WE'VE ALWAYS BEEN UNGOVERNABLE.

Emory's Mark Bauerlein, who knows a thing or two about teaching English, looks at historic and fictional famous figures and concludes, "One begins to suspect that the true American tradition is less that of our Fourth of July orations and our constitutional law textbooks . . . than, quite simply, that of riding somebody out of town on a rail."

Well, yes, as we noted in response to another of his essays,

Reality, which is emergent, tends to be socially conservative,  And the snooty-ass gentry have, inter alia, erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our People, and eat out their Substance; declaring themselves invested with Power to legislate for us in all Cases whatever; and excited domestic Insurrections among us.  And they fret about the Incomprehensible Others thinking of torches and pitchforks.  It is the Right of the People to Alter or Abolish.

Which means, as the professor notes, sometimes you bet on emergence and light out for the territories.

Anyone who took up arms against the Crown had to have a streak of defiance somewhere in his character.  We should appreciate it as an essential part of the American personality.  In the panorama of our history, we see this brash “Damn the torpedoes!” attitude surface again and again, sometimes in our most hallowed figures, and not as an accidental feature.  Ben Franklin begins his adult career as an outlaw, fleeing Boston and legal servitude to his brother, sneaking into Philadelphia with little money and no prospects.  John Adams is a great statesman, Sam Adams is not, nor are the vandals of the Boston Tea Party.  “Give me liberty or give me death!” is a tempestuous outcry.  The first pioneers on the frontier bet their lives on an uncertain future.

Other times, you protect your vision of the future by breaking out the tar and feathers.