1. There are two possible readings for the American Revolution: either it was a matter of sincere, but politically incompetent idealists blundering their way into civil war or it was a matter of men who had settled on rebellion from the start taking every opportunity to deliberately escalate the situation (or, most likely, a combination of both).

The one reading that cannot hold water is the standard narrative of politically savvy geniuses genuinely trying everything in their power to avoid revolution, but forced into it by the obstinacy and injustice of the ruling government. The events simply do not support that.

2. Personally, I like Hamilton much more than I like Jefferson, but I much prefer Jefferson’s vision of the country – local governments, predominantly rural – to Hamilton’s – strong central government, heavily urbanized, with a finance and industry-based economy.

The issue, I think, is that Jefferson wants an aristocratic culture, but hates aristocratic authority. Hamilton understood that a republican form of government necessarily draws power to the financial class and so wanted to incorporate that into the federal government. So, Hamilton’s goals are realistic, while Jefferson wants to both have his cake and eat it.

3. In all societies, what counts most is always the quality of the people, especially those in the ruling class. How involved the general populace is matters very little, except for the purposes of calming dissent and in the fact that it tends to decrease the quality of the ruling class.

4. To say that a particular group needs the vote is to say that their political interests are distinct from another group and the community as a whole. Voting rights formalize group divisions.

5. Some of the channels I follow were posting clips of an interview Sydney Sweeney gave recently. I’ve not really paid much attention to her and haven’t seen her act in anything, but my immediate thought watching these clips was that this is a very intelligent and calculating young woman. Not only does she do an excellent job of navigating the interviewer’s attempts to trap he, but it’s pretty obvious that she’s anticipated most of these questions and carefully weighed the sort of responses that will help her career. Namely, to avoid at all costs looking like another out-of-touch celebrity trying to use their fame to ‘change the world.’

In case there’s any confusion, I have no idea what her actual views are and I don’t care (I suspect they’re along the lines of “money, power, fame + me = good”), but I like the strategic cunning that I’m seeing.

6. I think there has been a generation or so of people who grew up with aspirations to ‘change the world,’ whose ambition took the form of being the next MLK or Woodward and Bernstein, leading anyone who gains any attention to try to ‘use that for good’ by bandwagoning onto whatever the current thing might be.

Miss Sweeney, it seems, is Machiavellian enough to avoid that. She seems to have said “I want a career,” and to be playing all her cards toward that end. She knows what her advantages are – looks and an aura of ‘normality’ – and she deploys them with strategic skill. A less intelligent woman would dive into the controversy and try to appeal to what she judges to be the more important side. Miss Sweeney, instead, recognized that the best possible answer, in today’s culture, is to shrug and move on. She knows there’s a large market of people who hate when celebrities talk down to them, so she aims to appeal to that side.

Another example: she co-starred in Madam Web, a terrible movie that everyone on the set must have known was going to flop. It could have seriously damaged her career…except that she took the opportunity to roast the film online and wore an ultra-low-cut dress to the premier, meaning that everyone who talked about the film also talked about her. She was clever enough to see that the film was so bad it would be talked about, so she positioned herself to be part of the conversation in a comparatively positive way (“The movie sucked, but she sure is hot…”). Therefore she comes to more people’s attention without being tainted by the film’s quality.

Again, I bring it up because I think that illustrates a valuable skill; the ability to assess both the field and your own assets in order to maximize your advantage. It’s impressive once you start noticing it.

7. Much of modern culture is self-consciously imitating the past without having anything worthwhile of our own to add.