Patriot tho’ I consider myself, I am slowly coming around to the idea that the American “Revolution” was more an assertion of the colonialists’ rights as Englishmen than it was a true revolution against the existing social structure.
As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s:
The English who emigrated three centuries ago to found a democratic society in the wilds of the New World were already accustomed in their motherland to take part in public affairs; they knew trial by jury; they had liberty of speech and freedom of the press, personal freedom, and the conception of rights and the practice of asserting them. They carried these free institutions and virile mores with them to America, and these characteristics sustained them against the encroachments of the state.” (italics added).
In fact, de Tocqueville goes as far as to say that America never had a revolution.
Contra the narrative, the British in North America were not claiming rights that they had “discovered” after centuries living independently of the mother country. Even less were they concerned with abstractions such as the “Pursuit of Happiness.”
To believe otherwise is to go down the road of our progressive friends, who are able to conjure a never-ending parade of rights out of thin air.
Neither are the rights that the Founders were fighting for universal. They had their roots in Anglo-American history, custom, and jurisprudence. Again, to suggest that rights exist outside of a concrete social and political context–that they have a basis in something other than the real world of real people in a real place–is to turn “rights talk” into the spinning of webs by legal scholars and social activists.
Now, there is a certain beauty to the Lockean/Jeffersonian idea that our rights come from God and are therefore, “unalienable,” that is cannot be given nor taken away.
But in almost 250 years, the one thing we have learned is that unless the society recognizes and perpetuates the rights (such as the right to speech, association, firearms—not to mention states’ rights, parental rights, and the right to life—all of which are under constant attack in our current atmosphere) they can be taken away. God be damned.
In the end, the only thing standing between our rights and tyranny is public opinion. Once the majority decides that something is no longer a right, it’s not. Hence, the verity of Reagan’s line that we are never more than a generation away from tyranny. (And a reminder that Democracy is not necessarily the best guarantor of individual rights, but that’s a topic for another time.)
And it’s not to say that the Americans weren’t contemplating revolutionary ideas. As Bernard Bailyn describes in his book “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” at about the same time that Jefferson was writing the Declaration, Americans were developing a theory of constitutional government that evolved into the idea that a constitution was something separate from a regular statute, that it should be written, that it should be acclaimed by the people-at-large (not just legislatures), and that its “primary function was to mark out the boundaries of governmental powers.”
The above is the Revolution that American conservatives should be celebrating. The idea that there are some zones of life—religion, conscience, property—that are beyond the reach of government is abhorrent to progressives. Which is why the left hates the Constitution and anything (the Electoral College, the filibuster, the Supreme Court) that puts constraints on their radical designs for America.
Of course, America did have a true revolution in the 1960s. And we are the worse for it.
J.S. Scifo is a North County resident who has worked in national and state politics.