Portside

This April 19th marks the 250th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord, which began the American Revolution and its war against monarchial power. It comes at a time when those who oppose President Trump’s exercise of powers that go well beyond those the Constitution allots to presidents are stunned by the speed and scope of his actions, and uncertain about how they can even begin to counter them.

But a mobilization that celebrates America’s founding revolt against arbitrary authority presents them with a stellar opportunity to show just how profoundly un-American Trump truly is.

On April 19th, it will be exactly one quarter of a millennium since anti-royalist militia members in Massachusetts refused to disperse when ordered to by British troops. A shot was fired, and the troops kept firing, killing eight of those American resisters. Later that day, the militiamen returned that fire, killing a number of British soldiers. The revolution was on. Ralph Waldo Emerson later put the significance of that skirmish in proper historic perspective:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,

Here once embattled farmers stood

And fired the shot heard round the world.

This year, so far, all the shots have been coming from the White House, from the man who would be king. It’s time for small-d democrats to launch volleys of their own, so loudly, insistently, and in such numbers that they’re heard around the world, too. The world has been waiting impatiently to hear from them.

The anniversary of our revolution presents today’s small-d democrats, whose ranks are by no means limited to capital-D Democrats, with an opportunity to renew the fight against royalist presumption. Donald Trump was elected to be president, not an emperor who rules unchecked at home and seizes new retro-colonies abroad.

It was monarchial government that the patriots of 1775 rose up to oppose, that the authors of the Declaration of Independence blamed for the abuses that led to the Revolution, and that the authors of the Constitution sought to block its return by vesting fundamental powers in the nonexecutive branches of government, creating the system of checks and balances within which all previous American presidents have operated.

Trump wields power as if those other branches and the Constitution itself don’t matter at all, as if the causes and concerns that animated the nation’s founders must be subordinated to his need to wield power over not just his critics but any potential rival sources of power. That’s evident in his repeated appropriations of Congress’s explicit constitutional authority to establish, abolish, fund, and defund federal agencies and their projects, and in his refusal to treat nations long allied with America as partners unless they submit to his whims.

Are the grievances against which this nation first rose up, which brought the Minutemen to the Lexington Green, really with us again today? The Declaration promulgated on July 4, 1776, held King George responsible for “a long train of abuses and usurpations.” The King, it said, “has refused his Assent to Laws” (that is, refused to recognize laws passed by colonial legislatures). He was responsible, it continued, “For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments.” These transfers of power from colonial legislatures to the Crown were at the center of the Founders’ case for revolution.

They are echoed today by Trump’s attempt to stop all congressionally allocated grants and appropriations (now blocked by the courts) and his efforts to abolish and defund congressionally created and financed departments and agencies. It was precisely the Founders’ fear that a president might one day attempt such one-man rule that led James Madison and his colleagues to author a Constitution that expressly forbade such actions.

Though the commitments of 1775’s patriots to the idea of democratic rule provide a stellar model to the patriots of today, I am not, of course, suggesting armed insurrection or a contemporary version of the patriots’ violent resistance. I am suggesting holding massive peaceful protests in every city and town on April 19, with crowds of Americans celebrating the anti-monarchial uprising of 1775, and pledging their allegiance to that heritage by protesting and denouncing the increasingly autocratic rule of Donald Trump. No special attire required, but it would be good to have some fifes and drums, some three-cornered hats, and, if we’re to be faithful to our patriotic heritage, maybe some burnings in effigy, that sort of thing. A prolonged buildup to April 19 and the events of that day can provide what may be our best opportunity to explain just how profoundly un-American Trump’s conduct actually is.

Trump’s opponents generally, and Democrats particularly, have been so shocked by Trump’s opening assaults on constitutional order and long-held American values that they’ve not yet found a way to collectively respond. Some Democrats apparently fear that attacking Trump would only widen the gap that’s opened between their party and the working-class voters who once were its base. One reason for that estrangement is that it’s those voters who have experienced the downsides of globalization—the offshoring of industries, the rise of a global workforce that puts downward pressure on their wages—against which the Democrats, their onetime champions, failed to protect them. A strong sense of national identity—and not just among nativists—suffuses the working classes of most nations, ours very much included.

The activists who have been struggling to figure out how to mount an effective resistance to Trump’s barrage of power grabs represent a panoply of causes and constituencies, which sometimes obscures (to themselves as well as others) the fact of their common commitment to a democratic order. That common commitment should be the purpose and focus of an April 19 protest; its message should be that they are marching to honor and restore America’s distinctly anti-autocratic heritage. That might even begin a process of reconnection with those working-class Americans who backed Trump for economic reasons while seeing the Democrats as alien ideologues.

As ideologies go, that of April 19 is the least alien and most American imaginable. As the Minutemen were fighting to create what became defining American values, so the Resistance can fight to reclaim them.

Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.

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