Writes Freddie in an otherwise decent article:

“[T]his is a country born out of violent revolution by men at the absolute vanguard of left-wing philosophy for their times.”

Freddie usually takes care with words. This bit is uncharacteristically sloppy. Perhaps that's the point, to rile folks up? Anyway.

Much of the revolution's foundational rhetoric evinced vivid egalitarianism, but was the struggle’s animating philosophy “left-wing” in any meaningful sense? Perhaps, when he says “left-wing,” Freddie simply means republican, anti-royalist, and (sort of) secular. In that case, America was at the forefront of international leftism in its struggle against the Central Powers. (And anyway, the Romans who overthrew the Etruscans were anti-royalist republicans. Were they "at the absolute vanguard of left-wing philosophy for their times"?)

The revolution had its share of radical democratic cosmopolitans, sure. But for every Tom Paine there was a slave-owning aristocratic quasi-feudalist. Or a bourgeois monarchist in the mold of Hamilton.

Seems to me—and here I know I’m getting away from Freddie’s point—that the driving force behind the revolution was nationalism. There emerged in the thirteen colonies a patriotic sensibility. Home was no longer Britain but America (or Virginia, Massachusetts, whatever). Most partisans fought not out of any commitment to political or economic leveling, but because they were sick of some distant king dispatching goons to thieve their hard-earned pennies and impose arbitrary laws from afar. (Eventually, and soon in some circumstacnes, these impulses coalesced into a general governing philosophy that put a premium on liberty and constitutionalism, with the narrative flourishes coming much later.)

The revolution, for all its liberal trappings, was not an ideological affair, which is why there was a minimum of internecine brutality between patriots and tories. This imagining—pragmatic, nationalistic, and vaguely localist—cuts against both the conceptions of both the left and the right. The spirit of 1776 was neither egalitarian nor libertarian. It was nationalistic. (Which should really make Freddie happy, since his "ultra-leftism" depends upon group consciousness and solidarity and the centralizing impulse to succeed.)

The outcome produced greater equality for a few. Certainly, white males of means witnessed an increase in their political rights and liberties, though in many senses it was not a dramatic expansion. And for blacks, the greatest single oppressed minority in American history, the success of the revolution likely prolonged their bondage. The struggle against Britain was in that sense reactionary, or stereotypically "right-wing."