“A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse...” – Thomas Jefferson, 1791
US politics in 2024, as reflected by the Uniparty in Washington, DC, looks as remote and disconnected from the currents of everyday life as the royal court of King George III at the time of the American Revolution.
All of the nation’s major institutions, from Congress to news media to the presidency, have suffered a historic loss of public confidence, with approval ratings as low as 7% for Congress in 2022.
Those who think the country is “on the wrong track” hover between 75-85%, while nearly 70% believe the Ukraine invasion will lead to nuclear war with Russia. As of August 2023, more than 55% opposed further funding for Ukraine. After the horrific October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, and Israel’s immediate counter declaration of war, direct armed conflict between the US and Iran now looms as a possibility.
Yet nothing seems to change.
Arguing from a conservative point of view in City Journal, Christopher Rufo, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, articulates the need for a “counterrevolution” against today’s vast federal administrative state.
Today’s counterrevolution is not one of class against class but takes place along a new axis between the citizen and an ideologically driven state. Its ultimate ambition is not to replace the new “universal class”—the heirs of the 1960s cultural revolution, who have worked to professionalize it and install it in elite institutions—or to capture the bureaucratic apparatus that the universal class currently controls; instead, it seeks to restore the nation’s founding principle of citizen rule over the state.
Although there is much in Rufo’s analysis that I disagree with, his focus on restoring “citizen rule over the state” lies at the heart of any hope for the nation’s future and is part of America’s founding DNA.
Is the restoration of even a rough semblance of citizen rule remotely possible today?
DEPLORABLES THEN & NOW
In September 2023, I published an article exploring the role of colonial taverns as crucial and ubiquitous meeting places during the American Revolution.
The article highlights the fact that the American War of Independence was won by an often uneasy alliance between leaders comprised of elite colonial gentry and unpaid or poorly paid volunteer soldiers who were overwhelmingly from the ranks of tavern going commoners. After the war, both sides sought political advantage for the interests of their class, and conflict between them often broke into the open.
Historian Michelle Orihel notes that following the surrender of the British in 1781, “revolutionary elites attempted to consolidate their power through cultural, financial, and religious institutions and associations, but other Americans, many of them non-elite, ceaselessly fought against this process of elite formation through print culture, extra-legal protests, and armed revolt.”
It is not tendentious to suggest that gun toting, religious, fiercely independent commoners of yore would likely be characterized as “deplorables” today. It is equally likely that both today’s and yesterday’s “commoners” would embrace the label as a badge of honor.
But would yesterday’s gentry recognize themselves in today’s elites? Would General George Washington feel affinity for career Pentagon bureaucrats such as General Mark Milley, ex-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or current Secretary of Defense, 40 year Army officer and former Raytheon lobbyist, General Lloyd James Austin III?
Would President John Adams be able to relate to President Joe Biden? Would his son John Quincy Adams find common ground with Biden’s son Hunter? If these questions sound absurd, it is because US political culture has become absurd, and absurdly dangerous.
The “ominous farce” that is Mark Milley is a prime example of today’s incapacitated military, a craven career bureaucrat who has won no wars while presiding over an outbreak of drag shows on US military bases, a historically catastrophic Afghan withdrawal and the imposition of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion goals over performance metrics across the US military, all continued by Austin.
By contrast, although Washington was an unabashed member of the land owning gentry, he entered combat regularly on horseback to command field action armed with sabers, twin pistols and a rifle. The reciprocal bond that he forged with the soldiers he commanded was predicated on an earned sense of loyalty and near reverence for his bravery, fearlessness and exemplary physical presence.
No idealization is needed to see the fierce, unifying love of freedom and independence that bound colonial elites and commoners, in spite of their enormous differences. By contrast, the vast breech between the governed and their putative leaders today seems unbridgeable.
IS THERE A PATH FORWARD?
The non-partisan America 250 initiative, charged by Congress with planning for America’s 250th anniversary, conducted a series of surveys in 2021 that found:
92% of adult Americans want to make America a better place to live
83% believe in the American dream of working hard to achieve their goals
81% associate America with freedom
80% associate America with opportunity
79% would rather live in America than anywhere else
74% associate America with diversity
Further, there is a quietly emerging renaissance of civil society in the US., with citizens across the nation forming voluntary associations to work for various forms of direct democracy, citizens legislative authority, community banking, lifelong civics education and local control in areas from farming to digital democracy to fundamental electoral reform and urban planning.
Can this native optimism and longing for community be harnessed for positive change short of a revolution? There is a profound popular desire for productive unity that rejects the divisive, elite bloodsport politics of money and power concentrated in permanent Washington and echoed in compliant regime media.
The nation is clearly passing through a historic crucible. The central question is whether regular citizens can rise to the challenge of changing course and restoring “citizen rule over the state” without the country descending into anarchy?
Apocalyptic visions abound. Yet writing in the Atlantic, historian Fintan O’Toole cautions that the situation may be more complex than is commonly imagined.
“feverish talk of civil war has the paradoxical effect of making the current reality seem, by way of contrast, not so bad. The comforting fiction that the U.S. used to be a glorious and settled democracy prevents any reckoning with the fact that its current crisis is not a terrible departure from the past but rather a product of the unresolved contradictions of its history.”
Perhaps we should begin meeting in local taverns again to discuss the best path forward before it is too late to do so?
PART 1– How Deplorables won the American Revolution