Welcome to the second American Revolution
If you examine our whole predicament dispassionately, brothers and sisters, we have come to a point of extreme irony in the history of our country. The people who have traditionally called themselves “patriots” are today ready to go to work to dismantle the very republic our forefathers pledged their “lives, their fortunes and their sacred honour” to protect. In the next four years we will be made to watch these flag-waving hypocrites attempt to dismantle the very freedoms of a nation they once claimed to love.
We cannot let that happen. Yes, I realize those words are far easier to write than to implement, but we must find a way to stop them. We must take back the nation, reverse the damage and begin anew. The torch of 1776 has been rekindled and passed to us, to you and me. We are the new Jeffersons, Franklins, Washingtons and Hamiltons. Welcome to the second American Revolution.
We still have a republic, it is our unforeseen duty to keep it. And as long as I am paraphrasing the true patriot Dr Franklin, we must all hang together or we will most assuredly hang separately.
Like our forefathers we are now at war with a monstrous tyranny conceived by an enemy across an ocean. As with our forefathers we face an adversary both powerful and intractable, determined to destroy us. As was true of our forefathers, our tools are small and poor, our prospects bad, our neighbours suspect. But we also share the one advantage they had. We are morally right. Were they alive today, there is no doubt in my mind that they would be with us. We have also inherited their spirit to guide us.
Because our strength is small we must begin small. The men and women who forged the nation that became known as the United States of America began by convincing their neighbours that their cause was just. We can do the same. But we can’t do it the way we began, with insults and mockery. We must convince them with reason, slowly and carefully and respectfully applied. We must make it our duty to convince just one other person that the monster who is about to once again infest the sacred House of the People is an evil man who cares about no one else but himself. A man who would burn the whole country to the ground for personal pride and profit.
In the coming months and years that evil man will help us by revealing his evil. This time around his minions will be legion and the wickedness they will work will be everywhere. I won’t sugarcoat it. Yes, America will become a land of Nuremberg Laws and concentration camps, of judicial murder and sanctioned rape, of repealed rights and legislated outrages. Those are the sad realities, and much of it we will be helpless to prevent.
But we still have voices, and as long as we do we must use them. We must not give up. Giving up would be the moral equivalent of joining them, and I have known you all long enough to know that most of you will never join them, not even existentially.
Recall that in 1776 the men and women who strove to forge a new nation began without the assurance we have today of their success and their glory. Those were dark days. Those were days when their prospects were meagre and their enemy was all-powerful. Those were days when the future was not assured. Just like these days.
Today we have better tools. We have instantaneous access across the globe and a world of sane people rooting for our success. It has made it possible for people like me, expatriates living in foreign lands, to enlist the assistance of others of like mind and similar circumstances. I believe, in the end, we will be triumphant. The world will be a very different place by then. Let’s do everything in our individual and collective powers to ensure it is also a better place.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.