Posted on 07/02/2015 4:37:52 PM PDT by Kaslin
Generally, I’m not one to hammer on outlets as a whole, although some — Salon comes to mind — seem to use trolling people with ridiculous premises as their entire marketing strategy. Vox has its moments like this, although they also recently hired the estimable Jon Allen as a political editor to shore up their credibility. However, it’s essays like today’s “3 Reasons the American Revolution was a Mistake” two days before Independence Day that provide most of Vox’s reputation for intellectual heft. Well, it’s those and that West Bank to Gaza Bridge that inspired Sonny Bunch to offer “The Year in Voxfails” at the Free Beacon, along with the supposedly longest winter night ever that wasn’t.
At least this essay from Dylan Matthews is more of an opinion piece, and Dylan’s entitled to his opinions and to write about them, even if they are more or less spun out of pure fantasy. That’s what this is, of course — a series of improbable what-ifs that ignore historical realities and contexts for simplistic assumptions, built around a trollish central argument guaranteed to get clicks. It’s practically old-school undergrad blogging at its most pure, and only needs some Rule 5 imagery to complete the experience.
According to Matthews, a British colonial system would have produced fairer treatment for Native Americans, even though the British and French pitted them against each other mercilessly prior to the American Revolution. If the British stuck around, then that would have continued and gotten worse after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era as the British tried to eat into French territory. It might be true that we wouldn’t have pursued Native American land very far past the Ohio Valley, but only because the French held the Midwest all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. Had the British been left in charge here rather than the Americans, the Louisiana Purchase likely would never have taken place, as the French wouldn’t have sold it to their enemies in England. That means that the US would only exist to the east of the Mississippi, which hardly sounds preferable to today, or the colonists would have had to fight more wars with France to gain the Midwest. And that would still leave us with Mexico owning most of the West Coast.
Matthews also argues that British control would have ended slavery sooner, apparently because the British managed to end the slave trade earlier than we did:
The main reason the revolution was a mistake is that the British Empire, in all likelihood, would have abolished slavery earlier than the US did, and with less bloodshed.
Abolition in most of the British Empire occurred in 1834, following the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act. That left out India, but slavery was banned there too in 1843. In England itself, slavery was illegal at least going back to 1772. That’s decades earlier than the United States.
Can anyone spot the fallacy in this argument? In 1772, the colonies still belonged to the Crown … and it didn’t end slavery here at all. It didn’t impact the British slave trade much either; it took William Wilberforce more than three decades to end the British domination of the slave trade in 1807. Furthermore, the colonies here were not a conquered people but autonomous enough that the British abolition wouldn’t have impacted the southern colonies, not for a very long time. The outposts where the British managed to dictate emancipation didn’t have home rule in the same sense as the American colonies had it — nor would the South have just acquiesced on the question, as the Northern colonies found out to their frustration. We just would have had a civil war a few years earlier, and probably in a far more messy form, with an almost-certain political partition typical in former British Empire outposts in the post-colonial era.
Finally, Matthews insists that we would have protected ourselves better from dictatorship:
Honestly, I think earlier abolition alone is enough to make the case against the revolution, and it combined with less-horrible treatment of American Indians is more than enough. But it’s worth taking a second to praise a less important but still significant consequence of the US sticking with Britain: we would’ve, in all likelihood, become a parliamentary democracy rather than a presidential one.
And parliamentary democracies are a lot, lot better than presidential ones. They’re significantly less likely to collapse into dictatorship because they don’t lead to irresolvable conflicts between, say, the president and the legislature. They lead to much less gridlock.
Say, perhaps Matthews might want to look at 17th-century English history for an object lesson on that score. Oliver Cromwell became a de facto dictator by leveraging the power of Parliament against the King, which committed regicide and made Cromwell the Protector. Even if Matthews isn’t terribly familiar with that history, the founders of the American system certainly were. When drafting the Constitution, they ensured that the executive and legislative branches had co-equal power, with checks and balances to ensure that neither branch produced a dictatorship.
For that matter, Matthews might want to study the history of 20th-century parliamentary systems, especially one in particular — the Weimar Republic. Parliamentary systems provide no particular protection against dictatorships, and the instability of multi-party politics can actually create more of those dangers. But here’s a better question: why does Matthews want a parliamentary system and its supposed bulwark against dictatorships? Ironically, it’s because he likes their unchecked power. No, really:
In the US, activists wanting to put a price on carbon emissions spent years trying to put together a coalition to make it happen, mobilizing sympathetic businesses and philanthropists and attempting to make bipartisan coalition — and they still failed to pass cap and trade, after millions of dollars and man hours. In the UK, the Conservative government decided it wanted a carbon tax. So there was a carbon tax. Just like that. Passing big, necessary legislation — in this case, legislation that’s literally necessary to save the planet — is a whole lot easier with parliaments than presidential systems.
On second thought, skip the history lessons, and study the use of irony instead.
The facts are whether the revolution would have succeeded or not in 1776, many of the residents of America wanted independence. It would have happened sooner or later. And as far as the British treating their subjects better than Americans, why don't they ask the Irish and the Scots about that.
There was the Irish potato famine where while hundreds of thousands of Irish were starving to death, they were still exporting beef and other foodstuffs from Ireland to England. And in Scotland they had something called the Highland Clearances after the failure of Bonnie Prince Charlie's rebellion in 1746.
Overall, the British can rightfully lay claim of doing more to civilize the world than any other country in history. The introduction of British law and customs put many previously uncivilized or backwards countries on the road to modernity and a better way of living. But they had their share of mistreatment of other peoples as well as Americans. In short, nobody's perfect.
George III never came within three thousand miles of America. I wish I could say that about Obama.
I won’t waste my time reading that drek, but it occurs to me....
Who’s more tyrannical, Queen Elizabeth, II or Caliph Baraq, I?
America, as a nation, had slavery for about 80 years.
Yeah, British rule was better. /s
Well, in point of fact, those early settlers of which you speak were Church of England and did not grant the same freedoms to other Christian faiths. Presbyterian, for example.
You guys at Vox can kiss my ass!
It is, in addition, hilarious to see ferocious anti-imperialists and anti-colonialists such as Mr. Matthews suddenly turn coat and embrace both when it suits the narrative, which in this case is painfully obvious: it is the United States which has sinned in those regards and not our tutors across the water. We were, to be sure, entirely supportive of their brutal takeover of Canada from the French, but that was as loyal colonials, not imperialistic rivals.
I'm afraid I must insist that it was in the best interest of everyone involved that the War of Independence turned out as it did. The losers nearly across the board were the Europeans, whose record vis a vis human rights might be considered a touch tarnished in any case. If three quarters of a century later the British were ahead of us in dispensing with chattel slavery in favor of economic slavery, we did, shortly thereafter, redeem the deficiency in blood.
How come some posts show symbols like the following?
it’s essays like today’s “3
It's 'Merica's fault.
Any more questions? obviously you haven't taken advantage of the open enrollment periods designed for your re-education (and own good). concentrate harder, comrade
Most browsers will instead render the page as Windows-1252, the default Windows NT code page. Windows-1252 is a subset of the Latin-1 code page: some characters do not exist at all, and other characters are in different places; hence, the weird, out-of-place symbols.
IOW, this one, you can blame on Microsoft.
That was a much better answer than one I gave, but I may have had more fun.
‘Twas a time when Vox occasionally wrote stuff that was well reasoned and coherent - must have bee trying to build some creds for when his real self oozed out - similar to Kathleen Parker and BOR....
They show up okay to me
The offer began with a moving video of America the Beautiful sung by the Hillsdale Choir.
I highly recommend Hillsdale courses and I suggest that voluntarily supporting Hillsdale may do more for educating newer Americans than all the politicians, universities, and schools.
By-the-way, I appreciate receiving this Free Republic posting.
“Raw Judicial Power” and “Judicial Putsch”: What is Next? by Rev John Rankin
In the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing human abortion, dissenting justice Byron White called it an exercise in “raw judicial power.”
In today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, dissenting justice Antonin Scalia called it a “judicial putsch” (overthrow).
In both cases, these supposed “rights” were invented apart from Constitutional law. This means we are no longer a nation of laws, but of a nation where the human wills of certain elitists are imposed on the rest of us.
Does it matter? From antiquity we have the biblical understanding of human freedom under the rule of law, and governed by King Yahweh. In Mesopotamian and Egyptian culture, we have kings who call themselves gods, and impose slavery on the non-elites of society. The “state” is god.
In the biblical profile of Sodom and Gomorrah, social and sexual anarchy lead to the state becoming god, no dissent is permitted, and the poor and needy get trampled.
In the Roman Empire, Caesar was eventually lifted to the status of a god, where Tiberius was the “son of the divine Augustus.” The self-proclaimed son of god. So when the true Son of God appears, the greatest contest of the ages comes to pass. Thus, for early Christians to call Jesus Lord was to oppose Caesar as lord, and thus the persecutions began.
We are now a nation that has forsaken its heritage of unalienable rights given by the Creator, and replaced it with the state as god.
The trajectory now in the United States is to remove the religious liberty of all people who dissent from the state as god, including those of us who say no to human abortion, say no to same-sex marriage, and say no to state enforced healthcare that cheapens real care and costs us much more.
And just like Nazi Germany where the church was squeezed into compliance — save a few brave souls who resisted like Dietrich Bonhoeffer — the next assault will especially be against pastors, churches and Christians who do not yield to the state as god. Support homosexuality, ordain homosexual clergy and perform same-sex marriages or lose your tax exemption ...
So, the British were around in Old Testament times? Really? The British are the reason the Slavic peoples got that title? The British sold Abraham his servants?
Nice try. The ONE thing the article got right was that the Brits were among the first peoples to abolish slavery. The rest was utter dreck, but your hyperbole and inaccuracies only encourage the barking moonbats in their insistence that we on the right are ill-informed.
William WilberforceBlack Rednecks and White Liberals - Thomas Sowell
#30 You mean I gotta take Latin to understand some posts? : )
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.