How British Colonial Governance Gave Birth to the World’s Most Complicated Divorce
How British Colonial Governance Gave Birth to the World’s Most Complicated Divorce
When Your Landlord Is Also Your King and Also Wrong About Everything
Let us begin where all great political disasters begin: with a king who thought he knew best. King George III of Great Britain was, by most historical accounts, a man of sincere conviction, industrious temperament, and almost supernatural ability to misread a room – specifically, the room containing three million increasingly furious colonists who were tired of paying for his wars while having absolutely no say in how those wars were started.
This is the foundational grievance of American democracy: taxation without representation. It sounds simple. It was simple. And yet, somehow, it required a revolution, a war, several pamphlets, and an extremely long document to resolve. Welcome to American governance, where the simplest ideas require the most paperwork.
Enlightenment Philosophy: Smart Europeans Who Made Everything Complicated
To understand why the colonists did what they did, you must first understand that they had been reading. Dangerous hobby. John Locke had written extensively about natural rights – life, liberty, and property – which the colonists found deeply compelling, partly because it was philosophically sound and partly because they had quite a lot of property they were tired of being taxed on.
Montesquieu, a French political philosopher who had never set foot in America and was therefore extremely confident about how it should be governed, introduced the radical idea of separating governmental power into multiple branches. The colonists found this brilliant. The British crown found this baffling. This difference of opinion would eventually cost everyone approximately 25,000 lives.
The Enlightenment, in summary, was a period when Europeans decided that reason should govern human affairs rather than tradition or divine right. It was an excellent idea in theory. In practice, it produced the French Revolution, the guillotine, and a legislative body in America that once spent three weeks debating whether the national bird should be a turkey. Progress is not linear.
Pamphlet Culture: Twitter, But With Wigs and Better Grammar
Before the internet existed to radicalize people at scale, the colonists had pamphlets. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense sold approximately 500,000 copies in a population of 2.5 million, which is a ratio of political engagement modern democracy can only dream about while doom-scrolling at 2 a.m.
The pamphlet was the original viral content. Short, punchy, morally outraged, and absolutely convinced that the author alone had identified the real problem. Sound familiar? The only meaningful difference between a 1776 pamphlet and a modern political Twitter thread is that the pamphlets occasionally cited Cicero and used complete sentences.
Paine argued that monarchy was absurd on its face – that the idea of hereditary rulers was like choosing your surgeon based on who their father was. This was considered incendiary at the time. Today it is considered a fairly uncontroversial observation. Progress, as previously noted, is not linear. We have simply found new ways to choose terrible leaders that feel more participatory.
The Real Lesson: Distribute Power and Argue Forever
The deductive logic of the American founding is elegant: if power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, then the solution is to divide power so thoroughly that no one can get enough of it to do serious damage. This was a good idea. It was also, simultaneously, a guarantee that nothing would ever get done quickly, because doing things quickly requires concentrated power, which is the thing you just banned.
The founders were not naive about this tradeoff. They were brilliant men who understood that the price of liberty was eternal inefficiency. What they perhaps did not fully anticipate was a future in which the world’s most powerful nation would spend six weeks unable to elect a Speaker of the House while simultaneously holding nuclear launch codes.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. The colonists in 1776 had a king to fire. They had grievances to list. They had a revolution to conduct. They had, above all, an appointment with history – and unlike the British Parliament, they intended to show up.
George III, for his part, reportedly dismissed the revolution as a minor disturbance that would sort itself out. He was wrong, as kings so often are when they stop listening to the rooms they are in. This, too, is a lesson American democracy has had to relearn several times since. It never quite sticks.
SOURCE: The London Prat