Notes on the Revolution: Reflections on the U.S. at 250

The American mythology is evaporating. What's left is necessary reality.

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The American Revolution was both an uprising fueled by a thirst for liberty by the people and a forcible transfer of power from the monarchical class to a group of wealthy, slave-owning landholders. That the latter gets largely erased from history, or that it resides more and more within leftist circles, and that the statement of this very obvious fact has led to an aggressive, reactionary push to override our educational and cultural institutions is a damning indictment.

What is now understood to be the revolution in totality, and what you will see when you watch popular culture and mainstream narratives, was a framing created by the bourgeoisie through their control of newspapers and cultural production. Newspapers owned by that wealth class and pamphlets printed on their presses whipped the masses into a frenzy - a reminder that, depending on the scholarship, only approximately 40% of the American population supported the revolution when it happened - and, around the country, charismatic preachers riding the wave of a phenomena now referred to as “the Great Awakening,” positioned Americans to see themselves as united and called to a higher purpose. Through these means, as well as anti-colonial sentiment, created the uprising that now holds sway over our imagination and official understanding.

And then, it was a group of wealth class figures who resented British rule for its interference in their business endeavors and speculation of real-estate. Many of the Founders, including George Washington, depended on westward expansion for their wealth and the British regulation of adventuring into Native American territories and, predictably, the slaughter and eradication of those people, represented an existential threat to the Founders’ economic fortunes and futures. Faced with these restrictions, the Founders concocted one conspiracy after another - hence Thomas Jefferson’s incrimination that King George had “excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions - while stoking popular anger and placing their rebellion on the burgeoning principles of Enlightenment ideals and the idea of liberal democracy.

Now, here we are, 250 years later, watching the capitalist vultures circle the ruins of Gaza with visions of luxury resorts, a president who has used his position to both enrich himself at our expense, facing yet another capitalist collapse as contradictions strain to their breaking point, the need for more real estate speculation has created a creaking, violent, ever-expanding empire, including the recently acquired nation of Venezuela, colonized spaces now include digital and psychological realms as a class of oligarchs fights to control our behaviors and imaginations, and the descendants of the Founders are busy dismantling what remains of the liberal democracy that was erected as a veneer to hide the plunder and control.

Unfortunately, the experiment has played out as one might expect. For all of the flourishes of rhetoric, the rationalization through Enlightenment ideals, the hagiographic mythmaking, and generations’ of shameless and exhausting star-spangled propaganda, what remains is the undeniable core of what hid beneath the visage of revolution: a king was overthrown to make way for a new class of kings.

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In the modern era, the relationship between the myth and the reality is permission to hurt and exploit as many people as you can, to live a life free of friction and conscious and concern. For decades we have been plagued by what I have come to call “American Stupid.” A brash, trolling abrasiveness. Unearned arrogance. Commercials talking about how American love it “big and loud” while hawking an oversized, overly-expensive truck that men can buy so they can speed down an interstate, cutting people off, driving on the shoulder, flipping off other drivers while blasting the dumbest, most pandering, unintelligible music imaginable, songs about living in a small town and working for a living and going fishing and hunting when the listener doesn’t live in a small town or work or fish or hunt. Every moment of time not spent harassing and exploiting is spent either buying the next big thing or watching overly-glitzy coverage of sporting events where more ads play after bombers and fighter jets fly over stadiums that get bigger and louder every passing year as the owners fleece their cities.

I have said before that Fascism is both theft and a collective breakdown. What we see now, as the clock ticks to 250, is the full-evolution of the material truth behind the mythology. This country, as it was founded and designed, was a machine for plunder, a fiction that allowed genocide and slavery and colonization and the stealing of resources from neighbors and employees. All that is left of the mythology and the fairytale is a group of millions dedicated religiously to the holding of the lie because the lie is what makes their barbarism possible. Hating others, seeing them as subhuman, and then stealing everything from them you can carry and setting the rest on fire is the full evolution of the material purposes of the Founding. It is your right, after all, under both the American fantasy and the operating system of capitalism, to be the worst person you can be regardless of the consequences.

It is appropriate that Donald Trump is our president. Modern America has failed to produce a more rightful avatar of its hollowness, pettiness, and brutality than this man, a charlatan who has spent his entire life, like it or not, embodying the true values of the American Dream. From the moment he was old enough, he has screwed has many people as possible while building nothing and hurting everyone he has come into contact with. That the office of the President of the United States of America is now a clearinghouse for some of the most transparent corruption and unnecessary violence imaginable is apropros. It took 250 years, but America has reached its full evolutionary state under this arrangement and between the contradictions of revolutionary fervor and class control, it is obvious which side has won.

As of present, the collective breakdown stems from the split between the realization of the reality and the angry denial. Those supporting this abysmal state are doing so because they have been given permission to become their worst selves, to effectively go on a bender of malignant narcissism that matches their beloved cult leader’s condition, to act as selfishly as him, to revel in the misery of their perceived enemies, to see threats to their power and wealth around every corner, and the “joy” of sinking deeper and deeper a toxic cocktail of self-hate and self-aggrandizement. We have seen this before, both in our lives and in our histories. The beginning of the American project sounded the starter pistol on the chauvinistic adventures against the Native Americans in search of free real-estate and the embrace of slavery as a “necessary” foundational block of the nascent country’s economy and culture. When we took as much land as possible from the indigenous, we began our wars against neighbors and foreign peoples. By the time the 21st century began, those operations were worldwide in nature.

The difference was adherence to the lie. It shown through at times. Our white, patriarchal supremacy in service of capitalist extraction outshone our supposed revolutionary principles at times, leaving the project exposed in all its shame. There was only so much propaganda, so much good will. But the controlling wealth class elites almost always managed to bring the two in balance again, usually fearmongering foreign threats like England or France or Spain or ideas like white replacement or Communist infiltration, doing their damndest to hide the material drives of the nation, but now we are left with a transparent and inarguably venal and solipsistic core. We are lucky, I suppose, that this movement that seeks full control of resources and a fascist hell that rewinds beyond the founding of liberal democracy is populated by some of the least talented individuals imaginable.

The “Great American State Fair” currently “operating” in Washington, D.C., is a perfect metaphor. Shabby. Low-rent. Slapped together and literally crumbling by the minute as unenthusiastic performers dodge pieces of the stage falling from the ceiling. AI art that was whipped together so haphazardly that it’s obvious the person producing it didn’t try past the first attempt to fine tune the images. In one of the tents sits a fitting reminder of the convergence of the myth and the reality, a baptizing pool for attendees to dedicate themselves to a God we have to assume is a MAGA fan and supporter in the Christian Nationalist vein. Trump devotees have traveled there by the dozens, found no air conditioning or support, and have been left, like the woman in the video below, on the verge of sickness before taking a quick dip in the pool and being given medical attention.

Holding onto the illusion of the myth even as it flickers and dies is an act of pure desperation. I would hope that this woman and others like her would reconsider their devotion to a man who would subject them to this kind of thing, but I also spent years attending one MAGA rally after another where people adorned in his cheap merchandise were left to cook in the heat or to walk miles and miles in uneven and uncaring terrain because Trump and his crooked allies so obviously hold disdain for anyone who would buy their grift.

Because that’s all that’s left. Finally accepting the reality means not only giving up the illusion of MAGA but also discarding the lie that has been sold to Americans now for 250 years, to one ancestor after another, to our parents, our friends, our neighbors, our communities, every single one of us. It is the type of psychic pain that we would do almost anything to avoid. Including performing belief when no belief remains.

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The performance of “patriotism” is embarrassing, which makes the present liberal push to wrap our arms around the flag like Trump assaulting it for photos so galling. The Fourth of July has always been a pageantry of meaningless signifiers. Star-spangled bunting and graphics. Pictures of bald eagles. Constant reminders of the Founders who rallied to protect and grow their investments at the expense of everyone outside their class. A parade of military weaponry. Novelty products and cheaply made party favors.

What is missing is constant. The people and the groups who have fought to lift up the mythology and inject it with actual meaning and purpose. Before Trump, the Fourth of July was largely faceless, lacking humanness beyond the Founders, and even then it was a doctored and weaponized portrayal. Noble men with noble intentions. We see the same thing with Trump now but there is no doctoring his ambitions or warped desires. Still, we do not see abolitionists or the members of the slave revolts or suffragists or labor warriors or the Stonewall rioters or immigrants who organized for rights and many of whom who were arrested or deported. The closest we get to reminders of the average working person is when they’re totaling our grocery basket filled with hot dogs and red, white, and blue adorned special editions of the regular products we already have. At night, we look toward the sky for explosions rather than across our yards and streets and at one another.

This Fourth of July is special not in its significance regarding the age, but in that it stands as yet another moment to take stock and see the divide between the myth and the reality. The parade of military equipment, including a full seven hours of planned flyovers in Washington, D.C., feels not only wasteful but also a reminder of a stunning military defeat in Iran. The hot dogs cost more and cutting costs means possibly leaving the “patriotic” junk like the Red, White, and Blueberry Pop Tarts on the shelves. Worsening weather phenomena resulting from climate change has rendered outdoor activities dangerous and potentially life-threatening, leaving many of us wandering around looking for an abandoned baptism pool. The message of the mythology will be handled by a decrepit and decaying tinpot dictator who would care less whether any of it sounds even the least bit legitimate.

For all of the opposition to Trump, so many of the critiques boil down to something startling: disagreements on how exactly to “make America great again.” The argument, when laid bare, is telling. These are dueling delusions. On one side, a group that is intoxicated with the power to hurt as many people as possible while growing their own wealth and their own mythology. They believe in a mythic American past where the mythology was true and perfectly balanced with the material reality. On the other, a group that has wielded power and hurt untold numbers of people but believed they have done so for the right reasons, all while building their own wealth and maintaining their own mythology. They also believe in a mythic American past that was balanced between the mythology and reality.

And that leaves the rest of us. Caught between twin delusions and fantasies, continually crushed for our rightful critiques and understandable concerns. In this way, we have our own lineage that stretches back to the groups who, not even twenty years into the new nation, saw that the Federalists and the wealth class had engineered a system to their advantage and to our detriment, who tried to continue the supposed revolution but were stamped out by a militia led personally by President George Washington. Who later demanded an end to the barbarism of slavery. Who called the genocide of the Native American what it was. Who organized in our neighborhoods and our communities and ended child labor and established meager worker protections. Who gave rise to one social movement after another that wrestled power from the state on behalf of the people, achieving civil rights and striving for equal protection under the law. These are the real heroes of the American Revolution.

The truth is that the revolution was real. It wasn’t real because it happened, it was real because people believed in it. They saw, and we should never forget, the need to move beyond a fixed hierarchy that benefited a select few born into wealth and class privilege with only the mythology of being chosen by the universe and god to protect their status. Regardless of printed propaganda and religious evangelizing, this was a manifestation of something that isn’t uniquely American but has been found in every country and kingdom and location around the world throughout time. Monarchs and nobility and despots have always been opposed, no matter what the popular histories tell you. What rights we have enjoyed have been won through battle and sacrifice and bravery. This was yet another instance that built on a grand tradition of humanity finally standing in the face of overwhelming power and saying enough is enough.

Revolutions tend to die when they are extinguished. The American Revolution was controlled, from the beginning, by the next iteration of the nobility, only this class hid itself behind an engineered system and this weaponized framing. The words of the Declaration of Independence, or at least the remembered sections, were penned by a slaveholding rapist, but the energy is real and has inspired millions both here and abroad, even those, like the Vietnamese and Haitians who took the Declaration of Independence and its eventual response in France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen seriously, who heeded the call for freedom and liberal democracy and were crushed by the very nations that produced them in the first place.

That Jefferson and the other Founders cribbed revolutionary spirit for their own intentions does not mean revolutionary spirit is captured. It’s borrowed. It can be twisted, juiced, abused by charlatans like Trump and his followers, but, unlike a flag that can rip or trucks that break down or mythologies that fade, the human desire for a better world is eternal and unshakeable and it does not reside solely within the United States and is not possessed by any group, regardless of how much power or wealth they enjoy.

The flame of revolution did not, despite what you might be told, ignite in 1776.

And it will not die in 2026.