by Richard M. Balzano
This complicated nation celebrates its 250th birthday on July 4th. Despite, or perhaps because of, the tragic state of affairs at present, semiquincentennial celebrations will likely see a spike in a particular American brand—toxic nationalism cosplaying as patriotism, built on a profound and tactfully curated misunderstanding of both the present state of geopolitical affairs and historical events, in this case reducing the American Revolution to an anti-colonial common man’s war inspired by enlightened ideals. The American origin story, set in the context of the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolution™, could use a touch of decolonization, because these revolutions were not all that revolutionary for most people, and the consequences of this misunderstanding have had counterrevolutionary consequences over time.
At its paradoxical foundation, the American Revolution was fought against (British) colonialism by colonial elites eager to discard the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and colonize North America and its Indigenous inhabitants west of the Appalachians. The widely recognized contradiction that the Revolution’s Enlightenment principles were selectively applied to propertied men barely captures the extent of moral dissonance in American self-reflection—historian Gerald Horne has made a compelling argument that colonial elites observed the abolitionist movement gain traction in Britain and sought to break with Britain so as to sustain the institution of slavery.
The American Revolution was not the common man’s fight, but an elite-led endeavor. Colonial poverty was rampant and wealth inequality extreme, but the Revolution’s architects tactfully redirected grievances and hostilities from colonial elites to the British with some success. Many poor colonists were indifferent or unwilling to risk their lives to trade one group of ruling elites for another; many were conscripted to fight—in the name of liberty, obviously. The Revolution was not particularly popular in the South, and parts of the South and mid-Atlantic fell into a state of quasi-rebellion.
To the victor went the spoils, and loyalists’ riches often went to already-rich elites in the new United States. The Revolution made the rich much richer, although it did produce a “buffer” middle class to separate the rich from the starving poor majority whose lot did not much improve. Several Founding Fathers did not envision a republic in which the poor would participate in government. In many instances the property requirements that barred poor white male colonists from voting or holding certain political positions remained in place after the Revolution, and Massachusetts upped their property requirements! Poor Revolutionary soldiers and veterans were frequently underpaid or unpaid, and many found themselves still impoverished, overtaxed, indebted, and facing foreclosure. The revolutionary spirit Americans often associate with the elite-led American Revolution is more accurately the spirit of Shays’ Rebellion and similar uprisings that continued long after British surrender. Founding Father Samuel Adams and the Boston Caucus had earlier tried to corral lower class anger and direct it towards the British in the lead up to the Revolution, but elites like Adams turned on poor veterans when they mobilized—Adams notably called for the death penalty for Shays’ Rebellion participants.
The Age of Revolution™ was not all that revolutionary. Beheading elites en masse may very well be a landmark moment for humanity, but the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution—it benefitted the emerging middle class far more than it transformed society’s lower rung.
Many Western scholars contend the French Revolution directly inspired the Haitian Revolution, but recent scholarship suggests that the French Revolution provided only the opportunity for the Haitian Revolution to succeed, not the inspiration. The Haitian Revolution is more a continuation of hundreds of years of slave revolts and resistance than an extension of European ideals—it is not likely that Caribbean slaves needed European wisdom to reject the institution of slavery to which they were bound. Perhaps Western scholars have colonized the history of the Haitian Revolution and they are reluctant to let it go?
The obsession with private property is perhaps the most prized and influential Enlightenment value in the West. This is best evidenced by Haitain freedom. To lift a post-revolution French blockade, Haitians compensated the allegedly Enlightened French for their lost property—including human property, to the tune of 150 million Francs. That cumbersome debt crippled Haitian development into the twentieth cuntury until it was purchased by American investors. Washington did not forgive the loan, but it was not theirs to forgive—Haitains made the final thirty-plus years of payments on their ancestor’s freedom to private American banks, but the U.S. did maintain control over Haiti’s treasury until 1947 when the loan was paid in full.
Latin America’s revolutions are also ripe with paradox. Latin America’s creole elites revolted under the auspices of Enlightenment ideals like popular sovereignty, but their endgame was to sustain their privilege in the face of impending Napoleonic reforms that threatened the status quo. Lower class anger was redirected towards the Crown, and the poor rallied under the banner of nativism, but life did not improve for much for Latin America’s poor upon winning independence. Slavery came to a staggered end in Spain’s former colonies, but new forms of exploitation emerged to replace the old. Less revolutionary yet, Brazil’s independence from Portugal came with a transition to monarchy, which did little to disrupt the status quo slave regime. Independent Latin America was quickly consumed by debt and entangled in asymmetrical economic relationships with European powers. For over a half-century, Britain siphoned the most neocolonial wealth from the indepent region—a French foreign minister said that “in the hour of emancipation the Spanish colonies turned into British colonies.”
Western Revolutions were not common-man uprisings, but rather elite-led bourgeois revolutions to insulate wealth and power within the upper tiers of society. The Haitian Revolution is the exception, but its history has arguably been colonized. Worshipping the edited version of these events obscures class realities and contributes towards the current economically cuckolded American population as it defends billionaires’ right to exist, conflates credit with purchasing power and debt with ownership, remains content with the fact that rent is paid to an individual whose title still ends in “lord” in 2026, and pays $80 to fill the gas tank of a vehicle with a rear windshield adorned with a Gadsden flag and thin-blue-line stickers.
Western historical memory around the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolution™ has had detrimental consequences abroad, as revolution and Enlightenment mythology provides the ideological and moral framework that rationalizes Western domination. Western democracy—however undemocratic and corrupted by Western capitalism—is the alleged gold standard for political organization…according to the West. The U.S. and its bolder European allies conduct foreign policy as if they have the proprietary rights and moral authority to legitimize or delegitimize contemporary revolutionary struggles. The West—and particularly the U.S.—overthrows democratically elected leaders in the name of democracy, deems an apartheid state “the only democracy in the Middle East,” trains, arms, and bankrolls insurgents to overthrow targeted governments and brands said insurgents as “freedom fighters” while labeling legal resistance to illegal intervention and occuppation as terrorism. Ironically, the revolutionary movements denounced by the West as “terrorists” are more authentically anti-colonial than the revolutions the West mythologizes about itself.
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Richard M. Balzano is an historian and political analyst peddling truths at several institutions of higher learning, quietly devoted to the art of sedition and comfortably resigned to the peripheral left.