[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
Trent Staggs’s Heirs of the Revolution is a smart, snappy, and supremely timely jeremiad about the legacy of America’s founders, about the ways in which that legacy has been betrayed over the course of American history, and about our duty as Americans to (as the subtitle puts it) “restore our Republic.” It’s a short book, comparable to the pamphlets – most famously, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense – that, in the days of the founders, played a significant role in shaping the political ideas of the British colonists who would soon become citizens of the United States of America. And, like the best of those pamphlets, it packs a punch.
Staggs, a businessman who serves as mayor of the Utah town of Riverton (pop. 45,000) and who lost last November’s Senate election despite enthusiastic endorsements by the likes Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, and Kash Patel, has boiled his message down to six points, each of which is given its own chapter. First, we need to restore citizenship, which, Staggs argues, “was once seen as a privilege and an honor” but “has been eroded by apathy, ignorance, and disengagement.” One aspect of serious American citizenship, he proposes, is a belief in American exceptionalism, which, he points out, can be traced back to John Winthrop, who in his 1630 sermon “A Model of Christian Charity” envisioned the New World as “a city upon a hill” that, in Staggs’s words, “had a divinely ordained responsibility to serve as an example of moral leadership and governance for the rest of the world.”
Staggs places a great deal of emphasis on dual citizenship, which he considers anathema because it “presents a direct challenge to the concept of undivided national loyalty.” I would agree that holding a US passport along with one from Iran or Qatar or North Korea is problematic, but I would contend that being (as I am) a national of two longstanding NATO allies is a somewhat different thing. Granted, the political and media establishments in Norway, where I live, can be nothing short of appalling – but then so can their counterparts in the U.S. But most of the Norwegian people are very America-friendly.
Two cases in point. The other day, when the USS Gerald Ford, the world’s largest warship, docked in Oslo harbor, crowds gathered excitedly to welcome it. A few days earlier, there was an airshow in the town where I live, and people came from all over to watch F-16s, Spitfires, and older planes do their thing. (The roar of the F-16s shook our apartment windows and scared the cats.) All that being said, I most certainly appreciate Staggs’s point about divided loyalties, which is a problem that I’ve been writing about for years, mostly in connection with the influx into the West of so-called “refugees” who retain the passports from their homelands (and often have second homes – and second wives – there) and return regularly to the places from which they supposedly fled.
Staggs’s second chapter, about the need to restore legitimate elections, opens with a line from Samuel Adams to the effect that a citizen, when he votes, “is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country.” (Staggs’s habit of singling out appropriate quotations from our founders is one of the appealing aspects of this book.) He calls, rightly, for paper ballots; and he worries, quite reasonably, about the influence on elections of foreign money.
On to the chapter about “Restoring Moral Governance,” in which Staggs quotes a famously wise statement by John Adams: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” My only cavil about this chapter would be this: I don’t share Staggs’s apparent belief that there was a time when American politics, or any country’s politics, wasn’t riddled with corruption of one kind or another. I do agree with him that sharply reducing the size of government can make a big difference, and I share his distaste for so-called “omnibus bills.”
“Restoring Ownership,” Staggs’s fourth chapter, makes an important argument: that the people who rebelled against the Stamp Act, “a minuscule tax by today’s standards,” would have been shocked by the way in which the federal income tax rates grew larger and larger after the ratification of the 16th amendment in 1913. As outrageous as today’s high level of taxes (which aren’t anywhere near as confiscatory as they were in the 1950s) is the increasingly aggressive use of eminent domain by state and local governments to steal privately owned land, and the power granted to federal agencies such as the IRS and EPA to do the same. Then there’s the growing practice by corporations like BlackRock of snapping up private homes with generous cash offers, thereby “edging out individual buyers who simply cannot compete.” Similar tactics have been used by “massive agribusinesses” that gobble up family farms. All of these practices are, of course, utterly contrary to the spirit of the Constitution.
“The foundation of national morality must be laid in private families,” wrote John Adams. “In vain are schools, academies, and universities instituted, if loose principles and licentious habits are impressed upon children in their earliest years.” This quotation kicks off Staggs’s fifth chapter, “Restoring the Family,” in which he admirably expresses support for school choice and calls for dismantling the Department of Education. Lamenting the high rates of divorce and single-mother families, he asserts that “[p]ractical programs such as premarital counseling, conflict-resolution workshops, and marriage-enrichment initiatives…should be widely available through churches, community centers, and local governments.” Well, good luck with that. I’d say that what’s needed is nothing less than a full-fledged cultural upheaval.
Finally, Staggs’s chapter on “Restoring National Defense” opens (perfectly) with the warning delivered by Eisenhower in his farewell address about the power of the military-industrial complex – and goes on to cite Washington’s admonition, in his own farewell address, to avoid entangling alliances and unnecessary wars. Staggs calls, sensibly, for the U.S. to “defund the UN,” to end the incestuous relationship between the Defense Department and military contractors, to expand the Navy, and to “focus on protecting the homeland and defending national interests, not on endless foreign interventions.”
Yes, to some of us, almost all of what Staggs has to say is nothing more or less than the sheerest common sense. And much of what he calls for is already being implemented by the Trump administration. Staggs fully acknowledges this, writing in his introduction that Trump’s “historic victory in November 2024” has provided reason to hope for the restoration of the American Republic and for an avoidance of “the catastrophe that would await the world if America falls.” Yet, as Staggs emphasizes, we’re not out of the woods yet. Trump came perilously close to being felled by an assassin’s bullet. He has only one term in which to turn America around, and if the Democrats somehow manage to get their act together and score a victory in 2028 – however unlikely that may seem at present – everything Trump did will quickly be overturned. And if that happens, we’ll all be royally screwed.
The fate of America, then, still “hangs in the balance,” as Staggs says, and it’s up to all of us to take our heritage of freedom seriously and to “actively defend and preserve it for future generations.” Indeed. Heirs of the Revolution may not be a sophisticated scholarly tome that could double as a doorstop, but who cares? It’s a noble little book that, one hopes, will do the important job of communicating some vital home truths to ill-informed readers who desperately need to learn about them.