The Revolution was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775,” wrote Adams to Jefferson years later, in 1815. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it. “What do we mean by the Revolution? The War? That was no part of the Revolution. At the end of that period, they no longer viewed their rights as those of Englishmen, but coming from nature, an Enlightenment idea. To John Adams, the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, and especially the Writs of Assistance, had caused in the minds of the colonists a shift in the way they viewed the provenance of their rights during the crucial 15 years prior to Lexington. It is clear, too, that leftists see 2020 and the immediately preceding decade as providing the same environment-changing events as the 1760s did for the colonists.
This means that, just as the writings of James Wilson and Thomas Jefferson are made clearer by having a grounding in their Enlightenment philosophical forebears, to understand the language of today’s left it is important to grasp how 20th century Critical Theorists viewed the world. Just as colonists based their worldview on the ideas of thinkers that had preceded them, such as the Englishmen William Blackstone and John Locke and the Frenchman Montesquieu, today’s woke progressives take their ideological marching orders from European thinkers of decades ago, such as the Italian Antonio Gramsci and the German-American Herbert Marcuse. Except in reverse, of course-all the gains in human freedom achieved through the Declaration and the Constitution would unravel if the four discussants got their way. One almost gets the sense of what it must have been to eavesdrop on the Founders at 1776 or the Framers at 1787, as they envisioned a new order replacing a passing one. The conversation was held to mark the anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which told the states they could not prevent women from voting. They come neatly folded into a very instructive conversation held in August by four charter members of the hard left-Alicia Garza, founder of Black Lives Matter Nikole Hannah-Jones, founder of the New York Times’ 1619 Project Maria Teresa Kumar, President and CEO of Voto Latino and historian Martha Jones.
The warnings (or threats) are everywhere and difficult to miss. The question is, will Americans from the right and center listen, grasp that progressives mean what they say, and realize that the country might change into something unrecognizable? What they want is a revolution “in the minds of the people,” not unlike the one John Adams said led to 1776, though to attain opposite ends. Hard-left progressives are telling anybody who will listen that the 2020 riots and pandemic have handed them the opportunity they’ve always needed to transform America.