THE SPIRIT OF 1776: REALLY?!?
It really annoys me when self-styled patriots claim that they are energized by the spirit of 1776. Insurrectionists last week carried “Don’t Tread On Me” Revolutionary battle flags. Not for the first time, they have got the history of the United States all wrong. What they mean in a muddled unreflective way is that they draw inspiration from Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922, from Hitler’s rigged election in 1932, and from Franco’s 1939 rise to power in Spain. There are many other relevant examples. These are the proper parallels for their behavior.
Revolutionaries who demanded independence from Great Britain insisted that they would no longer tolerate taxation without representation. And they won. The American people understood that without a voice in making the law, they were not free. And they voted — for George Washington, for John Adams, and at a turbulent moment in 1800, Thomas Jefferson organized a peaceful transition of power that stands as a precedent for a genuine constitutional government.
The Spirit of 1776 calls on us to remember that the Founders gave no support to the notion that certain leaders by virtue of aristocratic birth or great personal wealth deserved special privilege. It is true that some Americans worried that the people might encourage anarchy. They begged Washington to become a supreme ruler, a kind of figure who stood above the will of the people. He could become our own Oliver Cromwell. Washington would have none of it. Nor, until recently, did the presidents who followed him.
Americans who drafted and ratified the Constitution certainly did not advocate the creation of a new monarchy. The notion of substituting a domestic tyrant for one who lived in England had no popular appeal. They were fully capable of identifying dictators; the Declaration of Independence is a list of crimes of a monarch who mistook his personal authority for genuine due process. As Thomas Paine observed in The Rights of Man, “If I ask a man in America if they want a King, he retorts, and asks me if I am an idiot.” Silly talk about “King Donald” may titillate the political right, but those who spout such nonsense cannot claim a shred of legitimacy from the actions of the American people in 1776.
For the Revolutionaries who brought forth a new republic, the assertion of rights — however defined — assumed that human beings are social animals and as such have responsibilities to the larger community. In other words, for them, claims about rights inevitably drew people into discussion about the rights of others. According to this logic, if one person possesses fundamental rights, then so too do others — friends, neighbors, even strangers. The challenge in a system of contested mutual rights was — and remains — how best to negotiate mutually acceptable limits and boundaries.
However much appeals to community annoy modern authoritarians, discussions about mutual obligations are woven into the original fabric of our political society. For over two centuries privileged groups have repeatedly insisted that they hold rights that other Americans do not because of gender, race, or class. Efforts to restrict the rights of others have seldom worked. During each confrontation over the universality of rights dominant elites have been unable effectively to deny other Americans the rights they claim simply on the basis of their humanity. To try to defend privilege through appeals to 1776 is absurd.
The battle over extending rights to others — Blacks, women, and gays, for example — has never been easy, something that the rioters who trashed the Capitol fail to understand. Against fierce opposition, 19th-century suffragettes made a persuasive fight against male privilege on the basis equal rights. More recently, others have taken up the same argument. Coercion has sometimes slowed the opening up of a genuinely rights-based society, but those who insist that rights are reserved for them alone eventually give way as the circle of rights steadily expands.
The pro-Trump mobs insist that they are defending liberty. This is another false claim. It reflects a kind of selfie mentality that sanctions doing whatever one wants to do without the slightest consideration for the needs and interests of other Americans. Liberty is not a justification for selfishness. For the false patriots who attacked our recent election, the language of liberty is defiant. They want to enjoy “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” without having anyone telling them they cannot do so.
However much such self-absorbed thinking has transformed our understanding of the country’s founding principles, the challenge for us now is to find a means to preserve our shared rights as well as our liberty. Doing so will require Americans to think of themselves — at least, in a political sense — as members of a community in which we all recognize our responsibility for the common good. To be sure, we all have needs and desires as individuals. We take pride in our diverse identities. But the uncompromising insistence on personal autonomy cuts off the possibility of imagining liberty within a framework of mutual obligations.
We might remember what Americans who actually lived in 1776 said about these points. As one observed, “Liberty is frequently used to denote a power of doing as we please, or of executing our acts of choice.” We must reject that kind of thinking, he wrote, because “civil liberty does not consist in a freedom from all law and government, but rather in a freedom from unjust law and tyrannical government.” Trump’s allies are not preserving the Spirit of 1776; they are undermining the very revolutionary principles that once made our country a beacon for democracy.
