THE SELF-STYLED PROGRESSIVES ABANDONED PATRIOTISM.

Of late, some among their number have discovered that aggressive, in-your-face deconstruction of everything is an evolutionary dead end.

Independence Day, however, is behind only Thanksgiving in the ranking of contested Federal holidays.  It is only fitting and proper that it is so, as the Scottish Enlightenment notions of natural rights and perfect liberty is a long term bet on emergence.

None of which stops the factions of today from seeking to score rhetorical points.  I start with a Politico essay by Cristina Beltrán, "It’s Time For Progressives to Reclaim the Fourth of July."  She notes that the so-called progressives might have abdicated their claim.

It didn't have to be that way.  Concurrently with official Bicentennial celebrations, none of which were Federal projects, except for a special quarter, an idea that has subsequently gone from classic to dadaist, there was a People's Bicentennial Commission, which offered its own approach to "live up to the true meaning of its creed."

In 1971 a group of Americans angry over the state of the nation and the perceived betrayal of the values of the American Revolution formed the People’s Bicentennial Commission. Over the next few years they engaged in rowdy protests, including burning the president in effigy and disrupting official commemorations of the Boston Tea Party and Battle of Concord. They claimed the legacy of the patriots of 1776, and used TEA as an acronym for their feelings about tax policy.

However, they were not angry about being “taxed enough already,” but wanted the “tax equity for America” with the wealthy paying their fair share. They excoriated the East India Company as a typically nefarious corporation, blaming the Boston Tea Party not on taxes but on that corporation’s corrupt bargain with the British government to get a monopoly on the sale of tea in the colonies. They did not decry socialism, but instead boldly advocated for what they called “economic democracy.” In their words modern American corporations were nouveau “Tories” bent on strangling the will of the people.

A movement from the Left drenched in patriotic trappings confounds our present-day expectations. In the 1970s the political Right had not yet established a monopoly over the legacy of America’s founding. The People’s Bicentennial Commission, formed out of the New Left movements of the prior decade, sought to use the Bicentennial as an avenue for attracting ordinary Americans to an explicitly leftist agenda, and it almost worked. Its story offers a fascinating mirror to the present day, and some lessons and warnings about our current day History Wars.

Well, the Scottish Enlightenment is a collection of coherent beliefs, and the intellectual tendencies of the loony left have over the past fifty years favored the denial of such things.

That lunacy had not yet made its way out of French philosophy and into the streets.

The group emerged from an effort by elements of the New Left to use patriotic and nationalist rhetoric to engage a broader audience who may have been turned off by seeing anti-war protestors brandishing Vietcong flags. For example, in 1969 SDS patron John Rossen wrote a book The Red, White and Blue Book under the pen name “Johnny Appleseed.” It contained quotations from throughout American history that purportedly showed American founders and other valorized figures supporting radical politics.

That's not hard: by the standards of the late eighteenth century, resting Divine Rights in all people, rather than in kings alone, is subversive.  Too soon, though, began the guilt tripping.

As part of these efforts the PBC encouraged students to take part and to challenge their schools’ curriculum. The official guide urged students to get more power in their schools, demand a free press for student newspapers, and to demand student evaluations of teachers. Resistant principals were to be labelled “King George.” In terms of curriculum, the PBC counseled students against “conservative” textbooks that downplayed the revolutionary nature of the American Revolution. They demanded textbooks that portrayed Progressive Era reform and the New Deal as mere half-measures that have not done enough to achieve the necessary “economic democracy.”

However, much like modern day conservatives who deify the Founders, the PBC’s own story of the American Revolution excluded complicated realities in place of comfortable narratives, especially in regards to slavery. Voices of Revolution contained quotations from selected sources that decried slavery and supported the rights of women, implying those positions were at the center of the Revolution and not at its fringes. When dealing with the fact that the Continental Congress had struck language critical of the slave trade from the Declaration of Independence, it noted that the ideals of the Declaration had eventually led to slavery’s demise: “But the message of equality and inalienable rights still rang out in the Declaration, and generations of abolitionists and suffragists were later to base their own movements for justice on the self-evident truths of our founding document.”

The presentism that inevitably works its way into leftist polemics was beginning to surface, and eventually the sectarianism stepped on the message.

Much of the public discourse this summer has been clouded over with the rhetorical cordite and gunpowder of another major battle in the History Wars, this time taking shape over a calculated conservative freak-out over critical race theory. The story of the People’s Bicentennial Commission shows just how long these wars have been taking place. Radicals today are much less likely than the PBC to construct a positive or nationalistic narrative of American history to further their own ends. Figures like Jackson or Jefferson are not to be praised.

While I agree with this stance, it also leaves unanswered questions about how to build a national narrative from the Left that is critical but also offers some kind of social glue and positive national identity. A political movement that fails to do this will have a hard time getting traction in this country, and conversely Joe Biden’s unlikely success in the 2020 election can be chalked up in large part to his appeals to a positive American national identity. Almost fifty years after the demise of the People’s Bicentennial Commission, nobody has figured out how to create a positive narrative of American history that coincides with a critical Leftist perspective. Maybe the harsh reality of American history makes that impossible. Even though the PBC ultimately failed to thread that needle, at least they tried.

Maybe hectoring and scolding Normals isn't a productive strategy, and that is why the loony left fails.  Charles Lipson takes up the argument.

As we celebrate this Independence Day, we desperately need to remember our own shared beliefs and ideals in hopes they will bind together our divided nation. Our shared ideals and common identity as Americans should bind us. Today, alas, they are too frayed to do the job. Some think it is a fraud even to stress those commonalities.

It is not. Our shared aspirations and common identity are our country’s best hope for the future. And our history should be a source of hope, as well as somber reflection.

Those ideals are not “our country, right or wrong.” They are not “our country with an airbrushed past.” Neither are they “our country as a relentless record of evil and oppression, at home and abroad.”

Rather, they are “our country as it strives to become better, to celebrate its accomplishments, to overcome its historical wrongs, to heal its lasting wounds and, ultimately, to achieve the ideals set before us in the Declaration of Independence and made concrete in our Constitution.” Whether our ancestors came over on the Mayflower, a slave ship, or a boat from Europe, escaping the Nazis, those are our shared ideals, but only if we embrace them.

What are those ideals? What are those accomplishments, incomplete as they still are? They are the promise that all men and women should be treated equally, allowed to speak freely and assemble peaceably, worship as they choose, permit others to worship, speak, and assemble as they choose, vote for whichever candidates they prefer, and live in safety, governed by laws made by the representatives they choose in fair elections. Those goals are grounded in tolerance and mutual forbearance, which are essential for a cohesive society where people come from different backgrounds and hold different beliefs.

He calls the roll of the deconstructionists, should you be interested.

It's in the continuing scolding and shaming, though, that the populist right stakes its claim to patriotism.  By default.  "Bud Light will not revive unless and until Americans get that apology. Patriots have had enough of having the trans agenda, and other Leftist insanity, forced upon us. Anheuser-Busch is the first corporation to be made to understand that, and it looks as if the lesson still has to be learned."