As I noted in my On TAP column of February 6th, this Saturday—April 19th— marks the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, which began the American Revolution. On that day in 1775, armed farmers assembled on a town square to resist British troops come to make some arrests—minus guarantees of habeas corpus—of Bostonians (John Hancock in particular) who’d prominently opposed the forced billeting of British troops in Massachusetts homes and the suspension of laws enacted by colonial legislatures. A shot rang out, a battle ensued, a revolution began. It was, Ralph Waldo Emerson later wrote, “the shot heard round the world.”
Had there been no deep and novel cause behind that shot, it would never have reverberated so widely. But that cause was spelled out one year later in the Declaration of Independence, which argued both that “Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and that King George, far from seeking the consent of the governed, was responsible for “a long train of abuses and usurpations” of power from the colonists’ governments. The king, it said, “has refused his Assent to Laws” (that is, refused to recognize laws passed by colonial legislatures). He was responsible, the Declaration continued, “For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments.” These transfers of power from colonial legislatures to the Crown were at the center of the Founders’ case for revolution.
When I wrote in February, it was already clear that Donald Trump was determined to exercise powers constitutionally vested in Congress, including those of establishing, abolishing, funding, and defunding government departments and agencies. He had not yet, as president again, ignored and flouted the federal courts, nor violated as many guarantees of liberty vouchsafed in the Bill of Rights as he has subsequently. It was already clear that he would treat his aides not as an administration but as a court, and the parallels to old King George were already clear. Today, he presides over the nation not just as Old George, but as Mad George, decreeing extrajudicial punishments on his critics, renaming pieces of geography, and using his tariffs to pressure world leaders, as he told a meeting of Republicans last week, to come before him “kissing my ass.”
So Saturday offers us an opportunity to celebrate the original patriots for their opposition to a mad monarch, for their belief, however fledgling and incomplete it may have been, in laws enacted democratically, by the consent of the governed. Following up on the thousands of local demonstrations of April 5th, building on the massive crowds that have turned out for the Bernie-AOC tour, it’s time for Americans to assemble again to resist the usurpations of power and the reign of not just a unitary, but also a monarchial, autocratic, and sociopathic executive.
Continuing his efforts to give chutzpah a bad name, Trump has been reported to be planning to visit Concord on Saturday. Today’s Minutemen and -women should turn out—a few three-cornered hats and fifes and drums would be in order—to oppose his rule. I gather some activists are holding these kinds of events around the country, one in Manhattan’s Bryant Park, another around the site of a Revolutionary War battle at Fort Stanwix in upstate New York. Nothing could be more American, in the best sense of the word, than to oppose this increasingly tyrannical tin-pot, and the more patriotic these demonstrations, the better. Tomorrow evening, bells will be sounded in Boston’s Old North Church (the one-if-by-land church where lanterns signaled Paul Revere to warn the Minutemen of the approaching troops) and in churches across the country, specifically to celebrate our democratic and anti-monarchial heritage. Continuing in that vein, some veterans’ groups are planning mass demonstrations for June 6th—the 81st anniversary of D-Day—to protest the massive cuts to veterans’ health care, which also will inherently (and, I hope, explicitly) celebrate those periods in our history in which our nation played a decisive role in defending democracy and defeating tyranny.
Trump has volubly trashed the 1619 Project, but he daily trashes the legacy of 1776 as well. It’s time for patriots to reclaim it.
