Happy Independence Day / Matthew Yglesias

Happy Independence Day

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 3 minutes

Happy Independence Day

Fireworks are fun

The inaugural Slow Boring book club meets next week! Join us at 8:30 p.m. Eastern on July 7 for a discussion with Princeton professor Leah Boustan about her new book Streets of Gold. Buy the book here, and sign up for the discussion here. This event is for paid subscribers.

Happy Independence Day!

July 4 is first and foremost a time for grilling and fireworks, two things that I really unironically enjoy. But it’s probably also a good time to Say Something About America, so I wanted to recommend an oldish book by Bernard Bailyn called “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.”

What he does for the book is really dig into the pamphlets and such that were being published and widely read during the revolutionary period. Not just the handful of really stellar ones that stand out centuries later as quality work, but lots of run-of-the-mill stuff that was influential at the time and then just kind of faded away. It’s an inherently interesting exercise for someone in my line of work. You’ve got to figure that something like 99.999 percent of the commentary published during the Trump years is going to be washed away and forgotten. The handful of stuff that persists will be the things that future people find insightful. But if future people want to properly understand what was happening at the time, they are going to need to understand a lot of not-very-insightful commentary that was nonetheless reflective of various widely held sentiments.

So Bailyn, in that spirit, is really spelunking in the replacement-level political commentary of late-18th century America.

And what he finds (this is my editorial spin on it, not his) is that while the revolutionaries have a lot of very legitimate beef with the government in London that inspires the Revolution, they also have a lot of very odd ideas about the internal operation of the British government. They are really hung up on a fairly paranoid interpretation of 18th-century British politics in which the king is supposedly deploying massive corruption to subvert the power of parliament and re-enslave the British people.

As far as I can tell, this is just wrong. Britain was not democratic in the 1770s, but it was part of the way down the road of a long-term process of gradual democratization of British politics. The dispute between England and America was that England wanted to arrange colonial policy for the benefit of English people, whereas Americans wanted it arranged for the benefit of themselves. That was a genuine clash of interests and a perfectly good reason to seek independence, but the revolutionaries had this larger lurking background conception of what was going on.

And I think (again, this is me editorializing about Bailyn, not Bailyn himself) this is reflected in some of the oddities of American constitutional design. We with the benefit of hindsight know that the story of British democracy was the story of expanding the franchise for the House of Commons and establishing the supremacy of the Commons over the King and the House of Lords. But the revolutionaries strongly identified executive authority (which is to say the prime minister and his cabinet) with the king and saw a politically active prime minister as a form of corrupt royal subversion of parliamentary authority that was putting England on a slippery slope to tyranny.

So when they set up a new government for themselves, they didn’t just think “hey this is great, we’re self-governing now and we’ve solved the problem!” — they also tried to solve this other alleged problem where the executive was too involved with legislating. This concept of separating the functions does not seem to me to be something that has stood the test of time. And the view that the British system was on the road to tyranny is clearly just false. The actual issue in the American War of Independence was, well, independence. We’re over here, trying to create a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. It remains a great idea, but it would be better if we could keep our focus on that and sideline some of these misreadings of the English political situation.