America's Founding Irony
The founding irony of America is that the Founding Fathers all broke a bunch of laws and committed a ton of crimes for us to even have our democracy in the first place.
You cannot tell the story of America without telling about the founding crime of high treason that got this red, white and blue ball rolling.
It’s an exercise of nationalist fantasy to wrap one’s self in the history of place, to claim a country’s story so as to author its ending. This is why generations of American Conservatives have embraced the nation’s founding as exclusively their story to tell. And for their part, Liberals have gladly ceded them the past, preferring their bridges to future nowheres. And after all, in an age of cancel culture, do you really want to risk being seen caping for slaveholders? Think of the outrage.
But it’s unnecessary to apologize for the ethical missteps of the founders to point out the truth of their situation which is that they were outlaws. Resisting taxation and raising arms to expel imperial forces, these were considered acts of treason against the Throne and an egregious affront to the King’s divine sovereignty and dominion over place and people.
It would have seemed then much like kicking God in the dick and twice in the ass for good measure.
Which is why efforts of contemporary Conservatives to identify with these founding rebels strike so incongruent, even cacophonous.
Imagine how ridiculous it would have been for any Founding Father to wave a Redcoat Lives Matter flag in front of his house. How absurd it would be to see Betsy Ross stitching a red stripe into colonial flags to honor the sacrifice of British soldiers in keeping the colonies under imperial law and order.
Every signatory of the Declaration of Independence was signing his death warrant. By so blatantly breaking the law and defying order, they made themselves the world’s most wanted men, knowing that the only thing standing between them and a firing squad was this new, fantastic idea of revolution.
These men who we call our Founding Fathers were not themselves Conservatives. Their revolution upended all traditional claims to sovereignty. In the name of advancing liberty, they discarded centuries of “but that’s how it’s always been done” in favor of a form of political governance so novel that they would have to invent it themselves.
All of this is to say that America was founded in crime. Our Revolution was, first and foremost, an act of insurrection. The colonists resisted tyranny and transcended empire to bring forth a new nation, the first of its kind, but they did so first by breaking the law.
As always, it comes down to perspective.