What Was the American Revolution For?

"This past June, at a No Kings rally outside a white clapboard church in a little brick town in the lower right-hand corner of Vermont, Green Mountaineers huddled together in raincoats under a pearl-gray sky. Some ironic anti-royalists wore golden paper crowns from Burger King, but the more sartorially, not to say lepidopterously, dedicated came dressed as orange-and-black butterflies, these being the only monarchs allowed in America."

""Rejecting Kings Since 1776" read a sign carried by a woman wearing a rainbow bucket hat. In the matter of handmade placards-Magic Marker on cardboard, duct-taped to wooden yardsticks-there was a certain amount of politico-literary one-upmanship. "Cry My Beloved Country" was clever, but was "Make Orwell Fiction Again" cleverer? Abraham Lincoln was there, grim-faced and sepia on a sign that read "Government of the People, by the People, for the People." A red-white-and-blue printed poster quoted Thomas Paine's "Common Sense": "In America, the Law Is King!""

"With or without the No Kings movement, the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the American Revolution is, inevitably, an occasion to ask what the Revolution meant, whether the people really do rule, and whether the law is still king. The jubilee began in earnest in Lexington and Concord on April 19, 2025-the anniversary of the shot heard round the world, marking the start of the war-with an early-morning battle reënactment, and very tasty cider doughnuts."

Protesters at a No Kings rally in Vermont blended satire and earnest republican symbolism by wearing paper crowns and monarch-butterfly costumes while carrying handmade placards. Signs invoked Lincoln, Thomas Paine, and republican slogans that asserted popular rule and legal supremacy. The semiquincentennial raises questions about the meaning of the Revolution, the reality of popular sovereignty, and the present force of the rule of law. Commemorations began in April 2025 at Lexington and Concord with reënactments and local festivities and will culminate on July 4, 2026 with nationwide events including parades, exhibits, lectures, and protests.

Read at The New Yorker