The Revolution for a United States?

Welp, it’s prom season, and every year at school, I get asked about whether or not I’m going to be cool with my daughter dating guys in high school, or if I’ll be one of those impossible idiots with a shotgun to try and intimidate them to make them afraid so that.. what? Fear will cause him to treat my daughter well? Super curious what it says about dads that this is somehow a viable strategy. Being afraid of someone has not really ever accomplished anything meaningful. You’re just.. scared.

So every year, I say absolutely, yes, I hope she dates high school morons. When they start to object (the guys in class, not the girls, they just laugh), I point out that the chances of meeting a great future significant other in high school is probably lower than in college or later on, and I want my daughter to get as much practice as possible when the stakes really aren’t that high. She needs to figure out what kind of person she likes, and what sort of stuff is unacceptable. Am I going to be a dick when/if she brings someone over? Absolutely not. A casual high five-shake, a pat on the shoulder, and probably something like “Good luck” with a raised eyebrow and a shrug? Way more my style. Whoever my daughter dates should probably see that she comes from a normal, well adjusted family. (Super tangential but speaking of well adjusted people, I’ll save my theories on a randomly selected US Congress or executive for later.) The most important thing is that my daughter feels comfortable, tries some stuff, and above all learns from her mistakes. You can’t make mistakes if you don’t actually ever do the thing.

For the United States of America, our first political-regime-date was the Articles of Confederation, and boy howdy did we realize what we did NOT want from our government.

Well, some of us. More on that in a bit. Try to imagine who in the present moment really needs to learn more about the Articles before taking a political stance as we go here. It’s not a mystery, and I’d say be gentle and friendly about who those people are, but I don’t have enough fucks left to extend grace or good faith to them.

You’ll see what I mean.

So what exactly were the Articles? Well, after declaring independence, the Continental Congress decided that we needed some kind of government or framework of cooperation between the thirteen colonies. The Articles reflected the incredible distance and separation between those colonies: the Confederation Congress created by the Articles had no executive, no standing army, no ability to raise funds aside from asking the new “states” for money, and required a super-majority to pass any legislation and total unanimity to ratify the Articles or to amend them. Proposed in 1777, they didn’t even get ratified until 1781.

Four years. No real government. During a revolution.

So my title for this newsletter was a little over the top, but there can be a really fun conversation about what the actual “revolutionary” bit was during this era, and whether “America” is the right word for it. If it’s just a colonial or regional rebellion, well, cool, but I am pretty sure that’s not what anyone considers to be revolutionary.

Looking at you Texas Revolution.

However, for most folks that IS the totality of the revolution. We finally sign a treaty in 1783, Britain sort of agrees to bugger off (they didn’t exactly), and the American Revolution ends.

Getting back to ye olde “Revolution in the United States,” we need to ask why the Articles were so weak? Spoilers: They were super weak.

It was a totally logical, reasonable reaction to the reasons we decided to break up with Britain. Shitty, abusive monarch? Welp, no executive branch solves that problem! A central government obsessed with limiting economic freedom via trade? (this is literally the only real economic complaint in the whole Declaration of Independence for those folks who can’t get past No Taxation to read the rest of the slogan…) Welp, the Confederation Congress could not do anything about the economy. We Pennsylvanians have absolutely nothing to do with you Georgians? Cool. States run the show — one vote per state, super weak central government, high bar for agreement from the states to actually do anything. Every single bit of this makes sense from the perspective of those colonists who banded together solely for the purpose of fighting off the British. And let’s be clear, any time there’s a “revolution” or “rebellion,” the folks fighting together may well only have an enemy in common, and nothing else. That was certainly the case in the British North American colonies. Worried about the slippery slope of government corruption or abuse? Nah, we’re just going to blow up the whole hill and the only direction anything can roll is right back down to the bottom.

The thing is, this system of government sucked.

Hyperinflation! Foreign states not respecting treaties or us, like, at all! No way to react to farmers taking courthouses to stop foreclosures or providing us with object lessons on when to use an apostrophe to make a name possessive? Did Daniel Shays lead Shays’ Rebellion or Shays’s Rebellion? I’m team Shays’s.

This was all according to the desires of the newly independent United States was without a doubt the plan. The period after the Articles were created from 1781 to 1787 was pretty, pretty bad. Eventually folks looked around and decided something had to be done. At minimum, we needed to amend the Articles.

So we had a convention, in Philadelphia, behind closed doors, in the summer, with, uh, alcohol. Amend? Oh hell no, the Articles got kicked out, and instead of pretending to need all 13 states for ratification as per the Articles, the Constitution would kick in with only 9 states. Some jokingly refer to this as a bloodless overthrow of our previous regime, which I find hilarious, but I also think it’s the actual revolutionary bit in all this revolutionary era stuff.

We learned from our mistakes.

Truly, truly, wildly unheard of. So let’s look at a few of the things that changed based on these early lessons learned, and here’s where we start considering who in 2025 needs to hear this.

First, the writers of the constitution bailed on a confederated structure that would give states all the power and the central government almost none. States’ rights, if you will, did not work out. States printed money on their own, refused to provide funding for the federal government, and had so many different rules and regulations that “interstate commerce” was terrible. Spain shut off our access to New Orleans, Britain refused to leave their forts in our land west of the Mississippi, and just generally European states were content to ignore us safe in the knowledge that our dumb little experience in self government was going to fail. Everyone needed Europe in their life, you see, inconceivable these dumb colonists could exist independently.

As with most false binaries, there’s a spectrum between states having full power and a federal government having all the power. We label the three variations confederate, federal, or unitary systems of government.

A unitary state literally has no sub-units with meaningful ability to legislate or function independently of the central government. This is usually for small (geographically), homogeneous places - think Iceland, Japan, even the United Kingdom until the 90s. Also, dictatorships. As you can imagine, the high lord dictator for life has not much time for sharing power to regional sub-units. As big as China is, it is much more of a unitary state than anything else. Which is absurd.

A federal state balances power between sub-unit and central governments. This is the broadest category, of course, and the mix can vary a bit. This kind of government makes the most sense for large (geographically), diverse places - Canada, Mexico, India, and so on. There are a lot of advantages to allowing regional governments to make some laws for themselves, but there also needs to be a fair amount of standardization and especially collective security.

A confederate state then gives most of the power to regional sub-units, with the tiniest weakest central government that maybe gets to do national security. Please take out a world map. Point to the country on the map that has a confederate system.

Have you found it?

Yeah, me either. It just doesn’t work out long term.

So how much influence does the central government get to have over the economy in a federal system? This is a major plot line in US history. Obviously the Constitution is going to give the federal government more power than the Confederation Congress had - it was a shitshow economically! I’ve got a whole series in the works to discuss the cycles of more or less involvement economically because to me this is one of the most interesting, compelling things to talk about. It’s a massive contemporary debate! We have EVIDENCE for how the two approaches have worked! Exclamation marks! But suffice to say, this was a controversy from the get, and we’re going to get Jefferson stomping off in a huff when Hamilton gets his way (mostly! sigh) during Washington’s presidency. More on this later, but Hamilton absolutely thinks the federal government should do as much as possible to shove our economy down a modern road.

What a communist.

Finally, let’s spare a word for the idiots running the Confederate States of America during the Civil War. Every downside to the Articles I mentioned earlier? Oh yeah, they definitely made the Confederacy less equipped to fight the Union. Still requesting money from the states? Yup. Weak central army that relied on requesting troops from the states? Yup. An awful, agricultural economy that was dependent on foreign trade to supply itself with any kind of manufactured goods at scale? Ayup! In short, if any of those idiots had taken a moment to read some US history, instead of sitting confident in their ideological delusions, they might have had a chance. But they didn’t, so they didn’t, and the Union steamrolled them. So much for their “superior society” built on elite geniuses ordering everything.

Which didn’t mean they lost the war, mind you. Just look around. See any folks advocating the same kind of ideas? It’s obviously not the same exactly — the states’ rights folks still want a strong national military while being personally armed to the teeth. But they’ll nod along to almost every other bug/feature of the Articles and especially the Confederacy. And if they think third time lucky, well, okay, that’s certainly one argument.

In the end, we bailed on the Articles for the same reason most folks don’t make it long term with their high school sweethearts. You think love can overcome fundamental problems, but if you actually pay attention and grow and learn, you realize that what you really want is something else. Maybe not a full 180, but there are definitely some different things that become clear and important to you. But, as I said before, if you don’t get out there and date, how will you ever know?

And if you find out that something is awful and harmful and bad and still go back to it?

That’s a problem.

So for me, the real revolution was the decision to bail on the Articles and all the reactionary stuff and create a stronger federal government, add a chief executive, add the ability to create a standing army, allow the federal government to manage the national economy… You can understand how or why this debate has never died — even though we would arguable not be here at all if we’d stuck with the Articles. You can’t say for sure, none of us can do that sort of what if stuff with any accuracy, but it’s really hard to look around at the complete absence of confederations in the world and think somehow it would have worked here.

Which is not going to stop the American exceptionalism folks. Nothing’s ever going to stop those folks from saying thing that obviously don’t work will work in the US. Just don’t ask how. It just will!

You can skim or read the whole thing here from the National Archives. It’s not very long, which you might have guessed from my obvious love of it. I’ll write something about the Constitutional Convention (especially my love/hate with the Electoral College) soon enough, and there’s definitely a podcast in my head where I walk through how I break down how revolutionary the American Revolution (whichever one you want to point at) semi-quantitatively.

In the meantime, let your kids date in high school. It’s probably going to end poorly, but that’s where us parents come in! Let ‘em learn — ask them to think about what happened: causes, comparisons, was it different or the same as earlier relationships? This is historical thinking at its best. Next time: Economic cycles in US history? The Constitution? The Declaration? Let’s see. It might be time to look at the big picture.