I recently saw an article published in a legacy outlet, linking the current violent crackdown on the citizenry, by the lawless federal paramilitary known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to the British military response to the resistance in Boston in the 1770’s. I saw another article, also published in a legacy outlet, linking Alex Pretti’s decision to carry a gun to a protest, where ICE agents killed him, to the intentions of our national founders regarding essential liberties. Both of these callbacks to the U.S. founding period are steeped in a drastic, revealing error that I think matters.
The protesters are not like Bostonian resisters, ICE oppression not a revived “Lobsterback” occupation. Modern gun rights do not fulfill a founding intention to enable us to resist the tyrannical intent of those who are now deploying ICE on our streets. The error emerges not from seeing Trump’s use of ICE against the people as tyrannical—it obviously is—but from troping back to the nation’s founding in a mood of nationalistic fantasy that makes us, at best, collectively stupider than we should be, at worst less genuinely resistant to oppression.
Not that the authors of these articles are themselves stupid. They’re just bedazzled by sentiment.
The first is by Ted Widmer, who has had a long and successful career in both academia and government: Clinton speechwriter, doctorate in lit, history prof, Library of Congress, etc., etc.. His article, which ran in The Boston Globe, is headlined:
Boston in the 1770s. Minneapolis in 2026. Our current leaders have forgotten that the essence of America entails resistance to heavy-handed occupation.
Writers rarely do headlines, but that one pretty neatly sums up the point Widmer wants to make. His idea—far from unfamiliar—is that we were born, as a people, in a resistance, concentrated in Boston, to a tyranny; those origins, a kind of DNA, now determine public behavior in response to a return, in the form of Trumpist authoritarianism, of the very forces that we came into being to fight.
In the end, of course, we overturned those forces in a revolution. So the analogy works fine—if you’re Stephen Miller.