Americans today are learning deeper appreciation of Tom Paine’s famous words about “times that try men’s souls.” Agreed, but I prefer the words of that Indonesian man who told NPR that when he saw the great tsunami of 2004 coming, “I told myself I must keep my eyes wide open, for I’m having a rich experience.”

It would be hard to find a richer experience than living through our fourth American revolution. Yes, we’ve faced revolutionary situations four times now. We initiated two of them; in two others we defended against insurrectionists bent on destroying our nation. Three times we’ve prevailed, and soon we’ll prevail a fourth. It’s always helpful to know your situation in full perspective. Historians write about revolutions as if they were exclusively political events, but gaining and keeping political freedom is only half the story. Always, always, constraints on economic freedom are also involved. Remember this: You cannot be politically free if you lack the freeing assurance of economic adequacy. Anyone forced to choose between food, shelter or medicine is not free. Our Constitution calls for more perfect union, but it won’t happen while we allow poverty and gross inequality to exist. And that, friend, is our mutual problem to fix.

Our first revolution, when we took the initiative to gain Independence, pitted our Founding Mothers, Soldiers and Fathers against their Loyalist next-door neighbors in addition to the British military. Loyalists wanted to remain subservient to a rich British monarch and parliament determined to continue enriching themselves at the expense of their American subjects. Their method was to import cheap raw materials from “those primitive colonists,” then sell finished goods back to them at prices jacked-up enough to ensure they stayed poor and couldn’t make trouble. The Americans made good trouble anyway, and their neighbors who preferred King George moved to Canada. The starkly differing values of revolutionaries, Loyalists, king and Parliament were plain for all to see.

Our second revolution is called the Civil War. The insurrectionists were wealthy southern plantation lords determined to keep their slave-based economy forever. It enabled them to dress well, eat well, live in mansions and keep on getting richer by paying their rag-clad sunup-to-sundown laborers no wages—nothing at all—as some big retail employers clearly would love to do again if they thought they could get by with it. And if the slaves objected there was always the whip and the auction. After the southern dis-unionists lost the war they denied they’d lost it, did not go to Canada, and have opposed progressive efforts toward more perfect union ever since. After Sherman’s regrettably incomplete march through Georgia, they rebuilt Old Dixie’s feudal social structure by switching to share-crop tenant farming, which served them almost as well as slavery and still does in some areas. Dixiecrats clearly did not share the values of real Americans who had fought the British to gain political and economic freedom and now fought under Lincoln’s Union banner to extend both freedoms to all Americans.

The third American revolution—again an initiative—happened when Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration introduced the New Deal into American life. For the first time in U.S. history, someone actually had the moxie to stand up and attack the root economic causes that had continually produced boom-and-bust panics, recessions and depressions—one about every twelve years on average, year after year after decade after century—always robbing people of their savings, homes and farms, throwing them into poverty time and again. Faced with the capitalist economy’s collapse brought on by insane stock gambling, followed by economic depression so ferocious it threatened to impoverish and collapse the entire nation, Roosevelt’s New Deal revolutionaries tried something new.

I love FDR’s unofficial motto: Try something; if it doesn’t work abandon it and try something else. New Dealers took him at his word, and through the 1930s tried many new things that worked. For the first time ever, Americans gained some genuine economic security and peace of mind thanks to innovations like Social Security, and worker protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Government of-, by- and for-the-people was actually helping people. The difference between the selfish values of money-grubbing Wall Street speculators who caused the problem, and the caring, community values of those true revolutionaries who fixed it, were stark for all to see. Sadly, those who saw are mostly gone now, there’s almost nobody left who remembers, and today we’re living through a new rich experience.

In this Fourth American Revolution (it’s an insurrection again) our task is to throw out a kakistocracy (“rule by the weirdest and worst”) that we passively, inattentively, stupidly, allowed to take over our government. Like those old slaveholders, robber barons and greedy King George—and goaded on by insatiable anarchist billionaires—these latest throwbacks are busy vandalizing a century’s hard-won political and economic reforms we put in place to protect good citizens from self servers who value power and wealth gained only at other people’s expense. Led by a barely-literate bully lacking the class of a decent dogcatcher, and with tactics reminiscent of Bolsheviks and Nazis [go read up on how Lenin and Hitler took over], these bizarre amateurs actually want to overthrow our democracy and take over.

And as their lot always do, they’ve attracted minions bright and dull who do their bidding and of course vote against their own best interest. Easily distracted, most were lured in via non-resolvable issues like abortion, immigration, gun control, gay rights, phony machismo—it’s a long list. Hot-button emotional issues stoked by kakistocrat lackies are real good at distracting attention away while the super-rich warp our economy, sending all wealth to themselves first so they control whether to let any of it trickle down. These latter-day Loyalists, backward-lookers all, yearn to restore George III—a Nixon-McCarthy-Benedict Arnold hybrid—by trashing the moral good works created by our extremely few truly great presidents: Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Johnson. In such circumstances, loyal Americans’ job is to defend and restore FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society, not to mention comparable good laws we’ve yet to enact to HELP people—to fairly share our colossal national wealth, sanctify our democracy and our Constitution, make a more perfect union greater still—and then keep it that way. Thus, especially keeping an eye on people’s values, shall we maintain and intensify our moral opposition until we prevail.

In mid-2025, the contest is well joined. When they inevitably lose this fourth revolution, the reactionaries won’t be able to flee to Canada because thoroughly disgusted Canadians are beyond accepting any more crazy, undependable, USA-style Americans into their nice democratic, economically-rational North American nation. Therefore, we here in the States had better start learning to behave with more civility toward each other and work out our heated arguments that increasingly are upsetting the entire world’s civilized structures, both political and economic, as well as our own. It begins with values.

Which do you and your neighbor value: self serving or helping others? Do you prefer that everybody attain more knowledge, understanding, maybe some wisdom, or to cut funding for education? Would you like to privatize the people-helping Social Security system, putting its big trust fund at the mercy of incurably greedy Wall Street stock manipulators, or might we perhaps opt to double or quintuple taxes on billionaires and giant corporations, thereby quickly putting Social Security on unquestionably sound fiscal footing? Why don’t we also build a new Ellis Island as single-point entry for legal (which actually means “legal”) immigration? Maybe, then, nice non-native folks who understandably hope to live in the world’s foremost land of opportunity, alabaster cities and rule-by-law will not be incentivized to break the law as their first, best option for entering it. A new Ellis Island might even tamp down this out-of-control, insanely costly, brutally barbarian enforcement on our sieve-like borders. While we’re at it, I suggest we pack the Court so thirteen justices will include a majority who possess ethical values.

As we’re arguing over details, unnoticing how our national wealth leans ever more to the rich and gets leaner for everybody else, we should be recalling how well Frederick Douglass nailed our real problem: “The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful and virtuous.” If our life purpose is to love one another as unconditionally as God loves us—AND IT IS—we must rise above “reactionaries versus progressives” and be one people pursuing one great purpose. Each revolution makes us stronger, renews our status as the world’s first-ever true and lasting democracy, refreshes our ideals of economic adequacy, political equality—and self governance, which we almost have sense enough to do. I think our Fifth American Revolution should focus on values:  things like being content with “enough”; like helping all who need help; like attaining knowledge and wisdom; and—beginning in first grade—lifelong teaching of civic, community, cooperative values. What a novel enriching experience that would be.