THE MADNESS OF THE AMERICAN REBELLION

You hear a lot here about the madness of King George as an external cause of the American Rebellion.

This is  a different angle entirely.

"Will not posterity be amazed when they are told that the present distraction took its rise from the parliament's taking off a shilling duty on a pound of tea, and imposing three pence, and call it a more unaccountable phrenzy, and more disgraceful to the annals of America, than that of the witchcraft?"

Daniel Leonard

The American rebels were truly mad in something like DK's Greenfeld's sense. They were witchcraft, witch hunt, stark staring mad. 

Let's call it Dostoyevsky Mad. Grand Inquisitor Mad. The Idiot Mad. 

Or simply "Russian Mad". Or just Russian, for short!

Why demand of people like that, most all people, mad as they obviously are, that they then must vote? Go to the polls again and again and again and again? Why? 

Why put that burden, that ultimate responsibility, for their being itself, on them and on no one else, on each of them, individually, as voters?

"...The remedy for the Trump Presidency lies at the polls..." DK  

Yet, as DK points out, and as he says Greenfeld has claimed: That way lies madness!

"An influenze more wonderful, and at the same tome more general that that of the Witchcraft in the Province of Massachuset's Bay in the last Century! The Annals of no country can produce an Instance of so virulent a Rebellion, of such implacable madness and Fury, originating from such trivial Causes, as those alledged by these unhappy People." Ambrose Serle

The colonists repudiated Parliament. They paid mere lip service to the person of the king, not to the British concept of the king in Parliament.

They had, in their minds, no higher authority than themselves, each and all of them, "the people", thus a prescription for Greenfeld Madness which DK refers to.

There are other explanations for the American Rebellion than madness, but why not save them for another time.