The American Revolution: A Revolution Unfinished

The Contradictory Legacy of 1776

Should We Reclaim the Legacy of 1776?

Discourse regarding the legacy of the American Revolution and patriotism always re-emerges around this time of year. I figured I would publish a piece that was originally going to be a chapter in my forthcoming book Freedom To Change Nothing, but I decided to leave it out. So, I will put out a shorter version of it here. The American Revolution has a contradictory legacy on today’s left. It used to be the case that much of the Left, both the social democratic labor Left and even the Marxist/communist Left, claimed the legacy of the American Revolution as fundamentally progressive. The Left has since largely abandoned this position and has chosen to focus almost exclusively on the negative dimensions of the American founding. In light of America’s Independence Day, this essay attempts to reckon with the American Revolution’s full contradictory legacy, to take seriously both its radical achievements and its darkest failures, and to make the case for why its unfulfilled promises remain worth claiming today.

How one judges the American Revolution depends almost entirely on the frame through which one chooses to view it. Seen as a country with a revolution, the event of 1776 appears as something closer to an independence movement than a genuine social revolution: emancipatory for some, while making life demonstrably worse for others, namely enslaved Africans and the Native peoples who refused to cooperate with the new order. Seen as a revolution that happened to take place in a particular country, however, the picture shifts dramatically. The American Revolution emerges as a radical socio-political transformation of intercontinental significance, one that bridged the previously separate traditions of liberalism and democracy for the first time in history and opened the doors to liberal-democratic revolutions across the globe.

In an older, much more critical 1Dime YouTube documentary, I have shown how the American Revolution was contained by the Constitution of 1787, which gave birth to the world’s first managed democracy: a political system explicitly designed to contain the democratic forces the Revolution had unleashed.^[1] However, this shouldn’t detract from the Revolution’s great achievements and the fact that the American Revolution has a contradictory legacy that should be situated within its broader historical context. The truth of the American Revolution is not fully captured by the historical portraits of new-left activist historians who miseducate their naive students filled with white guilt, nor by triumphalist jingoistic state propaganda that makes it seem as if the United States was the first country to reject the divine right of kings.

A Contradictory Legacy: Neither Saints nor Villains

Both the romantic narrative of the American Revolution and the dismissive one miss the point. The patriotic version presents the Revolution as an unambiguous triumph of liberty and self-governance. The critical version reduces it to a movement of slaveholding elites. Both contain elements of truth; neither captures the full picture. The truth of the American Revolution is found in its contradictions.

The Revolution’s radicalism was genuine, and it was far deeper than is commonly understood. As Gordon Wood has argued, if we measure the radicalism of a revolution not by the number of people killed or manor houses burned, but by the amount of social change that actually took place, then the American Revolution was as radical as any in history.^[2] Colonial America before the Revolution was a fundamentally hierarchical society in which people of different classes were regarded as different kinds of human beings. Gentlemen and commoners were considered, in Wood’s phrase, “the most ancient and universal of all Divisions of People,” a distinction so powerful that it “overwhelmed all others in the culture, even the one between free and enslaved.”^[3] The Revolution destroyed this worldview. The idea of equality, once unleashed, “tore through American society and culture with awesome power.”^[4] Titles of social distinction were abandoned. Productive labor, previously scorned as the mark of the lower orders, was elevated into a badge of honor. The entire moral hierarchy of the old world was inverted. The Revolution “destroyed aristocracy as it had been understood in the Western world for at least two millennia” and “made the interests and prosperity of ordinary people, their pursuits of happiness, the goal of society and government.”^[5]

The Revolution also transformed the terms of debate around human bondage. Before the Declaration of Independence, slavery did not require justification; it was accepted as simply the way things were. After the Revolution, it became an anomaly that demanded defense. The northern states, propelled by revolutionary ideals, were among the first political entities in the Atlantic world to abolish slavery; Britain did not follow until 1834.^[6] And the Revolution’s influence did not stop at national borders. In France, Haiti, and Latin America, people took the Revolution’s universalist promises and used them to make revolutions of their own. The vocabulary of rights, equality, and popular sovereignty carried across the Atlantic with consequences that no one in 1776 could have foreseen.

Yet the Revolution’s darkest contradiction was equally real. As the franchise expanded and more people gained a political voice, the spectrum of opinion that entered the arena expanded as well. The democracy that gave voice to abolitionists also gave voice to the most reactionary elements of American society. It is not a coincidence that the genocide of Native peoples accelerated under Andrew Jackson precisely when the system became more responsive to popular demands.^[7] Settlers, empowered by an increasingly democratic system, used their voice for purposes that were profoundly illiberal for those outside the circle of citizenship. This pattern, in-group egalitarianism coexisting with out-group hostility, is not uniquely American; it is a recurring feature of democratic societies throughout history. But it profoundly shaped the American experience.

And yet, for all its contradictions, the managed democratic system that the American Revolution gave birth to should be judged within its historical context. When compared with the many other experiments in government that occurred around the time of the American Revolution and afterwards, the American system looks considerably better than its critics acknowledge. It is often forgotten that many countries tried to establish a republic and found it extremely difficult to maintain a democratic system for any length of time. France, which many critics of the American Revolution would prefer to praise as the more radical revolution, was barely able to establish anything stable. The French Revolution led to violent excesses, a power vacuum filled by Napoleon, and decades of instability between monarchy, republic, and empire. It took France multiple additional revolutions and arguably not until the Fifth Republic after World War II to figure out government. The Bolivarian Revolutions in Latin America, which drew directly on the American example, produced republics that struggled enormously, cycling in and out of dictatorship and autocracy for over a century. Weimar Germany and pre-Mussolini Italy had short-lived democracies that collapsed into fascism. Spain and Portugal’s experiments in democracy were followed by decades of authoritarian rule. In truth, very few countries, England and its former colonies, Holland, and not many others, were able to maintain a stable form of democratic government at all.

Those who critique the American Revolution as insufficiently democratic never look at it within the context of its time and how radical it was as a historical achievement. They myopically point to bad things about the system, which only sound like profound revelations if one is looking exclusively at America and does not know the history of the rest of the world. Slavery still occurring after the American Revolution only seems like something that discredits the Revolution if you did not realize that no country had abolished slavery before, and that the northern states were among the first political entities in the world to do so. The treatment of indigenous peoples seems uniquely American until you realize that it is how all of Latin America was founded, how the Han Chinese claimed much of their territory, and how the Russian Empire expanded across Eurasia. The fact that only propertied white men could vote seems like a damning indictment until you recognize that propertied men in early America constituted a far greater share of the population than in Britain, and that these property qualifications were gradually dropped state by state in the decades that followed. The Civil War itself is often described as the Second American Revolution, the event that completed a central part of the original promise, namely the abolition of slavery, and the early Republican Party understood itself as fulfilling the Jeffersonian legacy in doing so. None of this excuses the Revolution’s failures. But it does mean that treating those failures as though they were uniquely American, rather than characteristic of the era, reflects ideological convenience rather than historical understanding.

The Revolution was both genuinely democratic and complicit in racial domination, not because of a failure to live up to ideals, but because democracy itself, when it operates within a society structured by racial hierarchy and settler colonialism, can produce outcomes that are both egalitarian for some and catastrophic for others. This is not a reason to reject the democratic project. It is a reason to understand what democracy actually is, and what it is not, rather than treating it as an automatically redemptive force.

Why Claim the Revolution?

Why insist on reclaiming the word “democracy” when it has been reduced to a buzzword that corrupt politicians use to legitimize a fundamentally undemocratic system? Why reclaim the language of liberty when it has been used by property owners to protect their wealth and privilege? Why should anyone reclaim the legacy of the American Revolution when it contradicted its own ideals on so many counts, slavery, racism, genocide, and has been invoked to justify American imperialism and so much human suffering? The same objection, after all, could be raised against socialism: Marxism and communism have been used to justify all manner of atrocities, and yet no socialist thinks that this fact invalidates the entire socialist tradition. The question is not whether the tradition has been abused, but whether the tradition contains something worth fighting for. There are two reasons why the legacy of the fight for democracy and liberty, and in the American context, the legacy of the American Revolution, are worth reclaiming. One has to do with principle, and the other has to do with the practical realities of building any politics.

The argument from principle is straightforward. It is historically inaccurate and reductive to adopt the one-sided narrative that America was nothing more than a settler colonial slave state with nothing in its legacy except slavery, genocide, and imperialism. The historical record shows a far more complex picture: a genuine democratic tradition inaugurated by the Revolution, one whose significance cannot be collapsed into its failures. We should be clear in dispelling the myth that a real democracy exists. But we should not abandon the prospect that America could become more democratic and strive to make the commitment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness an economic reality for the average person. The seeds of this prospect are already present in its own history. It is also naive to throw out the ideals of liberty and democracy entirely on the premise that they are merely bourgeois lies and instead opt for an entirely foreign political doctrine with very little historical presence in the region. The goal should be to be post-liberal, not anti-liberal: to go through the liberal tradition and beyond it, not to skip past it as though it had nothing to offer. Attempting to go beyond liberalism without going through it has historically led not to liberation but to new forms of despotism.

The argument from practical politics is more important, and less often made. Contrary to the imagination of some radical left intellectuals, revolutions do not happen because a group of thinkers invents a new value system and preaches it to the people. Throughout history, revolutions and radical mass movements occur when the ruling class and the state repeatedly break their promises and violate the core values on which the existing society is already supposed to be based. Most ordinary people have what might be called a naturally conservative disposition, not politically conservative per se, but conservative in the sense of a preference for order and a distrust of radical changes with uncertain outcomes. People opt for the most radical choices only when they are driven to despair. A revolution happens not because the people have been seduced by a completely new political doctrine, but because the ruling class is seen as betraying the values it is supposed to uphold.

When political doctrines do take hold, they succeed not by wholesale rejection of everything that came before but by blending the new with the old, the familiar with the unfamiliar. Even when a political doctrine is internationalist and universalist in nature, it must be tailored to a region’s particular socio-historical customs if it is to gain traction. Historical change does not occur through the wholesale rejection of a society’s traditions and the attempted imposition of entirely foreign ideas. It occurs through the legitimation of new, bold, even heretical ideas by connecting them to old, established historical wisdoms and traditions. Invoking known iconography and known figures of the past can be a powerful strategy for political movements, adding a sense of familiarity, continuity, and foundation. But this works only when the political language and iconography being invoked are part of an actual significant tradition in that country’s history. In China, Russia, and India, the hammer and sickle can still function as symbols of liberation, because those places once had a strong communist tradition. This is simply not the case in countries like the United States, Canada, or Britain.

Employing past Marxist-Leninist iconography or explicitly modeling democratic socialism on the Nordic model in a country where neither tradition has deep roots is a futile strategy that only makes one look out of touch. Most Americans are never going to participate in a political movement that is anti-American or that embraces a system of government modeled on the People’s Republic of China or the Soviet Union, whose systems are the products of their unique geopolitical contexts and their long-standing bureaucratic and autocratic socio-political traditions. Even if you wrap Chinese or Soviet communism in an American flag, you will not make regular Americans like it. People have enough common sense to see through that kind of rebranding. But a politics that draws on the radical dimension of America’s own revolutionary tradition, a politics that can say “this is what Paine fought for; this is what the Revolution promised; this is what the Constitution was designed to prevent”: that is a politics with roots, and roots matter.

This is not a speculative point; it is a pattern visible across the history of successful revolutionary movements. When Mao claimed the legacy of Sun Yat-sen, he was not endorsing Sun’s politics; he was claiming the legitimacy of an existing nationalist and revolutionary tradition. When Castro invoked the spirit of 1776, he was connecting the Cuban struggle to a vocabulary of independence that even his American adversaries could not easily dismiss. And when Jefferson himself rewrote Locke’s famous dictum from “Life, Liberty, and Property” to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” he was not abandoning the liberal tradition but revealing its deeper logic, radicalizing it from within by stripping it of the property defense that had always been its conservative anchor. The most effective political transformations work through existing traditions, not against them.

This is precisely the opportunity that the American left has squandered. Figures like Jefferson and Lincoln, for all their well-documented contradictions, remain among the most powerful symbols of egalitarian aspiration in American political culture. Jefferson authored the words that abolitionists would throw back in the faces of slaveholders. Lincoln oversaw the Homestead Act, one of the greatest redistributions of wealth in American history. Both could serve as historical legitimation for egalitarian projects of extraordinary ambition. Instead, the academic left has largely reduced them to their worst attributes, ceding the entire terrain of American patriotic symbolism to the political right. The result is that radical democratic demands are framed as anti-American, as foreign imports, as threats to the constitutional order. This framing is one of the most effective mechanisms of what I call contained opposition: it renders resistance culturally illegitimate before it can become politically dangerous. Driven by self-hatred, guilt, and an appeal to ideologies imported from Europe or the Third World, much of the American left has made itself into what might be called self-contained opposition: opposition so self-marginalised that it does not need to be controlled from above, because it is too impotent to go anywhere on its own.

The purpose of reclaiming the legacy of the American Revolution is not to create the myth that a real democracy once existed and needs merely to be restored. It is to recognize that the American Revolution represents an unfinished revolution that demonstrated the great democratic potential that was stopped in its tracks. The radical experiments of the 1770s and 1780s, the movements for abolition and suffrage and economic justice that followed, are part of an actually existing American tradition of genuine democratic aspiration. The system’s greatest trick has been to convince people that this tradition does not exist, that democracy was achieved at the founding and has merely been refined since. Dispelling this myth is the first step toward making the tradition available again.

If the call to “save our democracy” is based on a noble lie, a call to complete America’s democratic revolution could be a true myth to consider instead. The etymologies of the words “lie” and “myth” indicate that these terms carry very different meanings. To lie means to deceive, belie, or betray. The word myth (derived from the Greek word mythos) originally meant “narrative.” Unlike a lie, a myth is not inherently deceptive, nor is it necessarily true or false. Historically, myths often empower and unify people, while lies function to deceive and misdirect people against each other.

Although some guilt-ridden, self-defeating activists of the “educated” left today have convinced themselves that the American Revolution was built on nothing but lies and slavery, the United States does indeed have a revolutionary legacy that many Americans are proud of. The American Revolution set a historical precedent by being the first country founded explicitly on Enlightenment ideals like liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet the American Revolution never fully actualized its ideals, and how to take these ideals to their logical conclusion has always been open to debate. What makes this a “narrative” and not an unambiguous “fact” is that the American Revolution, like all revolutions, had a very contradictory legacy, and it is difficult for a single historical narrative to capture all its complexity. By nature, all narratives emphasize some realities more than others. In any case, the narrative of the American Revolution as a radical, unfulfilled project could be seen as a “myth,” but one that is based on truth and, most importantly, is an effectual truth. Some of the more radical ideologists of the American Revolution, like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, advocated ideas that would be radical even by today’s standards, ideals that would clearly stand at odds with the authoritarian corporatist behemoth that America has become.

The Unfinished Revolution

The American Revolution remains unfinished not because its participants failed to live up to their ideals (the standard liberal interpretation), nor because it was a fraud from the beginning (the standard radical dismissal), but because the institutional order that emerged from it was designed to prevent its most radical promises from being realized. Paine’s vision was defeated; Madison’s was institutionalized. Every major democratic advance in American history since, from the abolition of slavery to women’s suffrage, from the labor movement to the Civil Rights movement, has taken the form of what Sheldon Wolin called fugitive democracy: episodic eruptions of popular power that emerged against the managed system, not within it.^[8] It took the slave abolitionist movement, a civil war, the civil rights movement, and the labor movements to force America to live up to even a portion of its liberal democratic ideals. And yet, with economic democracy still absent from most people’s everyday lives and political democracy subordinated to corporate interests, the American Revolution is still far from complete.

The mythology of American democracy is deeply rooted, in part, because of the country’s unique revolutionary history. Unlike European democracies, which emerged gradually through reform and compromise within existing monarchical and aristocratic orders, the American system was born in revolution. This gives the mythology a special potency: Americans are taught that their system was created for democratic purposes, not merely reformed in a democratic direction. The founding narrative, with its heroic framers and its self-evident truths, provides a reservoir of legitimacy that can be drawn upon whenever the system’s democratic credentials are questioned. The very language of the Revolution, liberty, equality, the pursuit of happiness, functions as a permanent alibi for the managed system that the Revolution’s conservative phase produced.

In most discussions of democracy, the meaning of the word is presupposed and taken for granted. It is assumed to be whatever we have. What we have is something very specific: a managed democracy, designed to provide the form of democratic participation while constraining its substance, to offer the freedom to change nothing while maintaining the appearance of freedom to change everything. This is why the revolutionary tradition matters. Not because it provides a blueprint, there is no blueprint. Not because it guarantees success, there are no guarantees. But because the American Revolution demonstrates, as a matter of historical fact, that the managed order is not natural, inevitable, or permanent. Thomas Jefferson himself stated, “Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.”^[9]This is why Jefferson came to the conclusion that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."^[10] The revolution is not behind us. It awaits its completion.

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Footnotes/Citations

^[1]I elaborate on this at length in my forthcoming book, Freedom to Change Nothing: The Spectrum of Managed Democracy and What Makes America Unique.

^[2]Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 15.

^[3]Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 38.

^[4]Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 283.

^[5]Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 18–19.

^[6]Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 508–509.

^[7]Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 34–40.

^[8]Sheldon Wolin, Fugitive Democracy: And Other Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 261.

^[9]Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, September 6, 1789, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 15:392–98.

^[10]Thomas Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, November 13, 1787, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), 12:355–57.