Once a Revolution Begins it Never Ends

Once a revolution begins it never ends until it either fails or a counter-revolution replaces it with the old order. We Americans are taught the wonder and goodness of our "brief" revolution in 1775-1783 and we for the most part believe the revolution began and ended on or about those dates. 

Not true, revolutions are made of ideology and ideology takes time to develop, spread and take hold. The American Revolution was just one by-product of an ideology that was born three centuries previous - an ideology that continues to fuel the revolution to this day.

The birth of this ideology might rightly be dated at the end of the 14th Century with the rise of humanism as a result of the Renaissance.  Renaissance thinkers abandoned the traditional European approach to the world and replaced it with an infatuation with Greek and Roman thinking. 

The next phase of this revolution was in 1517, the year Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg. Luther did not intend to create a revolution - in fact he could rightly be called a paleoconservative, he merely wished to return the church to right practices.  He failed (at the time, although the Catholic Church did begin a Counter Reformation reform movement eventually) and as a result several sects of Christianity arose.

Now contrary to what Baptist Sunday school teachers may say the Catholic Church was not completely corrupt.  There were not small groups of "real Christians" meeting in secret in attics.  The Catholic Church was it, folks found salvation for centuries within that institution - they sat in Latin mass that they did not understand, they had Latin Bibles that they could not read but they had a simple faith (mere Christianity).

The division of Christendom allowed the ideas of humanism to spread into theology and political thought - individual man became central. The Age of Enlightenment was not far behind this development. First in the 17th Century philosophers paid minor homage to theology in their work and by the 18th Century philosophy was strictly humanistic.

Man had become the central focal point of the universe.  Traditions and history could be swept away if they hindered man getting exactly what he wanted.  To the enlightened mind the world could be shaped into any form that man desired, men should be free of bonds and constraints placed upon them by old institutions and long respected traditions.

Our Founding Fathers were students of this tradition.  Just take a gander at the Declaration of Independence. They began a revolution based upon the premise that "all men are created equal" (how idealistic, some are born poor, some blind, some slow - are these equal in any way other than they way their Creator sees them?) and that men have the right to throw off traditions because they merely desire it. If there was a group among them that understood the danger of the beast they were unleashing it was the anti-federalist (a misnomer to be sure, from a paleoconservative perspective these were the only real federalist at the table, thus most modern paleoconservatives are Jeffersonians)

Up to this point paleoconservatives and libertarian only disagree in principle.  Yes it is true we paleoconservatives do not think much of the Enlightenment but it is a fact and we cannot turn back the clock.  However libertarian theory would generally hold that the adoption and subsequent broad interpretation of the Constitution by the Federalist was counter-revolutionary.

I believe that a proper paleoconservative view of this is that the Constitution was a natural extension of ideas of many of the Founders - Enlightenment ideas that said man could shape his world into a utopia - the city on the hill. The Anti-federalist represented the only counter-revolutionary force and they lost.

The revolution continued when

• states' rights was practically laid to rest in 1865
• citizenship was appropriated by the Federal Government through the 14th Amendment
• personal income became the property of the state
• welfare of others became a responsibility of all
• the Constitution ceased to be a contract and became a living document
• men are not only treated equal under the law but given unfair advantages to ensure "equality"
• the Federal Government decided what is right and what is wrong and who is the enemy
• rights became a privilege

The revolution has come full-circle.  It began as an attempt six hundred years ago to free the mind of man, morphed into the idea that man should be free and man could build utopia and has come to the reality that only government knows best - man should not be that free, just "trust us and everything will be ok".

 

The paleoconservative does not disavow good knowledge that came from the Enlightenment, neither do we look regretfully at the attempt made by men like Jefferson in the 18th century - these are part of history and the clock cannot be set back.  We simply realize that man is fallible, reason is often flawed.  We accept that man is a social creature and must have government (we depart from our libertarian brothers here) but we are not statist - we generally despise the modern state as a vehicle to accomplish anything (particularly moral and social good). Family, community and tradition have precedence over the individual in the paleoconservative mind.

My point is we must realize that the American revolution did not end in 1783, it is ongoing in more transformational ways than any philosopher of that era could have imagined.  The logical endstate is a tyrannical perversion of Hobbes' Leviathan. That is the elephant in the room that libertarians and paleoconservatives rail against - once that is gone we can go at each other to determine what comes next.  It is time to end the revolution.