No representation without taxation

Theory In Action, 2016

In this essay I make an argument for a Second American Revolution (SAR) in the United States. In Part I, I discuss the current critical juncture. Part II of the essay focuses on the ends of a SAR. Here I highlight the timeliness of a new constitution and emphasize in particular the anticipated benefits of a more proportional electoral system for the House of Representatives. I also underscore the necessity of an ideological paradigm shift from neoliberalism and discuss a libertarian social democratic alternative. Part III deals with the means of the SAR, emphasizing the importance of building a broad-based nonpartisan revolutionary coalition. In Part IV, some of the major challenges facing a revolutionary movement in the United States are examined and identifies some preliminary revolutionary objectives.

2012

When one reflects on the sorry condition of America’s finances one has to wonder why there is such resistance to fiscal discipline. Is it merely because there is an obstreperous group in the US Congress who cannot abide any tax? Has the public been subtly lobbied into believing that American taxes are high, pointless and intolerable or is there some gene in the America’s body politic that has always been there that expresses itself from time to time in a pernicious cheapness? Perhaps all those things are true, or perhaps none. Nevertheless, a glance backward at Colonial days can stimulate a sense of déjà-vu. This article explores the history of America’s relationship to taxes prior to the American Revolution.

An Examination of the Ideas, both Native American, and Liberal, that Informed the American Revolution

2008

Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries Naomi Wolf As the practice of democracy becomes a lost art, Americans are increasingly desperate for a restored nation. Many have a general sense that the "system" is in disorder-if not on the road to functional collapse. But though it is easy to identify our political problems, the solutions are not always as clear. In Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries, bestselling author Naomi Wolf illustrates the breathtaking changes that can take place when ordinary citizens engage in the democratic system the way the founders intended and tells how to use that system, right now, to change your life, your community, and ultimately, the nation.

Historians have long found it easy to explain the reaction of colonial elites to Britain’s imperial reforms in the Revolutionary era. This is because historians could point to the ways the imperial reforms threatened elite families’ economic interests, commercial enterprises, and political dominance in the colonies. It is common, therefore, to hear that the American Revolution was launched in pursuit of the material and political interests of the rich and powerful in the colonies. Yet if the Revolution served the interests and ambitions of elite families who led the Revolution, what explains the broad support they enjoyed from below (from lower- and middle-class colonists)? Indeed, many Americans – students, teachers, and historians – struggle to explain what moved common people to make common cause with colonial elites. Why did ordinary Americans – people who did not sit in the assemblies, and in most cases, did not even vote for representatives – care about and feel threatened by policies that Parliament initiated in the realm of high-politics?

Responding to Quentin Skinner's narrative of the development of the concept of the right to revolution in his landmark work Foundations of Modern Political Thought, I argue that John Locke should be reinstated as the seminal figure in articulating the right to revolution. Skinner reduces the right to revolution to an argument for popular resistance (as developed by the Monarchomachs), but this overlooks the central role of the evolution of the concept of sovereignty in formulating revolutionary discourse. I argue that John Locke is the first to synthesize the popular resistance arguments of the Monarchomachs with the notion of modern sovereignty developed by Jean Bodin and George Lawson in order to form the basic position of the modern right to revolution.

The American founding principles contained in the Declaration of Independence are being replaced. More specifically, many legal scholars, jurists, and politicians act legally and politically from different philosophical assumptions than that which is contained in this famous document. It has been argued that to stray from the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence is to stray from that which makes America, America. This essay will show that America is in a transition from a government that was founded on the principles of Natural Law with a minimal commitment to deism to a government that is founded on a Rawlsian type social contract theory that is committed to secular reason. Furthermore, this article will show that while the original American constitutional experiment was by and large congenial to religious reasoning, many contemporary theorists believe that religious restraint is demanded by a properly functioning liberal democracy.

People Power: Popular Sovereignty from Machiavelli to Modernity, eds. Robert G. Ingram and Christopher Barker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), 2022

This article reinterprets the origins of the American Revolution and more generally the origins of the revolutionary upheavals of the later eighteenth century in light of the development of civil society in the early modern Atlantic world.