Krehbiel Commentary

Last night, I watched some of the History Channel's series The Revolution. It was interesting to me because, much to my chagrin, I had previously not known much about the American Revolution. I noticed something odd though, when viewed through modern eyes: America was basically founded by liberals. That's a fairly counter-intuitive concept. The popular meme today is that liberals are "destroying America," "anti-American," etc. while conservatives are "protecting American values," etc. etc. Now I'm sure that liberalism was different in the 1700s than it is today, but the Patriots were definitely liberals in the sense that they were fighting for expanded civil liberties (for white male land-owners, at least), which is also one of the talking points of modern liberals. Even more surprising is that the Patriots were militant liberals. That's a concept you don't see much from today's left. Well, except from the angry liberal bloggers, of course. :)