The 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord is a good time to resist mad kings old and new.

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-04-17-come-saturday-reclaim-american-revolution/



As I noted in my On TAP column of February 6th, this Saturday—April 19th— marks the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, which began the American Revolution. On that day in 1775, armed farmers assembled on a town square to resist British troops come to make some arrests—minus guarantees of habeas corpus—of Bostonians (John Hancock in particular) who’d prominently opposed the forced billeting of British troops in Massachusetts homes and the suspension of laws enacted by colonial legislatures. A shot rang out, a battle ensued, a revolution began. It was, Ralph Waldo Emerson later wrote, “the shot heard round the world.”

Had there been no deep and novel cause behind that shot, it would never have reverberated so widely. But that cause was spelled out one year later in the Declaration of Independence, which argued both that “Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and that King George, far from seeking the consent of the governed, was responsible for “a long train of abuses and usurpations” of power from the colonists’ governments. The king, it said, “has refused his Assent to Laws” (that is, refused to recognize laws passed by colonial legislatures). He was responsible, the Declaration continued, “For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments.” These transfers of power from colonial legislatures to the Crown were at the center of the Founders’ case for revolution.

When I wrote in February, it was already clear that Donald Trump was determined to exercise powers constitutionally vested in Congress, including those of establishing, abolishing, funding, and defunding government departments and agencies. He had not yet, as president again, ignored and flouted the federal courts, nor violated as many guarantees of liberty vouchsafed in the Bill of Rights as he has subsequently. It was already clear that he would treat his aides not as an administration but as a court, and the parallels to old King George were already clear. Today, he presides over the nation not just as Old George, but as Mad George, decreeing extrajudicial punishments on his critics, renaming pieces of geography, and using his tariffs to pressure world leaders, as he told a meeting of Republicans last week, to come before him “kissing my ass.”

So Saturday offers us an opportunity to celebrate the original patriots for their opposition to a mad monarch, for their belief, however fledgling and incomplete it may have been, in laws enacted democratically, by the consent of the governed. Following up on the thousands of local demonstrations of April 5th, building on the massive crowds that have turned out for the Bernie-AOC tour, it’s time for Americans to assemble again to resist the usurpations of power and the reign of not just a unitary, but also a monarchial, autocratic, and sociopathic executive.

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