AOC, the American Revolution, and the Billionaires

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, U.S. Representative from New York, is getting dumped on by the right-wing press, and by commentators of various kinds on social media, for claiming, in a discussion at the Chicago Institute of Politics, that the American Revolution was fought against “the billionaires of their time,” meaning against aristocratic and royal elements in British government that American colonials felt oppressed by. Readers of this blog and my books will know that I see such characterizations as naive, given the overwhelming degree to which the Revolution was led by upscale Americans who were resisting what they felt were British obstructions to their own efforts to consolidate wealth, monopolize resources and finance, and to become the billionaires of their time, but what’s interesting to me is that the responses that reject Ocasio-Cortez’s claim are more simplistic than the claim itself. I think that says a lot about the crapper that our debates about history and current politics are being flushed down, in this, the grand semiquincentennial year of our independence from Great Britain.

What’s notable to me about AOC’s capsule description of the Revolution is that it’s more or less what I thought, when I was watching the Disney adaptation of “Johnny Tremain” on TV in the early 1960’s, and indeed when reading the 1944 Newbery Medal book by Esther Forbes that the adaptation was based on. What I learned then was that the American Revolution involved an alliance of standup artisanal working people and enlightened members of the merchant and professional classes, joined in opposition to a rich, effete, necrotic, corrupt, malevolent, coddled, lazy, ignorant, militaristic British and Loyalist aristocracy bent on the suppression of freedom and opportunity.