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A "rectification" settled by shooting the British army until they fled back to England.
The point is that a Venn diagram of the most wealthy and influential men in the colonies pre Boston Massacre in 1770 and post Constitutional Convention in 1787 is practically a circle, thier power didn't come from "shooting the British army until they fled back to England" they already had it.
How many wealthy and influential Royalists lived in the Colonies before the Boston Massacre? How many lived in the Colonies after the revolution?
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"(We) Live Free or (You Will) Die" works great, I don't think anybody doubts that. The problem is that it's mythologised until people believe that standing up and declaring your willingness to die for freedom makes you free, rather than being able to back up that declaration with overwhelming and coordinated force.
This is why conservatives are constantly trying to do what the Left does (protests, pointing out hypocrisy, public mourning of horrible murders) and are baffled when they don't get the results the Left gets.
EDIT: Whatever power those men might have thought they had was on sufferance from the British until they were able to fight off the British, if you prefer to put it that way. If the British had put down the American Mutiny (as it might have been dubbed) then things would have been very different, and we would now agree post hoc that those wealthy and influential men in the colonies had been standing on unstable ground.
And this is where Friedman and his disciples would point out that "the myth" is true. There is a very real sense in wich being willing to die does in fact make make you free. Someone can put a gun to your head but they can't make you do anything if you are sincerely prepared to eat that bullet.
Nor would i say the right is "baffled" so much as we have different reasons and motives.
And I think that's very beautifully polished bullshit. "Free to die" is a very different kind of freedom from "Free to live a happy and prosperous life doing all the stuff you (plural) think I shouldn't do" and people are overwhelmingly interested in the latter. Presenting the former using the same word as the latter is somewhere between a category error and slippery rhetoric, depending on the speaker's motive.
If you are prepared to eat a bullet rather than obey, all you're doing is saving your killer time and potential future complications while they take your stuff, pour the ashes of your fathers in the river, and deface the temples of your Gods. As we see from the statue of Robert E Lee.
Personally I want to die fat and happy, surrounded by friends, disciples and twelve loving grandchildren who will further my beliefs and family story.
The latter is built on the former. Without the former, the latter disintigrates.
Because the former makes you fight well in war (a la Iran), or because the former by itself will grant you the latter?
Capacity to accept extreme sacrifices helps whether you are fighting or not fighting. I agree with you, I think, that such a capacity does not in and of itself guarantee victory, peace or prosperity, but the good life runs on sacrifice, and if individuals or collectives are not willing to make those sacrifices personally, they will sooner or later run out of other peoples' sacrifices, in a similar way to how socialists inevitably run out of other peoples' money.
Horatius accepts dying well with a spear in hand, facing the foe. Christian martyrs die well, refusing to fight on principle. Either of these are, I think, valid expressions of accepting sacrifice, of the sort durable peace and prosperity are built on. But what you seem to be pointing to in this thread is that there is a sort of illusory sacrifice, where mere indolence masquerades as principle: "not organizing and not compromising is my principle. How about a fruitless gesture instead?" I would point out that there's also a similar illusory sacrifice pursuing violence-for-its-own-sake; CatgirlKulak and the Israel-Palestine conflicts seem like good examples of this failure mode.
Sacrifice is necessary, but waste is not sacrifice, and an inability to distinguish the two leads to disaster. Are we not fighting because it is not time to fight, or are we not fighting because fighting would be scary? Are we not fighting because fighting is wrong, or are we not fighting because we are too comfortable?
I have a chronic argument running with @CapitalRoom and @The_Nybbler on this subject for some years now. They argue that the time to fight has passed us by, and seem to want either fighting now, or an admission that fighting will never happen. My position is that while the current position is miserable and undignified, we are in fact moving in the correct direction, and endurance continues to be the correct choice.
In your opinion, what does organizing look like? What does compromising principle look like?
I agree with much of this. Sacrifice is necessary for any important endeavour - in a strike, for example, an employee forfeits pay because they hope to get more later, or even out of pure spite to send the message that they aren't willing to put up with intolerable conditions simply because it's technically still better then the alternative.
I've sacrificed to some degree for politics. I had a very hard time for a year or so, and put myself into some very difficult positions, trying to stop my local part of the university falling to wokeness. I held out for a decent while, and perhaps I blunted the worst of it, but I mostly failed. I failed in part because I ignored the advice of my working class formerly-leftist co-conspirator to go after the people in question for having pretty unsavoury associations with local left wing movements. There was a pretty good chance we could have caught them between being disloyal to the cause and affirming anti-semitism in front of the university. I said, "we don't do that, even though they do", and my friend respected my judgement, but I'm still a little haunted by that failure and the consequences of my desire to do the right thing.
In general, my belief is that political power is based on having both a popular element and a machine. A popular element alone is powerless: they can vote, but they can't choose the options on offer, they can't force the power structures of their country into giving them more than token gestures, and authority figures will be punished for appealing to them. A well-funded, well-oiled machine alone is weak: they can push, they can lobby, they can have quiet conversations, but if politicians are forced to (or want to) disclaim them and their desires in public, they will be limited in what they can achieve. So you need both.
I think this is what @Soteriologian refers to as Zerglings and the Overmind, respectively, and that's what I mean by 'organising'.
The main problem of politics is that maintaining both of those things requires you to do stuff that is icky. So for building a big popular movement, you often want someone like a Trump, whose achievements and gumption I genuinely respect but who I also consider dishonest, venal, and rather thick. You need to be able to cut through by exaggerating, you need to be able to fudge and distract when an issue is going to split your coalition, you need to be able to push your sins and failures onto a loyal follower so that you can be the beloved figurehead, etc.
For maintaining your machine, you need money, power, favours. You have to be able to work with some rather grim people. You have to give up stuff you feel strongly about in exchange for stuff you feel more strongly about. You have to enforce negative consequences on some people who are perfectly nice and probably decent in their way, because they are fighting on the other side and you need to signal that people should be careful before they try that or you simply need to get allies into their seats.
Look at Trump's 1.8 billion fund: it was clumsily executed, but it was the beginnings of being able to fund a machine that could give aid and comfort to Right wingers who fall in battle, the same way that the Democrats gave aid and comfort to all those people who ended up with Yale tenure. And it was scuppered because older senators' revulsion at the graft involved surpassed their desire not to have the country by run by Leftists.
Being a politician means being a sin-eater, for a cause worth it. That's their sacrifice. And it's why I have very little patience for the "do what's right and die free" brigade, because they're actively undermining these efforts and the wellbeing of their countrymen to maintain their own personal feelings of virtue. I don't mean that anything goes of course - when all's said and done, you still do have to be better than the other lot and not just axiomatically so, or what was the whole thing for?
Within the constraints of my own sense of self-preservation and a somewhat conflict-averse personality, I believe in pragmatism. That means you don't affirm pretty things that are no use and don't help, and it means you don't martyr yourself (or others) for nothing because that doesn't help either. Sometimes it might be time to die on that hill, but pick the hill carefully and remember that living on the hill in a pretty hobbit-hole is better.
"Be ye wise as serpents, and innocent as doves" is closer to what I try to aim at, though admittedly with a ratio of 2:1.
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It is good that we have been able to speak plainly.
Sorry, I'm not trying to be a dick, although I know it's coming out that way, I'm just wearied of the endless conversations on the Right which run approximately:
A: we need to actually organise and compromise on our principles to get results.
B: not organising and not compromising is my principle. How about a fruitless gesture instead?
A: will it help? it never has before
B: the willingness to make a fruitless gesture even if it won't help is the most important thing in the world
A: that sounds like no. do you actually care about making any real change in circumstances?
B: not if it would require me to do anything I'm not already doing
It's very frustrating when half the people who agree with me on concrete things that are going wrong would literally rather eat a bullet than help me try to fix them, or even rather than admit that what they've been doing hasn't got anywhere.
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