This video is about how historians answer a question like this one. In Virginia, Black freedom was a legal status made on paper and policed with weapons, which means the absence of paper is not a small matter. And in this case the search for the paper was already done, by Prof. Luther Porter Jackson, the civil rights legend and historian of free Black Virginia, working in Petersburg itself, as the first editor of Isaac’s memoir. He found nothing. Howard University’s Rayford Logan published that finding in 1951. Isaac, for his part, never once claimed he was free.

So the question was answered. What Monticello put in its place is a single census line and a surname attached in the 1990s. Why an institution would prefer that to the record and the scholars who searched it is something I can’t pretend to understand. Watch, check out my note about the evidence, and draw your own conclusions about what the preferred ending is for.

Here’s the note: https://www.tadstoermer.com/notes-and-sources/ch3

Today, the American right — and establishment Democrats — are laying into Piker.

Why?

The topline answer is something he said on a livestream. Warning that conflating American Jews with Israel makes Jews less safe, Piker said that if American Jews continue to present the idea that they are “singularly invested in Israel,” someone will eventually act against them — American Jews, not Israel.

Then it kicked off. The people who don’t like him called it antisemitic. Many of his defenders said he was warning against antisemitism. In the space between them lies an argument that we need to have on its merits, among informed people who take it seriously.

The problem with having an argument on its merits, though, is that you can lose that argument. Better to shift the fight to terrain you can’t lose on.

And that is where the discourse went when the Democratic establishment got into it. They took the fight onto the field of our political culture — the ground where they’ve maneuvered the American left into losing fights for a hundred years.

What they made of Piker’s statement became evidence against people who didn’t share it, against policies it had nothing to do with, and against an insurgent progressive left pushing for change. The attacks stopped being about what Piker said and became about who is alongside him, who must denounce him, and — here’s the real turn — which candidates and policies can be discredited by being associated with him. The point is not to answer the progressive left. The point is to exclude it. Outside the party, outside the argument, outside America.

Because that left is a threat. The same threat every insurgent in this year’s Democratic primaries carries. Not to the country — to the people criticizing Piker. To their place, their influence, their payday. The things that established them.

This is familiar ground. But be careful: this isn’t a lazy history-repeats-itself take. This is a history-is-happening take. The ongoing project of the American establishment versus its own terror of the American left.

And we can trace that project to its birth. All of it — the nationalization of our political culture, organized, designed, indoctrinated against the left — started one hundred years ago.

When the smoke had more or less cleared from World War I, and the American establishment stopped worrying about the threat from Germany, they turned their attention to the threat from within the United States. The worry wasn’t new. They had agonized over America becoming less Anglo-Saxon for decades. It's what the Americanization movement of the late nineteenth century was for, with its hereditary patriotic societies, its flag rituals, its campaigns to press the immigrant into the mold of the English-speaking world, with all that meant. The Pledge of Allegiance was a product of that push.

Mostly, they figured the historical threats to their place at the top of American life were handled. The United States Cavalry and lynch law had done their work. The uncomfortable reality of Reconstruction was overthrown. Indigenous threats were concentrated on reservations. Black political power was shattered.

The new threat was different. Waves of immigration from the very much not Anglo-Saxon parts of Europe were pouring into American cities — and these arrivals were inside the gates: voting, organizing, running for office. Their threat couldn’t be segregated or intimidated. It was the ideas that came with them about the relationship between governments and the governed. Ideas about how capital and property and assets operated to determine choices about how power was distributed. Ideas about communism and socialism and the right of workers to organize and fight for what they deserved against the people trying to keep those rights away from them.

Combating ideas was work of a different kind, and the establishment had built a tool for it. They had established the National Security League. It wasn’t a grassroots club of concerned citizens. It had been created in 1914 by a corporate lawyer, Stanwood Menken, and an army general, Leonard Wood, with plenty of help from politicians and publishers and other great men. Elihu Root, the influential former Secretary of State, gave it prestige. Theodore Roosevelt gave it noise. And the presidents of Harvard and Columbia and Johns Hopkins, along with bankers and governors and industrialists, filled its committees. Simon Guggenheim, Henry Frick, and the Vanderbilts gave it money. J. P. Morgan gave it more.

Originally, their job was preparedness — and then selling a European slaughter to an isolationist public. Before America entered the war, the League pushed universal military training, ran summer training camps, and promoted a 1915 propaganda film — The Battle Cry of Peace — about a defenseless America being invaded by an as-yet-unnamed enemy. Once the fight came, it churned out pamphlets, organized loyalty parades, sent thousands of volunteer speakers into communities and organizations, supplied 1,400 newspapers with content, and recruited professors into what it called a national patriotic education faculty. It backed the Espionage Act and the policing of speech. And when it started grading members of Congress on their loyalty, the House investigated the League in 1918, found election-law violations at the top of all that money, and did nothing.

After the war they turned to the home front, the next threat: the American left. They had events to work with — the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Seattle General Strike, the Boston Police Strike, the steel strikes, the Wall Street bombing of 1920, the growth of the American Socialist Party and the Wobblies. Root stood in Carnegie Hall on Constitution Day 1919 and sounded the alarm: radicalism of all forms was a threat to the very existence of American government. Workers, including policemen, asking for a union were harbingers of the end of the republic. Anyone insisting on an eight-hour day, and a living wage, and factory doors that didn’t lock closed during a fire was a sleeper agent for the Bolsheviks. They turned that variety of dissent, and grievance, and a hope for a better life into a single conspiracy under one red flag, bent on the violent overthrow of their American republic.

Ignore the fact that socialism covers a wide range of politics. Communism is there, and so is Bolshevism. Lenin’s radical tilt in 1918 frightened many inside his own party in Russia. A socialist was not necessarily a Bolshevik, any more than a conservative was necessarily a fascist.

Precision, though, wasn’t the League’s goal. Exclusion was.

So they reframed what the threat from the left was really about: not better conditions for workers or even a better democracy, but something closer to the center of their American life — the constitutional order they owned.

It’s a marker of just how nationalist our modern political culture is that it might be hard for many of us to imagine American political life before our worship of the founders, our constitutional cult, our patriotic catechism. A time when people didn’t care too much about Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. When the men of 1787 didn’t determine our political language or dominate our political imagination. When the Federalist Papers weren’t a kind of scripture outside of a courtroom. When the name Alexander Hamilton wouldn’t excite anyone. When everyone wasn’t an originalist in one way or another. No “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, no official national anthem, no official national motto of “In God We Trust.” When genuflecting at patriotic symbols wasn’t culturally enforced.

Enter the League’s Committee on Constitutional Instruction to change that, spearheaded by the head of Princeton’s history department, Robert McNutt McElroy — a Republican from Kentucky, then beginning work on a biography of Jefferson Davis. They didn’t take their case to adults in the open. They took it to children in classrooms, drafting model laws mandating rigid “civics” instruction in public schools, turning the study of history into compliance with a belief system. The goal wasn’t to teach our history. It was to teach students how they should feel about it.

Drafting model laws wasn’t an aspirational exercise for them. The League was made up of governors, legislators, and cabinet officials across the country — the men who could implement those laws. It was America’s political and financial establishment. And in 1922, the campaign welcomed the country’s legal establishment, when the American Bar Association formed its Committee on American Citizenship, soon led by a Texas lawyer and Democratic Party official, Robert E. Lee Saner. The committee announced an “open revolt against authority” in the nation and declared its goal: to “re-establish the Constitution of the United States...in the minds and hearts of the people.” They drafted a “Citizenship Creed” and pushed state laws requiring teachers to take loyalty oaths to the Constitution. They mobilized lawyers across the country to “stem the tide” of radical attacks on the Constitution and the flag, and urged every lawyer to be a missionary for constitutional loyalty. They even adopted the government’s “Four Minute Men” strategy, which had sent speakers into movie theaters to shame people into buying Liberty Bonds during the war, and sent four-minute speakers into factories and movie theaters for the Constitution.

Together, the League and the ABA led the remake of America’s political culture to exclude the left. Out went anything that could speak to the kind of individualism that could fuel the left’s ideas. The radicalism of the American resistance in the Revolution? Gone. Take Samuel Adams, the Alice Paul of the American Revolution. He organized riots, destroyed property, and terrorized government officials with direct action to compel change. U.S. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, speaking at the Adams bicentennial in 1922, handled him the new way: don’t for a moment suppose the Man of the Revolution wanted “the hideous tyranny of anarchy and violence enthroned here.” No, Samuel Adams was “preeminently a man of law and order.” That would have come as a surprise to Adams, the resistance leader who sent a mob to destroy the home of a lieutenant governor and exploited the Boston Massacre, reborn as a constitutional statesman who deeply cared about tax policy.

How about the Declaration of Independence? Even that was a liability. Too much talk about equality and the right of the people to alter or abolish governments. To the 1920s establishment, it smelled like the French Revolution — utopian, dangerously democratic, a license for class warfare. James Beck, the Solicitor General of the United States, said so. The trouble was Jefferson’s “unqualified assertion of the equality of men and the absolute right of self-determination.” That was “visionary idealism” that could only end in “rampant individualism.” Calvin Coolidge, Beck’s boss, showed the other way to handle the Declaration’s danger: cap it, seal it off. The Declaration was a ceiling, set in 1776. He said, “If all men are created equal, that is final... No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.” And anyone proposing to move past 1776 “can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary.” The left didn’t just lose the Declaration; the establishment pushed them out of it.

Still, too many leftists were reaching for examples and inspiration from America’s revolutionary experience. Even scholars were getting into the act, reading class into the Constitution itself. In 1913, Charles Beard published An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, making the case that the Framers were men with property — public securities, western lands, creditor interests — who built a national government strong enough to protect it against popular majorities set to take it away from them, even redistribute it. The Constitution, for them, was a business investment. The reaction to Beard tells you everything about the stakes. The ABA’s citizenship committee warned that ignorant citizens were falling for the claim that the Constitution was nothing more than “an aid to the rich and powerful.”

Beard was hounded as a subversive — another turn in excluding the left. He had already resigned from Columbia in 1917 over the university’s wartime purging of dissenters. His reason for resigning is worth a pause, because it encapsulates the aggression of the establishment forces trying to shape American culture. Although Beard supported the war, his university was wrong to fire two professors for opposing it. Beard argued that a university run by “reactionary and visionless” men, whose move is to exclude dissent, discredits every cause they touch, including the just ones. He never took another university post.

The League and the ABA answered Beard the same way they answered every threat from the left, not with a counter-argument but with a counter-campaign. The ideas themselves barely interested them. Behavior did — belief reshaped at national scale, obedience as the product. The war was proof of concept that propaganda, deployed on a national front, could manufacture consent, obedience, and activity; it could turn demonstrable fictions into uncontestable truths. So they turbocharged the methods of the emerging public relations industry that had worked so well in the war. The industry’s theorists, Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays, were writing in exactly those years about bypassing truth and the engineering of the public mind. You don’t persuade a mass public with facts. You manufacture a crisis, trigger the emotional reflex, and provide a pre-packaged symbol to worship. Truth is irrelevant. Behavioral compliance is the only metric of success.

And how to do that? They manufactured the crisis: an attack on America's constitutional order from the left under a red flag. So what they needed, to influence hearts rather than persuade minds, was the right story. Sidestep reason entirely in crafting a new narrative about what America was, and where it began. That required what today might be called a “retcon” — return to the beginning and rebuild the canon from there. Don't just change the record. Transform what it means.

So go back to Philadelphia in 1787 and start the story over. Not the Constitution as it was — argued into being, carried by force of politics, contested from the first day — nor the one Beard described, but the founding document of a better America than either: a law-and-order America, created by sober, mature, responsible framers who stood above the reckless, emotional revolutionaries.

Of course, that would take some massaging of historical facts, because the real story of the Constitution is the exact opposite of what they needed. The constitution they were sanctifying had been argued into being over furious opposition, forced to take a Bill of Rights the framers didn’t want, remade by the Civil War, refounded by the Reconstruction amendments. Every change that mattered came from dissent, resistance, and pressure from people who fought the framers’ vision. You can’t run a new origin story, one that comes with a moral lesson, from that. A morality tale needs to teach lessons the audience can follow, and the lesson of real history is that you have to fight the forces of law and order to achieve change. So the new story essentially had a problem with narrative design. The raw material pointed to a political world in which every change had to be ripped from the framers against their will, but that ending wouldn’t do. The framers, as the heroes of the tale, needed to have been right the whole time.

So they tried something new: throw out the history entirely, just pull back in what fit the new story's design, to make it work the way they needed it to work. The Constitution had to be created whole in 1787, in the convention at Philadelphia, the product of just those minds, in that one time and place, less concerned about the rights of man (too much French Revolution in that) than about the duties of man. There they created a republic of law and order, a marvelous, intricate machine of government that explicitly and decidedly rejected any idea of the United States as a democracy. No, democracies are too dangerous. To the League and the ABA, democracy meant what it had meant to George Washington: mob rule. And here, for once, they didn't have to invent anything — the framers’ fear of democracy was real, and the nationalist campaign happily kept it. Even Woodrow Wilson had gone too far. Wilson said the war was to make the world safe for democracy. The National Security League wanted to make democracy safe for the world. Democracy uncontrolled was just another word for anarchy.

No, the United States was a representative republic, where political power belonged to the better sort, those who knew the right thing to do. They would represent everyone else. Under a rule of law that would forever protect property and restrain the crowd.

But the task before them was enormous. A hundred and thirty-five years of constitutional evolution and revolution packed into sixteen weeks of one Philadelphia summer. Something else had to explain it.

Never fear. They had help. God lent a hand. The Constitution became nothing less than a “miracle.” They sold the idea that the framers weren’t a group of privileged elites pushing their own priorities, but unified demigods channeling the Holy Ghost to deliver a flawless, finished scripture of liberty from Mount Sinai on the Schuylkill. The leaders of the Sons of the American Revolution made it loud and clear that no student of the Constitutional Convention could fail to see the hand of God in its deliberations. And they put it in the distinct language of orthodox faith because they meant it that way. Their pamphlets called the Constitution “our holy of holies” and “the American Rock of Ages.” A federal judge said citizens should recite the Constitution’s principles “as we do the Lord’s Prayer.” A widely used schoolbook told every man, woman, and child to approach the document as if “entering upon some holy shrine.” More than a thousand clergy, at the ABA’s urging, worked the Constitution into their Thanksgiving sermons as a blessing. And the ABA’s Citizenship Creed urged Americans to accept that the Constitution “must be an actual part of my life and of my religion.” Not reverence as a figure of speech, but as observable, actionable articles of faith.

Harry Atwood, one of the campaign’s most tireless evangelists, spoke for the whole movement and its narrative when he said the Constitution was “the greatest human achievement since Creation,” marking “the greatest event in the history of the world, save only the Birth of Christ.”

So the convention became a gathering of worthies, representing everyone in America who wasn't there — women, the poor, enslaved people, Patrick Henry. Their surrenders became compromises inspired by revelation. The ratification debates reinforced sacred unity. James Madison was anointed the father of the Bill of Rights. Marshall became a consolidator of the Constitution’s power, Daniel Webster its defender, Lincoln its rescuer. Reconstruction and the Radical Republicans became worse than nothing at all, not just erased from the story of the Constitution but recast everywhere else as its villains, the tragedy of the age. The Emancipation Proclamation, because it was Lincoln’s, became what the Thirteenth Amendment, forged by the Radical Republicans, actually was. And the Fourteenth Amendment, if they had to talk about it at all, was just continuity with the framers’ vision, a simple clarification of what they had wanted to do all along (which is essentially how Chief Justice Roberts just defended birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara).

The point was continuity, not change. 1787 as the beginning of everything, and that everything was law and order and duty. Nothing in that history for the American left to grab onto. Then make loyalty to that constitution — the one they constructed, the mythical unitary constitution — the measure of being an American. Swear loyalty to it, but understand what that loyalty is really to.

And it worked. Not slowly. Not partially. Spectacularly. The way few campaigns in American history have ever worked. In a single decade, they had turned ideological dissent on the left into a crime against what it meant to be an American, and they never had to pass a single constitutional amendment to do it.

By 1924, 25 of the 48 states required the Constitution to be taught in their schools. By 1926, it was 37 states, 200,000 teachers, four million students, many under laws copied verbatim from the League’s model statutes. By 1930, 43 states and almost five million students. A quarter-million copies of the League’s constitutional catechism were in classrooms. And the machinery had a hammer. Teachers took loyalty oaths to the Constitution as a condition of employment. Thirty-three states went further: every teacher — mathematics, music, it didn’t matter — had to pass an examination on the Constitution to stand in front of a classroom at all.

And the campaign also went straight at the people it feared: immigrants, the left’s supposed recruiting pool, targeted them in their own languages. The American Defense Society ran a special program delivering its People’s Edition of the Constitution to Russian immigrants, many of them Jewish refugees it suspected of radical views. An anti-radical society of New York businessmen and lawyers announced it would translate a simplified Constitution into all languages, so that immigrants could be taught, in their own tongues, how the Constitution “provides better and safer means of correcting causes for discontent.” Read it instead of striking, instead of organizing, instead of acting. The League’s own materials reminded every applicant that citizenship required being “attached to the principles of the Constitution.”

There was laid the foundation of our modern political culture. Not grown. Not inherited. Manufactured, in less than a single generation, to counter the progressive left.

There was something of a backlash. The campaign had worked too well. Edward Corwin, Princeton professor of jurisprudence and a member of the American Philosophical Society, pronounced that “the worship of the Constitution is at an end.” He was wrong about that, but the exhaustion seemed real by 1938. Nevertheless, the reconstruction of the political culture was done, so the right kept swinging the sacred document, using it to attack the New Deal, especially after FDR tried to pack the courts. So liberals in the establishment, recognizing the new rules of American political life, rushed to claim the founding documents as their turf — still law and order, but their version of law and order, defending the New Deal and all that governmental power used in ways they agreed with.

The establishment right had successfully shifted the field and then defined its boundaries. The establishment left then moved onto it, camped out, and never left.

World War II forced a new problem, and the law-and-order constitution couldn’t solve it. The establishment had to pivot back to fighting Germany, twenty years after they had stopped. And there was a much more troublesome wrinkle: by late 1941, the communists were on America’s side. In fact, the American left held a stronger claim to antifascism than any other group in the country — earned in the 1930s, when the left was organizing against fascism and dying fighting it in Spain while much of the establishment did business with Berlin or looked away. Worse still, the white America the League had spent a decade reshaping had little interest in fighting Germany again. As late as the spring of 1941, some four in five Americans opposed entering the war. America First counted its members in the hundreds of thousands. Hitler was a problem, sure, but why should they enlist, work around the clock in factories, accept rationing — and die in Europe to stop him?

So the Office of War Information, created in 1942 — maybe the most important federal agency you have never heard of — layered 1776 over 1787, pivoting the center of American identity from the constitution of law and order to a patriotic fight for freedom against tyranny. Which, as the propagandists plastered everywhere, was apparently always America’s fight, against tyranny wherever it was. Back in comes the Declaration, and Jefferson — literally, when his memorial went up in DC in 1943. At its dedication, FDR said that Jefferson proved “that the seeming eclipse of liberty can well become the dawn of more liberty.” It wasn't about the spirit of the Constitution anymore; it was a bloody crusade for the soul of humanity. Jefferson was no longer the dangerous author of alter-or-abolish. He was the “Apostle of Freedom,” enlisted in America’s global war.

And that worked too. The second layer of 1776, laid over the first layer of 1787. The establishment’s campaign had spent the 1920s teaching obedience to constitutional sanctity. The OWI’s campaign now had workers and soldiers seeing themselves as agents in America’s global struggle for human freedom.

Then the two strains got consolidated when the real work of the establishment — stomping the American left — returned after World War II, now with fresh vengeance. 1776 as the fight for human freedom. 1787 as the victory of law and order. They were forged into a single mythology in the Cold War, now fueled by mass media. A group we today call the consensus historians took the 1920s blueprint and the 1940s messaging and wrote a version of U.S. history where few differences, much less class conflict, ever existed, arguing that America was built on a pragmatic, non-ideological, unified vision of responsible liberty. They framed the entire American left as a foreign virus rather than a homegrown reaction to exploitation.

It wasn’t just about scholarship. Their work had a hard edge. It was about nationalism. As Daniel Boorstin, one of the shapers, told a congressional committee in 1953, his job and the job of all American historians was to combat communism by teaching students the “unique virtues of American democracy.” He wrote a whole book to lay it out, The Genius of American Politics, published that same year, arguing that America’s genius was its freedom from ideology. Theory itself was alien to the American experience. But notice the trick in words that might seem neutral. By Boorstin’s definition, the establishment’s creed — property, the Constitution, the market, the republic — wasn’t itself ideology, but simply the American mind, the American experience, the natural landscape. And anyone who wanted the country to be different was, by definition, importing an alien theory.

Other historians joined in. Louis Hartz made the United States the direct descendant of John Locke’s liberal vision, creating an American mind incapable of producing or tolerating real socialism. Richard Hofstadter surveyed the great political conflicts over liberty and found that they weren’t really conflicts at all, just differences of opinion within the same structure of liberal ideas. In an especially hostile turn, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. reconstructed the American political center — his “vital center” — as the only respectable political left, pushing the actual left out of the political landscape entirely.

Those historians and the storytellers, such as Catherine Drinker Bowen, who followed them weren’t telling the same story, but they were all doing the same work. Together they toughened the boundaries of modern American political culture, making being part of the American left so thoroughly un-American, even anti-American, that the charge would fall like a final judgment in American politics, from that day to this one.

That’s the cage that now welcomes Hasan Piker. We are all in it with him. This is not history repeating. It’s history continuing. The same fight, running unbroken, for one hundred years. A political culture of exclusion is doing the work it was meant to do: collapsing the left into its most frightening edge, then branding that edge the enemy of what it means to be an American.

So will Republicans and the Democratic establishment take Piker’s arguments on their merits, in this glorious marketplace of ideas? You already know the answer. He’s on the left. He doesn't look like us. He doesn't have a name like ours. He didn’t go to our schools. He doesn't even get a seat at the establishment’s table.

But look past him and see the work the cage is doing in your life. It forecloses real change before change can even be proposed, because the people who oppose all change are setting the rules you have to play by. That is what the fight has been about for a hundred years.

And here is what the establishment understands better than its critics do: the fight never stopped because the left never stopped either. They built all of this — the creed, the catechism, the cage — because the American left kept being born, generation after generation, out of what’s wrong, what keeps being wrong, in American life.

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I can’t keep putting off putting the notes and sources for A Resistance History of the United States…

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That act of resistance costs them. Major Strasser …

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But what’s also true is that the Democrats are doing some constitutional damage of their own. That matters, because their claim as the only reliable defenders of America’s constitutional faith is a cornerstone of their…

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Let’s start with the basics. Protest and resistance are not synonyms.

Protest seeks to express opposition, to arti…

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The American political establishment has gone after socialist candidates for Congress before, and it went all the way — to refusing to seat a man his voters kept electing. It’s worth knowing how that went. For everybody involved.

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Here is the case the MAGA right is making. After a string of DSA primary victories in June, Trump began using the word “communism” almost compulsively; Reuters counted 81 times in two weeks. He called the DSA candidates “hardcore, godless communists” and described communism as the gravest threat the country has faced in its entire existence. His own team’s research reportedly found that the word energizes the base more than it persuades anyone, which tells you what this is: a turnout strategy dressed as a national emergency.

Mike Johnson filled in the domestic detail. The “crazy little mini-Mamdanis” popping up around the country are a danger to you and your family. Reagan warned about communism when it was a distant threat across the world, Johnson reminds us, but now “the barbarians are inside the gate.” We are no longer arguing over marginal tax rates, in his telling, but over whether freedom itself survives.

And see the work that the word “communist” is doing: it converts an opponent into an enemy, a political program into a conspiracy, and an election into an emergency. Once that conversion is complete, ordinary democratic remedies, like voting, are no longer enough. You do not debate an existential enemy. You expose it, investigate it, attack it.

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But this one lands in my lane, because it is about the work stories do, the way they shape how we see the world around us and, above all, our political culture.

And Nolan’s films always do real work. That is the reason to pay attention to them, and it is precisely the thing his critics seem uninterested in exploring.

But we can start by separating the two arguments currently running under the same headline. The first is the purist fight, which began with the helmets and has since expanded to the armor, the ship, and Tom Holland saying “my dad is coming home.” Who cares? It is a movie about a poem about a guy who blinds a giant and annoys a sea god. The loudest of it gathered around Lupita Nyong’o’s casting as Helen, on the grounds that Homer calls her the most beautiful woman in the world, which he never does. Not in the Iliad or in the Odyssey. Even “the face that launched a thousand ships” line is from Marlowe. The men most furious about her face might have noticed, had they watched the movie, that Nolan casts an Oscar winner as Helen and then gives her almost nothing to do, which tells you how much room the great man’s story leaves for anyone else.

Ignore the rest of it. Homer’s epic has been rewritten, retranslated, and repurposed for three thousand years; it is a record of performances, not a text betrayed by them. Every bard who sang it changed it, reinterpretation is the tradition, and there is no authentic Odyssey sitting in a vault for Nolan to violate. The people policing helmet typology are not defending Homer. They are defending their claim of ownership over Homer.

The second argument is more interesting to me, and more valuable to our work, and it comes from the scholars themselves. Their complaint is not that Nolan changed things but what he changed them into: a poem of genuinely sophisticated morality watered down in favor of spectacle, and a hero remade, as the translator Daniel Mendelsohn put it, in Nolan’s own image. Nolan’s protagonists are reliably tortured men wrestling with angst and old wounds, and this Odysseus spends the film mourning the death he dealt at Troy, with the poem’s violent homecoming traded away for something more tragic. That is not a complaint about fidelity but rather about substitution, which is worth slowing down to consider.

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It comes from a dying man. Henry James spent the first winter of World War I — 1914 into 1915 — in London, dictating a novel he’d abandoned years earlier, because he found he couldn’t work on anything else while the world he knew came apart. The Sense of the Past. He never finished it. He was preparing to return to it when his final illness took him in December 1915, and a friend published the fragment two years later, with James’ dictated notes for the ending stapled on like a promise.

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It already feels a little lighter, like we can be free from the endless reflections on what 1776 meant, none of which really went anywhere, given that America is in a decidedly unreflective mode, having been led by narrators who, by their own admiss…

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Almost nobody will read you the most important part of it, which comes immediately after.

“…that whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.”

Two verbs. Alter or abolish.

Jefferson did not write reform or abolish, or persuade or abolish, and the difference matters, because by the time he reached that sentence the permitted, peaceful channels of protest and opposition had already failed. “Alter” is not a polite request made to people running a system still willing to answer — not a letter to the editor, not a weekend rally, not the fantasy that the establishment, properly informed and persuaded, will become ashamed of themselves. Alter is the right of a people to compel change when those in charge have stopped recognizing your claim on them.

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Norma Roth, the children’s book author The Guardian found on 17th Street, remembers doing precisely that with her children during the Bush years, teaching them what freedom was supposed to mean by letting them use it. You cannot do that now. The Ellipse, Lafayette Square, long stretches of the Avenue itself — all of it sealed behind chain-link while Trump remakes the city in his own image for the 250th. Behind the fencing, the White House looks less like a public building than a bunker.

The article gets the renovation right, including the part most people are too polite to say, but Roth says it for them: he is shitting all over the place. The white pavilions with their gaudy gold trim have spread out from the Oval Office, a room he turned into the lobby of a bankrupt casino, and across the holding pen that used to be the National Mall. The idea of a $600 million ballroom in the building zone where the East Wing stood. The threat of a triumphal arch that locals already call the Arc de Trump, set at the gateway to the city so arrival itself can feel like submission.

Tacky is one thing. Tacky backed by police power is another.

Walking the city yesterday, though, the renovation was only the architecture of the thing. Everywhere you turn there is some fresh lesson in what resistance is up against, and most of it is quieter than a crane. Some of it sits in museums and historic sites, each insisting it speaks for America while narrowing America down into an uncritical celebration of one particular version of the country: the nationalist version, not the patriotic one. Those are not the same thing and never have been. Patriotism can survive grief, shame, repair, dissent, and love. Nationalism cannot. Nationalism needs the fence.

The crudest lesson was also the clearest. There were soldiers everywhere: National Guard, armed, in the Metro at DuPont Circle and again at Metro Center, up on the Hill, and clustered in camouflage a few blocks off 14th Street at the edge of the Pride parade. The first time I came upon them in the station I stopped, the way you do when something is wrong before you can name it, and wondered what I had missed. What had happened while I was away?

The last time I saw troops in this city like that was the week after September 11th.

Then I remembered that nothing had happened.

Or rather, nothing had happened that soldiers could fix. In 2001 the troops had a reason to be there. These men had nothing to do but stand and walk. No one spoke to them, and they were not there to be spoken to. They were the opposite of the D.C. cops a few feet away, who still seemed to treat the city and its residents like people: smiling, joking, answering questions, actually protecting and serving somebody.

So why were the soldiers there at all?

Because thin-skinned men who want to be authoritarians like to play with their toys, especially the ones that come in uniform. They like to perform authority precisely where they suspect they are getting none. Troops in the Metro are there to be seen, and they are seen. People stiffen when a pack goes by. The temperature in the station drops a degree. That reaction is the product, the entire return on the deployment. It is power as weather, meant to remind you that something could happen. Noticing the trick is where refusing it starts.

And then, at the parade, I watched a few thousand people refuse it without appearing to notice the troops at all.

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That is the work Washington does. George Washington — who bought the sash to “distinguish myself” — is how America gets the Founding without the Revolution. He lets the country celebrate its origins without reopening the argument that made those origins unstable in the first place. He lets historians, museums, politicians, documentarians, and donors move quickly from resistance to command, from conflict to unity, from Revolution to war, and from war to nation.

A dream is the thing you have with your eyes closed, and a year spent gazing at Washington is built to keep them shut.

What the gazing is built to obscure is the Revolution itself, which is a harder and stranger thing than the pageant admits. The American Revolution was not a birth or a blessing. It was a long, contentious, dangerous argument, carried on for more than a decade, over rights and representation and the limits of authority, conducted for most of that time against a Parliament rather than a king, and waged by people who disagreed bitterly with one another about how far it should go and what it was even for.

It carried a radical edge that the men who led it never wanted. It opened a contest over who would hold power at home that the colonial establishment could not fully control. It exposed fractures between governors and governed, merchants and mechanics, enslavers and the enslaved, landlords and tenants, gentlemen and the ordinary people whose bodies, labor, money, and fury made resistance possible. It was never resolved so much as interrupted, first by a war and then by a constitution written to contain it. The Founding was the settlement. The Revolution was the conflict that the settlement disciplined.

That is the American Revolution. It does not fit on a coin, and it does not make anyone feel good, which is why almost no one running the 250th wants to discuss it.

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Resistance works.

I don’t mean that as a slogan. I mean it as a matter of record. Almost every advance in this country that we now claim as part of who we are was forced into being by ordinary people who broke the rules to …

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