What We Do
Ours will be an Internet-based revolution. Social media outlets are human creations and therefore flawed. At their best, however, they represent an awesome communication and organizational tool that would have amazed and delighted America’s Founders (since eighteenth century written correspondence could take weeks rather than nanoseconds). We think Ben Franklin would have owned Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook et al.
No one can safeguard and reinvigorate American democracy all by themselves, of course. America’s political challenges are deep-seated, and the defenders of the status quo entrenched. But 21st century America has plenty of brave reformers too, although they are not always as united in the face of the chief threats to our liberty as they should be.
Our intent is to be the pebble that starts a political avalanche.
We will begin by utilizing legal avenues within the political system to reform it. We eschew violence. We hope revolutionary scale reform can be accomplished peacefully. We won’t welcome new members unless they agree not to break any law, even stupid or unjust ones, without asking permission from our headquarters. We believe so strongly in our cause that we are willing to risk a backlash from hate-filled extremists.
We are willing to work with all Americans, including elected politicians who support our aims. But make no mistake. We intend to fundamentally reform the American political system. If the political class opposes us, we will defeat them. And if the system as currently constructed is impervious to reform, we will replace it.
America’s First Declaration of Independence states our rights quite clearly: “…when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”
Immediate Priorities
Speaking of the Declaration of Independence, America’s founding documents were extraordinary for their time. They established a political system that offered freedom on a wider scale than anywhere else in the eighteenth century and contained the seeds that would later germinate and address the moral failures of early America, including slavery, the extermination of native Americans, and gender discrimination.
But as momentous as they were in 1776 and 1789, the Declaration and the Constitution are now ancient. (For those of you born in the 1990s, the Declaration could be your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparent.)
They were written to deal with some threats that no longer exist and are silent on some new, 21st century risks. The Declaration has never been updated and the Constitution only fitfully and incompletely. That must change.
We, the Rabble, claim no unique wisdom or virtue, but someone has to start. To launch our national movement, we have redrafted the Declaration of Independence, which we will be releasing officially soon after this website goes live. It is written in late eighteenth century rhetorical style, so may sound somewhat alien to modern ears, but there are important ideas in our new version, including the conviction that what 21st century Americans need is not independence, but a reinvigorated sense of “mutual dependence.”
Our next step will be to draft a roster of Constitutional amendments representing needed political reforms. To say the obvious, there are plenty of amendment proposals floating around the internet. Where even the good-faith reform efforts fail, however, is by being insufficiently ambitious. A single, or even several, reform amendments would still be inadequate to the putrefaction of the present system.
We must think big. Anyway, it will be easier to ratify multiple reform amendments as a package than fight exhausting individual battles against foes of reform. We’d welcome your feedback and your ideas (but are putting our foot down on proposals to make Spring Break a national holiday.)
