For July 4th, a Washington Times article by Kerry Picket took note of my book, “Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left”.
Mr. Greenfield calls it a “200-plus year war” against the left’s takeover of America which he said dates back to when the French Revolution went in a more violent and politically wayward direction than the earlier American Revolution.
“It’s something that you see in the correspondence of some of the Founding Fathers. As the French Revolution exposes what it is. It’s a radical movement. It’s a violent movement,” Mr. Greenfield said.
He continues, “John Adams would later write to [Thomas] Jefferson, ‘You certainly never felt the Terrorism, excited by Genet, in 1793. when ten thousand People in the Streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Washington out of his House, and effect a Revolution in the Government.’”
Not long before we won our independence from the British, we were forced to fight the Left.
George Washington becomes the only sitting president to command troops in the field in order to stop the wave of anarchy and terror that American leftists had begun to spread around the country.
Washington warns that if the Left triumphs, “we may bid adieu to all government in this Country, except Mob and Club Govt.”
It’s not hard to see that we’ve been run by Mob and Club Govt for some time now. And this is a theme that I also picked up in today’s article, “July 4th Marks Our Struggle Against the Left”.
Where the American Revolution had emphasized the independence of the individual from the state, the French Revolution focused on building up the state as the guarantor of freedom.
It was this distinction that confined most of the ugliness between key figures in the American Founding to nasty letters while the streets of Paris ran with the blood of political opponents. The new regime was so busy enforcing equality against everyone accused of aristocratic and reactionary tendencies that no one had any rights left against state or mob violence.
“If the progress of Jacobinism is to be arrested at all, it is by fighting it,” a letter from Abigail Adams quoted. ”And if there be a Nation on Earth capable of going the necessary lengths, and making the proper Sacrifices to stop its course,—it must be one that is already possesed of substantial Liberty, that knows how to appreciate it, & how to distinguish between it, and that Sort of Liberty which France is trying to propogate throughout the World. To every other Nation & people, the french liberty is perhaps equal, if not superiour to their own.”
That was what America could uniquely offer. Individual freedom over a massive program of state-dominated social transformation.
To most countries, the French Revolution might seem no worse in its abuses and better in its liberties, but America offered an opposing model. And yet we’ve had the leftist model, the French Revolution model, imposed on us anyway, as I wrote a while back in a classic Independence Day article.
To the Democrat voters of the welfare state, this is Fireworks Day. Every country has its fireworks days and this is the day that this one chooses to light up the night sky. The day means nothing to them because though they are surrounded by free things, they aren’t free. The difference between freedom and free things has been progressively erased so that many think that the American Revolution was fought because the British were racists or weren’t providing free transgender surgery to the colonies.
There is a big difference between a free country and a country of free things. You can have one or the other, but you can’t have both.
The American Revolution was not a struggle for another nation, one of many, but for a free nation. It was not split off to accommodate the national strivings of an ethnic group or their historical destiny. Its guiding idea, like its national holiday, was independence, but independence means very little unless it reaches the individual.
This is not Fireworks Day. It’s Independence Day and unless independence reaches the individual as freedom of action, not subjugation to an ideal society, we’re not living the American Revolution, but the French one.
After the American Revolution against monarchy, we fought the French and the Left in the Quasi-War to secure our freedom from the totalitarian programs of the Left. We won then, but can we win now?