If Only America Had Lost The Revolutionary War!

by John Hawkins | August 2, 2007 11:21 am

Today, via doubleplusundead[1] & Hot Air[2] we get to look at the ultimate culmination of the Left’s hatred of America: a liberal blogger wishing and fantasizing that the British had won the Revolutionary War.

From a post called “Was the American Revolution Bad for America?” at Alterdestiny[3],

“I have been thinking about some of the implications of Michael Moore’s Sicko. Specifically, why is the United States the only nation in the developed world without some sort of equitable, government-funded health care?

I am just wondering if we can look back to the American Revolution for some answers. To be exact, did the American Revolution undermine the modern United States’ willingness to engage in the sort of social democracies we see throughout Europe, Canada, and increasingly other nations as well?

I don’t have a solid answer for this. But I’m going to play a little counterfactual game to help think about these issues.

Let’s say the American Revolution fails. What happens?

We are Canada.

Is that so bad? I don’t think so.

Sure, Britain would have executed Jefferson, Washington, and the gang. That would have been terrible. But what happens after that?

….Third is the issue of westward expansion. Frontier issues played a major role in the Revolution, one that is underplayed in traditional narratives. The Proclamation of 1763, not allowing settlers access to lands west of the Appalachian Mountains, really made colonists angry. We wanted to kill Indians and steal their lands. That may sound too blunt, but it is most certainly true. As Richard White has shown in The Middle Ground, the worst thing that happened to the Indians of the Ohio Valley was the American victory in the Revolution. The British didn’t care about native rights of course. But they didn’t want to pay for frontier wars. With the British still in charge, perhaps you see a situation between Native Americans and whites similar to that in Canada. It’s still bad. But it’s not as bad. It’s probably not genocide.

Plus, we probably would not have Texas today. The American Southwest would quite possibly still be part of Mexico. Maybe when the Latin American nations throw off Spain, the British go in and take a bunch of Mexico. Quite a reasonable hypothesis. But in any case, you don’t see a bunch of pro-slavery expansionists go into Texas to bring slavery there. You don’t see a war started to protect that slavery. And most certainly, Texas is not TEXAS, in the way it is today. It’s hard to argue that Texas is good for the nation.

…It’s at least possible that the pushing up of the average money-grubbing white male to the top of the political process at a very early age has helped create a society focused on the individual over the group, on personal wealth over social wealth, on money over education, on white over black.

Finally, we wouldn’t be basing our whole political system in the present on trying to interpret (or misinterpret) what a bunch of rich white men thought over 200 years ago. We wouldn’t be trying to fit everything we do into the Constitution. We would be focusing on governing for the present, not the past.

No doubt, you can poke holes in my argument. But I think it’s at least worth considering whether the American Revolution was really a good thing for the United States. It’s a counterfactual, presentist argument, but one that is at least worth mulling over for awhile. And if you don’t like my argument, what better answers are there for why the United States is so different from the rest of the western world when it comes to creating a decent society for all citizens?”

If you hate Texas so much, hate the Constitution, desperately want socialized medicine, and love Canada, why not move to Canada? No, no, better to stay in America and fantasize that the British conquered America, executed the Founding fathers, and that we’re a giant Canada. God help the world if that had been true.

Source URL: https://rightwingnews.com/uncategorized/if-only-america-had-lost-the-revolutionary-war/

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