Class News
Timothy Breen ’64 on “revolution” vs. “insurrection”
January 6, 2022
Timothy Breen, acclaimed author of The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America, wrote a timely explanation of the difference between the American Revolution of 1776 and the Insurrection of January 6, 2021.
Timothy will be the featured author for the second Yale 1964 Authors Book Club on January 12, 2022.
January 6, 2021, and the Spirit of 1776
An Op-Ed by T. H. Breen
January 6, 2022
History will not excuse a violent assault on a constitutionally based rule of law. Self-styled American patriots who attacked the Capitol on January 6 were sadly mistaken when they claimed to represent the spirit of 1776. Insurrectionists carried “Don’t Tread On Me” Revolutionary battle flags. Others celebrated an imagined affiliation with the Tea Party. Not for the first time, they have got the history of the United States all wrong. What they probably meant in a muddled unreflective way was that their inspiration for mob violence owes a lot to Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922, Hitler’s rigged election in 1932, and Franco’s 1939 rise to power in Spain.
These are the proper historical parallels for their behavior. Not the American Revolution. After all, the revolutionaries of 1776 wanted to escape an authoritarian form of government — a tyranny of king and parliament — and introduce a democratic system based on the will of the people. The American people understood that without a voice in making the law, they were not free. And they voted — for George Washington, for John Adams, and at a turbulent moment in 1800, Thomas Jefferson organized a peaceful transition of power that stands as a precedent for a genuine constitutional government.
The Spirit of 1776 calls on us to remember that the Founders gave no support to the notion that certain leaders by virtue of aristocratic birth or great personal wealth deserve special privilege. It is true that some revolutionary leaders worried that ordinary Americans might encourage anarchy. A few of them apparently forgot that George III had been the problem and begged Washington to become the country’s supreme ruler, a kind of figure who stood above the will of the people. He could serve as a constitutional monarch. Of course, Washington would have none of it. Nor, until recently, did the presidents who followed him.
Americans who drafted and ratified the Constitution certainly did not advocate the creation of a new monarchy. The notion of substituting a domestic tyrant for one who lived in England generated little popular appeal. They were fully capable of identifying dictators; after all, the Declaration of Independence lists the crimes of a monarch who mistook personal authority for genuine due process. As Thomas Paine observed in The Rights of Man, “If I ask a man in America if they want a King, he retorts, and asks me if I am an idiot.” Silly talk about “King Donald” may titillate the political right, but those who spout such nonsense cannot claim a shred of legitimacy from the actions of the American people who fought for independence.
For the Revolutionaries who brought forth a new republic, the assertion of rights — however defined — assumed that human beings are social animals and as such they have responsibilities to the larger community. In other words, for them, claims about rights inevitably drew people into discussion about the rights of others. According to this logic, if one person possesses fundamental rights, then so too do others — friends, neighbors, even strangers. The challenge in a system of contested mutual rights was — and remains — how best to negotiate mutually acceptable limits and boundaries. That is why they insisted on a formal Bill of Rights.
However much the demand for rights annoys modern authoritarians, discussions about mutual obligations are woven into the original fabric of our political society. For over two centuries privileged groups have repeatedly insisted that they hold rights that other Americans do not because of gender, race, or class. Efforts to restrict the rights of others have seldom worked. During each confrontation over the universality of rights, elites who felt threatened by democratic processes have been unable effectively to deny other Americans the rights they claim simply on the basis of their humanity. To try to defend special privilege in the twenty-first century on the authority of our revolutionary heritage is absurd.
The battle over extending rights to others — Blacks, women, and gays, for example — has never been easy, something that the rioters who trashed the Capitol fail to understand. Against fierce opposition, 19th-century suffragettes made a persuasive fight against male privilege on the basis equal rights. More recently, others have taken up the same argument. Coercion has sometimes slowed the opening up of a genuinely rights-based society, but those who insist that rights are reserved for them alone eventually give way as the circle of rights steadily expands.
The people who stormed the Capitol and threatened democracy insisted, of course, that they were defending liberty. This is another false claim. It reflects a kind of selfie mentality that sanctions doing whatever one wants to do without the slightest consideration for the needs and interests of other Americans. Liberty is not a justification for selfishness. For the false patriots who attacked our recent election, the language of liberty is defiant. They want to enjoy “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” without having anyone tell them they cannot do so, or more to the point, without having to share life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness with Americans of different backgrounds.
However much such self-absorbed thinking has transformed our understanding of the country’s founding principles, the challenge for us now is to find a means to preserve our shared rights as well as our liberty. Doing so will require Americans to think of themselves — at least, in a political sense — as members of a democratic community in which we recognize our responsibility for the common good. To be sure, we all have needs and desires as individuals. We take pride in our diverse identities. But the uncompromising insistence on personal autonomy cuts off the possibility of imagining liberty within a framework of mutual obligations.
We might remember what Americans who actually lived in 1776 said about these points. As one observed, “Liberty is frequently used to denote a power of doing as we please, or of executing our acts of choice.” We must reject that kind of thinking, he wrote, because “civil liberty does not consist in a freedom from all law and government, but rather in a freedom from unjust law and tyrannical government.” The insurrectionists of January 6 were not preserving the Spirit of 1776; they were undermining the very revolutionary principles that once made our country a beacon for democracy.
After undergraduate and graduate degrees from Yale (BA 1964, PhD 1968), Timothy Breen taught at Northwestern University from 1985 to 2013. He also taught and held visiting professorships at other US and non-US universities and institutions. He is currently a professor at large at Vermont University. Since his first book in 1970, The Character of the Good Ruler: A Study of Puritan Political Ideas in New England, 1630-1730, he has authored eight further histories about the Colonial period, including The Will of the People.