Sez James Taranto—
The New Royalism
Our erstwhile colleague Ira Stoll notes this jaw-dropping passage from an article in The New Yorker:
In 1974, the historian David Ammerman wrote that it is obvious in retrospect that America wasn’t going to play second fiddle in the British Empire indefinitely. “What is not so clear,” Ammerman continued, “is that the pursuit of equality need have included violence or that the equality sought necessitated independence.” Spend a little time with the venality, misinformation, hysteria, and violence that led up to the Revolution, and the picture becomes murkier. As Breen notes, “No evidence survives showing that the king or his ministers contemplated a complex plan to destroy American rights,” yet a significant proportion of the American populace became convinced that this was the case.
As Stoll writes, the magazine “is so set against the modern American ‘Tea Party’ movement that it has gone so far as to come out against the original American Revolution, as well.” Remember when Steny Pelosi and Nancy Hoyer called Tea Party activists “un-American”? The New Yorker’s calling itself “un-American” is surely more accurate as a descriptive matter, but it seems equally unlikely to win people over.
More here.
