Coming projects from Larry Dudley

Current Projects:

IN THE MINDS OF THE PEOPLE: America's New Quiet Revolution

"What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760-1775, in the course of fifteen years, before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington—

John Adam, in a letter to his old revolutionary comrade, Thomas Jefferson, August 24th, 1815.

America today is as badly divided as any time since the Civil War, and what is frightening is that our divisions are actually approaching that dangerous shooting-war level.

The natural instinct is to think liberals and progressives must find a way to defeat the right-wing forces that are destroying our country. That is mistaken. Liberals and progressives will not restore the America we once knew by attempting to vanquish heir opponents in the country we have today, but instead will prevail by transforming American into a country they can win in, or perhaps better put, back into the America we once knew.

Liberals and progressives think they are getting badly beaten on messaging by the right-wing communications machine.

They are not communicating well, but the real problem is that liberals and progressives often do not know what to be effective about The "communications failure" stems in part from a failure to understand what they really stand for, what the country really stands for, and where those values come from.

Fortunately, liberals and progressives have history on their side. They can find everything they need to unite and restore America in the language and ideals used by America's first and greatest generation of revolutionaries— indeed, they cannot do it without that. The failure to understand their origins in the Revolution, and see it as the first true people's revolution, is a large part of the modern liberal and progressive failure. As Bill Clinton famously said, "everything that is wrong with America can be fixed with what is right with America," and that begins with our revolutionary heritage.

    We believe the revolution began at Lexington and Concord, but as John Adams, who lived through it all, helped make it happen, and probably understood its true nature as well as anyone ever did, explained in the quote above, the real revolution was a quiet revolution that began years before the shooting war started.

    America needs a new quiet revolution today, just like the one John Adams wrote about, one based on our original, irreplacable liberal and progressive values that created and defiined our country.

    Above all, liberals and progressives must not allow the right-wing and its backers to hijack America's revolutionary heritage and distort it into something that it was not.   As George Orwell said, "He who owns the past, owns the future."

America, from the very beginning, was a liberal and progressive project, and modern liberals and progressives must embrace and take ownership of our common revolutionary heritage. There is an old saying that the way to find common ground is to move to higher ground.   That higher ground is America's revolutionary heritage, and it is by moving to that higher ground that we will unite and restore our badly fractured country.