“There is nothing more common than to confound the terms of American Revolution with those of the late American War. The American war is over: but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution… On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed. It remains yet to establish and perfect our new forms of government; and to prepare the principles, morals, and manners of our citizens for these forms of government…Patriots of 1774, 1775, 1776—heroes of 1778, 1779, 1780, come forward! Your country demands your services. Philosophers and friends to mankind come forward! Your country demands your studies and speculations. Lovers of peace and order, who declined taking part in the late war, come forward! Your country forgives your timidity and demands your influence and advice. Hear her proclaiming, in sights and groans, in her governments, in her finances, in her trade, in her manufactures, in her morals and in her manners, “The Revolution is not over.” Benjamin Rush. Philadelphia, 1787.
This blog is dedicated to the American Revolution. By this term, I, like Benjamin Rush, do not mean the War for Independence against the Crown. I refer instead to the great patriotic endeavor that followed it — our endless struggle for liberty. Men and women continued to fight the tyrannies of arbitrary power and win victories for liberty and justice. They did so against tough resistance: human nature, aristocratic opposition, and the institutions and principles of a still imperfect Union. The mistaken belief that there are cultural limits to liberty lay at the heart of most early Americans’ acceptance of racial slavery. Even those, like Thomas Jefferson, who spoke most sincerely on the principle of the equality of men before God, believed at the same time that only white Protestant men had the capacity to live up to that equality in practice. Others, like Alexander Hamilton, feared common people of all colors, preferring his liberty tempered by the authority of an educated elite. Both fallacies survived through the Era of Jackson, when Democracy fought the interests of industrial capital but ignored more local manifestations of greed; extended the franchise to the white poor but hardened racial lines. We made great progress in the 1860s with Emancipation and Reconstruction, but much of this was reversed in the decades which followed as anti-American racialist terror reconquered the South and the North too fell victim to the idea that liberty was limited by geography. Scientific racism drove the country’s first laws defining “illegal” immigration and its first forays into Empire. Both parties, by and large, made peace with a growing Transatlantic industrial aristocracy. In the twentieth century the struggle continued on against enemies of liberty both foreign and domestic. Americans fought authoritarianism everywhere, in uniform abroad and in our everyday lives at home.
Yet our fight was made more difficult by a new idea hatched by reactionary conservatives, the same type of tyrant our forefathers overthrew in 1776. Because the world as a whole also struggled for liberty, because we sometimes sympathized with these struggles even when we disagreed with the means behind them, they started to call us anti-American. They started to say we opposed freedom. They claimed to be the only patriots. We lost our mettle when they called us Communists. We shrank from love of country when they soiled our proud flag. We abandoned our conception of America’s divine mission because they misunderstood and misappropriated God. We won many battles in the 20th century but are still losing on one very important front, one which could yet derail this revolution and sound the death knell for liberty. They still pass off their tyranny as patriotism.
We progressives are the patriotic Americans. We must never shrink from that principle. We must see our struggles as part of the American tradition and let that grand tradition renew our resolve and strengthen our foundation. We must fight the moral weaknesses of our country’s past and its present with its moral strengths. We must stop special interests gaining wealth and power through alliance with corrupt officials. We must build roads to prosperity that all may travel. We must block threats to our privacy and our way of life. We must assail limits to liberty built upon accident of birth. We must protect Constitutional rights for all people. We must never be won over to tyranny through pragmatic concerns. Anti-American developments like government spying and gun control and basing our financial system on speculation may make us feel safer and more prosperous, but they erode our freedoms and makes it impossible to fight for progressive issues. Ironically, anti-liberty forces managed electoral gains over the past four decades by pretending to care about these issues. These issues should, could, and will belong to progressives.
We must reclaim them by speaking the language of liberty. We must make it clear that progressivism is Americanism. The tyrants are making liberty look bad. Liberty now falters around the world and in the hearts of our own people. The people who act most proud of our traditions are teaching them wrong. We fight for freedom.
Those who fall into complacency, who think we have done enough, who are happy enough with their own good fortune and with ours as a nation, are mistaken when they believe themselves to be following the spirit of the Constitution, when they believe themselves to be preserving liberties. They are often fine people, often patriotic, but mistaken. Jealous hoarding of liberties by one people is against the spirit of liberty. As progressives, we must make clear that those who do this are less in tune with the American revolutionary traditions than those of us who continue to struggle to “let freedom ring.” Through this, we can gain continued victories for liberty. Through reclaiming patriotism, patriotism can renew us.
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I intend this blog as an exploration of what liberty means to me. At times it will be autobiographical, historical, current event-driven, philosophical or practical. I have been told a have a rather complex set of views. I agree with that completely. Some may be confused by labels. I love my country and hate its borders. I am an outspoken racial egalitarian who is obsessed with genetics, genealogy, and the expression of human similarity and difference. I am a religious Muslim (I researched all religions in high school and converted in 2000), a strong political secularist, and an unflinching American patriot. I am proud of my American heritage and how it becomes more American every day through my family’s and our country’s increasing diversity and engagement with the world. I want that engagement to be an engagement of liberty. I combine very conservative and very liberal viewpoints into a coherent whole. Confused? God willing, my future blog posts will make some progress toward explaining, maybe even toward realizing a dream.
Far too often, I too chose the path of not explaining. This was the path of destruction. I chose irreligion among the irreligious, cynicism among the cynical, complacency among the complacent, and fear among the fearful. No one knew who I was. I will be silent no more.
