The Revolution’s Reactionary Radicals
When Solomon observed that there’s nothing new under the sun, he might have been speaking of politicians: Most plagiarize from their predecessors. Wage and price controls, blaming the victims rather than the authors of government’s policies, banning pleasures and fun, encouraging “virtues” that advance the State and ridiculing or even outlawing those that don’t — these tactics and more are favorites not only of modern Republicans and Democrats but of certain “Patriots” who seized power during the American Revolution. Indeed, they nearly subverted it: As one critic charged, they “hate Tyranny, but … their meaning is they hate Tyranny when themselves are not the Tyrants.”
We talk of the Revolution, singular. But we might more properly pluralize it, given this secondary revolt raging within. And though the interior conflict spoke the larger war’s language of liberty, it actually opposed freedom. Its proponents craved a vigorous government, with agencies and committees galore — all under their control.
They called themselves Radical Patriots, as though troops who marched barefoot through blizzards and starved to fight government weren’t sufficiently radical and patriotic. But whatever their name, they were reactionaries who sought to return man to the State’s shackles even as other Patriots struggled to free him.
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