United States Declaration of Independence. //Photo: Taken from the internet.
“There is no need to look back unless it is to get useful
lessons from past mistakes.”
George Washington
The 13 British colonies and the unrest of the colonists
The triumph of the Seven Years' War caused the resources of the British Crown's treasury to be greatly diminished. The fiscal deficit led them to raise taxes in their 13 colonies on North America's east coast through legislative measures such as the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act, which generated much unrest among the colonists. Social unrest led to the rise of opposition groups such as the “Sons of Liberty,” co-founded by political philosopher Samuel Adams and merchant John Hancock. This intensified political repression and social protest actions such as the Boston Massacre (1770) and the Boston Tea Party (1773). From these events, a reasonable and famous slogan was adopted: “no taxation without representation.”
From British North America to the United States of America
From the audacity of independentist intellectuals, leaders, and patriots, moved by enlightened and emancipatory ideas and convictions, “shadow” government bodies were created in different colonies such as committees, provincial congresses, conventions, and assemblies of free men. It was possible to install counter-power bodies against the colonial political structures until the First Continental Congress was held (1774), the predecessor of the Second Continental Congress (1775) that mobilized the North American patriots for their war of independence. This Congress of American representatives appointed George Washington as military leader of the Continental Army, who used guerrilla warfare tactics to confront the powerful royal troops of the British Empire commanded by William Howe, a prominent military strategist.
The clashes at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, triggered the sequence of fighting for the birth of a new country and the first contemporary democracy in the world. The alliance of the American or "continental" rebels with the French, the Spanish, and the Dutch was decisive in achieving epic victories against the English and their German allies in the battles of Saratoga (1777) and Yorktown (1781). With the signing of the Treaty of Paris (1783) the British Empire recognized the independence of the American nation, which was built over time as a federal union.
Democracy, rule of law, and human rights
The "founding fathers" were the architects of a new system without guillotined heads or summary executions that would boycott the dynamics of their political opus. The republican model of separation of powers began to be tested with presidential, a bicameral legislative branch, a judicial branch, periodical elections, and legal equality that threw overboard the privileges of the estate society dominated by the clergy and the nobility during the «Ancient Regime». Economic freedom would be the dynamo of the postcolonial economic system.
The Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776), the Constitution (1787), and the Bill of Rights (1791) were the American foundations of the rule of law, classical constitutionalism, and the Anglo-Saxon or common law system. Those who wrote these texts were inspired by the natural law school – as opposed to legal positivism – whose intellectual controversy gave a philosophical foundation to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) in France and the 20th century to the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1949), legal collection pieces in the historical evolution of Human Rights.
Contemporary democracy under global attack
Contemporary democracy is under attack on a global scale! Political authoritarianism is spreading like cavities and we democracy defenders are fighting so that our values are not defeated by the anti-values of terrible authoritarianism that tend to destroy humanity. Despots and power clans collude everywhere to oppress, violate, and impoverish people. 248 years after the signing of the Act of Independence of the United States of America, the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of the American Revolution remain in force as political philosophy; principles in favor of a democratic organization of power relations in the face of transvestite political absolutism in the 21st century. The first independence of the American continent unleashed the era of revolutions, the Spanish-American wars of independence, and an irreversible process of decolonization.
Towards a new world order? Political authoritarianism versus human liberty
The world order after the Second Great War is being transformed and we are witnessing impactful international events that suggest a new one. We are devastated by cyclones of political authoritarianism that seriously threaten contemporary democracy. Vladimir Putin, the “tsar” of the Russian Federation, Xi Jinping, the president of Mainland China and Kim Jong-un, the supreme leader of North Korea, are the most famous names that personify authoritarian, personalist, absolutist and single-party political regimes. These authoritarian references have echo chambers in the theocracies of the Middle East, failed African states and some Latin American countries, which reproduce harsh positions against the Western model of life.
As a corollary, this historical cycle raises a fundamental conflict between those who are adherents of political authoritarianism systems and those of us who take a stand for systems oriented to human liberty. The liberating movement is no longer against foreign colonizers but against domestic oppressors who find in postmodernist, ultra-leftist, and decolonial positions their ad hoc fallacy to perpetuate themselves in power, dynamite liberal democracy and ruin the economies of their countries while illicitly enriching themselves by draining public funds.
«21st century despotism»
Russia and China, with a past of tsars and imperial dynasties, are very attractive political regimes for the fauna of Latin American autocrats and caudillos who conquer power (including through electoral ways) and then destroy democracy with populism. As conspiracy masters, they fanaticize their social base; collude with corrupt businessmen; obtain protection from the military; organize irregular armed groups (vigilante groups); do business with drug trafficking and organized crime; silence journalists, academics and intellectuals and repress barbarically any expression of opposition, activism and protest. Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela are the troiska of this political authoritarianism with markedly totalitarian features.
The political discourse for a supposed “21st century socialism” was really about a “21st century despotism.” Its pre-modern and absolutist forms – a harmful mix of statism, populism, and neo-patrimonialism – ruthlessly trample on the fundamental freedoms and human rights of people, sectors, and communities that get in the way of achieving their interests of family, party, and estate political power. These tropical pirates curse private capital but take over public capital and parasitize the State. These are revolutionaries of violence who make no progress in the economy, in education, in technology or in the sciences. They call themselves “progressives” or progresistas when they are “poverty apologists” or pobrecistas by privatizing political power, socializing the failure of their public management, equally redistributing poverty, and causing the great exoduses in contemporary history. His emotionalist discourse alienates his captive market: the socioeconomically vulnerable strata.
Resistance, defense, and evolution of contemporary democracy
The global attack on democracy is creating resistance in new generations. We liberty and democracy defenders are aware of its dialectics and evolution, but we are completely opposed to its open and covert enemies. Democracy is a stage of human evolution and, therefore, a reality subject to political optimization. Democracy is an ethical attitude concerning power and a systemic proposal for continuous improvement. Agreeing with Yuval Noah Harari, empires and democracies are the forms of political organization that have brought the most progress to humanity, the improvement of the second being desirable.
In America and Europe, the enemies of democracy act in the spaces of freedom that democracy itself allows them: culture, universities, activism, media, social networks, business, and political circles. They are infiltrated and kamikazes without weapons or bombs. This is due not only to disastrous theoretical aspects but also to the feeling that democracy does not solve the most distressing common problems of citizens, which is why people are voting for extremes on the political spectrum that exacerbate social conflicts and political tensions without choices to restore a positive social peace with a diversity of perspectives and interests.
Oppressors with “Hubris syndrome” are empowered everywhere, treating individuals and communities as subjects and servitude, in the worst cases, as pariahs and helots. If foreign colonizers found domestic allies to colonize, now domestic oppressors find foreign allies to oppress. This crisis of the democratic world takes us back to the 1930s and Strauss-Howe's generational theory that proposes a four-stage cycle of Summit-Awakening-Disappointment-Crisis, for which we millennials would assume the great reset and reconfiguration macrosystemic similar to the heroic generation of World War II.
Innovation and strategic reform to overcome the crisis
The White House. //Photo: Taken from the internet.
American leadership with innovative, reforming, and strategic thinking is called to reinvent its democracy and overcome times of crisis. This requires sagacity and willingness to conceive solutions – in the light of schools of thought – to the immigration issue, citizen insecurity, intercultural frictions, and the high cost of living. Extreme polarization, the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, low-quality political debates, and anachronistic candidates for the White House, are some alarming features of iron autocracies and plastic democracies in American politics. Furthermore, the policy of contempt towards Central America and the policy of indifference towards South America are not advisable because on the board of geopolitics and geoeconomics, the enemies of Western democracy increase their sphere of influence in the subregion, without forgetting that there are government mafias (as in Nicaragua) that export and re-export irregular migrants.
The country where contemporary democracy was born needs "innovative and reforming mothers and fathers" who unleash a powerful influence for the democracy defenders who wage our libertarian and emancipatory struggles against domestic oppressors, especially against the liberticidal, inequitable, and impoverishing regimes par excellence: the Castro, the Sandinista, and the Chavista. Liberty, equity, and prosperity, under democratic models, are common values and interests of the Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Caribbean Americas. 248 years after the greatest event for America and the entire world, with visionary and belligerent people like Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, or Adams, what are the lessons we can learn from the historical development to overcome the crisis, cause the collapse of authoritarianism and reinvent democracy?
What the Nicaraguan literary genius Rubén Darío wrote in one of his Pan-American ode poems is useful for reflection: “Eagle, the condor exists. He is your brother in great heights. The Andes know him and know that he looks at the Sun like you.”
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