Republics Large and Small.

• Author: Adelstein, Richard p.

Bringing the People Indoors

In the beginning, the American Revolution was about liberty. To the Americans, as to their ideological mentors, the radical English Whigs, liberty was the antithesis and eternal antagonist of power. Power meant simply control over the lives of one's self and others, and its relation to liberty was reciprocal; any increase in one man's power implied a decrease in another's. Personal liberty, as the influential Whig Thomas Gordon put it in 1722, was the minimal power over one's self given to every person by natural law, "the Power which every Man has over his own Actions, and his Right to enjoy the Fruit of his Labour, Art, and Industry." The political or civil liberty of the people as a whole, accordingly, was the sum of every individual's personal liberty, the power to control the actions and destiny of all the people, and when the two came into conflict, civil liberty, the expression of the people's will, would supersede personal liberty. Civil liberty was manifested in the institutions of "free government," which necessarily meant democracy, or government by the people themselves. Civil liberty, the Boston revolutionary Benjamin Church told his audience in 1773, is "the happiness of living under laws of our own making [and] is exactly proportioned to the share the body of the people have in the legislature," and where it existed at all, it was always threatened by despots seeking power for themselves. (Wood [1969] 1998, 1825, 60-65, quotations from Gordon and Church at 21, 24; Bailyn [1967] 2017, 55-61.)

Civil liberty was the inspiration of the English Whigs and the goal of the American revolutionaries. Both embraced the potential of England's "mixed government," which had evolved to balance the powers of the Crown, the nobility and the people at large in the government, empowering each of the three estates to protect its interests against the others, so that when the balance was properly maintained, it became an effective guardian of the people's civil liberty. But as the eighteenth century wore on, both the Whigs and the revolutionaries also came to see English government as deeply corrupted by the Crown's systematic attempt to unbalance it and to increase its own power by seducing members of Parliament with offers of lucrative sinecures and persuading them to support measures that placed important administrative functions beyond Parliament's control. This corruption was abetted, they thought, by a general deterioration of the social fabric induced by the wealth and luxury conspicuously enjoyed by the governing elites, putting the British Empire on a procession, as one American orator declaimed in 1775, "in fatal round, from virtuous industry and valour, to wealth and conquest; next to luxury, then to foul corruption and bloated morals; and last of all, to sloth, anarchy, slavery and political death." Like the Whigs, Americans felt increasingly estranged from the life of cosmopolitan London and alienated from its governing institutions and saw the people's liberty as gravely threatened by the passing of power from a tolerably representative Parliament to the Crown's administrative machinery. The Whigs, English as they were and thought themselves to be, sought to win their civil liberty through reform rather than revolution. But Americans throughout the colonies were beginning to understand themselves as a people distinct from their English rulers and America as a place where civil liberty might thrive among an uncorrupted, industrious population. Whig principles fused in the colonies with the revolutionary politics of John Locke and the contractarians, and in the summer of 1776 the Americans chose to separate from the empire and to create thirteen independent states of their own. (Wood [1969] 1998, 14-18, 28-36, quotation from American orator at 35; Bailyn [1967] 2017, 40-54, 86-93.)

In their common alienation from existing institutions of government, their hostility toward powerful elites, and their sense that those in power did not share their objectives or tend to their interests, and in the differing paths they took in response, the English Whigs and the American revolutionaries anticipated the phenomenon of contemporary populism. Populism has proven very hard to define because the many political and social movements around the world that seem "populist" in some dimension or other are so variegated. Their forms, tactics, and influence vary considerably and depend on the peculiar local conditions and histories that give rise to them. Some populists, like the Whigs, call for reform of existing institutions; others, like the early Americans, call for separation or revolution. Some are faithful legions led by strongmen; others open themselves to broader leadership and more points of view. Some are tightly organized; others more spontaneous. Any definition that comprehends even a few of these movements must necessarily tend toward abstraction, distilling one or a few essential characteristics of a highly diverse population.

The definition offered by the political scientists Jane Mansbridge and Stephen Macedo, spare as it is, sheds useful light on the phenomenon: "The four core elements of populism are (a) the people (b) in a morally charged (c) battle against (d) the elites" (2019, 60, italics added). All of these elements are easily visible in both the Whigs and the American revolutionaries: both claimed to represent a more or less homogeneous "people" unjustly denied the civil liberty to which natural law entitled them by a powerful, corrupt elite acting against their interests. Their anger and sense of alienation from the existing institutions of government are important. They felt themselves outside these institutions, not part of them, but their antagonism was not directed at the institutions themselves so much as at the men who controlled them. Their examples suggest two important points about populism. The first is that populist movements may be seen, depending on the observer's political commitments, as good or bad, as authentic, democratic expressions of popular will or unjustified threats to a system worth preserving. The exclusion that populists feel so acutely has always lent their cause the scent of disrepute; to both themselves and their targets among the elite, populists are hostile outsiders, often proudly or militantly innocent of the more subtle ways in which, as the insiders know, political institutions actually operate. They are often cast by their opponents (and by scholars) as unsophisticates, easily duped and incapable of responsible self-government. But the American revolutionaries, whatever the English elite thought of them, were hardly rustics or rubes. We venerate them because they weren't, and because their cause is ours.

A second, related point is suggested by the differing fates of the two early populisms. The populist movement may (or may not) lead to substantive reform in the governing...