It seems we still have some Loyalist Tories around and they are Statists. .

Peak Vox: The American Revolution was a mistake, you know

POSTED AT 7:21 PM ON JULY 2, 2015 

BY ED MORRISSEY

Generally, I’m not one to hammer on outlets as a whole, although some — Salon comes to mind — seem to use trolling people with ridiculous premises as their entire marketing strategy. Vox has its moments like this, although they also recently hired the estimable Jon Allen as a political editor to shore up their credibility. However, it’s essays like today’s “3 Reasons the American Revolution was a Mistake” two days before Independence Day that provide most of Vox’s reputation for intellectual heft. Well, it’s those and that West Bank to Gaza Bridge that inspired Sonny Bunch to offer “The Year in Voxfails” at the Free Beacon, along with the supposedly longest winter night ever that wasn’t.

At least this essay from Dylan Matthews is more of an opinion piece, and Dylan’s entitled to his opinions and to write about them, even if they are more or less spun out of pure fantasy. That’s what this is, of course — a series of improbable what-ifs that ignore historical realities and contexts for simplistic assumptions, built around a trollish central argument guaranteed to get clicks. It’s practically old-school undergrad blogging at its most pure, and only needs some Rule 5 imagery to complete the experience.

According to Matthews, a British colonial system would have produced fairer treatment for Native Americans, even though the British and French pitted them against each other mercilessly prior to the American Revolution. If the British stuck around, then that would have continued and gotten worse after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era as the British tried to eat into French territory. It might be true that we wouldn’t have pursued Native American land very far past the Ohio Valley, but only because the French held the Midwest all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. Had the British been left in charge here rather than the Americans, the Louisiana Purchase likely would never have taken place, as the French wouldn’t have sold it to their enemies in England. That means that the US would only exist to the east of the Mississippi, which hardly sounds preferable to today, or the colonists would have had to fight more wars with France to gain the Midwest. And that would still leave us with Mexico owning most of the West Coast.

Matthews also argues that British control would have ended slavery sooner, apparently because the British managed to end the slave trade earlier than we did:

The main reason the revolution was a mistake is that the British Empire, in all likelihood, would have abolished slavery earlier than the US did, and with less bloodshed.

Abolition in most of the British Empire occurred in 1834, following the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act. That left out India, but slavery was banned there too in 1843. In England itself, slavery was illegal at least going back to 1772. That’s decades earlier than the United States.

Can anyone spot the fallacy in this argument? In 1772, the colonies still belonged to the Crown … and it didn’t end slavery here at all. It didn’t impact the British slave trade much either; it took William Wilberforce more than three decades to end the British domination of the slave trade in 1807.  Furthermore, the colonies here were not a conquered people but autonomous enough that the British abolition wouldn’t have impacted the southern colonies, not for a very long time. The outposts where the British managed to dictate emancipation didn’t have home rule in the same sense as the American colonies had it — nor would the South have just acquiesced on the question, as the Northern colonies found out to their frustration. We just would have had a civil war a few years earlier, and probably in a far more messy form, with an almost-certain political partition typical in former British Empire outposts in the post-colonial era.

Finally, Matthews insists that we would have protected ourselves better from dictatorship:

Honestly, I think earlier abolition alone is enough to make the case against the revolution, and it combined with less-horrible treatment of American Indians is more than enough. But it’s worth taking a second to praise a less important but still significant consequence of the US sticking with Britain: we would’ve, in all likelihood, become a parliamentary democracy rather than a presidential one.

And parliamentary democracies are a lot, lot better than presidential ones. They’re significantly less likely to collapse into dictatorship because they don’t lead to irresolvable conflicts between, say, the president and the legislature. They lead to much less gridlock.

Say, perhaps Matthews might want to look at 17th-century English history for an object lesson on that score. Oliver Cromwell became a de facto dictator by leveraging the power of Parliament against the King, which committed regicide and made Cromwell the Protector. Even if Matthews isn’t terribly familiar with that history, the founders of the American system certainly were. When drafting the Constitution, they ensured that the executive and legislative branches had co-equal power, with checks and balances to ensure that neither branch produced a dictatorship.

For that matter, Matthews might want to study the history of 20th-century parliamentary systems, especially one in particular — the Weimar Republic. Parliamentary systems provide no particular protection against dictatorships, and the instability of multi-party politics can actually create more of those dangers. But here’s a better question: why does Matthews want a parliamentary system and its supposed bulwark against dictatorships? Ironically, it’s because he likes their unchecked power. No, really:

In the US, activists wanting to put a price on carbon emissions spent years trying to put together a coalition to make it happen, mobilizing sympathetic businesses and philanthropists and attempting to make bipartisan coalition — and they still failed to pass cap and trade, after millions of dollars and man hours. In the UK, the Conservative government decided it wanted a carbon tax. So there was a carbon tax. Just like that. Passing big, necessary legislation — in this case, legislation that’s literally necessary to save the planet — is a whole lot easier with parliaments than presidential systems.

On second thought, skip the history lessons, and study the use of irony instead.

Update: Here’s a fairly decent overview of the French and Indian War that preceded the American Revolution. Note the divisions here:

The French and Indian War resulted from ongoing frontier tensions in North America as both French and British imperial officials and colonists sought to extend each country’s sphere of influence in frontier regions. In North America, the war pitted France, French colonists, and their Native allies against Great Britain, the Anglo-American colonists, and the Iroquois Confederacy, which controlled most of upstate New York and parts of northern Pennsylvania. In 1753, prior to the outbreak of hostilities, Great Britain controlled the 13 colonies up to the Appalachian Mountains, but beyond lay New France, a very large, sparsely settled colony that stretched from Louisiana through the Mississippi Valley and Great Lakes to Canada. (See Incidents Leading up to the French and Indian War and Albany Plan)

The border between French and British possessions was not well defined, and one disputed territory was the upper Ohio River valley. The French had constructed a number of forts in this region in an attempt to strengthen their claim on the territory. British colonial forces, led by Lieutenant Colonel George Washington, attempted to expel the French in 1754, but were outnumbered and defeated by the French. When news of Washington’s failure reached British Prime Minister Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle, he called for a quick undeclared retaliatory strike. However, his adversaries in the Cabinet outmaneuvered him by making the plans public, thus alerting the French Government and escalating a distant frontier skirmish into a full-scale war.

The 1763 treaty ending the French and Indian War gave the British all the land east of the Mississippi, but left the French on the west side of the river. Had the American Revolution not happened, eventually this would have become another battlefield in the Napoleonic Wars, with the Native American tribes split up and played against each other in exactly the same manner.

Update: Also, Pontiac’s Rebellion immediately after the French and Indian War was prompted in part by harsh British treatment of Native American tribes, a point I had long forgotten. The three-year war did result in the British halting westward expansion by the colonials, but that was a temporary policy even in theory, and in reality didn’t last long at all.

Update: After the French and Indian War, the territory west of the Mississippi passed to the control of Spain, but was mainly settled (very sparsely) by the French. Napoleon reacquired it in 1800. Thanks to Twitter user Socrates for the reminder/correction — but it still leaves everything west of the Mississippi in the hands of a foreign power unlikely to sell it to the British.

Update: One last point on the transferability of the parliamentary system: none of the colonies used it during the period of British rule. They all had governors appointed by the crown, and assemblies elected by the colonists, with a clearly separate executive and legislative branches, although the latter at first tended to have little authority. In some cases, this form of government developed from the corporate-charter beginnings of the colonies. That history no doubt informed the design of the US federal system, which we should note has proven rather resistant to dictatorship as well. Perhaps without the revolution the colonies would have converted to a parliamentary system at some point, but it’s certainly worth noting that it hadn’t happened after more than a century of British rule in any of the 13 colonies by the time of the revolution, nor did it happen in any of them during the revolution or the Articles of Confederacy era.

Here's the whole piece from Vox. The loony left lives in a world of fantasy and what if's. 

3 reasons the American Revolution was a mistake

Updated by Dylan Matthews on July 2, 2015, 12:00 p.m. ET @dylanmatt dylan@vox.com

 

George Washington crosses the Delaware, makes the world a worse place in the process.Emanuel Leutze 

This July 4th, I'm celebrating by taking a plane from the US to the United Kingdom. The timing wasn't intentional, but I embrace the symbolism. American independence in 1776 was a monumental mistake. We should be mourning the fact that we left the United Kingdom, not cheering it.

Of course, evaluating the wisdom of the American Revolution means dealing with counterfactuals. As any historian would tell you, this is messy business. We obviously can't be entirely sure how America would have fared if it had stayed in the British Empire longer, perhaps gaining independence a century or so later, along with Canada.

But I'm reasonably confident a world where the revolution never happened would be better than the one we live in now, for three main reasons: slavery would've been abolished earlier, American Indians would've faced rampant persecution but not the outright ethnic cleansing Andrew Jackson and other American leaders perpetrated, and America would have a parliamentary system of government that makes policymaking easier and lessens the risk of democratic collapse.

Abolition would have come faster without independence

John Singleton Copley

John Singleton Copley depicts a black loyalist soldier in The Death of Major Peirson.

The main reason the revolution was a mistake is that the British Empire, in all likelihood, would have abolished slavery earlier than the US did, and with less bloodshed.

Abolition in most of the British Empire occurred in 1834, following the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act. That left out India, but slavery was banned there too in 1843. In England itself, slavery was illegal at least going back to 1772. That's decades earlier than the United States.

This alone is enough to make the case against the revolution. Decades less slavery is a massive humanitarian gain that almost certainly dominates whatever gains came to the colonists from independence.

The main benefit of the revolution to colonists was that it gave more political power to America's white male minority. For the vast majority of the country — its women, slaves, American Indians — the difference between disenfranchisement in an independent America and disenfranchisement in a British-controlled colonial America was negligible. If anything, the latter would've been preferable, since at least women and minorities wouldn't be singled out for disenfranchisement. From the vantage point of most of the country, who cares if white men had to suffer through what everyone else did for a while longer, especially if them doing so meant slaves gained decades of free life?

FOR WHITE SLAVEHOLDERS IN THE SOUTH … THE WAR WAS "A REVOLUTION, FIRST AND FOREMOST, MOBILIZED TO PROTECT SLAVERY"

It's true that, had the US stayed, Britain would have had much more to gain from the continuance of slavery than it did without America. It controlled a number of dependencies with slave economies — notably Jamaica and other islands in the West Indies — but nothing on the scale of the American South. Adding that into the mix would've made abolition significantly more costly.

But the South's political influence within the British Empire would have been vastly smaller than its influence in the early American Republic. For one thing, the South, like all other British dependencies, lacked representation in Parliament. The Southern states were colonies and their interests were discounted by the British government accordingly. But the South was also simply smaller as a chunk of the British Empire's economy at the time than it was as a portion of America's. The British Crown had less to lose from the abolition of slavery than white elites in an independent America did.

Library of Congress

Dunmore's Proclamation.

The revolutionaries understood this. Indeed, a desire to preserve slavery helped fuel Southern support for the war. In 1775, after the war had begun in Massachusetts, the Earl of Dunmore, then governor of Virginia, offered the slaves of rebels freedom if they came and fought for the British cause. Eric Herschthal, a PhD student in history at Columbia, notes that the proclamation united white Virginians behind the rebel effort. He quotes Philip Fithian, who was traveling through Virginia when the proclamation was made, saying, "The Inhabitants of this Colony are deeply alarmed at this infernal Scheme. It seems to quicken all in Revolution to overpower him at any Risk." Anger at Dunmore's emancipation ran so deep that Thomas Jefferson included it as a grievance in a draft of the Declaration of Independence. That's right: the Declaration could've included "they're conscripting our slaves" as a reason for independence.

For white slaveholders in the South, Simon Schama writes in Rough Crossings, his history of black loyalism during the Revolution, the war was "a revolution, first and foremost, mobilized to protect slavery."

Slaves also understood that their odds of liberation were better under British rule than independence. Over the course of the war, about 100,000 African slaves escaped, died, or were killed, and tens of thousands enlisted in the British army, far more than joined the rebels. "Black Americans' quest for liberty was mostly tied to fighting for the British — the side in the War for Independence that offered them freedom," historian Gary Nash writes in The Forgotten Fifth, his history of African Americans in the revolution. At the end of the war, thousands who helped the British were evacuatedto freedom in Nova Scotia, Jamaica, and England.

This is not to say the British were motivated by a desire to help slaves; of course they weren't. But American slaves chose a side in the revolution, the side of the Crown. They were no fools. They knew that independence meant more power for the plantation class that had enslaved them and that a British victory offered far greater prospects for freedom.

Independence was bad for Native Americans

George Romney

Pro-British Mohawk leader Joseph Brant.

Starting with the Proclamation of 1763, the British colonial government placed firm limits on westward settlement in the United States. It wasn't motivated by an altruistic desire to keep American Indians from being subjugated or anything; it just wanted to avoid border conflicts.

But all the same, the policy enraged American settlers, who were appalled that the British would seem to side with Indians over white men. "The British government remained willing to conceive of Native Americans as subjects of the crown, similar to colonists," Ethan Schmidt writes in Native Americans in the American Revolution. "American colonists … refused to see Indians as fellow subjects. Instead, they viewed them as obstacles in the way of their dreams of land ownership and trading wealth." This view is reflected in the Declaration of Independence, which attacks King George III for backing "merciless Indian Savages."

American independence made the Proclamation void here. It's not void in Canada — indeed, there the 1763 Proclamation is viewed as a fundamental document providing rights to self-government to First Nations tribes. It's mentioned explicitly in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Canada's Bill of Rights), which protects "any rights or freedoms that have been recognized by the Royal Proclamation of October 7, 1763" for all aboriginal people. Historian Colin Calloway writes in The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America that the Proclamation "still forms the basis for dealings between Canada's government and Canada's First Nations."

WHEN A CAUSE IS OPPOSED BY THE TWO MOST VULNERABLE GROUPS IN A SOCIETY, IT'S PROBABLY A BAD IDEA

And, unsurprisingly, Canada didn't see Indian wars and removals as large and sweeping as occurred in the US. They still committed horrible, indefensible crimes. Canada, under British rule and after, brutally mistreated aboriginal people, not least through government-inflicted famines and the state's horrific seizure of children from their families so they could attend residential schools. But the country didn't experience a Westward expansion as violent and deadly as that pursued by the US government and settlers. Absent the revolution, Britain probably would've moved into Indian lands. But fewer people would have died.

Robert Lindneux

The Trail of Tears

None of this is to minimize the extent of British and Canadian crimes against Natives. "It's a hard case to make because even though I do think Canada's treatment of Natives was better than the United States, it was still terrible," the Canadian essayist Jeet Heer tells me in an email (Heer has also written a great case against American independence). "On the plus side for Canada: there were no outright genocides like the Trail of Tears (aside from the Beothuks of Newfoundland). The population statistics are telling: 1.4 million people of aboriginal descent in Canada as against 5.2 million in the USA. Given the fact that America is far more hospitable as an environment and has 10 times the non-aboriginal population, that's telling."

Independence also enabled acquisition of territory in the West through the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican-American War. That ensured that America's particularly rapacious brand of colonialism ensnared yet more native peoples. And while Mexico and France were no angels, what America brought was worse. Before the war, the Apache and Comanche were in frequent violent conflict with the Mexican government. But they were Mexican citizens. The US refused to make them American citizens for a century. And then, of course, it violently forced them into reservations, killing many in the process.

American Indians would have still, in all likelihood, faced violence and oppression absent American independence, just as First Nations people in Canada did. But American-scale ethnic cleansing wouldn't have occurred. And like America's slaves, American Indians knew this. Most tribes sided with the British or stayed neutral; only a small minority backed the rebels. Generally speaking, when a cause is opposed by the two most vulnerable groups in a society, it's probably a bad idea. So it is with the cause of American independence.

America would have a better system of government if we'd stuck with Britain

Rick Madonik/Toronto Star via Getty Images

Canadian opposition leader Thomas Mulcair at Toronto Pride last weekend.

Honestly, I think earlier abolition alone is enough to make the case against the revolution, and it combined with less-horrible treatment of American Indians is more than enough. But it's worth taking a second to praise a less important but still significant consequence of the US sticking with Britain: we would've, in all likelihood, become a parliamentary democracy rather than a presidential one.

And parliamentary democracies are a lot, lot better than presidential ones. They're significantly less likely to collapse into dictatorship because they don't lead to irresolvable conflicts between, say, the president and the legislature. They lead to much less gridlock.

In the US, activists wanting to put a price on carbon emissions spent years trying to put together a coalition to make it happen, mobilizing sympathetic businesses and philanthropists and attempting to make bipartisan coalition — and they still failed to pass cap and trade, after millions of dollars and man hours. In the UK, the Conservative government decided it wanted a carbon tax. So there was a carbon tax. Just like that. Passing big, necessary legislation — in this case, legislation that's literally necessary to save the planet — is a whole lot easier with parliaments than presidential systems.

This is no trivial matter. Efficient passage of legislation has huge humanitarian consequences. It makes measures of planetary importance, like carbon taxes, easier to get through; they still face political pushback, of course — Australia's tax got repealed, after all — but they can be enacted in the first place, which is far harder in the US system. And the efficiency of parliamentary systems enables larger social welfare programs that reduce inequality and improve life for poor citizens. Government spending in parliamentary countries is about 5 percent of GDP higher, after controlling for other factors, than in presidential countries. If you believe in redistribution, that's very good news indeed.

The Westminister system of parliamentary democracy also benefits from weaker upper houses. The US is saddled with a Senate that gives Wyoming the same power as California, which has over 66 times as many people. Worse, the Senate is equal in power to the lower, more representative house. Most countries following the British system have upper houses — only New Zealand was wise enough to abolish it — but they're far, far weaker than their lower houses. The Canadian Senate and the House of Lords affect legislation only in rare cases. At most, they can hold things up a bit or force minor tweaks. They aren't capable of obstruction anywhere near the level of the US Senate.

Sophia Paris/MINUSTAH via Getty Images

Michaëlle Jean, Queen Elizabeth II's former representative in Canada, who once ate a raw seal's heart. I'm a vegetarian and even I think that's badass.

Finally, we'd still likely be a monarchy, under the rule of Elizabeth II, and constitutional monarchy is the best system of government known to man. Generally speaking, in a parliamentary system, you need a head of state who is not the prime minister to serve as a disinterested arbiter when there are disputes about how to form a government — say, if the largest party should be allowed to form a minority government or if smaller parties should be allowed to form a coalition, to name a recent example from Canada. That head of state is usually a figurehead president elected by the parliament (Germany, Italy) or the people (Ireland, Finland), or a monarch. And monarchs are better.

Monarchs are more effective than presidents precisely because they lack any semblance of legitimacy. It would be offensive for Queen Elizabeth or her representatives in Canada, New Zealand, etc. to meddle in domestic politics. Indeed, when the Governor-General of Australia did so in 1975 it set off a constitutional crisisthat made it clear such behavior would not be tolerated. But figurehead presidents have some degree of democratic legitimacy and are typically former politicians. That enables a greater rate of shenanigans — like when Italian president Giorgio Napolitano schemed, successfully, to remove Silvio Berlusconi as prime minister due at least in part to German chancellor Angela Merkel's entreaties to do so.

Napolitano is the rule, rather than the exception. Oxford political scientists Petra Schleiter and Edward Morgan-Jones have found that presidents, whether elected indirectly by parliament or directly by the people, are likelier to allow governments to change without new elections than monarchs are. In other words, they're likelier to change the government without any democratic input at all. Monarchy is, perhaps paradoxically, the more democratic option.