Violence as Ideology
The Declaration of Independence and the roots of today's discontent
Imagine that 14 million Americans, traumatized by political violence, started a New America that renounced assassinations, mob violence, civil wars and invading foreign lands? What if New America delivered even more life, liberty and happiness, leading the free world in social cohesion rather than homicides?
New America isn’t imaginary, it’s a real place. But Old America can’t believe New America exists. Old America lives in a political fog of fear. It’s thickening. Half the nation loathes the other half. Cycles of political violence continue to spiral.
American fears about race, wealth and status underlie the recent surge in political violence, according to detailed statistical analysis by political scientists. If they’re correct then 2026 is similar to a recent analysis of historical records from 1765-1776, leading to the Declaration of Independence. Surging violence was fueled by popular media frightening the public with racialized conspiracy theories; propaganda financed by a faction of elites with strong economic motives; and the factional targeting of political actors.
The paranoid conspiracy theories of 1776 and 2026 have similar themes “Race, fear, propaganda and politics have been inextricably intertwined throughout the history of the United States,” says historian Robert Parkinson, who did an exhaustive study of the popular media (newspapers) of colonial America, “after all, as I found, they were from the start, during the very movement that produced independence. This set the stage. Why would we assume that later such instances in our history would be any different?”
In colonial times, elite-funded propaganda aimed to frighten white Protestants to believe that African Americans, Native Americans and French Catholics in Canada were about to overwhelm them. The elites framed it as a plot by the king to deny Americans their basic liberties as Englishmen.
Today, political scientist Robert Pape says survey after survey shows political violence is acceptable to at least 20% of the American population, fueled primarily by racial anxiety about changes in social demographics. Pape says the “most dominant social change is for the first time in our country’s 250 year history, we are transitioning from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy.” Democracy itself is in question when widespread gerrymandering imperils the legitimacy of a vote.
Both Republicans and Democrats support political violence. The support rate is even higher among young liberals. Professor Pape says a first step in reducing the recent surge in “violent populism” would be for Republican and Democrat leaders to make joint public statements that political violence is unacceptable, to unite in telling Americans that political violence is un-American.
That might be wishful thinking. Donald Trump pardoned the white nationalist groups who violently stormed Congress to overturn a federal election. For MAGA, political violence comes with a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Political violence is not un-American, it’s central to American political identity. Americans are conditioned to believe in a myth that says political violence leads to good things. All sides in America, left and right, secular and religious, revere a document that justifies violence to solve political issues: the Declaration of Independence.
As children, Americans are taught the myth of a peasant uprising against a tyrant. But it wasn’t the poor against the rich. It was a faction of American elites (Patriots) against a faction of London elites (Tories) then holding sway in Parliament. The Patriots had supporters in Parliament’s Whig faction. Parliament ruled. The king was a figurehead since 1688.
A violent secession was not America’s only choice to achieve more autonomy. Congress debated a constitutional plan to unite the colonies as a self-governing dominion in a British commonwealth. It lost by one vote. But the violent faction expunged the debate from the record to hide the deep divisions in Congress.
The elites were competing to control taxes, trade and territory - especially the territory that Parliament in 1774 assigned to be administered under the newly acquired colony of Canada: everything east of the Mississippi to the Ohio River Valley. Many Patriot leaders had invested in land speculations in the Ohio and restricting their access to this land was the ultimate “Intolerable Act” of Parliament.
Far from rebelling against tyranny, the land-hungry Patriot elites allied with tyrants, notably the King of France, an absolute dictator who secured American independence by agreeing to supply the money, the gunpowder, his navy and army to pin down the British not just in America but all over the globe.
It was because of kings, not despite a king, that the violent faction of elites in America won independence. As winners do, the Patriots wrote the official history that Americans believe today. Expunged from that history is the story of 80,000 exiled Americans - almost 14 million today - who went north to create a New America. Along with 75,000 French Canadiens, they eventually co-founded a self-governing dominion, Canada.
The plan that became Canada is the plan for America that lost by one vote in 1774. Today, Canada is a world leader in social cohesion with an unmatched record of starting no wars at home or abroad (Figures 2 & 3). Canadians live longer than Americans, enjoy greater social mobility, report greater levels of happiness and do not live in fear of the folks next door. Oligarchs can’t buy elections because spending in Canadian elections is strictly controlled. Canada is rated 10/10 as a functioning democracy while the USA is rated 3/10, which makes it an “anoncracy” rather than a democracy.
Would Americans question the myth of the founding if they knew that except for one vote they could have had this New America, avoided the massacres and the mass tortures, and live today without fear and loathing of their neighbours?
“Questioning the founding was and is akin to treason” on the American left and right, says historian Michael McDonnell. To my surprise, I’ve found a few tiny buds of heresy questioning the Declaration on the right wing of the American chasm. In God Against the Revolution: The Loyalist Clergy’s Case Against the American Revolution, a conservative theologian meticulously details how the Founding Fathers violated Biblical basics. As well, a scholar writing for The Heritage Foundation recently called the Declaration’s grievances “fake news.”
However, these are voices in the wilderness. It’s not likely that facts, reason or coming to Jesus will prevail in America - not on the right, nor the left. Even the best-informed Americans still mostly genuflect in awe of the founding.
It’s “the most significant event in human history since the birth of Christ,” said filmmaker Ken Burns while hyping The American Revolution, his latest PBS epic. Historian Jill Lepore calls it “the most important piece of prose in modern history” while admitting the Declaration’s rationalization of political violence is what “thrives in the fractures and furies that drive American politics in the twenty-first century, the hatreds and the violence, the appetite for division.”
The founding myth “might be a story that better explains the mess we’re in today,” says Michael McDonnell, one of a group of historians who rely on a thorough reading of primary documents and statistical analysis.
McDonnell says the 250th anniversary of the Declaration is the time to “confront the fact that the fabricated nation was created and ruled by wealthy elites, predicated on a massive expulsion of refugees, a civil war, on the wealth that enslaved labor and stolen Indigenous lands created, and doomed to be riven by extraordinary and lasting divisions that could not be papered over in 1860, and cannot today.”
The left-wing’s most popular voice, Heather Cox Richardson is an historian who gives her three million readers regular dosages of the “good intentions” founding myth. Richardson uses stories from the founding myth to critique Trump. But she could ask her readers to consider the possibility that Trump is only doing what the Founding Fathers did: weaponizing xenophobic conspiracy theories to inflame fears and justify violence that advances the economic agendas of his family and his elite backers.
Instead, Richardson’s readers are asked to identify with the Patriots cheering as a Royal Navy fleet departed Boston in 1776. She omits the Patriots also jeered the 1,100 refugees huddled on ships: their brothers, cousins and neighbours whose property they stole and whose bodies they tortured in public rituals of violent humiliation.
An historian aiming to instil critical thinking could mention that sailing for Halifax that day was Timothy Ruggles. Ruggles was the top American-born general of the French & Indian War, repelling the French invasion in 1755 and forcing the French army to surrender at Montreal in 1760. He was a leading jurist and elected president of the first congress of the 13 colonies in 1765. But this pre-eminent American was exiled by the Patriots for refusing to bend on the principle that political violence is incompatible with the rule of law.
Ruggles and his Loyal Americans were the first 1,100 Americans who moved north, rejecting the Declaration and its impending centuries of violence. That exodus eventually grew to 80,000 and would be equal to 13.6 million today, per capita. The descendants of the Loyalists do not have a record of violence like the descendants of the Patriots. Canadians have started no wars at home or abroad (Figure 3). Statistics, not myths, document the divergent destinies of the country Timothy Ruggles was born in, compared to the one he died in, peacefully, at the age of 83.
The Americans who worship the Declaration of Independence have started 60 full-blown wars of choice and conducted 481 other military aggressions, according to the Congressional Record Service. In 94.27% of these cases the president violated the constitutional principle of a vote in Congress, like the present war of choice on Iran.
George Washington had more executive power than any British king since 1688, and the American presidency has become vastly more imperial, and unchecked, than when Washington inaugurated the office. Donald Trump is not an aberration. Trump is the apotheosis of the 1776 Declaration, to pick up a gun and take the law into your own hands. American assassins believe the same.
The Patriots used fear, paranoia and weaponized conspiracy theories to destablize government and gain control of the best undeveloped property on the planet. As businessmen, they were visionaries. They are not unlike the money behind MAGA, people like Elon Musk. But visionary tech oligarchs do not limit their horizons to mere real estate; the property they seek to control is the entire intellectual property of humanity.
Musk predicts Americans are in for more social unrest. If achieving economic and political goals comes with some political violence, well then, as Donald Trump says, and 20% of Americans agree, that’s just a cost of doing business.
A note on calculating the per capita figure of 14,000,000 Americans who went north and created a “New America” in Canada. From 1776-83, about 50,000 Americans moved to the jurisdictions now known as Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario and Quebec. In the following decade, another 30,000 Americans would join them. Comparing 80,000 to a base population figure of 2,000,000 white Americans in 1776 that would equal 13.6 million today. The white Americans who rejected the Declaration of Independence represent a significant statistical body and structural fracture of the settler society.
I’m grateful for your time and consideration. As the president says, “Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Comments on Substack are more than welcome - they help engage and grow debate. Below are links to sources. You can also subscribe for free below that.
Robert Page, University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats
Barbara Walter, University of California
Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence
Greg Frazer, God Against the Revolution
WB Allen, The Heritage Foundation
Cogliano et al, The American Revolution at 250
Marc Egnal, Challenging the Myths of US History
Michael McDonnell, Masters of Empire
Pew Research Center, America Divided
Alan Taylor, American Revolutions
Brilliant analysis and thanks so much for what you wrote about Canada a superb democracy. Michael McDonnell superb analysis of founding fathers motivations. He also wrote that it was tax evasion and property speculation by the aggressive white mainly English that founded America. And as you so well point out a absolutist French King NOT George 111! Trump is a strong successor of the founding fathers: racist, tax avoider and property speculator. Europe far superior in terms of caring democracy than USA. As a Canadian pleased vile Trump is waking up Europe and NATO to take lead in democratic values and take on Putin fascist loved by Trump.