Essentially, the patriots were able to mobilize a highly ideological minority to suppress loyalist opinion and keep moderates on the sidelines:
But the mobs went on with their work in spite of [John] Adams’ protest. All through the Revolution the loyalists were roughly handled, banished, and their property confiscated. Even those who were neutral and living quietly were often ordered out of the country by county committees, because it was found that a prominent family which remained neutral deterred by their silent influence many who otherwise would have joined the rebel cause. Few loyalists dared write about politics in private letters, because all such letters were opened by the patriots. In many of them which have been preserved we find the statement that the writers would like to speak of public affairs but dare not. A mere chance of most innocent expression might bring on severe punishment or mob violence.
These mob techniques are not so different from today’s technologically-enabled mobs, except perhaps the old kind were more eager to use tar and feathers.
This is not, then, a new factor in American life, but instead is a founding tendency which we see periodically re-emerging throughout our history. It also meant the ruination of countless loyalists, who either lived on in poverty or otherwise had to flee back to the home country:
The disastrous effects of the rise of the lower orders of the people into power appeared everywhere, leaving its varied and peculiar characteristics in each community, but New England suffered least of all. In Virginia its work was destructive and complete, for all that made Virginia great, and produced her remarkable men, was her aristocracy of tobacco planters. This aristocracy forced on the Revolution with heroic enthusiasm against the will of the lower classes, little dreaming that they were forcing it on to their own destruction. But in 1780 the result was already so obvious that Chastellux, the French traveler, saw it with the utmost clearness, and in his book he prophesies Virginia’s gradual sinking into the insignificance which we have seen in our time.
When the British began to prosecute the war in earnest after the replacement of Howe in 1778 by General Clinton, it was essentially too late to prevent the entry of the French into the war and the eventual conclusion.
Moldbug compares them to black helicopter conspiracy theorists, though I can’t seem to find which post he does it in.
When did America go off the rails? Well, the founding fathers were SJWs, so…
Gordon Tullock’s view in Open Secrets of American Foreign Policy was that the American Revolution was really the French strategic continuation of the the Seven Years War (He called it the true ‘First World War’ with battles between major powers occurring around the globe, the French and Indian War merely being a local theater of operations). The French were the major foreign backer from the very start, first financially, then with armaments, and eventually personnel when Howe was no longer able to throw the game.
Murray Rothbard mostly concurs with this narrative in Conceived in Liberty but puts even more of the blame on a clearly unserious Howe who let Washington get away with repeated incompetence. Rothbard was a huge fan of proto-libertarian General Charles Lee, however, and said he was defamed by several of the other founders.
Moldbug on the Patriots.
He cites Bailyn on the belief among the revolutionaries that Parliament and the Church of England were conspiring to snuff out all non-Anglican worship as well as political liberty.
Ah. I would never have thought to look there. Thanks Ashv.