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Bacon’s Rebellion and the Great Distraction: Why elites keep teaching the wrong lesson from America’s first crisis
Bacon’s Rebellion and the Great Distraction: Why elites keep teaching the wrong lesson from America’s first crisis
(Croaky Caiman) - America’s first great political crisis did not begin with ideology.
It began with loss of legitimacy.
In 1676, Jamestown burned — not because colonists had discovered revolutionary theory, but because a governing elite had grown distant, incompetent, and self-protective. The government failed at the only thing that ultimately justifies authority: protecting the people and maintaining order.
That moment — Bacon’s Rebellion — is routinely misunderstood. It’s not an origin story for commie loving class warfare tropes as is often its only use in most discourse. It’s a warning about what happens when elites abandon responsibility and then attempt to manage the consequences with narrative instead of reform.
What Actually Terrified the Elites
The danger wasn’t that the lower orders were angry.
Anger is always manageable.
The danger was that grievances stopped sorting neatly.
Frontier communities experienced real insecurity amid widening conflict and raids; Bacon’s followers publicly charged that Berkeley’s government had…