy, an authoritarian and nepotistic practice that impoverished and oppressed countless millions and was presided over by a bunch of fools. Alan Jacobs explicated this brilliantly at his own blog yesterday, quoting lenghtily from a Thomas Jefferson letter on the subject. These words from Jefferson really stuck out at me:
While in Europe, I often amused myself with contemplating the characters of the then reigning sovereigns of Europe. Louis the XVIth was a fool, of my own knowledge, & in despite of the answers made for him at his trial. The king of Spain was a fool, & of Naples the same. They passed their lives in hunting, & dispatched two couriers a week, 1000 miles, to let each other know what game they had killed the preceding days. The king of Sardinia was a fool. All these were Bourbons. The Queen of Portugal, a Braganza, was an idiot by nature & so was the king of Denmark. Their sons, as regents, exercised the powers of government. The king of Prussia, successor to the great Frederic, was a mere hog in body as well as in mind. Gustavus of Sweden, & Joseph of Austria were really crazy, & George of England you know was in a straight waistcoat.
I think many people of the left, in their well-meaning and often correct critique of American imperialism and other national sins, shade too far in the other direction, often coming close to the line of stating that the American revolution wasn’t even worth it, that it was a corrupt experiment from the beginning and the world would have been better off without it. This is, in short, crazy. The American revolution was not perfect, and neither were the Founders, but the alternative was not better. This is the point I was making yesterday about the Declaration of Independence. The American Revolution was a giant step forward, a war that launched the world into the Age of Revolutions and the rise of a culture that eventually outlawed slavery, expanded rights in unimaginable directions, and broke colonialism. The French Revolution, that paragon of leftist nostalgia, would have been unthinkable without the inspiration of the colonies. Even the liberalizing of the UK and the diminishment of the monarchy doesn’t happen like it did if America doesn’t reveal it’s weaknesses and inspire future anti-colonial uprisings. None of these things happens on the timeline they did without the precipitating moment that was 1776.
One last note: the aforementioned Age of Revolutions is a fascinating time in history, which shaped the world in ways we can’t even imagine, but which many people often don’t even know the half of. If you’d like to learn more about this time, I can’t recommend Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast enough. It is fantastic.
Justin DaMetz 