“You’re the only people alive on the earth today.”

“You’re the only people alive on the earth today. All those people who created traditions, created countries and created rules…they are dead. Why don’t you start your own world while you’ve got the chance?”
~ Bill Hicks.

What is rarely, if ever, taught in public education, much less heard in elite institutions of politics and media, is that this anti-authoritarian demand to be free of the past was one of the main views of the American revolutionaries, including many major leaders like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, having openly defended direct democracy and majoritarianism. They often spoke of this problem as the ‘dead hand’; a criticism applied to any established institution, tradition, custom, norm, law, constitution, or holy book. Freedom is always in the present because it is the only moment in which to act freely. To live shackled to the past, in being beholden to the dead, is to not be truly alive; instead, it’s to be infected with the soul sickness of the zombified living dead. One of the greatest of oppressions is to be haunted by a past that controls one’s mind, identity, and ability to act; held with the vice-grip of commanding voices that possess the victim, like J. R. R. Tolkien’s Gríma Wormtongue whispering into the ear of King Théoden of Rohan.

During the American Revolution, the radical advocates for the living generation and living constitutionalism came to be called the Anti-Federalists, only because they lost the war of rhetoric when the so-called ‘Federalists’ took control in dismantling the Articles of Confederation and enforcing centralized government controlled by elites (this kind of radical critique, such as when Bill Hicks speaks it, is now identified as ‘liberal’ or ‘leftist’). But in reality the ‘Anti-Federalists’ were the strongest defenders of actual federalism as decentralized power and self-governance. Levi Preston, a revolutionary veteran, as an old man simply stated what the American Revolution was about, “Young man, what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.”  He clarified exactly what he meant. Right before that, he said, “Oppressions? I didn’t feel them. I never saw one of those stamps, and always understood that Governor Bernard put them all in Castle William. I am certain I never paid a penny for one of them. Tea tax! I never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard.” It was not a tax revolt, as if early working class Americans were willing to fight, sacrifice, and die in defense of capitalism. Their sense of freedom denied was much more visceral and communal, with political implications right from the start. They were social justice warriors. They understood that the political is personal and the personal is political.

Such righteous assertion of self-independence, self-autonomy, and self-governance — the Spirit of ’76 living in the Spirit of the People — is not possible if one places the authority of corpses and ghosts over one’s own self-authorization and self-authority, any more than one can be free by submitting to the power of an aristocrat, king, or pope (or dictator, demagogue, etc; or partisanship and lesser evilism). Every living generation, morally and practically, has no choice but to choose for themselves, again and again. Even choosing submission to the dead is a choice of the living and so responsibility for the consequences of that choice cannot be denied. That sense of freedom-loving, almost anarcho-libertarian, independence is why many of the revolutionaries didn’t see the revolution as having ended with the defeat of the British Empire and so continued to fight against corrupt and oppressive elites, including against the plutocratic and oligarchic Federalists (e.g., Shays’ Rebellion); with the Spirit of ’76 never having gone away. Jefferson’s hope and Paine’s promise spring eternal; as evidenced by the thousands of riots, revolts, uprisings, insurrections, protest movements, and mass strikes that have happened since that time.

The colonial working class radicals and revolutionaries weren’t the only ones who bucked against new oppressions replacing the old, even ignoring rare aristocrats like Jefferson. Many others understood or suspected that leading Federalists like Alexander Hamilton were consciously modeling the new ‘constitutional’ republic on the British Empire and the British East India Company, if those like James Madison figured it out too late. These Federalists aspired not to be free but to be the next ruling elite of an even greater global superpower. Such schemes were a real threat, as we can see with what the United States has become, but it’s obviously not like no one saw it coming. Consider moderate and principled Federalists like John Dickinson, initially resistant to revolution at all and later the draft author of the Articles of Confederation, who feared such imperialistic centralized and concentrated power; as expressed in his purse and sword argument (basically, an Anti-Federalist argument; and the Articles did become a touchstone of Anti-Federalist thought). Even the Anti-Federalist Abraham Clark, supposedly the one who suggested a constitutional convention, was unhappy about the results; to such an extent that he warned, “We may awake in fetters, more grievous, than the yoke we have shaken off.” That worry turned out to be prescient, like so many other Anti-Federalist warnings and predictions.

Decades later, Jefferson would admit in private correspondence that the experiment of constitutional republicanism had been a failure because the founders failed to understand the mother principle, that of democratic self-governance. He said that the Spirit of ’76 only lived on “in the spirit of our people“ (and in the “will of the people”; not in the constitution or government), the only hope that the gains of revolution would not be entirely lost. The people, as advocated by the Anti-Federalists, understood the soul of the American Dream better than the elite, as promoted by the faux Federalists. That fundamental conflict is what our country was founded upon and it remains with us to this day. Not even the American Civil War was able to undo that moral corruption and political foundering because there was no one in leadership who was wise enough and brave enough to throw the Ring of Power into Mount Doom when they had the chance, and indeed there were numerous opportunities to course correct, to revive the anti-authoritarian and egalitarian vision of the Articles of Confederation.

None of this is merely about the past but about the ever present choice of each and every new living generation. That is why Bill Hicks’ words resonate with us today, the same reason the words of the Anti-Federalists inspired revolution back then. The authority of those words are not in who said them, be it a comedian or a ‘Founding Father’. The force of those words is in knowing they speak truth for time immemorial, as we can verify that truth in our own minds, hearts, and souls; can observe it, test it, and prove it in our lived experience; can touch it, feel it, and know it in the world around us. The sense of being a living generation of people is not an abstraction but what cannot be denied. First appearing in the Axial Age, there was the notion that all living people, as individuals or communal selves, can have direct access via experience and relationship to ultimate truth, natural law, higher reality, or divine being.

The message of Hicks and the Anti-Federalists is ancient, fundamentally spiritual and religious in nature — as Levi Preston explained, “We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watt’s Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanack.” The point is that they read these texts for themselves, as literacy was becoming common, and so the words were brought to life by their own voices. Rising literacy rates and availability of reading material, including radical pamphlets written by Paine, was the main force behind the revolution of mind that preceded the revolution of government and society. With an emerging independent-mindedness, the once mostly indentured and wretchedly oppressed colonials were gaining confidence in themselves. Unlike in earlier eras, they could read for themselves, interpret what they read for themselves, think for themselves, and so act for themselves.

There was a change not only in mentality and identity, for it was part of an ongoing shift in an entire worldview, a transformation of experienced reality; what first was planted in the Axial Age, took root in the Middle Ages, and finally was coming to fruition in early modernity. It’s a sense of being enmeshed within and inseparably part of a living world. This is what Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God being all around us. And it’s what the 14th century peasants meant, in revolting, when they demanded equality on Earth as it is in Heaven. That is what then inspired those like the Quakers, having come into their own during the radicalism of the English Civil War, to formulate their view of living constitutionalism; the source of John Dickinson’s thinking, as he was raised Quaker. Living constitutionalism, according to the Quakers, treats a constitution as a living document, not a dead piece of paper; for it is considered a compact between a living God and a living community, a specific living generation of people. Ironically, the reactionary right tries to cast shade on living constitutionalism as anti-traditional, when they know nothing of the traditions our society are actually built upon.

No one, not in the past nor in a distant place, can speak to anyone else on behalf of God or speak for anyone else in relationship to God (i.e., the highest truth, reality, and authority). We are all responsible for our own connection to and discernment of the ultimate. This is why natural law, now often co-opted as reactionary rhetoric, could in the past be perceived as radically dangerous in challenging the entire basis and justification for human law, as politically-established and government-enforced. That is what Jesus was invoking in challenging Jewish and Roman hierarchical authority and social institutions, casually dismissing them as if irrelevant with a zealous and charismatic confidence that the truth he knew could not be denied or harmed, no matter what the ruling elite and Roman soldiers may do to his body. In the living moment, he acted on, demonstrated, and proved the truth he spoke; emphasizing he was not special in this manner by telling others that they too were gods, of the Holy Spirit. The living God is not far away in Heaven but here on Earth. The living Revelation is not in the ancient past but right now. The living Word is not in a book but in the world. The living Reality is experienced and known by those with eyes to see, ears to hear.

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Let us make a small note here. We briefly mentioned the reactionary but didn’t go into further detail, as it wasn’t our present focus and we’ve talked about it plenty elsewhere. But as always, it can’t be ignored. What we did mention is how the reactionary has largely co-opted the rhetoric of natural law and so repurposed it to regressive ends. The deeper point, though, is that natural law originated in the radical, not the reactionary. A similar thing can be said of living constitutionalism. Sure, the reactionary can co-opt the social force and political results of living constitutionalism, as it can co-opt almost anything and everything. That is unfortunate, if it also shows the weakness and limitations involved. What the reactionary can never do is co-opt the moral force and motivating essence of natural law, living constitutionalism, and such. That is the beating heart that we are speaking of. The reactionary is always deadening. It is death and brings death to everything it touches, most of all rot of the human soul. It’s love versus fear, vitality versus anxiety, life versus death; but the two sides are far from being equal. One is light and the other mere shadow.

The living moral force of the living truth and reality is inherently and fundamentally radical and forever retains the radical; it is progressive and never regressive, liberating and never oppressive. All that radical literally means is a return to the root; and hence a return to underlying nature, fundamental truth, first principles. That is the point of showing the long history of this shared inheritance of profound wisdom, making clear that the roots of the radical go deep into human nature and human society. Not mentioned at all here is that the notion of a living experience of a living world is rooted even further down into the most archaic layers of our shared humanity, back to bicameral and animistic societies. No amount of reactionary co-option can undo this power. That is because it originates and is sourced within us, individually and collectively. As long as humans exist, the radical living challenge will remain potent and threatening. That is the whole point of why the reactionary feels compelled to co-opt the very thing that undermines it, in grotesquely wearing it like a superficial mask. This is the reason that a probing intellectual, spiritual, and moral discernment is of the utmost.

Yet it’s not only that the reactionary can’t undo the radical for neither can it stop it from spreading. That is precisely what has been happening these past millennia, as a new mentality has been taking hold, beginning as a spark and catching fire again and again. The Holy Spirit is a burning fire, the world aflame in light. The mistake many make is thinking that Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought is merely about a dully simple, reductionist, and materialistic individualism. But that false understanding is because the radicalism of the past has been obscured, as has been the radicalism of Western origins and the radicalism of the American founding. For instance, take the appearance in the ancient world, as if out of nowhere, of the idea that there is a common humanity, a universal human nature, a shared world, a single cosmos. During the Axial and post-Axial ages, that radical understanding came up in the words of numerous prophets, philosophers, wisdom teachers, gurus, and salvific figures. Human identities have grown ever broader over time. The peasantry, in revolting, came to an emergent class consciousness. The colonists, in revolting, upheld the ideal of global citizenship. Such an expanding and inclusive worldview keeps on growing, with each age of tumult bringing us to new understanding and a greater identity.

So, there is what is ancient to human society, even primal in having originated within the human psyche from millions of years of hominid evolution. To experience the living fusion of self and world, human and non-human is the undifferentiated state that forms the baseline of human existence. That isn’t to say differentiation, therefore, is bad; of course not. But starting millennia ago, a divide began to form, a mere crack at first, that has since fractured and splintered into modern psychosis. The radical impulse has never been to resist or deny differentiation that has made possible modern individuality, but neither has it sought to dismiss and devalue the communal identities of the past, the very ground of the bundled mind that we stand upon. Instead, what radical thinkers have advocated is how to transform and reform past communal identities, such that collective health and sanity can be maintained. Abstract identities, however, disconnect us from the living sense of belonging to others and to the larger world. For most of human existence, belonging has meant an identity of tribe built on a deep sense of place. That concrete immediacy and sensory immersion remains essential and necessary. Yet in a globalized interconnected society our ability to perceive a shared living reality is potentially immense; the imaginative capacity to sense, feel, understand, and know that other people are equally real. It’s the task before us, the ancient ideal and aspiration that guides us.

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Roger Williams and American Democracy
Founding Visions of the Past and Progress
Whose Original Intent?
Anti-Partisan Original Intent
US: Republic & Democracy (part two and three)
Democracy: Rhetoric & Reality
Pursuit of Happiness and Consent of the Governed
St. George Tucker On Secession
The Radicalism of The Articles of Confederation
From Articles of Confederation to the Constitution
The Vague and Ambiguous US Constitution
Wickedness of Civilization & the Role of Government
A Truly Free People
Nature’s God and American Radicalism
“We forgot.”
What and who is America?
Attributes of Thomas Paine
Predicting an Age of Paine
Thomas Paine and the Promise of America
About The American Crisis No. III
Feeding Strays: Hazlitt on Malthus
Inconsistency of Burkean Conservatism
American Paternalism, Honor and Manhood
Revolutionary Class War: Paine & Washington
Paine, Dickinson and What Was Lost
Betrayal of Democracy by Counterrevolution
Revolutions: American and French (part two)
Failed Revolutions All Around
The Violence of Bourgeois Revolutions and Authoritarian Capitalism
The Haunted Moral Imagination
“Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America.”
“…from every part of Europe.”
The Fight For Freedom Is the Fight To Exist: Independence and Interdependence
A Vast Experiment
The Root and Rot of the Tree of Liberty
America’s Heartland: Middle Colonies, Mid-Atlantic States and the Midwest
When the Ancient World Was Still a Living Memory
Ancient Outrage of the Commoners
The Moral Axis of the Axial Age
Axial Age Revolution of the Mind Continues
A Neverending Revolution of the Mind
Liberalism, Enlightenment & Axial Age
Leftism Points Beyond the Right and Beyond Itself

Ancient Outrage of the Commoners

For you are all children of God in the Spirit.
There is no Jew or Greek;
There is no slave or free;
There is no male and female.
For you are all one in the Spirit.

Based on Galations 3:28, Stephen J. Patterson, The Forgotten Creed

When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.

John Ball, 1381 sermon at Blackheath, after his release from prison during the Peasants’ Revolt

Who rightly claims the beating heart of moral imagination, of radical vision? Who feels the throbbing pulse of it in their veins, the flow of vitality in the body politic? Who bleeds when the cut goes deep, who cries out in pain, and who hears it? Who knows this wounding, what it means, what is to be gained? Who holds to this sacrifice and accepts its cost?

Within the broad liberalism of the Enlightenment, there was the reactionary strain of proto-conservative ‘classical liberalism’, as given voice by the Englishman John Locke (1632-1704) who gets more credit than he deserves. This early on was preempted by pre-Enlightenment religious dissenters and countered by radical Enlightenment thinkers, from Roger Williams (1603-1683) in the American colonies to Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) in Netherlands. We should acknowledge that Williams advocated Lockean-like land rights before Locke and did so with stronger moral force and egalitarian vision. And we should look to Spinoza, godfather of the radical Enlightenment, as a probable influence on Locke who lived in the same city when Spinoza was published, whereas Locke’s own writings only came later.

The more well known and respectable figures of the Enlightenment were being carried by the swift currents that surrounded them and preceded them, going back many centuries. The British Enlightenment didn’t come out of nowhere nor did the radical tradition of revolutionary zeal. Some consider the 17th century English Civil War, or else 14th century English Peasants’ Revolt, to be the first modern revolution based on class conflict (in the same period of disruption, there is also the 16th century German Peasants’ War led by Thomas Müntzer; see The War of the Poor by Eric Vuillard). In this largely religious milieu, there arose thought that was proto-liberal, proto-progressive, proto-democratic, proto-libertarian, proto-socialist, and proto-anarchist. But if nothing else, it was often radically populist and egalitarian.

Before the Protestant Reformation, there was the extreme hereticism of another Englishman, John Wycliffe (1320s-1384), who declared all were equal before God, everyone could know God for themselves, and Scripture was accessable to all. He also thought the clergy should take a vow of poverty or maybe be entirely abolished, and he went further in his radical belief that slavery is a sin. The entirety of feudalism was up for doubt and denial. Priests, lords, and kings had no rightful claim over the people and so freedom of the people could be reclaimed. What was to be rendered unto Caesar was not much at all. Such egalitarian righteousness would inspire the Peasants’ Revolt, and it lit a radical fire within the English imagination that never again was quenched.

Following the spirit of that age, Englishman John Ball (1338-1381) as one of Wycliffe’s disciples preached a warning, “Things cannot go well in England, nor ever will, until all goods are held in common, and until there will be neither serfs not gentlemen, and we shall be equal.” This was a demand for equality, on earth as it was in heaven, in the living present as it was at the time of Creation. “At the beginning we were all created equal,” Ball stated with the confident certainty of faith. “If God willed that there should be serfs, he would have said so at the beginning of the world. We are formed in Christ’s likeness, and they treat us like animals.” These words rang true among the commoners for it could not be denied, reading Scripture for themselves, what was found in the Word of God.

The uprising that resulted, although brief, was at times violent in seeking justice and it sent the ruling order into disarray — presaging what was to come. All of that was a more threatening challenge to the legitimacy of hierarchical authority, religious and otherwise, than either Martin Luther (1483-1546) or John Calvin (1509-1564) in the following centuries. These earlier voices of scathing critique, native to England, might be why the Protestant Reformation didn’t have the same kind of impact there as it did in continental Europe, for religious dissent wended its own path on the British isles. The religious fervor, often expressed as economic populism and politcal diatribe, kept eruptng again and again across the centuries. It was the seed out of which the English Enlightenment bloomed and it bore the fruit of revolt and revolution.

There long had been something in the British character that bristled against a ruling elite, maybe the cultural memory of British paganism among commoners in southern England, the Anglo-Saxon gut-level sense of freedom and communal identity in East Anglia, and the Scandinavian stoic but fiercely held independence found across the Midlands, not to mention the longstanding influence of cultural autonomy and at times political defiance from the Welsh, Scots-Irish, Highland Scots, and Irish. In defense against various ruling elites, from Romans to Normans and onward, a tradition of populist resistance and cultural pride had taken hold among regional populations, bulwarks against foreign incursions and centralized control. Attempts to enforce imperial or national unity and identity, loyalty and subservience was a constant struggle and never fully successful.

That particularly fed into the English Civil War (or rather wars) with the rebellious Puritans, pre-pacifist Quakers, the anti-authoritarian Levellers, and the primitive communist Diggers (among many others) who, in addition, took inspiration from the English tradition of the Commons and the rights of the commoners, a precursor to the American Revolutionaries’ invocation of the rights of Englishmen. Indeed, following coup d’etat and regicide (a fine example for the French revolutionaries to follow), many of the religious dissenters escaped to the colonies where they left a permanent imprint upon American culture and the American mind, such as the popular practice of the jeremiad (Sacvan Bercovitch’s The American Jeremiad & David Howard-Pitney’s African American Jeremiad).

This incited the religious protest of those like Roger Williams, upon finding in the colonies yet more authoritarian rule and churchly dogmatism. But it wasn’t only the religious dissenters who left England for the New World. Many Royalists on the other side of the English Civil War headed to Virginia and, in the case of Thomas Morton (1579–1647) with Merry Mount, caused trouble further north in New England. The Puritans, for different reasons than their treatment of Williams and Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643) along with the troublesome Quakers, hated what they perceived as paganism in the uncouth behavior of Morton, a man from Merrie Old England in the Devon countryside with its paternalistic populism and rural folk tradition, along with the libertine influence of the London Inns of Court, but also a place of organizing for the dissenting Lollards following John Wycliffe.

There were many distinct varieties of English hereticism and rabblerousing, all of which clashed as part of a creative flux of free-wheeling public debate and often scandalous rebellion, giving fruit to social reform and political idealism. It’s true that John Locke was part of this mix as well. Though not necessarly an advocate of slavery, neither was he a strong critic and opponent. His patron put him in the position of writing the constitution of the Carolina Colony that upheld slavery. In that founding document of violent oligarchy, based on his belief that such social compacts were immutable and eternally binding, he wrote that “every part thereof, shall be and remains the sacred and unalterable form and rule of government, for Carolina forever.”

The oppressed slaves, indentured servants, destitute laborers, and evicted natives were seen as trapped in a permanent underclass, a caste of untouchables for impertuity, no generation henceforth having any moral claim for freedom or justice. Dissent was denied any validity and so tacit assent was assumed as an article of faith of the elite-sanctioned moral order. It was a hermetically-sealed philosophical dogmatism and ideological realism. Public debate was declared ended before it began. This was a constitutional spell as binding word magic.

“And to this I say,” declareth John Locke, arbiter of truth and reality, “that every man, that hath any possessions, or enjoyment, of any part of the dominions of any government, cloth thereby give his tacit consent, and is as far forth obliged to obedience to the laws of that government, during such enjoyment, as any one under it; whether this his possession be of land, to him and his heirs for ever, or a lodging only for a week; or whether it be barely travelling freely on the highway; and in effect, it reaches as far as the very being of any one within the territories of that government.”

This was not an auspicious beginning for this particular American experiment. Yet Lockean ideology is held up as an ideal and standard of political thought in the modern Anglo-American mind of the propertied self and privatized capitalism. Among many, he has been deemed and esteemed as a founding father of respectable thinking. Lockean rights impinges an absolute claim on who is welcomed into the circle of privilege and who is excluded by decree. Ths is a non-negotiable conviction and certitude, a newfound set of Holy Commandments brought down from the mountain top of the rational intellect by the enlightened aristocrat as divine prophet.

That was one element, sometimes referred to as ‘liberalism’, that was woven into American political thought and quite influential, unfortunately. Although never having traveled to, much less glimpsed, the New World, Locke boldly envisioned it as a place akin to Eden, as had many other Europeans — he wrote that, “In the beginning, all the world was America.” That meant it needed to be tamed and civilized with the Whiggish vision of patriarchal progress and imperialistic expansionism, white man’s burden and manifest destiny that was to bring forth moral order to the world through not only slavery but also genocide, conquest, and assimilation. This was the orignal liberal elitism, in all its paternalistic glory, that one hears so much about.

That authoritarian impulse remains strong within the ruling order and has informed the longstanding reactionary fear of populist uprising and democratic demand. With the imperialistic pseudo-Federalism of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, the rot of authoritarianism had tainted the seed of freedom’s promise from the moment it was planted in the fertile soil of shared hope. Counter-revolution gained power within the American Revolution, which has ever since caused a conflation of anti-democratic rule with pseudo-democratic forms and rhetoric. This is how we’ve come to the point of a banana republic being called a democracy and used as proof of the failure of democracy by those who have done everything in their power to prevent and frustrate democratic aspiration at every turn.

In our collective miseducation and historical amnesia, many Americans can’t distinguish between democratic self-governance and anti-democratic oppression — causing moral injury, a schizoid wounding of the body politic resulting in spiritual malaise and psychosis. Even when diagnosis of what afflicts us rightly points to this unhealed trauma, the scapegoating of the democratic impulse becomes a sad charade that causes impotent despair and palsied cynicism. Amidst the throes of propagandistic infection, these fevered nightmares mock us in our still juvenile aspirations. We are meant to be shamed in our crippled and fumbling steps, to be trampled down by our own heavy hearts. We are judged guilty in the sin of our perceived weakness and failure. We are deemed as unworthy and stunted children who are a danger to ourselves and to society.

To assent to such a damning accusation is to accept defeat, but this demiurgic rule of lies fades before the revelation of ananmesis, a gnostic unforgetting. From religious dissent to radical rebellion, the burning ember of revolution within the Anglo-American soul never dies out, no matter how it gets mislabeled, misunderstood, and misdirected. The ancient outrage of the commoners, of the dirty masses and landless peasants, will continue to rise up like bile at the back of our throats, sometimes causing blind rage but at other times bursting forth with the clear sight of radical imagination and inspiration, commanding us to stand up in our full stature and stride confidently forward on a path that is set before us by an ancestral instinct, an awakening knowledge of the world before us.

We’ve been here before. It is familiar to us, the primal terrain of moral imagination, the living God whose indwelling authority speaks to us, we the living generation who carry forth a living vision, the ember setting tinder to flame to light our way. This is our inheritance, our birthright, the burden we carry and the hope that lifts us up. In the words that inspired revolution, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Every moment we awaken to is pregnant with promise, something ready to be born in spirit and baptized in fire. The revelatory and revolutionary truth of the demos is all around us, for those with eyes to see. The liberation of the soul, the refutation of enslavement, the casting away of shackles — in this, we are already a free people, if only we would claim it, take hold of it and wrestle the dream down to the ground of our shared reality, in our common purpose, through our collective action.

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

Matthew 6:24

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

Matthew 10:34

Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.

Matthew 19:21

And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

Matthew 19:24

And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves,

Matthew 21:12

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The above is a very loose and indirect response to what is found below — basically, modern democracy as an expression of the ancient demos, We the People, is not so easily dismissed:

Will Democracy’s Myths Doom Liberty?
by James Bovard

Americans are encouraged to believe that their vote on Election Day somehow miraculously guarantees that the subsequent ten thousand actions by the president, Congress, and federal agencies embody “the will of the people.” In reality, the more edicts a president issues, the less likely that his decrees will have any connection to popular preferences. It is even more doubtful that all the provisions of hefty legislative packages reflect majority support, considering the wheeling, dealing, and conniving prior to final passage. Or maybe the Holy Ghost of Democracy hovers over Capitol Hill to assure that average Americans truly want every provision on every page of bills that most representatives and senators do not even bother reading?

A bastard cousin of the “will of the people” flimflam is the notion that citizens and government are one and the same. President Franklin Roosevelt, after five years of expanding federal power as rapidly as possible, declared in 1938, “Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us.” President Johnson declared in 1964: “Government is not an enemy of the people. Government is the people themselves,” though it wasn’t “the people” whose lies sent tens of thousands of American conscripts to pointless deaths in Vietnam. President Bill Clinton declared in 1996, “The Government is just the people, acting together—just the people acting together.” But it wasn’t “the people acting together” that bombed Serbia, invaded Haiti, blockaded Iraq, or sent the tanks in at Waco.

President Barack Obama hit the theme at a 2015 Democratic fundraiser: “Our system only works when we realize that government is not some alien thing; government is not some conspiracy or plot; it’s not something to oppress you. Government is us in a democracy.” But it was not private citizens who, during Obama’s reign, issued more than half a million pages of proposed and final new regulations and notices in the Federal Register; made more than 10 million administrative rulings; tacitly took control of more than 500 million acres by designating them “national monuments”; and bombed seven foreign nations. The “government is the people” doctrine makes sense only if we assume citizens are masochists who secretly wish to have their lives blighted.

Presidents perennially echo the Declaration of Independence’s appeal to “the consent of the governed.” But political consent is gauged very differently than consent in other areas of life. The primary proof that Americans are not oppressed is that citizens cast more votes for one of the candidates who finagled his name onto the ballot. A politician can say or do almost anything to snare votes; after Election Day, citizens can do almost nothing to restrain winning politicians.

A 2017 survey by Rasmussen Reports found that only 23 percent of Americans believe that the federal government has “the consent of the governed.” Political consent is defined these days as rape was defined a generation or two ago: people consent to anything which they do not forcibly resist. Voters cannot complain about getting screwed after being enticed into a voting booth. Anyone who does not attempt to burn down city hall presumably consented to everything the mayor did. Anyone who does not jump the White House fence and try to storm into the Oval Office consents to all executive orders. Anyone who doesn’t firebomb the nearest federal office building consents to the latest edicts in the Federal Register. And if people do attack government facilities, then they are terrorists who can be justifiably killed or imprisoned forever.

In the short term, the most dangerous democratic delusion is that conducting an election makes government trustworthy again. Only 20 percent of Americans trust the government to “do the right thing” most of the time, according to a survey last month by the Pew Research Center. Americans are being encouraged to believe that merely changing the name of the occupant of the White House should restore faith in government.

Failed Revolutions All Around

I’ve been reading many comparisons of the American and French Revolutions. Unsurprisingly, I have my own take on such things that disagree with mainstream interpretations.

I don’t see these revolutions as being entirely distinct.

The American Revolution originated with the English Civil War. Actually, the entirety of the American colonial cultures and their respective social/political traditions began with the English dissenters and their enemies. The aristocrats who came to populate the South may have been or descended from Loyalists, but by the time of the American Revolution even they were swayed to the position of the religious dissenters against the Loyalists. The fight against English monarchy didn’t begin with the Enlightenment but with the Puritan split from the Anglican Church.

The French Revolution was in many ways a continuation of the American Revolution by way of influence. Part of the radical tradition that took fruit in France grew out of the English tradition. It was an Englishman like Paine that helped inspire both the American and French Revolutions. I’d say this relates to why the French Revolution was so similar to the English Civil War, a fact that would be obvious to more people if not for cultural bias.

This connection shouldn’t be so hard to understand. A large part of English culture and monarchy came from the French Normans. Both the British natives and the French natives were conquered and ruled over by the same Germanic tribes. During that era of monarchy, the kings and queens of these various countries along the North Sea tended to be closely related kin. The English got their language and their very name from the Angles and other related Northern European tribes. This created social and political conditions that were very similar across national boundaries.

The French Huguenots and Calvinists influenced the Puritans and Quakers which then shaped their dissent against the Anglican Church and the English monarchy. Those English dissenters later shaped the worldview of English colonists and English native-borns during the Revolutionary Era (Thomas Paine, was raised by a Quaker father and then spent many formative years in one of the major Puritan dissenter towns). This English radicalism then in turn came to influence the French during their revolution. It all came full circle.

A similar relationship existed between England and Netherlands. A Dutch king ruled over England for a time. Also, it was in Netherlands that John Locke sought refuge and was influenced by the Enlightenment tradition there. Classical liberalism of Netherlands and New Netherlands (present New York City) was earlier on more well established than in England and the English colonies. If not for that Dutch influence, maybe the English and their colonists would never have their Lockean tradition of natural rights. A Irishman like Burke who was less influenced by this instead held onto the notion of the rights of Englishmen which he saw as in conflict with this European natural rights philosophy. This is why Burke not only criticized the French Revolution but never fully supported the American cause for independence.

It is only from a modern perspective that we see these societies as being so different.

For various reasons, many have sought to intellectually separate Anglo-American history from European history. In this simplistic style of analysis, the American Revolution is seen as conservative and the French Revolution as radical, the American Revolution as a success and the French Revolution as a failure.

As for the first part, it is hard to see the American Revolution as less radical for it was started by and fought by radicals. Consider the origins of the American Revolution in the War of Regulation, a violent class war if there ever was one. As for the second part, it is hard to see the American Revolution as a clear success. After the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, only a few percentage of Americans had the right to vote (the plutocratic elite of free white male landowners which added up to, as some calculate, around 6-8% of the total population who were eligible voters).

Is that what the revolution was fought for? Is that what vindicates the revolution as a success? A few percentage of elites ruling over the vast majority? With taxes being even higher after the revolution, how was taxation any more representative than before?

The American Revolution didn’t end with success. Even after the elites declared it over, the lower classes went on fighting for their rights: Shay’s Rebellion (1786-1787), Whiskey Rebellion (1791-1794), Fries’s Rebellion (1799-1800), etc. These kinds of conflicts weren’t resolved even then. Because of the failure of the American Revolution, the Civil War became inevitable. Part of this failure was when the U.S. Constitution replaced rather than improved upon the Articles of Confederation.

This was a series of failures that began with the failure of the War of Regulation when the colonial elites put down those earliest of revolutionaries and had its earliest origins in the failure of the English Civil War that ended in re-establishment of the monarchy. During the Glorious Revolution that helped form the English political order that the colonists faced in the 18th century, there was the 1689 Boston Revolt which some people see as presaging the American Revolution. There was centuries of fighting and never any clear resolution, certainly not ‘success’.

Those failures of the past have their continuing influence into the present. It is because of the failure of the Articles of Confederation and the failure of the Constitutional Convention to improve upon it that has led to a gradual but inevitable centralization of power ever since. Because of that failure then, the Civil War followed. Because of the further failure of the Civil War to resolve these issues, the problems were shifted onto future generations and now we are faced with them. If we fail to resolve these issues in our lifetime, then it will continue on and maybe lead to yet another revolution or civil war.

We never seem to learn from the past or else we learn the wrong lesson entirely. It feels like we are stuck in a repeating pattern that is apparently beyond our collective comprehension. The few visionaries who are able to see clearly, whether Roger Williams during the 17th century or Thomas Paine during the 18th century, never seem to be able to get enough people to understand and so the problems continue on for another generation, another century, another era of oppression and violence.

Criticizing the French for their revolution hardly does justice to understanding our own failures and correcting them.