From Kevin Williamson at National Review, The Anglo-Americans:

Hannan, too, is kind of populist, a leading figure in a populist political campaign. An American friend sent him a note during the referendum that read: “We voted ‘Leave’ in 1776, and it worked out okay.” There is something to that. My colleague Rick Brookhiser gave a talk the next evening at Mount Vernon, and he spent some time on the more important difference between George Washington’s revolution and the French one that Thomas Jefferson and his party so admired. The American patriots, like Hannan’s colleagues in Brexit, were not fighting for something new so much as they were fighting for something old, something that had been lost, “something precious,” as Brookhiser put it. The American revolutionaries were mainly republicans, but they were not motivated mainly by anti-monarchism. Most of them would have been content with an English king if that English king had respected their rights as Englishmen. What they detected under the government of King George III was an apparatus of oppression and a design for the same. It was a revolution that was simultaneously a restoration.

HKO

Understanding the differences between the French and American Revolutions is critical to appreciating the Constitution

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