according to history, anyway...............

 

Rebellion is treason until successful . . .

-Salmon P. Chase

A story of rebellion.................

 Here is how Paul describes himself: “I am an animist in an age of machines; a poet-of-sorts in a dictatorship of merchants; a believer in a culture of cynics. Either I’m mad, or the world is.” He continues: “My most strongly-held belief is this: that our modern crisis is not economic, political, scientific or technological, and that no ‘answers’ to it will be found in those spheres. I believe that we are living through a deep spiritual crisis; perhaps even a spiritual war. My interest these days is what this means.”

-Bari Weiss, from her intro to this Paul Kingsnorth essay

as revolutions go........................

      As a permanent structure, the Articles of Confederation did not work.  But as a means of transition, a bridge into the future, it served a purpose, and, arguably, succeeded brilliantly.  Edmund Morgan, another giant of the field, writes: "If the American Revolution was in any sense a civil war"—which in part it was—"the Confederation did a much faster and better job of reconstruction than the United States did after Appomattox."  That is, the American Revolution did not turn on itself, with the victors shattering into warring factions and a government that maintains power only by the exercise of violence against citizens, as has happened so often with other successful rebellions, as in France in the eighteenth century and Russia in the twentieth.

     A peaceful outcome was not a given.  The Revolutionary generation would have had in mind Montesquieu's warning that the great first hurdle of nationhood was surviving the shift from war to peace.

Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles

John Adams................

      The dominant political narrative of colonial American elites was the story of how the Roman orator Cicero put down the Catiline conspiracy to take over Rome.  John Adams aspired to be the Cicero of his time—that is, the key political figure in late eighteenth-century America.

      He would come very close to achieving that vaulting ambition, which is surprising, because he was in many ways the odd man out among the first four presidents.  He was the only one who spent time as a schoolteacher, working for wages.  The other three were emotionally reserved, while he wore his feelings on his sleeve and tended to wallow in them all his life.  They were Virginians, while he was a son of Massachusetts, a colony founded by Puritans in 1628.  He was also the only one of the four never to own an enslaved human being.

     Most significant of all, Adams also was the first of the four men to move towards revolt.  He was entertaining radical notions while still an adolescent—and while George Washington was striving to achieve rank and standing in the structure of the British empire.  Indeed, long before the adolescent Adams crossed the Charles River to Harvard, he was full of thoughts about how to better resist British authority.  It helped that he was both bright and naturally irascible.  He had been questioning authority for years.  More than most men, he was born to do so.

-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

Hey, it could happen...................