A Familiar Place

If there is a faction of the modern American Right that sees itself as the inheritor of the mantle of the early American Patriots, I think there is also a faction of the American Left that doesn't think about the Patriots at all.

This isn't to say that the Pro-Trump Right are anything like the Patriots of the 1770s, but parallels may be drawn to the broader situation, I think. The mythology of the United States casts King George the 3rd as a clear villain; the sort of deliberate oppressor who was obviously an illegitimate ruler. But was the monarchy of Great Britain and Ireland so obviously illegitimate to anyone else? Was the Continental Congress and the army it raised anything more than yet another armed insurgency against lawful government until it suited others to recognize them?

The mythology of the United States tends to overlook the fact that colonial Americans were not singularly united in a desire to overthrow the British Crown and install a (somewhat) representative Republic in its place. There were plenty of Loyalists to the King around. Benedict Arnold was not a lone disenchanted soul.

I mention all of this, because the anniversary of last year's protest-turned-riot at the United States Capitol in Washington D.C. had brought out quite a bit of punditry, and a fair amount of hand-wringing over the idea of political violence. But the American Revolution was, basically, political violence. The United States of America did not come into being through a negotiated settlement between colonial luminaries and the British Crown/Parliament. Instead, it was an armed conflict, led by people who were among the wealthiest people on the continent at the time. The story of heroism that I learned in grade school tends to leave out the idea that the Founding Fathers were also looking after their own interests in the conflict, not simply those of the citizen farmers that made up most of the population.

The United States is a nation that came into existence through violence, aided by foreign powers that had an interest in seeing Great Britain lose territory and the resources and tax revenues that said territory represented. The Patriots saw their cause as just and their methods legitimate, and because they won, and the modern United States came from that conflict, it's seen today in the same way. There is no question of how the issue looked to people of the time, and how people saw themselves.

I would think that it's the same with every revolution. People choose sides, and those sides influence how they see the conflict brewing around them. Did supporters of the Patriot cause view British (and loyalist) institutions as untrustworthy? Did families split by the conflict see their opposite numbers as unreasonable? Did everyone involved see whatever position they arrived as the only one allowed by reasonable thought?

I don't know if the lens of the American Revolution is a good one to view the current state of the nation. I'm not a scholar of American history, for starters; I don't actually know much about the Revolution, or the social and political setting in which it took place. And I think that the simple and heroic story that is taught to schoolchildren glosses over too much of the difficult work (successful or futile) that was done at the time. But when I see people cloaking themselves in the mantle of Patriots, I am reminded that the idea that people of a single nation can be at odds over understandings of what constitutes good government is not new. There is a difference between the genuinely unprecedented and merely unfamiliar. I wonder how many societies have fractured for want of being reminded of that.