1776 or 1789: The Dividing Issue of Our Time
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Over the past few years, a recurring theme in my columns has been the divide between the transnational elite and the ordinary citizen. In many ways, it is the load-bearing framework for most of what I write.
There's no way I can condense my thinking into a few hundred words, but I am going to take a stab at it anyway. I am toying with the idea of writing a short book on how all the major divides between Left and Right come down to the argument between the American Founders and the French Revolutionaries.
The Founders explicitly understood their project as building a Republic based on a governing structure tailored to the people of the United States, whose political traditions were rooted in English Common Law , Christian ideas of virtue, and the "Rights of Englishmen." The structures matched the aspiration for maximum liberty with the practical need to ensure that humanity's baser instincts were checked by competing power structures.
It's all very British, and the ideas trace back to the Scottish Enlightenment, which explains why the Declaration of Independence sounds very much like John Locke, only updated.
That's why we speak of the Magna Carta as one of the ancestors of the Founding, even though almost nothing in it directly relates to the circumstances we found ourselves in then or now. It established the principle that the King is not an absolute ruler, which set us on the path to popular sovereignty.
The Anglo-American political tradition is about reconciling tensions among individual liberty, a prosperous economy, social harmony, and government power, and finding mechanisms that harmonize these competing goals.
That's the vision of 1776. Start with the rights of individuals as the seat of sovereignty, and then find practical solutions to maximize liberty in tune with solving practical problems such as balancing liberty and order, the need for competing power structures, and dealing with barriers placed by flaws in human nature that create conflicts that make the balancing act difficult or impossible.
The competing model was proposed in the 1789 French Revolution, whose goal was simply to wipe the slate clean and build an entirely new order, with new norms, a new morality, a reshaping of human nature, replacing the Church with the State, and rationalizing everything, down to the way we measure time, the year, and the inherent worth of individuals.
If you ever wondered where the idea of a "New Soviet Man" or a "Cultural Revolution" came from, it all has its roots in the vision of 1789 . Wipe away the old, up to and including human nature, and rebuild it from scratch. There is no such thing as history, norms, culture, or permanent shared knowledge. Everything can be restructured along lines that a technocratic elite can design and implement, reforming the malleable clay of human beings and institutions.
1776 begins with a people with a shared history and culture, and an understanding that individuals have competing goals, that the needs of order compete with the liberty of individuals, that state institutions tend to accumulate power in destructive ways, and that politics is a means of resolving disputes as peacefully as possible, and will never achieve utopia. Madison put it well in Federalist 51: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary"
1789 begins with the idea of human and institutional perfectibility, and that a class of philosopher-kings or technocrats can shape people and institutions in a manner that can achieve something akin to utopia. You just have to wipe away the barriers, and the barriers are recalcitrant people (solution: The Terror), competing particularistic outsiders (hence the wars of expansion against France's neighbors), and restarting society from what they called "Year Zero."
Yes, they literally restarted their Calendar.. They even changed the clock, the week, and the measurements. They redefined everything to rationalize it. Only the measurement changes stuck, though, because history and culture really are sticky.
The state replaced the Church and culture as the moral arbiter. The history of European conflicts, the revolutions of the 19th century, Marxism, and today's Critical Theory all have their roots in the vision of 1789.
Europe is still trying to implement the vision of 1789, only this time through the European Union's institutional mechanisms . They often speak in terms of creating a "United States of Europe" and use language that more closely mirrors that of the 1776 crowd, but the mechanisms they have built are pure 1789, only nicer. Speech controls, censorship, Narrative™ control, and even immigration policy aim to erase individuals' distinctiveness and national cultures, creating a moldable populace that will more easily implement the technocrats' vision.
When they say "diversity is our strength," what they are saying is that a nondiverse population is too difficult to reshape and mold into the New European/transnational man. You must first break down the culture to remold it. Break the eggs to make the omelet, and the eggs are the individuals.
Liberty is not the goal, because liberty means individuals pursuing their own vision of the good, shaped by their preferences, which in turn are partly based on their participation in shared religions and their longstanding culture. The whole point is to eliminate friction by reshaping every aspect of society, including the individual.
"You will own nothing and be happy" fits perfectly into this model. Citizens become good little cogs.
Ironically, mass migration and the problems associated with it clearly disprove this model, as did communist societies, and even the failure of the French Revolution. Import the Third World, get the Third World. You can't wipe away the history and culture, no matter how hard you try.
But they keep trying, because that is who they are.
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This difference seems to become more and more apparent as time goes by. the American revolution was about the rights of the Individual , protecting natural rights through , limited government and constitutional restraints. It's entirely premised on taking man as you find them and trying to create a workable system of government consistent with human nature. check, balances all designed to keep power diffuse and allow dissent and competing interests.
By contrast, 1789 represents the French Revolution and the mother of totalitarian ideologies. The "will of the people" is not, as one might think, what the people actually want as expressed through a vote. It's what the self anointed vessels of the popular will determine it to be because they believe they are acting for the people, whether the people like it or not. It's a rejection of human nature and instead an embrace of the idea that man can be perfected. Killing all those tainted with other beliefs almost invariably comes soon thereafter because there always some enemy within who's keeping the leftist utopia from being reached. Reality or foreseeable consequences simply don't matter because once everyone ascends and puts human nature behind them things like supply and demand won't be relevant. Everything will be perfect because they want it to be thus. And it's only the evil people not on board who are preventing the perfect state from being reached and that justifies the mass violence that inevitably flows when the followers of 1789 take control. Rights only exist to the extent they align with the common good as defined by those in power.
It is interesting that both the author of the article and the author of this comment rely upon bare assertion instead of reasoned argumentation, letting the rhetorical sweep the reader along without supplying the reasoning needed to support their conclusions.
Ironic, even, (or is it?) that the authors both fall into the same trap of extolling the supposed virtues of the American experiment and the evils of the French experiment while looking only at the high ideals of the former and comparing them to the basest faults of the latter. Makes one wonder if they overlooked the unequal comparison, or knowingly rely upon it?"
And it really goes downhill after that. Pure Bullshit.
All this very erudite folderol is meaningless and worthless as long as the right is controlled by Trump and MAGA. Trump wouldnt even understand half the sentences in this article and he would care even less.
Why? The claim that the 'folderol' is meaningless and worthless as long as the 'right' is controlled by Trump and MAGA needs more substantiation than spewed spittle.
Over the years both parties have tried to French Fry the Constitution. Both parties have attempted to punish the people for political crimes just as the French revolutionaries did. The 1st French Revolution vested so much power in government that the rise of a Napoleon was almost inevitable.
Trump is behaving like a Napoleon wielding the unchecked authority of populist government. That's what Democrats, in particular, wanted. Democrats have altering the interpretation of the Constitution to create an imperial Presidency in the mold of Napoleon. Andrew Jackson was America's 1st imperial President. That's what the Democratic Party was founded to obtain: unchecked authority of a populist government vested in the Executive.
That's a modern label without context .
No that's what Andrew Jackson tried to make it and he got away with certain things. Purifying the citizenry by deporting the Native Americans from their homes and territories, sometimes multiple times. Military adventures, expansionism and no understanding of banking.
The exact same thing can be said of Trump, is Trump a Democrat?
Here's some context:
Yes, Trump is also an imperial President. Prominent Democrats and liberal public figures and entertainers hobnobbed with Trump before he entered politics. Democrats' TDS come from the failed campaign of Hillary Clinton (who also hoped to be an imperial President).
LOL. Leaving aside the massive damage Trump and his adoring cult have done to our politics (as if that could be done), glorious odes to the Founding dont have the kick they once did. An era with shrinking connection to the 21st century is not the be all end all some wish it were.
That's the point John. Human nature doesn't change. It's why Aristotle is relevant. Many progressives want to believe it does and thus think they can reinvent humanity every generation and they end up murdering millions trying to prove it.
In the late 1790's something like 80% of Americans grew their own food and lived in a rural setting.
This insistence in equating societal needs in 1790 to the 21st century is simply not applicable. When you grow your own food and you're happy living on a farm you dont give a hoot about what corporations are doing, you dont care much about wealth inequality, you are not in a keep up with the Joneses rat race.
The ethos of the Founding era is everyone should better themselves and live an upright Christian life, and know their place in the pecking order. Jefferson and Washington and Madison were aristocrats.
The world is entirely different now due to scientific and technological advancement. Farming is going to be almost entirely automated. Many tens of millions are in big cities. The pull yourself up by your bootstraps ethos is a thing of the past.
We have a welfare state and there is no other choice.
"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good".
In 1776 Philadelphia was America's largest city, with a population of about 40,000.