WH

I find it impossible to draw the sort of lessons from the revolution that many on the Left seem to hope to draw. Most of the lessons I see are negative, which doesn’t make them useless, as far as I’m concerned — quite the contrary — but the American left generally hasn’t seen things that way. A lot of intellectual energy has been expended trying to ground the Left in a positive view of aspects of the American Revolution, and in other successes of American history, defining leftism itself as patriotically and even exceptionally American (“Communism is 20th Century Americanism,” etc).

It’s natural, in the face of a virulent attack from right and center, scourging the Left as un-American, to try to go hyper-American. But that’s only led to a lot of naïve and faux-naïve history, intellectually insupportable as far as I’m concerned. It’s hard for me to see how that kind of history could lead, long term, to any new clarity in thinking, which I’d see as important to making real change.

When all the real lessons are so painful, what are you supposed to do with them? There’s a compelling quandary regarding the Left and our revolutionary and founding history, and it shouldn’t be wished away.

Here’s a negative lesson of the revolution. The elite founders I was discussing were by no means the only contributors to the revolution. Artisans, laborers both rural and urban, tenants, poor farmers, etc, were all key to the effort; often they led the way. They hoped the revolution would lead to improved political equality, as they defined it, which mostly meant for white men. They often cast their ideas and actions in the elite Whig terms of the day — liberty, rights, “ancient” charter freedoms — but in fact they took a radical view, in that they wanted to disconnect political privilege from property.

Radical, because that was a sharp and total break from the long past on which the elite leaders based the right of revolution itself. Radical because these leaders of a working-class movement wanted new governments to limit the power of wealth, favor labor over capital, favor debtors over lenders. They were levelers, socialists. None of the famous founders agreed with them, and the movement, though crucial to the revolution, was crushed. I’ve analyzed the formation of the nation itself, at the end of the 1780s, as motivated almost exclusively by an elite program of crushing American socialist tendencies.

Well, that’s not a very happy story for the American left to tell about its early history. So we don’t talk much about leaders like James Cannon, Thomas Young, Christopher Marshall, or Herman Husband, or about the Committee of Privates, which organized the entire white working class of Pennsylvania in a successful revolution (briefly) against elite privilege in that state. Instead we’re always trying to cast one of the Adamses or Hamilton or Madison or Franklin or Jefferson, those famous elite leaders, as half-unaware proto-leftists and arguing about which one to lionize. That story keeps eating its own tail.

Of course some left historians do talk about the real leftism present at the founding. Without Gary Nash, Woody Holton, Terry Bouton, Wythe Holt, Ray Raphael, Jesse Lemisch and others, I wouldn’t know about this stuff. But few of those historians get across to the public, and those who do seem to me to turn away from the harshest conclusions of their stories, even while showing what really happened; they try to make that early leftism essentially, even exclusively, real-American, and they call for reviving it as such.

A colder-eyed view, inspired by a left economic critique, suggests that the crushing of that movement was in the end far more fully wired, structurally, into the national founding than the left ideas that got crushed.

So I prefer not to see anything as essentially American or un-American. I prefer to imagine we’re free, within reason, to do what we think is right. Having to cast every good idea as a expression of the American Revolution just wears us down.