The Patriot Post® · America at 250

In many ways, the phrase “American Revolution” is a misnomer. The most iconic revolution, for comparison, was the French Revolution, where the overthrow of an aristocracy, rejection of tradition, ideological purification, and the attempt to remake society according to abstract principles defined revolutionary change. In contrast, the American Revolution was no rejection of the past. The tradition of English common law was not transformed. Representative assemblies remained. And the Protestant civil and political culture — marked by literacy, individual conscience, and suspicion of centralized authority — endured. These traditions were not alien to the American colonists, but were inherited from the very civilization from which they separated.

Thus, the American Revolution was less a revolution than a formal announcement that a distinct American nation existed.

John Jay, in Federalist 2, described Americans as “one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.” He was not inventing a nation, but recognizing one. The word nation itself derives from the Latin natio, meaning birth — a people arising from a common origin.

Independence was not when Americans began self-government, but when they insisted their long practice of it implied sovereignty. The Revolution was not a bonfire of the past, but a severing — painful and deliberate — from a parent regime that no longer fit a grown child.

American exceptionalism is often reduced to one word: freedom. But this alone does not explain America’s distinctiveness. America’s uniqueness lies in its foundation on republicanism: the rule of a people through law and representation, rather than the rule of a ruler, a caste, or a permanent managerial class. As James Madison explained in Federalist 39, a republic is a government “which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people,” and is administered by officials holding office for a limited period or during good behavior.

Such a system presupposed a particular kind of citizen. John Adams put the matter plainly: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Republican government depended on habits that law alone could not impose: self-restraint, thrift, responsibility, and strong local associations.

When these habits weaken, governance does not disappear — it relocates. Authority migrates away from the citizen and toward institutions capable of managing what citizens no longer manage themselves. The steady erosion of the liberal bourgeois values that informed the American Founding has weakened the conditions on which republican government depends. Self-restraint has given way to impulse. Thrift to dependence. Industriousness to redistribution. And prudence to shortsightedness. Citizens who once saw themselves as participants in self-government have begun to relate to the state as subjects to be managed or beneficiaries of its provision.

John F. Kennedy spoke to the older civic understanding when he urged Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” Yet it was in the decade that followed that this understanding began to erode.

The 1960s marked not merely a period of protest, but a transformation in the structure and character of the American regime. The Civil Rights Act, while dismantling an unjust system of legal segregation, also expanded federal administrative authority by empowering permanent agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to regulate vast areas of social and economic life. At the same time, the Great Society expanded the welfare and regulatory state, further shifting political authority toward Washington.

In parallel, the nation’s understanding of itself began to change. Changes to immigration policy, combined with an ideology that treated America less as a historical nation, weakened the expectation of assimilation into a shared civic culture. As Horace Kallen himself described, the emerging ideal was a “federation of nationalities,” held together not by shared identity, but by centralized administration. The rise of administrative rule and the dissolution of national consciousness were not separate developments, but complementary ones.

The crisis of our time is constitutional. It is a crisis of whether the American people still exist as a self-conscious nation capable of self-governing, or whether the republic declared in 1776 will persist only in form while its substance passes into the hands of those who govern in its name. It is precisely this condition that Abraham Lincoln warned against when he declared that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” Lincoln spoke these words about slavery, but his warning expressed a broader truth: that a political order cannot endure if it loses coherence in its fundamental character. When a people ceases to conceive of itself as a people — when the “we” dissolves — the conditions of self-government dissolve with it.

As we approach the Revolution’s 250th anniversary, we should take the occasion to recover its true meaning. The Revolution was not merely a rebellion against British authority, nor a war fought in the name of abstract rights alone. It was the culmination of generations that produced a people capable of governing itself. It was the moment when the people asserted nationhood and assumed responsibility for their political destiny.

The American Republic has never depended solely on its institutions. It has depended on the continued existence of the American nation itself — a people conscious of its inheritance, capable of self-government, and willing to sustain the civic character that republicanism requires. The American Revolution was not simply the creation of a republic. It was the declaration of a people. And if that people is to endure, it must once again understand itself as such.