A Revolution Betrayed

George Washington didn’t want to be king.

He was the hero of the American Revolution, the rock-steady leader who kept the Continental Army together and in the field long enough to exhaust the world’s strongest military power into surrendering, despite intense political pressures to replace him and often dire material conditions. He understood, as most people on either side didn’t, that he didn’t have to win the war – all he had to do was not lose it, and eventually the British would tire of it. He was the man who turned back the Newburgh Conspiracy, which would have seen the unpaid men of the Continental Army march on Congress and overthrow it, simply by taking out his reading glasses to read a letter to those men. “Gentlemen,” he told them, “you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown grey but almost blind in the service of my country.”

They wanted him to be king. They didn’t know any better. The idea of a republic – a government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Abraham Lincoln later said, though who counted as one of “the people” was and remains a matter of fierce debate – was largely untested, and few at the time thought a country could survive without a king. Most such experiments had ended quickly and badly.

But the American Revolution had been fought to restore the balanced republican government that King George III had thrown out of order with his – to the colonial mind, at least – arbitrary and lawless conduct.

The Declaration of Independence is mostly remembered for that one jewel of a sentence near the beginning: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But the bulk of that document is an indictment of George III for his crimes against the colonies. The most common first word of every paragraph is “he” and that “he” is the king who had refused his assent to necessary laws, dissolved legislatures, made judges dependent on his will alone, kept standing armies in times of peace, cut off trade between the colonies and the wider world, and so on.

Also, George III had restricted immigration into the colonies – a serious crime according to the Founding Fathers.

The entire point of the American Revolution was to rid what would become the United States of a ruler who was above the law and replace him with a ruler who was not.

When the Revolution was over, Washington steadfastly rejected calls to replace George III with a new George I. He supported the Articles of Confederation until it became clear that states’ rights was a foolhardy way to try to run a country, and then he supported the Constitution when it was written to replace the Articles with a more centralized government.

Washington served two terms as president. He could easily have served more, but he walked away from power to demonstrate that this was how proper American leaders acted. They were not all powerful. They existed within the framework of the Federal Constitution of 1787 and of the laws, subject to all of them.

This bedrock foundation of the American republic lasted for 237 years, which, admittedly, is longer than the Founding Fathers thought it would. They understood that republics were fragile things, that such governments depended on the virtue of the citizenry – “virtue” being defined in the 18th century fashion as the willingness to sacrifice your petty, private interests for the sake of the public good. They knew that the greatest threat to the survival of the American republic would be an unvirtuous citizenry led by a tyrant – a demagogue who would stir up the vulgar passions of the mob and declare himself above the law and beyond restraints.

For more than two centuries we survived as a republic.

And last week the Supreme Court betrayed all of that in order to shield a twice-impeached convicted felon who is on public record calling for the weaponization of the federal government to persecute his personal enemies, an unrepentant insurrectionist, an admitted sexual predator and adjudicated rapist, a man facing 57 further criminal indictments in three separate jurisdictions, indictments which include crimes the United States has in the past executed people for, from the consequences of his crimes.

The decision in Trump v US, handed down by the Roberts Court, ranks among the most catastrophic ever handed down – right up there with the Dred Scott v Sandford decision of the Taney Court in 1858. It renders the president a figure entirely above the law and beyond restraints, and it returns the United States to the rule of kings.

It is a betrayal of the American Revolution and the ideals of the American republic, and if allowed to stand it will destroy this country in ways we haven’t even begun to contemplate.

This, apparently, is the plan. The president of the Heritage Foundation – one of the most radical right-wing organizations in America – celebrated this betrayal by declaring “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Leaving aside the explicit threat here that only if Americans stand by and allow the extremists on the right to destroy the American republic will we be allowed to live, and also the issue of what they think the “left” is in this country, there is the simple fact that the only reason to have a second American Revolution is to get rid of the first one.

My fellow Americans, on this Independence Day we face a crisis. The far right has mobilized to claim this country as their own private inheritance, in defiance of the will of the majority and the intent of the Founding Fathers. They are not even bothering to hide it anymore. They intend to rule, absolutely and as arbitrarily and lawlessly as the colonists accused George III of ruling.

But we do not suffer kings or their minions in America.

And to those who say otherwise, remember that we outnumber you.

You are on the wrong side of history, morality, and American patriotism.

We will see you fail.

We will see you forgotten to the seventh generation, your works erased, and the follies of your pride held up to ridicule and shame.

George Washington understood what American monarchists wanted and he rejected them. We as Americans can do no less.