🇺🇸 Gratitude on the 4th of July →

My latest post on the importance of remembering what makes the American flavor of independence unique:

Something unique about the American Founders’ flavor of revolution was that it was the first (only?) of the revolutionary movements of the past 300 years that took human nature into account. Many of the revolutions in the time since — the French Revolution, those of the 1840s, the Russian Revolution — had toppling despotic authoritarian regimes in mind.

In that respect the American Revolution shared a causal relationship in what brought it about.

Where the American version differed, though, was not in its origins, but its ends. It sought to replace an oppressive monarchy with something rooted in bottom-up individualism. A republican (small r) system of government that accepted human fallibility: one designed around the unchangeable essence of the “crooked timber of humanity.”