Politics & Power Quote by Robert Trout

It is a deliberately provocative reversal of one of America’s favorite origin stories: that the Republic sprang cleanly from Locke’s liberal toolkit of natural rights, consent, and property. Trout’s move isn’t to “add another influence” so much as to suggest a cover-up. The loaded phrasing - “could only have been maintained” - treats the Lockean narrative as a fragile construction, one that survives not because it’s true, but because inconvenient intellectual lineage has been edited out.

Leibniz is the tell. Invoking him signals a different founding temperament: systems over slogans, a more technocratic faith in institutions, harmonies, and design. Whether or not Leibniz directly shaped the founders as strongly as Trout implies, the rhetorical play is clear: if Locke stands for the individual and the marketplace, Leibniz becomes a cipher for statecraft, science, and coordinated national ambition. Trout is really arguing about what kind of country America imagines itself to be. If you can make the founding “Lockean,” you can naturalize a particular politics: minimal government, property-first liberty, a suspiciousness of collective projects. If you can show that story was curated, you unfreeze the ideology.

The context fits a 20th-century journalist’s sensibility: skepticism toward textbook myths, attention to who controls the archive, impatience with “neutral” history that just happens to flatter the status quo. “Suppressed” is doing heavy lifting - it casts historians and institutions as gatekeepers, not mere chroniclers, and asks the reader to treat national memory as contested terrain rather than inherited fact.