Who "Owns" the American Revolution?
If I had lived somewhere in the Thirteen Colonies of Great Britain during the late 18th century and read that some well-to-do rebels had composed, published, and under-signed the "Declaration of Independence," I would have reacted like most people, "Boy, are we in trouble!" People do not like anyone to mess with a government's functionality. We do not think on a grand political plane. We want to pay our bills, have a bit left over for the weekend, and stay healthy. Acquiring knowledge mostly involves what keeps us employed.
Even educated people who know about revolutions want nothing to do with them. The factions that foment them vary widely in character and intention, an unpredictable mix of the idealistic and the disreputable. Most of the factions regard their intentions as good, but then the wrong crowd sneaks in, takes over, and perverts their purposes, turning them against the very goals that define and fuel them.
The Thirteen Colonies of Great Britain must have had more presence on the World scene than they realized. The Declaration of Independence did not stay local for long. Many Germans had settled in the colonies, especially in Pennsylvania, the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch. They weren't "Dutch", of course. They spoke "Deutsch," German. In Philadelphia, a German-speaking jounalist translated and printed the Declation of Independence into German, in document form, and sent copies of it to German cities like Hamburg and Augsburg.
German newspapers quickly published excerpts from it for their readers and turned it into a subject of discussion among educated people. Amazingly, only a month after its publication in America, it had appeared in most of Germany. Some of the editorials and the readers' comments applauded the Colonists. Other newspapers wrote that the rebels were scoundrels or insane. Revolutions produce the same reaction from generation to generation, don't they?
Still, I can't complain about being a descendent of the American Revolution. It has defied the odds and created a marvel of a nation. Its constitutional structure has generated enough collective wealth to pay bills, educate, and promote countless generations of Americans. The underlying attitude of enquiry in our nation could be summed up in two words "What if?"
If people in our society can generate "what-if" questions that coelesce naturally into a forward step, we can also generate the means to set goals and bring the what-ifs to fruition. In a freedom-loving nation, founded on a posture of pro-active independence, human creativity comes into its own. The status quo allows it stand out as a spiritual given.
But only the Republicans "own" the Revolution. Only they support the posture of independence. If the future of the American Colonies had depended on left-wing Americans—Democrat-Socialists, Gays and Lesbians, and Minorities—we would have remained 13 British Colonies, all these years. The Left complains about the status quo, but they prefer to fight the Establishment, rather than to become the Establishment.
They like equality and inclusion, so they prefer to stick together in a regulated setting. They cannot sense empowerment by acting independently. They may hate Capitalism, but try convincing them to leave the U.S. and govern their own country, by whatever system they advocate—to obtain freedom from us. They would protest being excluded. The Left is controlled by "existential angst"—defined by Wikipedia as "a retreat from freedom and responsibility."
We need to recognize that there can be no real modus vivendi with the Left—our risk-averse, self-serving politicians notwithstanding. We need to fight for independence again, this time against the American colonists on the Left.