Politics & Power Quote by Robert Trout

Trout’s line is a provocation dressed up as a clarification: the Revolution, he suggests, wasn’t simply a colonial revolt against taxes and kings, but a deeper rejection of the very English liberal software many people assume powered it. The sting is in “in fact,” a journalist’s knife-twist implying the standard civics-story is complacent or naive. If Locke is typically cast as the patron saint of natural rights and legitimate government, Trout flips the script, casting Lockean rationalism and utilitarian calculation as the enemy rather than the fuel.

The move works because it targets an American habit: treating the Revolution as an export of English Enlightenment thought, just applied more bravely across the Atlantic. Trout’s subtext is that the American founding was less “English principles, upgraded” and more a messy act of cultural severance. He’s nudging readers to see the Revolution as resisting reduction to neat, measurable interests (utilitarianism) or abstract contractualism (Locke), and instead rooted in older, more stubborn claims: local autonomy, inherited political practice, religious moral frameworks, and a suspicion of metropolitan “reasonableness” that often functioned as a mask for control.

Context matters: as a mid-century broadcast journalist, Trout lived through eras when “freedom” was constantly being narrated against rival ideologies. Recasting the Revolution as anti-Locke is also a warning about intellectual genealogy: nations tell comforting origin stories, and those stories can be selectively curated to justify whatever version of “liberty” is currently in fashion. Trout is essentially arguing over who gets to own the American idea.