Houdini, I agree with you about needing a new narrative about the place we call America. Its important for normies to be able to identify with lefty ideas. One of the great successes of the Communist Party of China was to make Marxism understandable and relatable to normal Chinese people in the 1920s. One master of this was Li Lisan, a rival to Mao and an early leader of the party.
When he was teaching coal miners, he dressed like a traditional intellectual and spoke about Marx and Marxism in a way that related to the culturally dominant schools of philosophy – Confucianism and Daoism. By connecting Marx to Chinese norms, he was able to recruit a lot of coal miners to his cause. You can read about this in Elizabeth Perry's book, Anyuan, which discusses Li's early years as a labor organizer in Chinese coal mines. You should be able to find the PDF online at the usual places.
In the American context, when you talk about the American Revolutionn, one thing that I think could be interesting for you is the idea of popular sovereignty. This is an idea that became popular after the Revolutionary War as people were thinking about how to legitimate the new government when there wasn't a king anymore as the source of absolute power. In a way, I see the armed uprisings of the 1960s, even in black and brown communities as a continuation of this tradition.
>"Throughout American history, the idea that it could be legitimate and justified for groups of citizens to take up arms against the government was not at all unusual. Such ideas date back to the birth of the United States through the American Revolution against the rule of the British sovereign, King George III. As the legal historian Christian G. Fritz details in his book American Sovereigns: The People and America’s Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War (2008), even after the drafting of the federal Constitution, a significant portion of the American public believed that the ultimate source of the law was the people at large. The genuinely revolutionary character of this idea shouldn’t be underrated. In colonial America the sovereign, or ultimate source of the law, had been the monarch seated at the Court of St. James in London. The king stood above the law, and the government ruled in his name – hence “His Majesty’s government.” After the American Revolution, the drafters of the new republic’s highest laws fixed this same sovereignty in the people – hence the famous opening sentence of the Constitution:
Houdini, I agree with you about needing a new narrative about the place we call America. Its important for normies to be able to identify with lefty ideas. One of the great successes of the Communist Party of China was to make Marxism understandable and relatable to normal Chinese people in the 1920s. One master of this was Li Lisan, a rival to Mao and an early leader of the party.
When he was teaching coal miners, he dressed like a traditional intellectual and spoke about Marx and Marxism in a way that related to the culturally dominant schools of philosophy – Confucianism and Daoism. By connecting Marx to Chinese norms, he was able to recruit a lot of coal miners to his cause. You can read about this in Elizabeth Perry's book, Anyuan, which discusses Li's early years as a labor organizer in Chinese coal mines. You should be able to find the PDF online at the usual places.
In the American context, when you talk about the American Revolutionn, one thing that I think could be interesting for you is the idea of popular sovereignty. This is an idea that became popular after the Revolutionary War as people were thinking about how to legitimate the new government when there wasn't a king anymore as the source of absolute power. In a way, I see the armed uprisings of the 1960s, even in black and brown communities as a continuation of this tradition.
>Throughout American history, the idea that it could be legitimate and justified for groups of citizens to take up arms against the government was not at all unusual. Such ideas date back to the birth of the United States through the American Revolution against the rule of the British sovereign, King George III. As the legal historian Christian G. Fritz details in his book American Sovereigns: The People and America’s Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War (2008), even after the drafting of the federal Constitution, a significant portion of the American public believed that the ultimate source of the law was the people at large. >The genuinely revolutionary character of this idea shouldn’t be underrated. In colonial America the sovereign, or ultimate source of the law, had been the monarch seated at the Court of St. James in London. The king stood above the law, and the government ruled in his name – hence “His Majesty’s government.” After the American Revolution, the drafters of the new republic’s highest laws fixed this same sovereignty in the people – hence the famous opening sentence of the Constitution:> > We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. >>Even today, the idea of the people as sovereign is an important part of the American legal system. For example, in California, criminal prosecutions are carried out in the name of the “People of the State of California,” by the deputies of an elected Attorney General. In the United Kingdom, by contrast, prosecutions are carried out by the Crown Prosecution Service in the name of the Sovereign, e.g. “Rex [The King] vs Smith.” As not only Fritz but various other historians demonstrate, the ideology and rhetoric of popular sovereignty were present, often quite explicitly, in many political struggles that defined the early republic – much of the time, to justify taking arms against an unfair social order. Such disparate movements as Shays’ Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, and even the most radical wing of the early socialistic land reform movements were suffused with the idea that ultimate political and legal legitimacy lay directly with the will of the people, unmediated by whatever political structures happened at any given moment to already exist."
https://archive.is/uPqvbhttps://strangematters.coop/the-double-counterinsurgency-gun-rights-popular-sovereignty/(the original link has access to the footnotes, which also have some good context and might be useful for you)
The article goes into great detail about the narrative of popular sovereignty, including its problematic origins in the white colonial culture, but also a lot of information about how it influenced left wing struggles, including those of non-white people.
I'm curious what you'll think about it.