May 30, 2007
ALL ELSE FOLLOWS:
1688 and All That: Michael Barone explains how the "Glorious" Revolution led to the American one. (ANDREW ROBERTS, May 29, 2007, Opinion Journal)
When the English-speaking peoples consider the forces that have made them the global hegemonic political culture since the mid-19th century--representative institutions, the rule of law, religious toleration and property rights among them--they look back to Britain's "Glorious" Revolution of 1688. What at first looks merely like a minor coup d'état that replaced the Catholic King James II with his Protestant Dutch nephew and son-in-law, King William III, was much more than that. It heralded nothing less than a complete realignment of worldview for the Anglosphere. It changed everything.Michael Barone, the distinguished political commentator and co-author of "The Almanac of American Politics," demonstrates both an encyclopedic knowledge of late 17th-century European politics and a keen appreciation of their long-term implications. He sees in the Glorious Revolution--which he dubs The First Revolution--the genesis of "changes in English law, governance and politics that turned out to be major advances for representative government, guaranteeing liberties, global capitalism, and a foreign policy of opposing hegemonic powers." He argues that it was essentially in defense of the rights won in 1688 that the American colonists rose against George III in 1776.
The handful of Whig aristocrats who secretly invited Prince William of Orange over from Holland to overthrow their anointed monarch, James, were undeniably rebels and traitors, as were, of course, the American colonists who signed the Declaration of Independence. Yet they both acted in the name of an ancient, inherent, legitimate and noble cause: liberty. English common-law rights dating back to Magna Carta were perceived to be under threat from King James, and they trumped whatever allegiance might have been owed him. The Founding Fathers were thus repeating 88 years later, and in an American and republican context, largely what the "first" revolutionaries had done in 1688.
Which, of course, is why forcing the King to agree to the Magna Carta was our ur-revolution.
Sorry, LRA (you could try to drop the "Roman church" line if you wanted to be even slightly subtle about your bigotry, by the way). Dropping Catholicism for Protestantism in the way it was done was the first step on the road leading inevitably to the cultural suicide that is modern Europe.
The real pity is that all the English virtues that we extol were present before Henry decided he wanted to marry & divorce with impunity--note the closeness (until recently) of Anglicanism to Catholicism. An English Catholicism (as opposed to French) would have placed the Church & the world in surely a much improved place to stand up to the ravages of modernity in the last 100+ years.
Posted by: b at May 31, 2007 11:20 AMb:
Just in case there was any confusion about LRA being a Klansman. No one hates immigrants as much as he who isn't also anti-Catholic.
Posted by: oj at May 31, 2007 12:08 PMI don't know what the text books are like now, but I definitely remember even my grammar school textbooks mentioning the Magna Carta and Glorious Revolution as needed history in explaining American history and/or American government. At the time, I really didn't understand what they had to do with 1776, but they were lodged in the mind.
Posted by: Chris Durnell at May 31, 2007 1:00 PM