[August 30, 2026] Matthew Continetti’s piece “Inoculated Against Tyranny” is worth reading and thinking about. He says the American Revolution did not turn into a slaughterhouse because the men who made it built walls around power and left room for God. That is not a small claim. It is the difference between a country that still stands and countries that ate their own children.
The American fight was not the same animal as the French or the Russian one. Our people were English by blood and habit. They already knew self-rule in their towns. They hated taxes they did not vote on. Their churches taught that a man answers first to God, not to a king or a committee.
Edmund Burke saw it in 1775. He told Parliament the colonists loved liberty the English way, that three thousand miles of ocean made tight control impossible, and that their religion was “the dissidence of dissent.” He was describing a people who would not be herded.
That same spirit later made American conservatives reject the French Revolution and the Bolshevik one. Alexander Hamilton called the French upheaval a “disgusting spectacle.” He did not mince words. The Jacobins tore down the Church, invented a new calendar, and put a statue of the Goddess of Reason in Notre-Dame.
Hamilton said they were running “a conspiracy to establish Atheism on the ruins of Christianity.” He believed morality falls when religion falls. George Washington said the same thing in his Farewell Address: “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” Those are not pretty words for a holiday speech. They are a warning.
Whittaker Chambers put it even plainer in Witness. Communism, he wrote, is “the vision of Man without God.” It is the old whisper from the Garden: “Ye shall be as gods.” Once a man believes he can remake the world by force, he starts treating other men as clay. That is how you get the Terror and the Gulag.
Burke saw it coming. “Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere,” he wrote, “and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.” If people will not govern themselves, a tyrant will do it for them.
The American answer was to split power so no one man or one mob could grab it all. John Quincy Adams said it cleanly: divide your power so your rights never hang on the will of any single person or body.
The Constitution does that two ways. It splits power sideways among the three branches, and it splits power up and down between Washington and the states. The First Amendment keeps the government out of the church and the church free to speak. That is not an accident. It is the inoculation against potential tyranny.
I have seen what happens when those guardrails are kicked aside. In Iraq we watched men who thought they could invent a new order overnight. They ended up with militias, mass graves, and a dam that could have drowned a city if it failed. Power concentrated in one place and the result was blood. The Founders had already lived through enough of that in Europe. They did not want a repeat.
Some folks today act like the Constitution is an old fence that needs tearing down so they can build something “fairer.” Continetti calls them “Lulu Lenins.” They talk about equity and climate and speech they do not like. What they really want is a shorter path to the center of power. The Constitution is in their way, and they know it.
That is why the 250th anniversary still matters. We are not celebrating a perfect people. We are celebrating a system that assumed people are not perfect. Madison wrote that if men were angels, no government would be necessary. They are not angels. So we built a machine that makes it hard for any one group to become the new king.
I grew up in a house where the Constitution was not a piece of old paper. It was the reason a boy from a railroad town could enlist as a private and leave as a general without asking permission from a party boss. It was the reason churches could still preach and families could still raise their own children. Those things are not automatic. They last only as long as people remember why they were put there.
Continetti is right. The American Revolution was inoculated against tyranny at the start. Religion supplied the inner control. Divided power supplied the outer one. Take either away and the fever comes back. We have seen it in other countries. We do not have to see it here.
The job now is the same as it was in 1787: keep the walls up, keep the faith, and do not hand the keys to people who think they are smarter than the men who wrote the document. That is not nostalgia. That is just paying attention.
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Gen. Satterfield’s article gets it right about what stopped the American Revolution from turning into a slaughter like the French one. Our folks already knew how to run their own towns and they answered to God before any king. Burke saw that spirit early and Hamilton did not mince words when he called the Jacobins a conspiracy to wreck Christianity. Washington and Chambers both said you cannot keep national morals if you throw religion out. Splitting power in the Constitution was the other half of the shot that kept tyranny from taking hold. Your Iraq example shows what happens when one bunch grabs all the power overnight and the graves start filling up. People who talk about tearing down those old walls for something they call fairer just want a quicker path to the center. The 250th is a good time to remember we built a system for imperfect men, not angels. Keep the faith and the fences up or that same fever comes back.