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American Revolution Redux

Why are some Americans waving the flags of 1776?

The kind of distrust in mainstream institutions that we’re seeing in some sectors of the population today has a lot in common with the way British colonists in North America were thinking in the middle of the 18th century. Among the protesters outside the Capitol last January 6, and the rioters who attacked the building, were people who carried the Betsy Ross flag (13 stars) and the Gadsden flag (“Don’t Tread on Me”), as well as flags, banners, and signs displaying “1776” and other references to the founding era. If the past is a guide, these are people who believe that both Republicans and Democrats in positions of authority are corrupt and that society is so corrupt that the whole system needs to be disrupted and possibly overturned.

In the period leading up to the American Revolution, there was this belief that the British constitution had been corrupted by Parliament in league with the monarchy. And, once in a while, when the colonists were talking about the government, they started talking about the corruption of the Church of England or what they saw as a threatening tolerance by the government for the rights of minorities, such as Native Americans and Catholics in Quebec. There could be racism embedded in the calls for representation then as now.

In the minds of colonists who advocated revolution in the 1770s, all of these pieces fit together in the same way that any number of institutions, such as the media, universities, scientists, and the medical profession; experts or authorities of all kinds; and events such as the 2020 presidential election, all seem to fit together in the minds of protesters and conspiracy theorists today as part of corruption at the heart of American society.

Some of the people who see the country this way are drawing on national folk myths that have a very long and deep history and have been invoked periodically since the generation following the Revolutionary War. We saw this for the first time in 1786 in Shays’ Rebellion in western Massachusetts and, in 1794, with the Whiskey Rebellion, in which farmers in western Pennsylvania refused to pay an excise tax on home-distilled whiskey because they believed themselves underrepresented in the government, which they saw as corrupt. They envisioned themselves as replicating the Boston Tea Party and the Stamp Act protests in the years leading up to the Revolution.

These Patriots of the 18th century are forebearers of the people who invaded the Capitol invoking American Revolutionary slogans and imagery, a fraction of whom belong to modern-day militias and who have a keen sense of their historical relationship to the Minutemen in Concord, Massachusetts. The attackers of the Capitol on January 6 don’t tell the same story about the Revolution that I do, but they believe they are working in a historical tradition of patriotic defense of American ideals.

I think an essential context for understanding this group is that we are on the threshold of being a minority white nation. It’s projected that this will happen by 2045.

If you look at the states where that is already happening, it’s like reading a list of states where elections are most contested—states that are already barely or less than 50 percent white, like Nevada, Texas, New Mexico, Georgia, and California.

When Donald Trump said, “you have to fight or you won’t have a nation,” the “you” here is really the important word. His followers see him as echoing Patrick Henry or Thomas Paine, who were clearly speaking to white, Protestant colonists and not Native Americans or enslaved people any more than Thomas Jefferson was in the Declaration of Independence.