Exactly what was born on the 4th of July?

“Did not the American Revolution produce the French Revolution? And did not the French Revolution produce all the calamities and desolation of the human race and the whole globe ever since?”

Truer words have seldom been spoken, and do you wonder who was that inveterate reactionary speaking them? Who was that vermin who dismissed at a stroke the keystone events of our glorious modernity?

That arch-Tory Dr Johnson who said, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”? No, it was John Adams, America’s second president, writing in 1811, when Adams belatedly realised what he and his friends had perpetrated.

Say what you will about the Founders but, unlike their today’s heirs, they weren’t deaf to semantic distinctions. For example, they knew the difference between a republic and democracy.

‘Democracy’ never appears in their writings, except in pejorative contexts. Thus Thomas Jefferson: “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”

The Founders didn’t realise that a republic adhering to Enlightenment tenets will always become a democracy, while the latter will avoid ‘mob rule’ only by turning itself into a giant bureaucracy increasingly detached from the people it governs.

I’m always wary of countries whose origin can be traced back to a particular date. They’re inevitably contrivances, owing their existence to a violently expressed ideology rather than organic development.

The US too is the living embodiment of Enlightenment principles realised by ideologues. Like most revolutionary demagogues, the Founders had to concoct legitimising grievances, portrayed as unendurable but in fact mythical.

Thus they described that nice George III as a tyrant. In fact, if anything, his American subjects were a privileged lot compared to the English themselves.

One made-up grievance was taxation without representation. In fact, a typical colonist was taxed at barely a third of a metropolitan subject (many of whom weren’t represented either). With the advent of ‘liberty’ their taxes instantly went up, the Americans realised they didn’t like them even with representation and have been studiously avoiding them ever since.

One would guess that, given the choice of being taxed at half their income with representation or at 10 per cent without, a majority would opt for the latter. But the expensive toothpaste of centralising statism (otherwise known as modern democracy) cannot be squeezed back into its tube.

Add to this the founding claim that, self-evidently, “all men are created equal”, and the ostensible justification for the revolutionary outburst begins to look even more nebulous. (As a clever American once quipped, “This truth had better be self-evident, because you sure as hell can’t prove it.”)

But that doesn’t mean there was no justification. There was: the advent of our soulless, anomic modernity adumbrated by the ‘Enlightenment’, whose clarion call the Founders heard in every tonal detail.

The ‘Enlightenment’ was animated by hatred of Christendom, its civilisation, philosophy and above all religion. It wasn’t by accident that most Founders were, at best, deists and haters of Trinitarian Christianity. (Many were also Masons, and the republic’s livery includes much Masonic imagery. It’s also worth noting that both the architecture of the shrines in Washington’s Tidal Basin, and the inscriptions inside, frankly proclaim their pagan origin.)

Jefferson was among them, and he rejoiced that the First Amendment built “a wall of separation between Church and State”. To make this wall impregnable, he created his own patchwork gospel, pasting into a notebook the bits he liked and omitting those he hated, which is to say anything miraculous.

St Augustine must have had a premonition of Jefferson when he wrote, “If you believe what you like in the gospel and reject what you do not like, it is not the gospel you believe but yourself.” In fact, solipsistic belief in self, curiously mixed with pandemic conformism, became a distinguishing feature of Americans, and not the most endearing one.

What was born on the 4^th of July was the battering ram of modernity, the debaucher of everything sublime in our civilisation and the creator of “happiness”, understood in the crudest, materialistic sense.

The American dream, summarized by Kennedy so forthrightly as “two chickens in every pot, two cars in every garage”, is the stuff of which nightmares used to be made, vulgarity raised to the altar of neo-pagan deities. Alas, the chickens and the cars aren’t strong enough adhesives to keep society together.

Hence the founding American anomie, while producing the ‘happiest’ society the world has ever known, has also created the most atomised and disjointed one. Moreover, Americans evince the characteristic smugness of a provincial autodidact, certain that he has solved all the little problems of life and now must teach others the only true way.

I hope you understand that everything I say is underpinned by an unspoken “with notable exceptions”. I do know many cultured and civilised Americans; in fact, I’m proud to number many among my friends and readers.

Those Americans I cordially congratulate on their 240^th anniversary – except that I suspect they may not see it as a cause for celebration.