Ken Burns’ The American Revolution reminds us that the struggles shaping the nation’s birth are not distant episodes but recurring chapters of the same unfinished story. Three forces—slavery, resistance to autocratic rule, and internal conflict among Americans—defined the revolution of the eighteenth century, reemerged in the Civil War of the nineteenth, and again animate the turbulence of our own age. What emerges is a powerful through line: the American people repeatedly rise against forms of domination, whether imposed by a distant monarch, a planter aristocracy, or a modern political movement committed to concentrating power. That tradition should inform and motivate our present resistance.

The first American Revolution unfolded amid the profound contradiction of slavery. While the colonists resisted King George III as a tyrant infringing on their liberties, many simultaneously upheld a system that denied liberty to enslaved African Americans. Both sides in the conflict sought advantage by exploiting the aspirations of the enslaved—British commanders promising freedom to runaways, colonists invoking liberty while withholding it. This hypocrisy did not merely shadow the revolution; it was embedded in the logic of its struggle. Even as Americans rejected monarchical autocracy, they maintained a racial autocracy at home.

The theme of resistance to concentrated, unaccountable power would return with even greater force in the 1860s. The Civil War was not only a conflict over slavery—it was also a revolt against the autocratic rule of the Southern planter class, a small elite whose political and economic dominance sought to dictate the future of the entire nation. The Confederacy cloaked its rebellion in the language of states’ rights, but at its core lay a system in which a minority held absolute authority over millions of enslaved people. The Union’s refusal to accept that autocracy as the basis of national life was a second great American uprising.

Today, the same pattern resurfaces. While slavery has been abolished for more than 150 years, the rights of African Americans and other minorities remain central battlegrounds in our political life. Voting rights, educational equity, criminal justice, immigration, and representation are all sites where racial hierarchy is either challenged or defended. At the same time, a new form of autocratic ambition has emerged in the modern MAGA movement—marked by attacks on democratic institutions, efforts to undermine electoral legitimacy, intimidation of dissent, and the elevation of a single leader above constitutional norms. This movement echoes the impulses Americans opposed in earlier eras: the tyranny of a monarch, the domination of a planter aristocracy, the attempt to centralize power in the hands of the few.

Seen through this historical lens, the United States today faces what may be called a “third American civil war”—a profound struggle over who holds power, whose rights are protected, and what kind of nation we intend to be. And just as in the Revolution and the Civil War, resistance to autocracy is once again the defining moral and political imperative.

History teaches that Americans have repeatedly rejected systems of domination—whether imposed by a king, defended by slaveholders, or advanced by a contemporary movement that seeks to erode democratic governance. That tradition of resistance is not a relic; it is a responsibility. It must inform and inspire our present rebellion against authoritarian threats. The stakes are nothing less than whether the ideals first articulated in 1776—liberty, equality, and democratic self-rule—will be honored or abandoned.

The unfinished work of the Revolution and the Civil War has now been placed in our hands. We are called, once more, to determine whether the words “We the People” will serve as a living promise or become an empty phrase. The answer depends on whether we can recognize the through line of our history and act with the courage demanded by this moment.