By Rich Lowry
Monday, July 04, 2016
Two hundred and forty years before Brexit, there was
Amexit, also known as the American Revolution.
In terms of historical consequence, the Brexit vote and
the American Revolution don’t occupy the same universes, but they are connected
by a belief in popular sovereignty and a refusal to be governed by a remote
authority with only an attenuated mechanism — if that — for representation.
In Brexit, the British people decided that their
Parliament should trump the governing machinery of the EU, and in our
Revolution we decided that our Colonial assemblies should trump the governing
machinery of the British Empire. Both acts exhibited a punctiliousness about
government by consent that struck critics as unreasonable and even dangerous.
The Revolution fed off popular passions that shocked and
embarrassed some Colonial elites who were more cautious about separating from
Britain, in an echo of the elite reaction to Brexit. John Adams pushed back
against the “sneers and snubbs” directed at “the multitude, the million, the
populace, the vulgar, the mob, the herd and the rabble, as the great always
delight to call them.” (I’m in the debt of the magisterial new book Toward Democracy, for this and other
quotes.)
If the pro-Brexit forces seem overly touchy about British
sovereignty, consider the sensitivity of the architects of the American
Revolution. They believed that if government merely has the leeway to rule
arbitrarily, it is already tyrannical. It is necessary, Adams warned, to “nip
the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud.”
The Founders sought to protect the bedrock principle that
the people, again the words of Adams, are “the Source of all Authority and
Original of all Power.” Alexander Hamilton wrote that “the only distinction
between slavery and freedom” is whether man is governed either “by the will of
another,” or “by the laws to which he has given his consent.”
By this standard, the case against the British Parliament
was highly intuitive: Members of Parliament didn’t live in the Colonies, and
the colonists didn’t elect them. If the arguments were often complex — could
Parliament impose “external” taxes, but not “internal” ones? — the crux of the
matter wasn’t. Benjamin Franklin wrote as early as 1768 that either “parliament
has the right to make all laws for us,” or “it has the power to make no laws
for us.”
When it came, the American Revolution was a very British
affair. Its supporters cited British writers like John Locke and Algernon
Sidney; long-standing liberties under the informal British constitution; and
their own rights as Englishmen. “Perhaps there was never a people,” Samuel
Adams wrote, “who discovered themselves more strongly attached to their natural
and constitutional rights and liberties than the British Colonists on this
American Continent.”
History didn’t come full circle, but it did look over its
shoulder when a leading advocate of Brexit, the Tory politician Michael Gove,
cited the American Revolution as inspiration for Britain’s separation from the
EU.
Of course, the circumstances are vastly different. The EU
didn’t suspend the British Parliament. It isn’t sending a fearsome fleet across
the Channel to crush all resistance and to hunt down Nigel Farage, leader of
the U.K. Independence Party, and have him hanged (although some EU officials
might harbor this fantasy). Britain obviously didn’t become a newly independent
nation upon the passage of Brexit.
But the Brexit vote is a reminder that the threat to
self-government never truly abates; it just takes different (and more or less
benign or noxious) forms. This is why self-government always needs to be
jealously and zealously guarded — something our forefathers understood and
acted upon.
Levi Preston, a captain at the Battle of Concord,
explained decades later why he had fought: “What we meant in going for those
redcoats was this: We had always governed ourselves, and we always meant to.
They didn’t mean we should.” It’s a sentiment as relevant now as it was more
than 200 years ago — and will always remain so as long as men yearn to be free.
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