The Fourth of July Lesson Putin Still Hasn’t Learned

By Steve Richards
With assistance form ChatGPT

Thomas Paine’s warning still echoes: autocracy’s great weakness is not only cruelty. It is blindness.
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On the Fourth of July, Americans celebrate independence from a king who believed distant power could command a free people into submission. That mistake cost Britain its colonies. Two and a half centuries later, Vladimir Putin is making a remarkably similar mistake in Ukraine.
 
The American Revolution was not simply a protest against taxes. It was a revolt against autocratic rule — against a monarch who claimed authority over people whose lives he did not understand, whose grievances he ignored, and whose consent he did not need.
 
Thomas Paine understood the deeper problem. In Common Sense, he argued that monarchy does not merely give one man too much power. It also isolates him from the truth. A king is surrounded by courtiers, flatterers, and fearful subordinates. He hears what others think he wants to hear. The more absolute the ruler, the less likely he is to know what is actually happening.
 
That was the fatal blindness of King George III. He mistook the American colonies for disobedient dependents rather than a people discovering their own nationhood. He believed force would restore obedience. Instead, force clarified the moral issue. The more Britain tried to dominate America, the more Americans understood independence as not only practical, but necessary.
 
Putin’s war against Ukraine follows the same autocratic pattern. He appears to have believed Ukraine was not truly a nation, that its people would fold quickly, and that Russian power could erase Ukrainian identity. He confused military strength with legitimacy. He mistook fear for loyalty. And he badly underestimated what free people will endure when their homeland is at stake.
 
That is why Ukraine’s struggle should resonate so deeply with Americans on July 4th. Ukraine is fighting the same fundamental claim our founders rejected: that a larger power has the right to decide the fate of a smaller people. Russia calls Ukrainian resistance extremism, Western manipulation, or historical betrayal. Britain said much the same about the American colonies. Empires always have a vocabulary for denying the obvious.
 
The people themselves know better. Ukrainians know their churches, homes, language, families, graves, and future are not bargaining chips on an imperial map. They are the living substance of national freedom.
 
That is the deeper Fourth of July lesson. America’s founders did not merely reject King George. They rejected a system in which power could be insulated from truth, law, and accountability. Their answer was not another strongman. It was constitutional government — imperfect, contested, often frustrating, but built on the idea that no leader is above the people or the law.
 
There is a lesson for modern America here too. The danger of autocracy does not begin only when tanks roll across a border. It begins when leaders stop listening, when loyalty becomes more valued than truth, when institutions are treated as obstacles, and when citizens are encouraged to confuse grievance with patriotism.
 
Autocracy’s great weakness is not only cruelty. It is blindness. A free society’s great strength is not only liberty. It is the ability to speak the truth before disaster becomes inevitable.
 
That is what July 4th asks us to remember — and what Ukraine is reminding the world in blood.