Reflections on the Revolution in America
America and Britain, 250 years on
In 1782 — after the battle of Yorktown had de facto secured American independence, but before the war had come officially to an end — South Carolina loyalist John Hamilton wrote to a friend in London, arguing that ‘the last man and shilling must be expended before England gives America her independence’. He believed this on the assumption that the loss of the Thirteen Colonies would make the eventual loss of the British West Indies — one of the Crown’s most important holdings — inevitable, and would kick-start a decline in British power that would lead the British Isles themselves to become, ultimately, mere provinces of America. Hamilton’s claims may have been hyperbolic at the time; indeed, Britain retained its presence in the West Indies until after the Second World War, and Belize was one of the last imperial holdings to become fully independent. Yet there are certainly many of us in Britain today who feel they have, in some form, come true. Indeed, Britons are not alone in imagining themselves constituents (or perhaps subjects) of an American system which now spans much of the globe.
This year marks the 250th anniversary of the United States of America’s declaration of independence, and much has changed for America and Britain between John Hamilton’s time and ours. In 1776, the Thirteen Colonies had a smaller population than Ireland, and together exported less than the Crown’s Caribbean holdings combined. Yet America came to possess perhaps the most resource-blessed territory in the world, combining the largest expanse of highly arable land on the planet with a more extensive network of navigable waterways than every other country combined, and discovering underneath that land more or less every resource known to man, including latterly one of the world’s great untapped supplies of oil and gas in the shale fields of Texas and the heartlands. It is unsurprising, then, that — as Benjamin Franklin accurately forecast within a century of the revolution — the United States came to overtake the British Isles in terms of population, and the British Empire as a whole in terms of economic production and exports.
It was not until 1917 that this world-historic usurpation was first demonstrated, as Britain languished in the stalemate of the Western Front. We may have been on the victorious side of the First World War, but it was only America that truly won, Britain finding herself debt-laden and exhausted by its end. With the stroke of a pen, British naval dominance was ended in the Washington Naval Treaty. It was the Second World War, however, which sealed the Empire’s fate, as Britain mortgaged her holdings to secure American aid — the final blow served shortly after in the form of America’s intervention in the Suez Crisis.
It is often commented that this rapid fall from grace drove remarkably little reflection among the British over their place in the world, the period of decolonisation in particular overlapping with domestic strife over the fate of the post-war socialist economy. Indeed, for several decades following our emergence from that misguided dalliance, one could easily forfeit concern over our reduction, for our position still seemed relatively strong. At the time of the Hong Kong handover, the United Kingdom had a GDP greater than that of India and China combined. We possessed a respectable and combat-ready military even into the early twenty-first century, and, in 2007, British GDP per capita was measured higher than that of the United States. In the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis, however, the United States’ figures have continued to improve, whilst ours have stagnated. China’s rise relative to the US over the past two decades has masked the resurgence of American dominance, financially and militarily, over the rest of the developed world.
That America has a tremendous cultural influence is well understood, and it would be unnecessary to provide a full explication thereof. Nevertheless, one can still be surprised at the extent to which this process has developed, particularly over recent decades. A young Brit or American travelling to Sweden, Denmark, or the Netherlands for work or tourism will find learning the language of either nation superfluous, so widespread is English fluency among the young and urban — but even in Poland, 75% of people under the age of 30 can hold a conversation in the global lingua anglica. In fact, a small but growing fraction of well-off urbanites in places as far-flung as Malaysia now grow up learning English as their first language in preparation for attendance at prestigious ‘international’ schools. This anglicisation in itself is a big change, but it carries the potential for much more, as a common language serves as a vector for other forms of cultural homogenisation.
Indeed, on holiday in Jordan earlier this year, I found in Amman a city which felt more excitement about and placed more status upon the symbols of Americanism than any other I have been to. Fifty meters down the road from my AirBnB in the mansion district, a ‘traditional’ café stood wedged between a knock-off Costa Coffee, a Krispy Kreme, a Mexican restaurant, and a Hamleys. The café’s menu was written entirely in English, and no woman inside wore non-Western clothing, let alone had her head covered. Of the reading material adorning the bookshelves of the knock-off Costa, all but two books were in English (the remaining pair were Dutch). Whilst Britain and western Europe ostensibly tires of Americanisation, the rest of the world continues its charge theretoward apace.
Beyond the trivial, American influence is reflected across the world in changing political cultures. It has been fashionable for some time on the right to lament this fact, but for much of the world, it has been a positive development. Travelling to places on the earliest edges of this process reveals that fact in interesting ways. In Baghdad, for example, pockets of Westernisation exist across the city, from individual cafés and hotels to small complexes of shops and restaurants. It is a select few who fully indulge in the opportunity such places offer to live differently from their ancestors and fellow countrymen, yet there are many more who dip their toes, looking nervously but eagerly towards their more Westernised neighbours. Whilst we begin to revise aspects of our own liberal social settlement, we should not forget why this is the case, especially for young people trapped by the crushing weight of tradition and familial obligations. Whatever downsides individualism may bring, its alternatives can be devastating to contend with in a personal context, and it is easy to understand the inexorable diffusion of the American ontology in that context.
In fact, many of these places benefit greatly from a certain inevitable distance from America, which allows them to adopt those aspects of American political and broader culture without seeking to imitate it holistically. Perhaps it is the lack of that distance that makes Americanisation more damaging in Britain, and nowhere has it been more damaging than on our conception of ourselves and the nature of our polity. In 1988, US President Ronald Reagan said ‘You can go to live in Japan or Turkey, but you cannot become Japanese or Turkish. But anyone, from any corner of the world, can come to live in the United States and become an American.’ Reagan’s understanding of Turkish identity may have been somewhat confused, but that is besides the point.
Only two decades beforehand, Britain’s understanding of its own nationhood had far more to do with Japan’s (or Turkey’s) than with America’s, yet in the following decades we have gradually adopted that same understanding of ourselves — that Britishness is a solely civic identity, acquirable by any passport holder, defined by values or ideals instead of ancestry, and that Britain has always been ‘a nation of immigrants’. It’s often suggested that mass migration as a political project was embarked upon for reasons of commercial interest or political transformation, but in truth — at least for Tony Blair, its principal architect — multiracialism was simply modernity, as defined by the American example, adopted in an attempt to more faithfully build America in England’s green and pleasant lands.
It is interesting, then, that it is often those who most closely adhere to these thoroughly Americanised conceptions of nationhood who most vocally lament the ‘Americanisation’ of our politics and culture. During the protests and vigils that followed the murder of Henry Nowak, many on the left took to X to bemoan the ‘yankification’ of British politics, which was supposedly exemplified by the unprecedentedly racialised terms in which the event was discussed. The same kinds of criticisms have been levelled by the same kinds of people against flag-raising, public Christianity, and ‘debate culture’. Yet this supposed anti-Americanism is in fact as American as apple pie — reflective precisely of the attitudes of America’s left-wing establishment. This has been an entirely native cultural trend to the US since before FDR conquered Europe, stemming partly from antipathy towards those aspects of America which symbolise the left’s domestic opposition, and partly from the ideal of more perfect union. To be American is, in many ways, to lament that America is not yet American enough — that it does not yet live up to its ideals, and that it has not yet realised its promise.
One of the more pervasive exports of American culture has been the decision to elevate Africans in media and politics. This is understandable for the United States as, by the time of independence, around a fifth of the Thirteen Colonies’ population was made up of enslaved people of African descent. Through the issues of emancipation, the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, African Americans have not only been a significant part of the population, but of American political culture. Despite (as of the 2021 census) Black people constituting less than five per cent of the United Kingdom’s population, Black people have been found to feature in about 50% of all television adverts, around 25% of which had them in a lead role.
In 2017, in response to the Manchester Arena Bombing, where 22 concertgoers were killed, and over 200 were physically injured, the Oasis song ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ proved to be a popular local anthem in the aftermath, with the Guardian calling it the ‘symbol of Manchester’s spirit’. In 2020, when one Black felon met his end as a police officer knelt on him three thousand miles away in a country not even part of the commonwealth, we were encouraged by our media outlets, charities, celebrities and political mouthpieces to take to the streets and look very much back in anger. In the ensuing London protests, Churchill’s statue outside Parliament was defaced, and a mixed-race child attempted to burn the Union Flag on the Cenotaph. This was despite the culture of policing having been, and currently being, totally different in Britain and the US, not only in the number and presence of armed officers, but also in the deaths of civilians at the hands of police officers. Despite the lack of mass importation of African slaves to the British Isles, and the Imperial War Museum estimating the total Black population of the United Kingdom to have been around ten thousand in 1939, countless Black politicians and media personalities proudly claim that Black people ‘built Britain’. This has led naturally to the Windrush myth, with a few thousand Caribbean immigrants (not invited by the government) supposedly having ‘saved’ Britain after the Second World War (one always wonders as to how Britain needed ‘saving’ when the U-Boats were no longer patrolling and the Luftwaffe no longer overhead).
One notable remnant of the Summer of Floyd (as some call it) was ‘taking the knee’, started by African-American sportsmen in 2016. Taking the knee was quickly adopted in 2020 among football teams in the UK (and a few other countries), as players from the Premier League to the UEFA Championship proceeded to take the knee before kick-off, usually to a chorus of boos from the crowd. This continued for UK teams well after other countries had stopped doing it. Something the COVID-19 Pandemic revealed about British society was not only a fanatically slavish devotion to, and enforcement of, rules present among many folk (pensioners reporting children playing in the street to police etc), but an energetic servility in wanting to be the best standard bearers of the new, hot and fashionable movement; to be (and be seen by others as being) just as morally righteous as those brave protestors in America. In perhaps the best visual encapsulation of the British political class’s relationship with states, at the England versus USA game in the 2022 FIFA World Cup, the England players took the knee before kick-off (at the instruction of their manager, Gareth Southgate) while a puzzled American team stood. The ideological molestation of 2020 seems to have sunk its roots deep — certain vigils for Henry Nowak this year saw some of their attendees taking the knee, posing for photographs. Though clearly an inversion, the motif itself is here to stay.
The Black Lives Matter protests of that year spanned over sixty countries, in which nearly all non-English (native) speaking countries saw signs emblazoned with English slogans. Equally odd was the mere presence of said protests in countries such as India, Georgia and Fiji, but more notable were the gatherings in South Korea and Japan. The Republic of Korea saw protests condemning ‘US imperialism’ outside the American Embassy, while a vigil was held outside the American Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan (the largest US air base in East Asia). The approval ratings the United States enjoys in South Korean polls hover around 50%, while the American military presence in the ROK has continually generated protests about a so-called ‘occupation’.
Even if American geopolitical hegemony fades over this century as the country itself continues to turn inwards, its economic and cultural power will take longer to abate. English is not only the international language of business, it is the language of music, film, and television, with American audio-visual products dominating across the globe. There is no more an international competitor to Hollywood than to the English-language internet, and anyone with a TV or an internet connection will continue to turn their attention West for some time to come. Much can be said of ‘stuck culture’, the fragmentation of the ‘mainstream’ and ‘the normie’ as a dying breed for the generations raised on the internet. But thus far, the common frames of reference are still set by Atlantic discourse, and particularly for the developing world, even a globalised American ‘slop-culture’ represents genuine novelty. It may be that Americanisation has yet to reach its zenith as billions across the global south come online for the first time.
Given the extent to which we live in an American world, it is remarkable how weak an understanding of how the country came to be (and how this should inform our understanding of its nature today) most people in Britain have. A Briton in 1880 would have been forgiven for their ignorance of the Thirteen Colonies’ journey towards independence: America’s was not even the most important revolution of its century, having been overshadowed by France’s and the Napoleonic Wars that followed, and the United States had yet to establish a substantial global footprint. I would argue that today, this is no longer the case, and yet — whilst the American Revolution is on the national curriculum for Key Stages three and four — I could not find a single friend, acquaintance, or work colleague who was actually taught about it. Few have heard of the Townshend Acts, the Coercive Acts, or even the Stamp Act. Episodes like the Boston Tea Party and perhaps the Boston ‘Massacre’ are usually vaguely remembered, but few among the general public have much understanding of who the founding Americans really were and why they embarked on the path that would eventually lead to today.
Today, ‘New England’ is just a place name like any other, but in 1776 it was a far more literal description of what had been constructed along the north-eastern seaboard of North America. Before the cities of the northeast were inhabited by the Irish, the Italians, and other groups of varied heritage who came to America via Ellis Island in the nineteenth century, their denizens were Englishmen in every way, including their own self-understanding. Conflict with the imperial state was rooted not in the birth of a new nation but in the assertion by colonists of their rights as Englishmen, at least as far as they understood them. Thomas Jefferson, for example, was such an ardent Anglo-Saxonist — Anglo-Saxonism being associated strongly at this time with certain conceptions of English liberty, supposedly crushed by the Norman yoke — that he proposed Hengist and Horsa be put on the seal of the United States.
Despite Britain’s attitude of what Edmund Burke called ‘salutary neglect’ towards its transatlantic possessions, the American colonists were not alienated exiles, cast off or running away from their home country. Before 1776, nine members of the Royal Society came from New England, and three from Virginia. The English Civil War saw six first-generation New England settlers return home to serve as colonels in the Parliamentary Army, and eight made the same journey to serve as MPs before the end of the interregnum. Downing Street itself is named after Sir George Downing, a Massachusetts settler born in England who returned home and served as Scoutmaster-General under Cromwell. During the colonial period, roughly one hundred American-born students attended the University of Edinburgh, with around seventy attending each of Oxford and Cambridge. During the crisis years of 1763-83, five American-born MPs sat in the House of Commons.
Contrary to the nineteenth-century myth, when riding to alert the Massachusetts militiamen of incoming royal troops, Paul Revere did not exclaim ‘the British are coming’, but rather ‘the regulars are coming’. The vast majority of even the rebellious population of Massachusetts would still have considered themselves Englishmen when he did so. Even after Britain recognised American independence, there was still a strong sense of kinship felt by American leaders. Senator Thomas Pickering, after leading militia in 1775 to trap retreating British soldiers, lobbied to support Britain during the Napoleonic wars and described the British Isles as ‘the world’s last hope’ for liberty.
It has been interesting to see the re-emergence of this conscious Anglo-Saxonism throughout the Trump Administrations, especially the second. In 1918, when President Woodrow Wilson visited Britain and met with King George V, he explicitly instructed a British official not to refer to Americans as cousins or Anglo-Saxons. Yet, during King Charles’ visit to Washington earlier this year, President Trump spoke of the Continental Army and militia in 1776 as having had ‘Anglo-Saxon courage’ running through their veins, and said of them that ‘their hearts beat with an English faith’. As America reckons with its second great demographic transition, becoming a majority non-white country after it long since ceased to be a majority Anglo-Saxon one, some of its leadership is rediscovering the importance of that heritage in shaping the nature of their country.
But if these connections run so deep, why did the Anglo-Saxon people find themselves cleaved into two 250 years ago, and could it have been otherwise? Many excellent books tell the full story, but there are a few points worth touching on here which are interesting as historical curiosities and perhaps offer lessons either on how moments of revolutionary potential can be effectively handled or on the historic nature of Britain, America, and the relationship between the two.
The first is an oft-ignored point regarding the relationship between taxation and representation. The famous phrase came about largely in response to the implementation of the Stamp Act, the first incidence of direct taxation on colonial subjects, which required a tax to be paid on every piece of paper used. This imposition was justified by the Prime Minister at the time, George Grenville, on the basis that Americans were ‘virtually represented’ in Parliament, as all MPs were expected to act in the interests of the whole nation, not simply those who had elected them (or indeed their constituency as a whole). This understanding of Parliamentarians’ responsibilities has largely faded now, and the sectionalism that results renders us all the poorer for it, but at the time, it was very real, and indeed, the vast majority of subjects living in Britain itself were represented in this way, with only 5% of the population directly enfranchised.
What defenders of this argument fail to recognise is that, if the Thirteen Colonies had been granted seats in Parliament under the same electoral standards as Britain, the American electorate may have rapidly come to dwarf Britain’s own. In order to vote in 1765, one needed to be propertied and have a yearly income above a certain threshold. Around one-fifth of the adult male population in Britain owned land at the time, compared to around two-thirds in America. Despite owning more land and having a higher yearly income than some Barons in England, George Washington was represented in Parliament only on the same basis as the tenants who tilled those Barons’ fields (even if one does buy into the principle of virtual representation).
‘No taxation without representation’ is often repeated now as a rallying cry for democracy, and used to justify the claim that all people subject to a state will inevitably demand the direct representation of their own sectional interests in policymaking. This runs contrary to the notion that representatives should act in the interests of the whole nation, on which the notion of virtual representation rests. It is the former point that is more damaging, as it reduces statecraft to a struggle between internal factions, rather than the pursuit of the strength of the nation as a whole. What the above demonstrates is that this is the wrong lesson to learn. The cause of the extreme reaction in the colonies was not the fact that people in general were deprived of political participation, but specifically the failure to integrate newly emergent men of talent and high standing into the state. It is this failure that led to political rupture in 1776, and similar dynamics lie behind most revolutionary or secessionist moments. In many ways, the pursuit of the opposite approach — the opening of the state to new blood as it arises — neutered the British socialist movement in the early days of the Labour Party, whilst the failure of the current British state to provide participation and routes for advancement to those who are (and understand themselves to be) deserving of it is a source of great weakness.
The second misunderstanding relates to the intentions of the parties at war, and, therefore, the inevitability of the war’s outcomes. As regards the colonists-turned-rebels, nobody was talking about (let alone seriously preparing for) independence, save perhaps Samuel Adams, until less than a year before July 1776. Adams and the Sons of Liberty (the foremost agents of violent resistance in the years between the Stamp Act and the outbreak of war) swore their continued loyalty to the King throughout the 1760s, making Parliament their enemy — not the Crown, let alone the British state as a whole. As late as 1774, Thomas Jefferson was writing publicly that the King should have the right to refuse Royal Assent confirmed and returned, so as to end the ever-hated Parliamentary tyranny. That same year, at the first Constitutional Congress, Georgia refused to send a delegation because the gathering was seen as too radical. Even so, the toasts of the event’s dinners were made to the King and the ‘continued constitutional connection with Great Britain’.
Even after hundreds had been slain at Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill, the Second Continental Congress drafted the Olive Branch Petition as one final attempt to seek a peaceful resolution from Parliament. Even after the Proclamation of Rebellion (which announced that all thirteen colonies were in open revolt and would be militarily suppressed), the Invasion of Quebec and all other rebel military moves were made to gain a better seat at the negotiating table, not to annex Quebec into any of the colonies. It was not until Thomas Paine‘s Common Sense was published in January 1776 that the first serious discussions about independence started to take place. Even on that fateful day in July, the New York delegates abstained on the measure to declare independence, and John Dickinson (author of the Olive Branch Petition and a delegate for Pennsylvania) refused to attend the vote.
Contrary to what the rebels feared, the King and Parliament were not planning to reduce the Americans to helpless servitude. Lord Dartmouth had thrown around the idea of a federative plan for the thirteen colonies in a similar vein to Benjamin Franklin’s Albany plan (drawn up in the 1750s) and Joseph Galloway’s Plan of Union in 1774. The Prime Minister, Lord North, had drawn up his ‘conciliatory proposal’ that redressed the vast majority of colonial grievances. Despite Benjamin Franklin’s witticism that ‘we must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately’, that was not the case for those who fell into royal custody. Richard Stockton, a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, was kidnapped by a loyalist militia in November 1776 and dragged into royal custody. Rather than being summarily executed or transported to England for trial, he was offered a full pardon if he merely swore an oath of allegiance to the King and promised not to take up arms against him in the future. This he did, and he was let go, even though he had willingly and publicly put his name to a document of insurrectionary treason. In the final peace feeler Britain made during the war, Washington was even offered a dukedom.
Why, then, if there were compromises that both sides were willing to make, did political disagreement result in revolution? Beyond what has already been discussed, one reason is the mistaken belief by many in Parliament that the colonies could be militarily forced to accept terms of their design. It does not require hindsight to recognise the folly in that — William Pitt (the Elder), architect of victory in the Seven Years’ War, spoke in Parliament throughout the period between the Stamp Act’s passage in 1765 to his death in 1778 about the illegality of Parliament’s measures against the colonies and the impossibility of militarily subduing them. Edmund Burke (one of the colonists’ foremost defenders in the Commons) would deliver a speech in 1775, laying out clearly why the colonies could not be bullied into submission and why turning the screw on them would only bring more trouble. That same year, the former Lord Chancellor, Lord Camden, explained to the House of Lords that, for geographic and demographic reasons, any war with the colonies was unlikely to be winnable.
Some may believe that the loss of the American colonies was inevitable in the eighteenth century, but I would contend that there were possibilities they could have been retained, even if it was more likely they were not. Pitt the Elder was made Prime Minister shortly after the Stamp Act’s repeal, and had a long record as a voice of reason on the American question. Almost immediately upon his appointment, he suffered a mental collapse and was bedridden for virtually all of his Premiership (which lasted little more than two years). During his incapacitation, Charles Townshend — a notable hardliner — drafted a series of duties almost solely designed to spite the colonists and whip up conflict again (which they successfully did). Had Pitt's illness been less severe, shorter, delayed or non-existent, there was no chance the Townshend Acts would have been passed, and his Premiership — however long it would have been — would have undoubtedly found some other way of extracting revenue from the colonies without incurring massive trade boycotts. Alternatively, had Britain lost the Seven Years’ War whilst retaining its North American colonies, the threat of living under Catholic, French governors may have meant far less resistance to Parliament’s attempts to raise revenues to fund defence. These are just two possible routes, and as always with alternate histories, infinitely more are available.
The lesson to be drawn from Britain’s loss of the American colonies is one of understanding how your opponent really thinks, outside of the caricature constructed through the prism of your own interpretations. It is also a reminder of the necessity to allow expedience to trump the assertion of a principle. Suppose that Parliament had the full right to tax the colonies (and it probably did). Parliament also, in the United Kingdom, has the ‘right’ to enforce a £1,000 fine on every utterance of the phrase ‘should of’. Should such a thing be done simply because Parliament has the right to do so? The path towards reconciliation with the colonies, whilst it was still possible, could plausibly have avoided the renunciation of those rights if only they had not been exercised in the first place. Doing something to prove that you can is often the quickest way to ensure that that ability is taken away from you —but reserving a power for when it is truly justified can often be its best defence.
Even 250 years on, the American Revolution looms large in the political imagination not just of Americans, but of Brits as well. In particular, the mythology of popular resistance against an overbearing government feeds into right-wing thought of various stripes, from libertarians to conservatives to nationalists and beyond.
That rebelliousness, however, was not unique in spirit to the Thirteen Colonies at the time, nor is it unique to (or even particularly present in) America now. During the same decade where Westminster’s focus should have been fixed on the Americas, it was distracted year after year from 1763 onwards by Wilkesite (radical Whig) violence in London. The devastating Gordon riots took place during the war of independence itself. America has never in modern times seen right-wing direct action like the riots that followed the 2024 Southport stabbings in Britain, nor the recent reaction in Northern Ireland to an immigrant’s attempted beheading. As we have already detailed, the story of the American Revolution as a popular uprising is not quite right, and the notion of American rebelliousness often serves to keep the American right in a state of dangerous self-satisfaction, safe in the (mis)calculation that if things get bad enough, the people will rise up.
A closely related comfort blanket comes in the form of the Second Amendment, often toted by right-wing Americans as a great bulwark against tyranny and governmental overreach, with gun-wielding American patriots contrasted against ‘cucked’ Europeans who ‘gave up their guns’ and surrendered to the powers that be. Of course, this notion is farcical.
This is not because a heavily armed population cannot asymmetrically resist a more powerful military of the global hegemon, per se — indeed, America’s track record in counter-insurgency overseas has been weaker than that of Britain. The idea that American servicemen (many likely to have ties of some kind to the imaginary conservative revolt) could necessarily be relied upon facing widespread domestic insurrection with a certainty of loyalty is shaky at best. The complete non-starter, though, is the idea that overly comfortable, and mostly over-aged and overweight Americans would ever consider the sustained personal physical costs of this course of action (as opposed to episodic acts of resistance like Jan 6th). And thus, mass firearm ownership has done nothing to prevent the depredation and disenfranchisement of the American people.
Never mind issues of unconstitutional taxation and regulation — no fight was ever put up against the flood of tens of millions of illegal aliens across the Southern Border in the decades leading up to 2024, nor was there any armed resistance to the near-expulsion of Anglo-America from most of New York, Boston, and many other of New England’s major cities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I would not suggest that such a response would have been justified, but if American conservatives truly believe that armed resistance is ultimately an acceptable political route, under what circumstances should it be deployed if not these?
A more relevant inspiration to draw from the Revolution for western political dissidents in our own time would not be the viability of protest, resistance, or direct action, but the necessity of organisation, coordination, seizing the initiative and dictating the pace and course of events by going on the (proverbial) offensive. Time and time again, from the passage of the Stamp Act to the beginning of the war, the colonies displayed a marked ability to work together and coordinate. The Stamp Act Congress, which coordinated resistance, was attended by delegates from nine colonies. All but two of thirteen upheld boycotts against British trade in response to the Townshend Acts, and only Georgia failed to attend the First Continental Congress which organised opposition to the Coercive Acts.
Dissenting Patriots did not start their own rival congresses out of petty personal resentments of other Patriot leaders. The Committees of Correspondence in the colonies exchanged intelligence, circulated news of military movements, coordinated boycotts and street action, and operated almost as a political police force during the war. At almost every stage, both in the lead-up to and during the war, the Patriots consistently outmanoeuvred Loyalists in organisation and execution of plans. In the southern colonies, where Loyalist sentiment was highest, gatherings and marches of Loyalist militias were consistently disrupted and dispersed by Patriot militias before they could link up with royal forces or start effective ground campaigns against Patriot governments. The will for change is visibly more than present among the British population; it merely requires organisation among the masses.
Equally, Patriot organisations were not suspicious and exclusive, and they ensured that every man of talent was given the full opportunity to utilise that talent in the service of shared goals, channelled with effective coordination. We can and should criticise those who cast off on their own, especially where their independent efforts are in direct conflict with the primary current of our efforts. But we should also recognise that this is inevitable where people with the will and talent to act are not given opportunity to do so. The failure to identify and fold in talent was the crucial failure of the British government that led to the loss of the colonies; success in doing so was the Patriots’ ultimate weapon. Finding useful positions for allies with merit should be a top priority for any dissident leadership — because allies ignored can easily become opponents.
What of that Patriot Republic now? All of its founding fathers would lament the current state of the United States in one way or another. Indeed, the way that the country is governed has little to do with the state that they founded, nor the constitution that they wrote. No longer a loose federation of states touching lightly on the lives of a population of freeborn Englishmen, it has become the most powerful military force in history with imperial ambitions broader than any predecessor, governing a population drawn from every corner of the planet and exercising a degree of control over their lives and livelihoods that would have been unimaginable not just at the time of the revolution, but at any time before the twentieth century. It is perhaps unsurprising that America does not have the same government it had at its birth — after all, it is, for the most part, not the same country.
As for the 250th anniversary celebrations themselves, they offered a pithy encapsulation of the country’s current state. Half the country indulged in splendid (if empty) celebrations, with fireworks displays hosted by state and citizen alike, and the administration extolled the virtues of a tale of revolution which exists more in their minds than in their history. The other half shied away from participation lest it constitute an endorsement of the current leadership — taking the opportunity instead to sermonise on the original sins of the nation and admonish their fellow countrymen for their failure to live up to their ideals. If the latter response could be described as unpatriotic, it is nonetheless deeply American.
Whilst America may not be universally popular at home, it retains an admiration of some kind abroad. On the night of the fourth, an enormous fireworks and drone-lights show was conducted over the skies of Tokyo in celebration of the American partnership. The British Red Arrows flew red, white, and blue over the skyline of New York. Despite recent political and geopolitical disagreements, the world is still compelled by America and what it represents — for better and for worse.
For all of America’s political troubles, there is no sign of any economic or technological slowdown. Of the roughly 18,000 active satellites in orbit, around 11,000 were launched from US territory (of which 10,000 belong to SpaceX). The United States similarly dominates in AI. There can be no doubt that, when the first man sets foot on Mars, he will be an American. Whilst the rest of the world slumps towards recession, the American economy continues to grow at pace. Whatever assessments we may have about America’s recent adventurism, it has shown a level of technical military sophistication that even the United States itself could only have dreamed of mere decades ago.
But deep troubles there are. America’s government has metastasised much like ours into a sclerotic and wasteful giant, squatting on top of its society and squeezing as much prosperity out of it as possible. It is tangled in a confused web of international obligations, unsure of how to press its advantages and manage its threats. It is facing great technological and socioeconomic transformations that its state, as currently constituted, will not be able to effectively handle. Bigger than all of these, it will soon be the first country to complete the demographic transition from majority to minority white — a transformation which will, for all intents and purposes, put an end to the nation that has existed these past 250 years, and give birth to a new one in its place.
If, on the night before Trenton — as the Continental Army was reeling from the defeats at Long Island and Manhattan, before any sign of significant French or Spanish support had appeared — Washington had been granted a vision of America today, he may indeed have been thrown into despair. Yet a part of him, despite his concern, would swell with pride in the knowledge that the society he would go on to found would carve a place in history surpassing not only that of Britain, but of the Roman Republic itself, from which he drew so much inspiration. And as he gazed up towards the stars, then so seemingly far away, could he ever have imagined that the first flag on the moon would be the Republic’s?
This article was written by Cato, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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