Massachusetts natives know that Saturday, April 19, is the 250th Anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, or, as it’s been called since 1894, Patriots’ Day. This blogger, as a younger person from that state, used to grouse how few understood that the American Revolution started in 1775, not July. 1776
But what started in Concord in 1775 was only armed rebellion. The Revolution came with the Declaration of Independence, whose quarter millennium we will mark in thirteen and a half months. The difference is that the rebellion was over a bunch of grievances against the government. The Revolution came in the assertion that individual rights precede and override government – while renouncing the existing government and asserting certain interests, this land would now answer to principle, of rights equally endowed in all individuals, and government that exists to secure those rights. It came about because of the “long train of abuses” listed in the Declaration, but the founding of a new “People” on “self evident” truths was the Revolutionary step.
Independence could have been gained solely in protest against the abuses, in the coalition of complainants. A revolt and war for independence did start on Patriot’s Day. And it may well have gone exactly as the actual war secession did, creating a new “power of the earth” based on the complaints alone.
But without the Declaration’s creed – of rights and government tasked to secure them – the new power would not have been the nation we know. It would have been a vessel of protest, against measures at the time deemed intolerable. It would have had no active purpose beyond the complaints, though. The creed, the only expression where this new “People” identified itself, as “we,” who hold those truths, instilled the only affirmative purpose. This “we,” by the way, looks very much like the same “We the People of the United States” who promulgated the Constitution 13 years later. But nowhere else is there any description or definition of the new entity, nor of what and why it should exist, other than in the self-conception of July 1776.
True, that self conception came about as almost a whim, a turn of phrase inserted by young Thomas Jefferson, likely drawing on expressions that trace back to John Locke. It can be read as just a preface to the complaints. Some of those complaints are outmoded – quartering of troops, dissolution of local assemblies. Some still echo – taxation. But all of them only protested bad practices. A coalition based on a collection of complaints will last only as long as the complaints align together. And if their alignment is against the government imposing the burdens, it will not last once that government, the agent of alignment, is gone. A big non-alignment, over slavery, led a major part of the colonists’ coalition to break away 80 years later.
At the risk of overreach to today’s political situation –- we are playing out a political dis-alignment between factions, in which our politicians have reduced our creed of principle to a punch line for their claims against the other. We have managed to ossify a normal tendency to two-sided politics (versus three, four, or more generally diffuse discourse) into political, and legal, trench warfare. As politics often is, this is a contest of complaints and factions. One side has, after protesting a range of injustices, re-cast the victims as identity-based interest groups, and campaigns for their various interests, wrapping that campaign in the language of justice. The other has chosen to oppose their campaigns, on behalf of a larger, older faction that feels decline in its economic condition and denigration of its social standing. Blaming the identity group advocates, this group now demands respect for their own rights and interests, in emotional indignation. Both sides cite their own sides’ rights. Both call the other illegitimate. And when no one in a state accepts each other as sharing in a common identity or purpose, when shared principle no longer overrides politicized interpretations and contested interests, the “People” founded on that purpose is no longer a nation.
Today we may well be deepening our political trench wars, possibly even to violence, in a bipolar, divisive version of the consensus-based uprising of 1775. Or we can put the principle of 1776 above our differences, and recommit to the national bedrock of our founding creed. The first course will threaten not just our economy, our influence in the world, and thereby our security, but our national existence. The other will require a lot of swallowing of enmities and resentments, a lot of institutional reconstruction, and economic revival. But we will have comity, a recognition that we share something more important than anyone’s grievances.
Many will point to a certain elected individual of the day. But, while unusually obsessed with self interested pursuits, he is a symptom, not the ultimate heart of the problem. It is we who have allowed institutions to fester in dysfunctions, then piling political burdens on them, with no functional reforms. It is we who have accepted two parties campaigning against the other side rather than for anything positive. It is we who respond to slogans over substance. It’s not the man, whether this one or an opponent, it’s us.
Now can we, each of us in our own minds, and all of us then together, swallow our pride? Can we accept “the other side’s” legitimacy, drop our demands for the “unity” that only comes when someone is defeated, give each other the respect and trust of a compatriot? Can we re-build national comity – a feeling of togetherness, overriding our differences with our underlying tenets? There is a daunting amount of work to do, but it all has to start from this.
Common Conviction 