PUT YOUR FAITH IN EMERGENCE.

Religious dogma might be useful.  Consensus is poison.

So argues Matthew Continetti in "Inoculated Against Tyranny," asserting, "The Constitution’s separation of powers and guarantee of individual rights kept America’s revolution from devolving into fratricide."

His essay suggests thinking of the War for Independence as a "revolution" might lead one astray.

At first blush, the American Revolution poses a problem for conservatives. For one thing, it took place in 1775-83, years before the French Revolution of 1789 introduced the concepts of “left” and “right,” radical and conservative, into the political vernacular. For another, American conservatives find themselves in the paradoxical situation of defending a revolutionary heritage.

Some of the difficulties are resolved if you interpret the American Revolution not as a battle between left and right, as we understand those terms today, but as a fight between patriots and loyalists—with the patriots arguing for, fighting for and achieving independence from the British superpower.

Thus, men such as Thomas Paine and John Adams, who would travel different paths, nonetheless agreed on the principle of no taxation without representation and the broader philosophy of individual natural rights. And a figure such as Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish statesman known as the father of modern conservatism, called for compromise with America before condemning revolution in France.

Indeed, Burke’s remarkable “Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies” (1775), reads as an early brief for American exceptionalism. The British Parliament, Burke said, was responsible for the trans-Atlantic crisis because it ignored Americans’ distinctive traits.

I've preferred to understand "exceptionalism" as referring to our experiment in self-government, seasoned with a healthy dose of "Mind your own."

Yes, there is a strong strain of religious hostility to the secular impulses of Jacobins and Bolsheviks, and we'll see how that marriage of convenience between gentry leftists and Islamists will turn out.  At heart, though, "Mind your own" is as good a summary of how the semiquincentennial came to pass.

The American answer to hostility to religion and intrusive government was decentralized power. “Divide your power so that every part of it may at all times be used for your advantage, but in such a manner, that your rights may never depend up on the will of any one man or body of men,” John Quincy Adams wrote in “Letters of Publicola” (1791).

The U.S. Constitution divides power horizontally across the three branches of government, including within the legislature. And the Constitution divides power vertically between the federal government and the states. The First Amendment prohibits both the establishment of religion and laws preventing its free exercise. No wonder contemporary revolutionaries—the American millennial and Gen Z socialists that Sen. John Kennedy calls “Lulu Lenins”—are so eager to revamp the Constitution. It’s the ultimate obstacle to their radical designs.

From the beginning, then, America’s revolutionary project in self-government was inoculated against the fevers that would consume other revolutions in bloodshed and tyranny. If that isn’t cause for celebration, what is?

Whether that tradition of separated powers, horizontally and vertically, is sufficiently robust against the blandishments of advocates of the administrative state for another quarter millennium remains to be seen.