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US Revolutionaries Had 1 Huge Advantage: They Didn’t Have to Fight Off the US
Time and again revolutions, independence movements, and reformist democratic governments have been so harshly attacked and manhandled by the US that the likelihood of the regime emerging from it being what was originally desired was rendered almost nil.
Jul 05, 2026
More than any revolutionaries in history, America's revolutionaries got what they wanted. The government the United States ended up creating and sustaining was, adjusting for 250 years of changes, very similar to the government that the American revolutionaries had sought to create.
Why? What was it that led to Americans getting the government they had fought for, when so many other revolutionaries and independence movements, both historical and more recent, did not?
The common answer is to attribute this success to the wisdom of America’s Founding Fathers, and there’s certainly some truth to that. But for the past century, the biggest reason revolutionaries in foreign countries didn’t get what they fought for, as the Americans did, has been… the Americans.
Time and again revolutions, independence movements, and reformist democratic governments have been so harshly attacked and manhandled by the US that the likelihood of the regime emerging from it being what was originally desired was rendered almost nil.
The phenomenon of a revolution, even a very democratic-spirited one, ending in dictatorship after harsh foreign intervention predates both communism and American interventionism.
In China, Nicaragua, Cuba, and others, the US armed opponents of the new revolutionary regimes, imposed economic embargoes, and more in attempts to strangle them.
After General MacArthur had provoked China into the Korean War, China lost over 200,000 men fighting the US. Nicaragua faced US-created and armed terrorists and saboteurs—the contras—who operated from safe havens in nearby Honduras. Cuba’s revolutionary government faced a US-backed invasion, numerous terrorist attacks, assassination attempts, as well as widespread economic damage from America’s Operation Mongoose sabotage campaign.
In Vietnam and Korea, the US waged wars against communist-led independence movements. Devastating bombing killed millions of civilians and laid waste to both countries. During the Korean War, US Air Force General Curtis LeMay explained, “[W]e killed off…20% of the population… We… burned down every town in North Korea.”
After the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917, the US joined Britain, France, and nearly a dozen others in invading the newly-formed Soviet Union and aiding the White Armies against the Reds (Bolsheviks) during the Russian Civil War. This was what influential British leader Winston Churchill, then the British secretary of state for war and air, called "strangl[ing] Bolshevism in its cradle."
By the time the Reds had won, Russia had been at war for eight years, and the country the communists inherited was so poor, wrecked, and starved that cannibalism was widespread. According to United Nations data, in 1920 Russian life expectancy was a mere 20.5 years, as compared with 55.4 years in the US.
In other cases, the US targeted socialists or reformers who had gained power and sought egalitarian change through democratic systems. In Chile, Guatemala, and Iran, the US instigated and backed coups which overthrew democratically elected leaders—Salvador Allende in Chile, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran—and installed murderous dictatorships.
In Indonesia, the US conspired to overthrow President Sukarno, who had led Indonesia to independence, and eliminate his communist supporters. In The Jakarta Method…the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, journalist Vincent Bevins explains:
In 1965, the Indonesian military killed as many as 1 million of their own countrymen, destroying the third-largest communist party in the world and taking with it pretty much anyone seen as having left-wing tendencies (as well as hundreds of thousands who had nothing to do with anything).
The US Embassy prepared lists of the names of thousands of communists and suspected communists, and, Bevins says, “handed them over to the army, so that these people could be murdered and ‘checked off’ the list.”
The phenomenon of a revolution, even a very democratic-spirited one, ending in dictatorship after harsh foreign intervention predates both communism and American interventionism. For example, after the French Revolution in 1789, armies from Great Britain, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and others, aided by a revolt in Western France led by the Catholic Church, fought to destroy the revolutionary government and reinstitute the monarchy.
With the support of and extreme sacrifices from the French people, the Revolutionaries managed to beat all of them back, but were unable to return to the democratic system the Revolution had originally established. The Revolution ended with Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1799 coup, establishing a dictatorship.
America’s Founding Fathers were brilliant, but in establishing a new government they had a huge advantage that few revolutionaries of the past century have had—they didn’t have to fight America’s attempts to destroy it.
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Reclaiming the Pursuit of Happiness
Let’s celebrate the Declaration’s 250th by ending US poverty.
Jun 07, 2026
Every week in our law school eviction court clinic, we see parents hustling from their workplaces, still wearing fast food and home healthcare uniforms, hoping to push back the day when they and their kids will be sleeping in their car. We see seniors and persons living with disabilities on the verge of eviction because they had to spend their rent money filling prescriptions. We see some of the 43 million people in the US who are living with hunger.
Every person suffering like this is a rebuke to the core promise of the Declaration of Independence. We should commemorate the Declaration’s 250th anniversary with a renewed commitment to the pursuit of happiness, which means our government fulfilling basic economic needs.
From the very first moment of its existence, the United States embraced economic rights. The Declaration of Independence’s second paragraph commits our government to protecting the pursuit of happiness as an unalienable right. The founders, as flawed as they were, knew that this promise included ensuring that basic needs are met.
“Not a Charity but a Right”—The Founders and Government’s Role in Ending Poverty
The Declaration’s main author, Thomas Jefferson, lamented the democracy-undermining existence of poverty. Natural rights are violated, Jefferson wrote, when some residents struggle and others prosper. So he insisted that the government has a duty to act to remedy the injustice, including through aggressively progressive taxation.
Freedom and democracy cannot exist without first meeting the rights to basic human needs.
Other founders agreed. Alexander Hamilton explained that the General Welfare Clause in Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution (“The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect taxes... to provide for the General Welfare of the United States”) creates a government that addresses unmet economic needs. Hamilton’s fellow Constitution framer James Madison called for the new nation to enact laws that would “reduce extreme wealth toward a state of mediocrity, raise extreme indigence toward a state of comfort.”
For 18th century politicians, this type of government intervention was not hypothetical. Colonial governments instituted price controls on food and aggressively regulated gristmills to keep the cost of bread affordable for all.
The founder with the most pronounced vision of economic rights was Thomas Paine, author of the seismic pamphlet Common Sense and a driving force behind the American Revolution and the new government it birthed. Paine called for the redistribution of wealth via progressive taxation and for direct government anti-poverty interventions like old-age pensions, support for families with young children, full employment, and a basic income. “It is not charity but a right—not bounty but justice that I am pleading for,” he said.
The Meaning of the “Pursuit of Happiness”
Beyond the founders’ own words, it is clear from historical context that a 1776 commitment to protecting the unalienable right to the “pursuit of happiness” includes ensuring that subsistence needs are met. Law professor and dean Linda Keller’s comprehensive review of political thought and contemporary use of this critical phrase during the 18th century led her to conclude that basic economic rights are deeply rooted in the nation’s foundation.
“Its inclusion was not merely a rhetorical flourish, but rather the pursuit of happiness established an ‘unalienable right’ that includes an economic dimension,” Keller writes. “In particular, there are minimum needs that must be met in order to pursue happiness, for instance food, shelter, and clothing. Thus the government must provide the conditions to enable individuals to pursue happiness.”
Over the decades, other scholars have agreed. “The Declaration of Independence manifests a government’s affirmative role in protecting rights,” writes law professor Bert Lockwood. “Both the plain and ordinary meaning of happiness and its common usage in the 18th century indicate that the notion of happiness cannot be entirely separated from material well-being. Access to the minimal necessities of life, such as shelter or basic medical care, is thus an indispensable prerequisite to the notion of happiness.”
Charles Black, the longtime Yale Law professor and civil rights advocate who helped argue the legendary desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education, said the point was obvious. “The possession of a decent material basis for life is an indispensable condition, for almost all people at all times, to the pursuit of happiness,” Black wrote. “The right to pursuit of happiness is going to be for all but a small minority of those in poverty, a pale sardonically grinning ghost of a right.”
“Necessitous Men are not Free Men”
US leaders since the founders have underscored this same point: Freedom and democracy cannot exist without first meeting the rights to basic human needs.
“Necessitous men are not free men,” Franklin Roosevelt announced as the foundation of his proposal for a Second Bill of Rights ensuring access to housing, healthcare, and living wages.
US voters have consistently expressed concern over our rampant wealth inequality, supported a government jobs guarantee, and called for recognizing housing and healthcare as government-enforced human rights.
Soon after, the international community heeded Roosevelt’s call. Virtually every nation has ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which enshrines into law the rights to housing, healthcare, and living wage incomes.
Yet the US has not ratified the treaty known as the ICESCR. Not coincidentally, every wealthy nation that has ratified does far better than the US in protecting the pursuit of happiness. Those nations have comprehensive and successful programs ensuring housing, healthcare, and adequate incomes for their residents. In those countries, the grim eviction court scenes we witness every week are almost unheard of.
We can do better, too. US voters have consistently expressed concern over our rampant wealth inequality, supported a government jobs guarantee, and called for recognizing housing and healthcare as government-enforced human rights.
These rights are necessary for the pursuit of happiness. The founders knew it, and so do we. Along with fireworks and picnics, let’s celebrate the 250th by finally fulfilling the real promise of the Declaration of Independence.
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What the Right-Wing AI-Slop Machine Gets Wrong About Frederick Douglass
One hundred and fifty years ago to the day, Frederick Douglass gave his “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln,” a radical speech that refutes MAGA attempts to co-opt him.
Apr 14, 2026
Prager U—a producer of right-wing “educational videos” founded by conservative radio host and edutainment entrepreneur Dennis Prager—has recently been in the news regarding its “America at 250” initiative, a collaboration with the Trump White House well described by The New Yorker as “Serving AI Slop for America’s Birthday.” The initiative is one of many administration efforts to conscript this year’s July 4 celebration in its culture war against the left, a war, announced by President Donald Trump back in March 2025 with his Executive Order 14253, cynically named “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
It seems particularly appropriate to reflect on the MAGA effort to promote historical misunderstanding today, the 150th anniversary of one of Frederick Douglass’ most important speeches, “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln.” For Prager U first made headlines back in September 2021, with the posting of an animated video entitled “Leo & Layla’s History Adventure with Frederick Douglass.” While Prager is a stridently anti-“woke” enterprise, purveying a manifestly whitewashed historical narrative, this video was particularly notable, and outrageous, because it featured Douglass, the ardent Black abolitionist and radical Republican, as a self-righteous extoller of caution and celebrant of American Greatness. Like Trump’s “1776 Commission Report,” published that same year within weeks of the January 6 insurrection, Prager sought to co-opt Douglass (and also Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Martin Luther King, Jr.) rather than to ignore him, all the better to promote its right-wing conception of “patriotic history.” Prager did this in a particularly insidious way.
“Leo” and “Layla” are two white kids innocently watching TV when a newscaster reports on “angry” (obviously BLM) protesters demanding the abolition of the police. Leo, put off by a math teacher who strangely teaches about “systemic injustice,” then asks his older sister: “Why is everyone so angry? Are they burning a car? What does abolish even mean?” Seeking to understand, the siblings enter a time machine, where they are immediately greeted—“welcome to 1852!”—by a dapper Frederick Douglass eager to school the innocent children and restore their abiding reverence for all things American.
Douglass proceeds to explain “abolition” by informing the kids that he was himself once a slave, and when they ask him how he dealt with his unenviable situation, he replies: “It was very hard, and I was often sad. I taught myself to read and write... knowledge is the pathway from slavery to freedom... [and] today I am a free American, fighting for all to be free.” When the children express confusion about how the “founding fathers” could have reconciled slavery with the idea that “all men are created equal,” Douglass reassures them: “Children, our founding fathers knew that slavery was evil and wrong... They wanted it to end, but... made a compromise to achieve something great: the making of the United States.” Noting that abolition would have alienated the Southern plantocracy, he explains that “our founders created a system that would have slavery end gradually.”
Today’s anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s dedication of the Freedmen’s Monument is an occasion to remember that our history is not so easily conscripted; that the struggle for a truly multiracial and egalitarian democracy requires reckoning with racism and not denying its existence.
When the naïve students fret about hypocrisy, Douglass explains further: “Sometimes things are more complicated than they might seem, and complicated problems take time to solve... big problems need to be approached very carefully.” He then delivers the coup de gras: “Have you kids heard of William Lloyd Garrison? He’s an abolitionist like me, and he and I used to be friends, but we aren’t any longer... William refuses all compromises, demands immediate change, and if he doesn’t get what he wants, he likes to set things on fire.” He then explains that he is “trying to work for change inside the American system, and that “our system is wonderful, and the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. We just need to convince enough Americans to be true to it.” Douglass then warns the kids to avoid people like Garrison, radicals who “don’t just want slavery abolished, but the whole American system.”
The video obviously centers on a tendentious reading of Douglass’ famous 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” that completely ignores the way Douglass brilliantly shifted back and forth in that speech between identification with his white audience and harsh challenge to it:
But, your fathers, who had not adopted the fashionable idea of this day, of the infallibility of government, and the absolute character of its acts, presumed to differ from the home government in respect to the wisdom and the justice of some of those burdens and restraints. They went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to. I scarcely need say, fellow citizens, that my opinion of those measures fully accords with that of your fathers. Such a declaration of agreement on my part would not be worth much to anybody. It would, certainly, prove nothing, as to what part I might have taken, had I lived during the great controversy of 1776. To say now that America was right, and England wrong, is exceedingly easy. Everybody can say it; the dastard, not less than the noble brave, can flippantly discant on the tyranny of England towards the American Colonies. It is fashionable to do so; but there was a time when to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! Here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers.
In his speech Douglass embraced the revolutionary rhetoric of 1776. But he did not say that the American system was “wonderful,” and indeed he committed himself to working with other abolitionists to radically change the system. And while he did break with Garrison, his former mentor, believing that the Constitution—if properly interpreted to support radical abolition, a big “if”—was a “glorious liberty document,” he also clearly believed that its promise had yet to be redeemed, and could only be redeemed through a broad-based and uncompromising abolitionist movement. Far from disparaging Garrison’s radicalism, Douglass actually literally extols it in his closing words: “In the fervent aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it:
God speed the year of jubilee
The wide world o’er
When from their galling chains set free,
Th’ oppress’d shall vilely bend the knee,
And wear the yoke of tyranny
Like brutes no more.
That year will come, and freedom’s reign,
To man his plundered rights again
Restore...
Douglass’ 1852 speech, a brilliant reclaiming of the “spirit of ’76,” was no kind of celebration. It was a subtle but nonetheless powerful disruption of celebration, and an invitation and incitement to radical action. And what Douglass says in it was perfectly consistent with the equally famous and more radical words that he would utter a few years later, in his 1857 speech “On West India Emancipation”:
Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.
These are not the words of a man who believed that “our founders created a system that would have slavery end gradually.” They are the words of a man who believed, to the contrary, that slavery would not end until it was politically and militarily defeated.
Douglass, like his Radical Republican allies, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, and Thaddeus Stevens, vigorously supported the Union in the Civil War precipitated by Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election and the wave of secessions that followed it. But he did this not to vindicate the greatness of the Constitution or to preserve the existing American system, but to effectuate a radical democratic and in some ways revolutionary transformation of the American system. And the policy of Reconstruction he supported involved nothing less than such a transformation, upending the Southern plantocracy, redistributing property and opportunity to emancipated former slaves, and enforcing Black civil and political rights. He made this clear during the war in a July 4, 1862 speech entitled “The Slaveholders’ Rebellion,” and he made it even clearer in the substantial essay he published after the war, in the December 1866 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, entitled “Reconstruction.”
But perhaps the clearest statement of this theme is to be found in Douglass’ “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln,” delivered, at the dedication of the much-heralded Freedmen’s Memorial, on April 14, 1876, the eleventh anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination. Historian David Blight opens his magisterial Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 biography, Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom, with Douglass’s delivery of this speech, pointing out that the dedication had been declared a national holiday; that the event was attended by “a distinguished array of guests” that included President Ulysses S. Grant and many members of Congress and the Supreme Court; and that the entire event held a special meaning for the “huge crowd, largely African-American,” who were present not simply to commemorate Lincoln’s role in Emancipation, but to celebrate a Black-financed and produced monument whose dedication featured the most prominent Black man in the country.
As in his more famous 1852 “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” delivered as abolitionist sentiment was picking up steam, Douglass begins this speech in a spirit of civic communion. Invoking “the sentiment of gratitude and appreciation,” he reminds his audience of the history that made the Freedmen’s Memorial possible:
I refer to the past not in malice, for this is no day for malice; but simply to place more distinctly in front the gratifying and glorious change which has come both to our white fellow-citizens and ourselves, and to congratulate all upon the contrast between now and then; the new dispensation of freedom with its thousand blessings to both races, and the old dispensation of slavery with its ten thousand evils to both races—white and black.
Yet he then proceeds to note that “truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.”
In a speech whose overall purpose is the celebration of a vision of multiracial and universal citizenship, a vision that still remained far from realization, Douglass—the fugitive slave who had become both symbol and tribune of liberation—refuses to erase the very divisive question of race and racial identity. He insists that Lincoln “was preëminently the white man’s President,” and proceeds to outline the many ways, over time, that Lincoln had prioritized the Constitution, and the Union, over abolition, and the emancipation of Black Americans:
The race to which we belong were not the special objects of his consideration. Knowing this, I concede to you, my white fellow-citizens, a preëminence in this worship at once full and supreme... You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity. To you it especially belongs to sound his praises, to preserve and perpetuate his memory, to multiply his statues, to hang his pictures high upon your walls, and commend his example, for to you he was a great and glorious friend and benefactor. Instead of supplanting you at his altar, we would exhort you to build high his monuments; let them be of the most costly material, of the most cunning workmanship; let their forms be symmetrical, beautiful, and perfect; let their bases be upon solid rocks, and their summits lean against the unchanging blue, overhanging sky, and let them endure forever! But... in the fullness of your just and patriotic devotion... we entreat you to despise not the humble offering we this day unveil to view; for while Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a bondage, according to Jefferson, one hour of which was worse than ages of the oppression your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose.
In his speech, Douglass recounts the many ways that Lincoln was despised, both by defenders of slavery who thought him an abolitionist, and by abolitionists who thought him too willing to compromise with the defenders of slavery. He describes Lincoln’s assassination as an awful crime against a great man and against the freedom that Lincoln’s presidency ultimately symbolized.
And while refusing to ignore Lincoln’s flaws, Douglass insists that “we”—he is referring here to Black Americans like himself—“We were able to take a comprehensive view of Abraham Lincoln, and to make reasonable allowance for the circumstances of his position. We saw him, measured him, and estimated him... by a broad survey, in the light of the stern logic of great events, and in view of that divinity which shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will, we came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln.”
Recalling his joy upon learning of Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation,” his pride at the masses of Black soldiers that Lincoln had eventually mobilized to serve in the Union Army, and his determination to continue the struggle for freedom that Lincoln had advanced through his leadership in the Civil War, Douglass closed his oration with a sober appreciation of the fact that Lincoln’s very limits had perhaps been the very source of his strength. Noting that Lincoln “shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race,” and that this had long made him an uncertain ally and sometimes even an opponent, Douglass concludes:
Looking back to his times and to the condition of his country, we are compelled to admit that this unfriendly feeling on his part may be safely set down as one element of his wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict. His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful coöperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen... The honest and comprehensive statesman, clearly discerning the needs of his country, and earnestly endeavoring to do his whole duty, though covered and blistered with reproaches, may safely leave his course to the silent judgment of time...But now behold the change: the judgment of the present hour is, that taking him for all in all, measuring the tremendous magnitude of the work before him, considering the necessary means to ends, and surveying the end from the beginning, infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln.
As Blight observes: “Douglass employed a stunning level of directness for such a ceremony... In the rhetorical twists and turns of this complex speech, Douglass had one overriding target—the declension and betrayal of Reconstruction in the South by the federal government.” Speaking only months before the Declaration’s July 4 centennial anniversary, Douglass well understood how vulnerable was the halting progress achieved by Reconstruction. Indeed, within a year, the infamous Compromise of 1877 was effected, Rutherford B. Hayes was inaugurated president, and federal troops were finally withdrawn from formerly Confederate states, sealing the death of Reconstruction, a wave of racist violence and intimidation, and the resumption of white supremacy.
And so Douglass, on April 16, 1888—almost 12 years to the day of his Freedmen’s Monument speech—delivered another speech in the nation’s capital, describing the indignities and oppressions of the Jim Crow system as a betrayal of the promise of Reconstruction, and declaring that “I Denounce This Emancipation as a Tremendous Fraud.”
We are now living through another tremendous fraud—a Trump administration intent on destroying the rule of law, an independent civil society, and the safeguards that protect free and fair democratic elections, all in the name of an increasingly hollow vision of “American Greatness” resting on what David Blight and James Grossman have rightly called a “brutish assault on history.”
Today’s anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s dedication of the Freedmen’s Monument is an occasion to remember that our history is not so easily conscripted; that the struggle for a truly multiracial and egalitarian democracy requires reckoning with racism and not denying its existence; and that if American greatness means anything, it means the example of figures like Douglass, who persistently fought against both injustice and the celebratory cant typically invoked to reinforce it. And as we prepare ourselves for the ostentatious displays of patriotism that Trump has planned for us this coming July, we can do no better than to recall what Douglass said about an earlier July 4: “To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! Here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers.”
Thanks to Bob Ivie for his helpful comments on this essay.
An earlier version of this piece referred to "William Sumner" as an ally of Frederick Douglas. This has been corrected to Charles Sumner, the abolitionist Massachusetts senator.
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Renee Good Died From the Kind of State Violence Our Founders Warned Against
When state authority stops serving the people but instead lords over them, stops being questioned by the media and the people, and stops fearing consequences because it lives behind a shield of immunity, a police state is inevitable.
Jan 09, 2026
When I read that the young mother who was executed at point-blank range by one of President Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement goons on Wednesday was named Renee Nicole Good, it sent a chill down my spine.
As the pain and outrage was washing through me, it also struck me as almost too much of a coincidence that she was there protesting state violence and Ben Franklin had been using the name “Silence Dogood”—as in “Do Good”—to warn American colonists about the very same dangers of state violence.
When 16-year-old Franklin slipped his first Silence Dogood essay under the door of his brother’s print shop in 1722, America had few police departments, no body cameras, no qualified immunity, and few militarized patrols prowling city streets. But young Franklin already understood the danger.
Writing as a fictional widow, Franklin warned that “nothing makes a man so cruel as the sense of his own superiority.” The remark was in the context of self-important ministers, magistrates, and petty officials, but he was also talking about raw state power itself as we saw with the execution of Renee Nicole Good.
If we want to live in the democratic republic Franklin, Paine, and Madison imagined where power is given by “the consent of the governed,” then outrage isn’t enough.
Power that is insulated, Franklin taught, answers only to itself and believes its very authority excuses the violence it uses.
Franklin’s insight didn’t die on the printed page but, rather, became the moral backbone of the American Revolution. As Do-Good, he repeatedly cautioned us that power breeds cruelty when it’s insulated from consequence, that authority becomes violent when it believes itself superior, and that free speech is usually the first casualty of abusive rule.
In "Essay No. 6", in 1722, Dogood wrote:
Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech.
Renee Nicole Good was on that Minneapolis street to express her freedom of speech, her outrage at the crimes, both moral and legal, being committed by ICE on behalf of Donald Trump, Tom Homan, Kristi Noem, and Stephen Miller.
Thomas Paine took Franklin’s warning and sharpened it into a blade. Government, Paine said, is a “necessary evil” but when it turns its legally authorized violence against its own people, it becomes “intolerable.” Authority doesn’t legitimize force, Paine argued; instead, the ability to use force without accountability inevitably corrupts authority.
And here we are. This is the ninth time ICE agents have shot into a person‘s car, and the second time they’ve killed somebody in the process.
For Paine, violence by agents of the state isn’t an aberration, it’s the default outcome when power concentrates without clear accountability. Where Franklin warned about cruelty born of a sense of superiority (as armed, masked white ICE officers search for brown people as if they were the Klan of old), Paine warned us that force will always be directed against the governed unless that power is aggressively constrained.
James Madison—the “Father of the Constitution”—then took both men at their word. He didn’t design a constitution that assumed virtue; instead, he designed one that assumed abuse.
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” he wrote in Federalist 51, adding, “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
Because we and our politicians and police aren’t angels, Madison pointed out, state power must be restrained, divided, watched, and continuously challenged. Which is why the Framers of the Constitution adopted the checks-and-balances system—splitting the government into three co-equal parts—that Montesquieu recommended, based on what he had learned from the Iroquois (as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Democracy).
Franklin himself became even clearer about the threat of unaccountable state-imposed violence as he aged. Governments, he repeatedly warned, always claim violence is necessary for safety and we saw that Wednesday when puppy-killer Kristi Noem claimed that Renee Good was a “domestic terrorist.” Her comment is the perfect illustration of Franklin’s assertion that state violence, once normalized, always tries to claim justification.
To add insult to murder, Trump pathetically waddled over to his Nazi-infested social media site and claimed:
The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital… [T]he reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis.”
Silence Dogood would have confronted him head-on, as she-Franklin repeatedly did with the petty, self-important officials of colonial New England. He repeatedly noted that surrendering liberty for a little temporary security not only doesn’t prevent state brutality but actually it invites it. In a 1759 letter, Franklin explicitly warned us about men like Donald Trump and the siren song of “law and order”:
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Once a state teaches its agents that force is the solution, force becomes their habit. That’s how police states are formed out of democracies, as the citizens of Russia, Hungary, and Venezuela have all learned. And now, it appears, we’re learning as America becomes the world’s most recent police state.
This isn’t an uniquely American problem: It’s older than our republic. And Franklin told us exactly how it happens: When state authority stops serving the people but instead lords over them, stops being questioned by the media and the people, and stops fearing consequences because it lives behind a shield of immunity, a police state is inevitable.
As Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz noted Wednesday, the killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis wasn’t a “tragic anomaly.” It was the predictable outcome of systems Franklin would have recognized instantly; the kind of corrupt strongman systems that reward domination, excuse cruelty, and punish dissent.
Trump wants us on the “radical left” to shut up and go away. But Ben Franklin taught us that silence in the face of power isn’t neutrality but is, instead, an extension of permission. He wrote as Silence Dogood precisely because he understood that abuse flourishes when citizens turn their eyes away and lower their voices.
If we want to live in the democratic republic Franklin, Paine, and Madison imagined where power is given by “the consent of the governed,” then outrage isn’t enough. We must demand accountability, insist on transparency, and refuse to accept state violence and a firehose of official lies as the price of order.
Three centuries ago, a teenage printer’s apprentice warned us that silence enables abuse. He was right then. He is right now.
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We Didn't Fight a Revolution for a King
Why presidential power should worry every American.
Jul 04, 2025
The Fourth of July marks the day America declared our independence from the idea that one man should hold unchecked power over an entire people and from a system that placed loyalty to the crown above fairness, above freedom, and above the law. That's the kind of government America's founding fathers risked their lives to overthrow.
Alexander Hamilton summed it up in Federalist No. 47, which most readers were required to read in high school, "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." President Donald Trump does not wear a crown, but some of his unilateral, unconstitutional actions—past and planned—echo the exact abuses that America's founders opposed. And whether you support him or not, this should give you pause.
I say this as someone not looking to insult or belittle anyone's vote. Millions of Americans supported Trump in 2024 for valid reasons. Many voters simply felt he was the better of two flawed choices. But if you're one of those Americans—someone who voted for Trump but doesn't want to see one man hold all the power—this message is for you.
A system that allows one person to "do whatever I want" is only comforting if you always agree with that person.
The Founders didn't just oppose King George III because of taxes or trade. They rejected the very idea that one man should rule without real accountability. The Declaration of Independence laid out a vision of a republic in which power is limited, divided, and checked.
Our system was built with friction on purpose—three co-equal branches, independent agencies, freedom of the press, and state sovereignty—all to prevent the rise of a single ruler.
Donald Trump has stated that Article II of the Constitution gives him "the right to do whatever I want as president."
Maybe you trust Trump with that power. Maybe you think he is using it wisely, or at least in your interests by abducting college students off of city streets because of their speech, cutting off federal funds to universities that refuse to cede academic freedom to the government, summarily stripping away birthright citizenship from children born in our nation, starting a war with another nation without any justification or congressional authorization, and funding a genocide in clear violation of U.S law. But what about the next president who runs with this precedent and goes even further? Or the one after that? A system that allows one person to "do whatever I want" is only comforting if you always agree with that person.
Many Americans, especially Republicans, have historically been skeptical of big government and concentrated power—and rightly so. Because when power gets centralized, it never stays in the hands of just one party.
Presidents of both parties have tested boundaries. But what President Trump proposes goes further: He's not testing the guardrails—he's removing them. And he's doing it while promising "retribution" and calling political opponents "enemies of the state."
The Declaration of Independence includes 27 grievances against King George III. Among them: obstructing justice, making judges dependent on his will alone, keeping standing armies under his personal command, manipulating elections, and using public offices as instruments of personal loyalty.
Read those carefully and reflect on the last few months.
As a Muslim, I'm also reminded that the warning against absolute authority isn't just a constitutional principle—it's a moral one. In Islam, power is a trust (amanah), not a privilege, and leaders are servants accountable to those they lead—and to God. Yusuf ben Ali, whose name appears in a revolutionary war era military muster role, is just one example of Muslims risking all for American ideals.
The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said, "Every one of you is a shepherd, and every one of you is responsible for his flock." American Muslims know what it's like when government power turns its gaze on a single community—through surveillance, profiling, and fear-mongering. That's why we are especially sensitive to executive overreach. Because when power becomes personal, the Constitution becomes optional.
Too often, we treat criticism of a president as disloyalty. But that's not how the Founders saw it. They built a system where debate, dissent, and accountability were patriotic. Where allegiance is owed to the Constitution—not to a man.
We can and should insist on a system where no one—left or right—can ignore the law, silence opponents, or rig the system for personal gain.
The Founders gave us a framework strong enough to withstand kings, tyrants, and demagogues—but only if we choose to uphold it. We uphold it by not letting any president—Trump, Joe Biden, or the next one—rule without limits. And that's something every American—no matter who you voted for—should stand up and defend.
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This Juneteenth, America Must Choose to Live Up to Its Founding Documents
When we limit conversations about our complex past, we not only lose historical accuracy but also our capacity for growth and the honest reckoning that could finally help us fulfill our founding promises.
Jun 19, 2025
In 1796, 22-year-old Ona Marie Judge became one of America's most wanted fugitives. Born into slavery and held by President George Washington, Judge escaped from Philadelphia and fled north to New Hampshire. Washington immediately began hunting her, placing newspaper advertisements offering rewards for her return. For over 50 years, she would live as a fugitive, knowing that bounty hunters could appear at any moment to drag her back into bondage. Her story of survival reveals tensions that we're still grappling with today.
Judge's escape revealed the America we rarely acknowledge in our founding stories. As efforts to silence discussions of race and history spread nationwide—from federal agencies barring recognition of Black History Month to more than 44 states, including my home state of New Hampshire, limiting how schools can discuss racism—her story demands our attention.
Judge's escape laid bare the America we rarely acknowledge in our founding mythology.
The paradoxes Judge witnessed still define us. Washington was not the infallible moral leader of our imagination, but a flesh-and-blood man who owned other human beings and spent years trying to recapture the woman who dared seek freedom. New Hampshire was not removed from slavery's horrors—Portsmouth had been a major slave trading port since the 1600s.
Judge's escape laid bare the America we rarely acknowledge in our founding mythology. These tensions were the defining forces that shaped America's first century and continue to do so today. Judge's story illuminates how deeply slavery was woven into the fabric of the entire nation, connecting Black and white lives in ways our history books have long worked to hide. Understanding her experience becomes essential to understanding ourselves, especially as movements to obscure these complexities grow stronger.
The Pattern of Progress and Backlash
This current backlash against Black history education shouldn't surprise us—it follows a persistent American pattern. Every period of racial progress has triggered fierce resistance designed to roll back gains and rewrite the past. After Reconstruction brought Black political participation and civil rights, the country allowed Jim Crow laws to flourish and KKK terror to reign while Confederate monuments were erected across the South to rewrite the Civil War as a noble struggle rather than a fight to preserve slavery. The rise of the war on drugs and mass incarceration of Black Americans followed the 1960s civil rights laws. The election of the first Black president, Barack Obama, triggered the Tea Party movement and birtherism campaigns designed to delegitimize his presidency.
Today's attacks on how we discuss race and history represent the latest iteration of this cycle. When we limit conversations about our complex past, we not only lose historical accuracy but also our capacity for growth and the honest reckoning that could finally help us fulfill our founding promises.
Why Local Stories Matter
This ongoing struggle is why the work happening in New Hampshire—a politically purple state where Black residents make up just 2% of the population—offers constructive lessons for the rest of the nation. If honest conversations about Black history can flourish here, they can do so anywhere; however, success requires understanding what we like to use as a guideline: the rule of thirds. One third will support, one third will be persuaded, and one third will oppose. The progress is determined by the persuadable middle. We've seen how we can make real change by reaching that crucial middle group in New Hampshire.
Look no further than our annual July 4 readings of Frederick Douglass' "What to the Slave Is Your Fouth of July" speech, which has grown from one participating town to 22, with communities reading simultaneously across the state. From synagogues to rural town halls, people gather simply to hear Douglass' words—no discussion required, no positions demanded. This creates space for reflection and connection without the political battles that often shut down conversation before it begins.
Judge's legacy calls us to specific action: Resist erasure wherever we encounter it—in our children's schools, local libraries, state legislatures, and national debates.
Building unexpected alliances has proven equally powerful. Working with the Daughters of the American Revolution to install historical markers honoring Black Revolutionary War heroes demonstrates that historical truth enriches rather than threatens our understanding of patriotism. We've now placed nearly 40 markers throughout the state, each one making visible stories that were always there but rarely acknowledged.
This success stems from focusing on education and storytelling rather than confrontation, allowing facts and local narratives to speak for themselves. New Hampshire residents hunger for authentic stories about their own communities, even when those stories complicate their narratives about the past.
From resistance to Reckoning
The power of personal narrative will be on full display this Juneteenth, as Portsmouth hosts an unprecedented gathering where direct descendants of America's founding fathers and the people they enslaved come together to explore our intertwined histories. Shannon LaNier, the ninth-generation descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, will join Laurel Guild Yancey, descendant of Portsmouth's Prince Whipple, a Black man who fought in the Revolutionary War while enslaved by Declaration of Independence signer William Whipple. In a profound twist of history, the Whipple family would later become the very people who provided sanctuary to Ona Judge when she sought refuge in Portsmouth—the same family line that had owned Prince Whipple would become her protectors, demonstrating how the arc of justice sometimes bends through the most unexpected transformations.
When descendants sit together sharing these narratives, they reveal how the stories of America's founding fathers and the people they enslaved have been inseparably linked across generations. These family histories, passed down through centuries, offer living proof that our nation's racial past isn't separate and distinct, but intimately woven together from the very beginning. Their gathering in Judge's adopted hometown creates a bridge across time, connecting her story of resistance to our current moment of choice.
After all, her choice to flee slavery, knowing the dangers ahead, required extraordinary courage. She lived in poverty, often depending on charity, and had outlived her three children and husband when she died in 1848. Yet she chose uncertainty over oppression, a fugitive's life over bondage, never abandoning her claim to freedom despite facing consequences far more severe than anything we encounter today.
The free Black families in Portsmouth who risked everything to shelter her further demonstrate that resistance has always been collective work, requiring people to see their own freedom as incomplete while others remained in chains. Their courage offers a template for our current moment, when we need that same spirit of collective action.
Judge's legacy calls us to specific action: Resist erasure wherever we encounter it—in our children's schools, local libraries, state legislatures, and national debates. Speak up when school boards attempt to ban books that tell the full story of American history. Engage with the persuadable middle in our communities, attend town halls, and vote for leaders who understand that historical truth strengthens, rather than weakens, our democracy. Most importantly, discover the complete stories of all who have lived in your community—Indigenous peoples, Black families, immigrants, and others whose experiences have been overlooked—and support those working to bring these histories to light.
This Juneteenth, as conversations unfold in the place where Judge found refuge, her story asks us to choose: Will we allow fear to silence these essential truths, or will we find the courage to engage in the honest reckoning needed to fulfill the promises of equality our founding documents made to all Americans?
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What Would the Founders Make of Trump’s Authoritarianism?
The Founders imagined the president as an administrator, not a policymaker, and definitely not an imperial unitary executive.
Mar 26, 2025
The U.S. Constitution is very specific about the powers of Congress and very vague about the powers of the president and the judiciary. While the authors of the nation’s founding documents were explicit that power had to be divided between three coequal branches, the legislative, executive, and judicial, they did not anticipate the authoritarianism of President Donald Trump, the cowardice of congressional representatives beholden to a populist demagogue for endorsements and campaign funds, nor the reactionary ideology of a right-wing Supreme Court. It is not fair to blame the founders for events 250 into the future, with the United States in the midst of a major constitutional crisis.
In 1787, Benjamin Franklin placed the responsibility for upholding the Constitution on future generations when he warned that the new government is “A republic, if you can keep it.” Abraham Lincoln recognized the difficulty of maintaining a country based on this one’s founding principles in his Gettysburg Address over 150 years ago when he told the assembled, “We are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
The Constitution assigns the president an undefined executive power with some very specific tasks. The president represents the country in talks with other countries and can negotiate treaties, but the treaties must be approved by the Senate; the president can veto or sign bills approved by both houses of Congress, and then they are responsible for enforcing the laws; and the president acts as Commander-in-Chief of the military during a war, nominates judges and ambassadors pending Senate approval, and grants pardons.
The Trump claim for a unitary executive and virtually unlimited executive power undermines everything they were trying to create.
There is no mention in the Constitution of political parties or of Cabinet members. Departments and Cabinet positions were created by Congress later to make the government run more smoothly. Executive orders are not mentioned in the Constitution either, and they do not carry the power of law, but every president since George Washington has issued executive orders as instructions to heads of the different federal departments about how to carry out their duties. The Constitution does not give the president the authority to issue executive orders that overturn or ignore laws passed by Congress or decisions made by the Supreme Court.
Since George Washington’s presidency, different presidents have interpreted their powers and responsibilities as chief executive in different ways. President Trump embraces the modern unitary executive theory, which claims that the president has sole authority over the executive branch of the government. According to this theory presidential power can only be restrained if a president is impeached by the House of Representatives and convicted by the Senate, something that it so difficult that it has never happened in United States history.
Without restraints, Trump argues he can summarily fire without cause any employee of the executive branch including Cabinet members approved by the Senate, he can decide not to spend money allocated by Congress, and he can ignore laws he does not agree with even though they were passed by Congress and signed by a previous president. The right-wing majority on the Supreme Court seems inclined to support Trump’s view of executive power. In 2020, during Trump’s first presidency, the Supreme Court narrowly ruled 5-4 that “the entire ‘executive power’ belongs to the president alone,” although it never actually explained what executive power means.
Three of the nation’s founders, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, addressed the allocation of power in the new government and explained why power had to be divided. Thomas Jefferson was not at the Constitutional Convention, but he did address the separation of powers in his 1784 Notes on the State of Virginia, with ideas that helped shape the Constitution. While Jefferson was more concerned with the legislative branch assuming too much power, he was very clear that “all the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judiciary, result to the legislative body,” but “concentrating these in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government... An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one which should not only be founded on free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.” Jefferson warned, “The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold on us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.”
James Madison, who was the secretary at the Constitutional Convention, explained how separation of powers should work in essays he wrote during the debate in New York State over ratification of the Constitution. In Federalist Papers 47-50, he explained the importance of separating powers and how the principle was applied in the Constitution. He also addressed concerns about how the system would work. An underlying principle of the new government was that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” balancing power among the branches of government to protect individual rights and prevent tyranny. Madison famously wrote in Federalist Paper 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
Alexander Hamilton, an active participant in the Constitutional Convention, wrote in favor of a strong executive and is used to justify the unitary executive theory; however, Hamilton was not discussing unlimited executive authority but was disputing the idea of a presidential council. Hamilton explained the specific powers assigned to the president and did not anticipate claims that a president would be virtually unchallengeable. According to Hamilton, “The only remaining powers of the executive are comprehended in giving information to Congress of the State of the Union; in recommending to their consideration such measures as he shall judge expedient”; and “faithfully executing the laws.” He was very careful to distinguish between the president as an elected executive subject to impeachment and the power of a hereditary monarch.
I think the Founders imagined the president as an administrator, not a policymaker, and definitely not an imperial unitary executive. Their bigger fear was that congressional majorities would attempt to usurp the executive’s responsibility to administer laws in order to benefit special interest groups. For the same reason they wanted an independent judiciary to prevent the politically motivated administration of justice. The Trump claim for a unitary executive and virtually unlimited executive power undermines everything they were trying to create.
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We the People Face the Abandonment of America's Foundational Principles
Are we ready to defend our ideals, or have we lost interest in distinguishing virtue from vice and public good from private greed?
Feb 05, 2025
Misattributed quotes and next-level gaslighting aside, we find ourselves yet again at a crossroads in time—a moment demanding serious reflection on the foundational principles that shaped our republic. This is not hyperbole.
For far too many years, most of what we have been willing to believe contradicts the ideals of the figures said to be revered by those we have entrusted with our government.
As to misattributed quotes, we could jump right in with Thomas Jefferson's actual words regarding our shared principles, but let's first reflect on the insights of his revolutionary compatriot turned bitter political rival, John Adams. In a letter dated April 16, 1776—less than three months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence—Adams shared this wisdom:
Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.
Now, recognizing that those working to recreate our nation—in their own oh-so-very perfect image—may not favor the Federalist Adams, our indispensable second president, let us fast forward some 140 years to Theodore Roosevelt. "Teddy" Roosevelt, a man well-versed in the ideas of our Founding Fathers and our foundational principles, had this to say in a letter dated January 1917:
Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood—the virtues that made America. The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety first instead of duty first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.
The focus on virtue as the foundation of national character contrasts sharply with the narrative we have been fed by those who, in reality, promote "the things that will destroy America." God only knows why we, the people, have been so accepting of their manipulative tactics instead of insisting upon promoting "the virtues that made America." Regardless, we have once again set ourselves up to watch as policies that overwhelmingly benefit a growing cadre of super-rich are implemented.
Yes, they will fuel their economic fire sufficiently so that some of us will enjoy a few crumbs. But regardless of their justifications, the harsh realities facing the shrinking middle class and the most vulnerable will be disregarded. They'll tell us that our best way forward is to be dragged down some technological path by today's Monied Interests, feeding us an amped-up version of the same greed-driven trickle-down bullshit that we've willfully consumed for nearly half a century. And for good measure, they will, this time, destroy as many ballasts of good governance as they possibly can. Then, their blaze will exhaust itself—leaving behind a stunning path of destruction. Never mind the damage done.
We the People should by now recognize their ways.
Let's now acknowledge that many of our antagonists today would prefer that we conclude this essay with the Anti-Federalist Jefferson's 1801 Inaugural Address, wherein he listed his governing principles and said, "These principles form the bright constellation, which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages, and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment..." However, it seems anything but likely that those currently at the helm of government are willing to acknowledge this in context.
For example, we are far removed from Jefferson's agrarian society, our need for a standing army is without question, and the Monied Interests have evolved beyond anything Jefferson could have imagined. So, we'll conclude, in a moment, with another example of Jeffersonian wisdom. Nonetheless, here's an abbreviated look at Thomas Jefferson's "bright constellation":
- "Equal and exact justice to all…
- Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations…
- The support of the state governments in all their rights…
- The preservation of the General government in its whole constitutional vigor…
- Absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority…
- A well-disciplined militia…
- The supremacy of the civil over the military authority…
- Economy in the public expence…
- The honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith…
- Encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid…
- The diffusion of information, and arraignment of all abuses…
- Freedom of religion; freedom of the press; and freedom of person…
- and trial by juries impartially selected."
To close, let's turn to the wisdom of an aging Jefferson, as he penned in an 1819 letter:
Of Liberty then I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will: but rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will, within the limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add "within the limits of the law"; because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.
We may not yet fully realize it, but we are literally in the process of deliberating (for lack of a better term) our foundational principles, and the chaos to come is going to test our commitment to Jefferson's Rightful Liberty—our foremost foundational principle of liberty and justice for all. We will soon know if we, as a nation, will continue our pursuit of a more perfect union.
The good news is that we, individually and collectively, get to decide which path we will pursue. The choice is ours.
Are we ready to defend our ideals, or have we lost interest in distinguishing virtue from vice and public good from private greed? Are we really to be remembered as the ones who abandoned America's Foundational Principles?
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Want to Reclaim the Spirit of 1776? Reduce Inequality
In both 1776 and the mid-20th century, our most financially fortunate found themselves in relatively equal societies, and shared a sense of responsibility to the greater good.
Jul 04, 2023
Over ten generations have come and gone since 1776. Yet the giants of 1776 still fascinate us. Books about Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington still regularly dot our bestseller lists.
What so attracts us to these “founding fathers,” these men of means who put their security, their considerable comfort, at risk for a greater good? Maybe the contrast with what we see all around us.
Today’s men of means display precious little selfless behavior. Our CEOs, bankers, and private equity kingpins remain totally fixated on their own corporate and personal bottom lines. They don’t lead the nation. They steal from it.
In both 1776 and 1976 America, the top 1% overall took less than 10% of the nation’s income. The top 1% share today, economist Emmanuel Saez details, is running at over double that level, well over 20%.
So who can blame the rest of us for daydreaming about a time when a significant chunk of our elite showed a real sense of responsibility to something grander than the size of their individual fortunes?
Actually, suggests University of Michigan sociologist Mark Mizruchi, we don’t have to go back to 1776 to find Americans of ample means who cared about “the needs of the larger society.” We had this sort of elite, he argues in The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite, right in the middle of the 20th century.
Many of America’s top corporate leaders, Mizruchi writes, spent the years right after World War II engaged in public-spirited debate over how best to put the Great Depression behind us and build a prosperity that worked for everyone.
These corporate leaders didn’t try to gut the social safety net the New Deal of the 1930s had created. They supported efforts to stretch this safety net even wider. In the postwar years, major corporate executives helped expand Social Security and increase federal aid to education six-fold. They even accepted high federal income tax rates on high incomes—their incomes.
Mizruchi takes care not to go overboard here. Corporate leaders of the mid-20th-century years regularly did do battle, at various times and on various issues, with unions and other groups that spoke directly for average Americans. But these corporate leaders also did display, notes Mizruchi, “an ethic of responsibility.” They compromised. They tried to offer solutions. They behaved, on the whole, far more admirably than the union-busters, tax-dodgers, and bailout artists who top Americans biggest banks and corporations today.
What explains why our corporate elite behaved so much better back in the post-war years? Mizruchi explores a variety of factors. In the 1950s and 1960s, for one, our corporate elite had to share the political center stage with a strong and vital labor movement. Today’s corporate leaders face a much weaker labor presence.
This weaker labor presence has allowed wealth and power to concentrate ferociously at America’s economic summit. We have become, over recent decades, a fundamentally much more unequal nation.
This inequality, in turn, may be the key to understanding why corporate leaders after World War II much more resembled the elite of 1776 than our own contemporary corporate movers and shakers. In both 1776 and the mid-20th century, our most financially fortunate found themselves in relatively equal societies.
On the eve of the American revolution, as researchers have documented, England’s 13 American colonies had a much more equal distribution of income and wealth than the nations of Europe.
In the years right after World War II, the United States enjoyed a similar epoch of relative equality. Corporate CEOs in the 1950s only made 20 to 30 times what their workers made, not the nearly 400 times more that top corporate execs routinely rake in today.
In both 1776 and 1976 America, the top 1% overall took less than 10% of the nation’s income. The top 1% share today, economist Emmanuel Saez details, is running at over double that level, well over 20%.
Did this relative equality of revolutionary America and America right after World War II help shape how elites interacted with their societies? That certainly seems plausible. More equal societies, after all, have narrower gaps between those at the economic summit and everyone else. The narrower the gap in any society, the easier for all—elite and average alike—to feel invested in their society and share a sense of responsibility for its future.
The takeaway for our Fourth of July, 2023 edition? If we want to rekindle that spirit of 1776, not just daydream about it, our course stands clear. We need to create a more equal America.
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Christian Nationalism vs. the Separation of Church and State
The Founding Fathers wisely recognized what religion would become in the hands of charlatans: a theatrical performance and political tool to hypocritically showboat their "piety" as a way to manipulate voters for political gain.
Jan 23, 2023
We have a long tradition in America of Separation of Church and State that prohibits government’s promotion of religion on the one hand, and interference with its free exercise on the other. In their refusal to establish a state church or to favor one religion over another, the Founding Fathers didn’t think that religion was bad but that there was something amiss in human nature, a certain tendency, a will to power and a lust for domination, that always bore watching.
It was a virus that lay dormant until its host came to power, whereupon that person or group became suddenly rabid with a mania that sought to convert, punish or persecute anyone not of their fold or persuasion. Paradoxically, the guise under which this malady manifested itself, as the history of Europe made only too plain, was religion.
The Founders thought that religion, something good in itself, could be used toward either good or bad ends, and, unless preventive measures were taken, could induce in the susceptible a madness so malignant and vicious as to destroy the very essence of religion itself. By persecuting whoever refused to accept their religion or whose lives were deemed insufficiently righteous, those in power could impose a religious tyranny so suffocating in its grip, scope and intensity that one involuntarily thinks of barbed wire and concentration camps.
Various theories have tried to account for this bizarre aberration — the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the ascent of man from beasts, innate human depravity, the Freudian “id,” defective genes, or bad social engineering. But more important than those theories themselves is the lesson to be drawn from those institutions that promise heaven on earth.
Given the weak human vessels in which this religious feeling resides, even this noble sentiment could become tragically twisted and unleash on the world unspeakable horror. Immanuel Kant’s words come to mind when considering such would-be utopians and their spiritual gulags: “Nothing was ever made straight with the crooked timber of humanity.”
In government, the need for transparency, accountability and investigative journalists — assuming they haven’t been censored, banned, imprisoned or shot — is not a casual suggestion, but the sine qua non for maintaining even a pretense of institutional integrity. Human nature is self-contradictory and prone to temptation, especially when the camera’s not running or the press isn’t present. And, no matter the institution, it’s always wise to audit the books — both the official ones and the real ones hidden in the back-office safe.
Politicians, as the saying goes, "Campaign in poetry but govern in prose," so that we had better distrust whatever they’re saying and doing by an ironclad system of checks and balances, fact-checking and vigilant oversight. As soon as they pass a law, they’ll invite a lobbyist to insert a loophole, recalling Juvenal’s admonition, “Who shall guard the guards themselves?”
Even religion can be dragged in the mire by persecuting those of another faith or of no faith at all until, weakened by torture, the unfortunates would end their suffering by conversion or death. So, to prevent these abuses of power as had occurred in Old Europe when Catholics persecuted Protestants, Protestants persecuted Catholics, Protestants persecuted other Protestants, and both Protestants and Catholics persecuted the Jews, the Founders erected a “wall of separation” between Church and State as a safeguard against such outrages.
They wanted to put an end to intolerance, bigotry and sadism that wore the flattering garb of religion and spoke in the sanctimonious accents of self-promotion. They believed that what they were doing was ushering something new into this world, novus ordo seclorum or “a new order of the ages” (see the back of a one-dollar bill).
America was to be a radically new experiment in government which, like ancient Athens itself, would show the world that free men had no need of princes and kings, but could govern themselves. No wonder the royal courts of Europe hoped this fledgling experiment wouldn’t succeed lest the contagion of democracy spread to their people.
The Founders refused to involve government in religion, religious quarrels or animosities that for centuries had convulsed Europe’s political landscape. Under stressful conditions, similar hostilities might also threaten our newfound nation, already a powder keg of sectarian tensions. Lending the power of the state to favor any one denomination or religion over another could exacerbate those mutual suspicions still further that might suggest the beginning of an established State Church.
A wall of neutrality would keep government from pitting one church or religion against another, a policy that had fanned the flames of centuries-old hatreds. Every religion must therefore be allowed to worship in its own way with neither interference nor support from the state. Everyone must be protected from “religious enthusiasm,” as that quaint 18th-century phrase understatedly put it. The only service government could render religion was to stay out of its way as long as one religion didn’t interfere with another.
This was an insight only painfully arrived at after generations of bloodshed, as monarchs imposed their religion on all their subjects (cuius regio, eius religio: whose realm, his religion) to unify and transform their dominions into virtual theocracies to facilitate rule. The Old World was replete with examples of such murderous fury, as competing factions virtuously butchered one another in the conviction that they were “doing God’s will.” Intending to bring their countries together, kings only managed to tear them apart.
The Founders were only too well acquainted with this blood-drenched chronicle, and they resolved to keep such hatreds far removed from our shores. History had taught them that bringing religion into the public arena was to let loose a monster. Still raw in their memory were the anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780 that only 11 years earlier had shocked all of Europe as parts of London were left in flames. It was a vivid reminder, if any were needed, of the deadly contagion of “enthusiasm.”
If Gordon had prevailed against the British government, there was no telling whether the outcome would have turned back the clock two centuries when Protestants murdered Catholics only to be followed by Bloody Mary’s retaliation upon her Protestant subjects. It would have been the same sad old tale of religion’s debasement by score-settling, persecution, torture, and death. Religion was nitroglycerin that had to be contained for everyone’s safety.
So, the separation clause was added to the Constitution as the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. It was imperative that government stay out of religion, neither encouraging nor impeding its practice. It makes admirable sense since every religion or even non-religion is thereby protected; every faith is of equal value since government plays a neutral role — a neutral role, that is, except when one religion or denomination harasses or persecutes another faith’s members, who refuse to believe as that religion dictates. Government then intervenes to protect the innocent.
This policy of separation is still on the books, and with good reason: Human nature never changes. There are still groups today whose agenda is converting and persecuting, hating and perhaps even murdering those of other faiths, denominations, or of no faith at all to save them from themselves and the fiery furnace to come — unless these “lost souls” submit and “see the light.”
Or, more exactly, “the light” by submitting to them who claim to know the innermost secrets of God himself, as if the Almighty were only the God of their particular denomination or faith alone instead of the God of them all under different names!
What a sorry little God he would be if he weren’t more open-minded than his closed-minded children who insult him by their demeaning image of him and use that caricature as their puppet who “reveals” to them alone what he wants for their country or political party!
Whether such proselytizing zeal is disguised aggression, megalomania, or repressed self-doubt that feels both threatened and driven to convert others to dispel that doubt, these are very dangerous people and should never be part of government or have their theological views of the Second Coming guide an administration’s foreign policy toward Israel and that tinderbox of the Middle East.
And yet, unbeknownst to themselves, these individuals render the nation an inestimable service by being a constant reminder of the very reason for upholding this Separation of Church and State. The Founding Fathers believed that religion was, and must always remain, a private affair because bringing the volatility of “religious enthusiasm” into the public arena would only trivialize religion and destabilize a nation. They feared the political effects of interdenominational feuding, the polarization caused by doctrinal differences, the demonization of dissenters, and the eruption of religious intolerance and hatred.
There was also a second reason why the Founders feared religion in politics — the rise of religious opportunists who would inflame political passions to promote themselves. Religion would become in the hands of these charlatans a theatrical performance and political tool to hypocritically showboat their “piety” to manipulate voters for political gain.
An unscrupulous politician could disguise his lack of convictions by holding his finger to the wind to determine which way the wind was blowing and telling his audience whatever he thought it wanted to hear. This individual well understood the art of inciting “enthusiasm” or hysteria toward some plan of action and call it “the Will of God.”
The Founders would have blanched at politicians returning to their constituents and pandering to their sincerely held religious convictions to gain a following or court popularity — not that they couldn’t take part in religious services as private citizens, but not as representatives of their government lest people think they were lending the prestige of their office to their particular church or religion.
These Founders also knew their Bible, as it played such a pivotal role in their 18th-century world. They knew of Christ’s admonition in Matthew 6 about not playing the hypocrite by standing on the street corner and making a public display of one’s piety, for one would have already received one’s reward. Instead, one should withdraw to one’s room, close the door, and in privacy pray to God as grandstanding didn’t count as prayer with the Lord! As experienced men of the world, they knew only too well how politicians might cynically abuse religion to seek power and votes.
They were also highly educated, even erudite, men, especially Thomas Jefferson, whose library contained a Who’s Who of “great authors,” one of whom was the celebrated French playwright Moliere, author of “Tartuffe,” the embodiment of religious hypocrisy. It is both an uproarious romp into the glacial regions of inner emptiness, as well as a manual for observing the bobbings and weavings of unctuous sanctimony raised to high art.
In that great patrician school of Parisian sophistication, it was thought that the only way to effect moral change was never by sermons but by ridicule. Many don’t mind being considered a scoundrel, but never a fool! Castigat ridendo mores (“Comedy corrects manners”) was the essence of Moliere’s art that skewered human folly by laughter alone.
This caustic mockery of his characters and the gales of laughter that broke forth from the audience were much more effective in pillorying vice than sermons delivered from Notre Dame’s pulpit. Moliere, the French Aristophanes, was and always has been a moral institution for the French, who can laugh at themselves in his characters with no loss of face.
Jefferson and his colleagues well understood that some members of government might be tempted to play Tartuffe on the political stage. One Tartuffe, or a group of them, could do untold harm to a nation by using religion for political ends. To the educated, the 18th century was an age of taste and decorum, moderation and dignity, and everything had its proper place. Religion especially could never be allowed to be vulgarized or cheapened by demagogues toying with people’s religious emotions.
There would be no limit to their unbridled ambition and religious hypocrisy in saying whatever would ingratiate themselves to the favor and trust of an audience. So profound was their cynical abuse of religion for being elected that they would wax rhapsodic on the metaphysical subtleties of Hottentot theology if they thought it would secure them a “leg-up” over their political rivals at election time.
Our Founders felt that religion was something sacred and should always remain so by being kept off-limits to political wolves in sheep’s clothing.
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