There's two ways to kill government itself.

Well, technically there's only one, since they both amount to the same thing.

Kill a government's legitimacy, and the concept of government collapses. The government itself might stick around for a little bit, as we see in North Korea, which essentially operates a slave state. In other words, once the government collapses, you might be left with its exoskeleton -- a spidery, cracking shell of what it used to house, still gruesomely creaking through its tasks as if in a sick sort of rigor mortis.

There's two ways to actually go about slaughtering that legitimacy, though. Both are suicidal. One is accidental.

Both are the recognition of corruption.

Before we proceed, let's explain that word -- because it doesn't necessarily mean what it normally does. There's two types of corruption -- the first is the traditional version, in which the political elite decide that the common folk that have elevated them to their position on high, whether that position's a president, or a prime minister, or a king -- in which they've decided the common folk aren't worth honest consideration, not deserving of respect, good only for being manipulated into preserving the status quo. That sort of corruption, once exposed, raises hackles and ignites a vicious fury in those suffering beneath the regime, no matter its type. It's the illegal sort, the sort lauded by conspiracy theorists. It's the Thought Police. 1984. When it finally burns, it burns fast and hot, Arab Spring style.

Then there's the other kind. The kind that brings bad memories of a computer session gone awry. Click. Click. Click. "File corrupted." That's the other kind -- resulting in the deep sigh of an exasperated mouse-user. Or, in the case of government -- an exasperated citizen -- sick of it just not working anymore. The corruptive slight was malevolent -- it was procedural. Fated. The result of bad planning; systematic corruption has no triumph in store -- it's a failure for all involved. The only path forward is to learn from the mistakes and try it again.

Remember those two -- systematic and ethical -- they'll come up again.

For now, we've just got to remember that both systematic and ethical corruption can be very real, and aren't necessarily uncommon. Human rights violations in Syria forced massive amounts of people to scream, "Ethical corruption!" and fight for themselves. Detroit reels under the steady blows of systematic corruption -- no frantic clicking of a mouse can save it from itself.

Neither, however, are the actual knife in the heart of the government ideal that keeps the bureaucracy alive. Unseen, or, more aptly, unrecognized, both types of corruption can trundle along their merry ways, keeping the long-suffering people suffering. But the moment it becomes insufferable, the simmer rises to a seething boil, and the people start standing up.

Protest, assembly -- the press goes wild. Is there initiative within the bureaucracy to fix the government in a systematic collapse? How about revise their world views -- realize their error in an ethical breakdown?

Nope? Alright -- campaigns, civil suits, referenda -- the judicial system (if it's there) is activated in reverse. Should it fail to turn -- bankruptcy, riots, chaos. The assemblies go underground, the tea goes overboard. The revolt is in full swing. New government's coming, because even if civil society must revert to the state of war to rehabilitate itself -- that's what it will do. It's a law of nature.

Now, there's two ways corruption can be recognized -- and these are the two. There's the recognition of actual corruption -- in which the people can no longer avoid the reality of their situation. People start dying. The government covers it up. The media turns, and the people rise. That's what happened with the American Revolution. Impressment of colonists into the British military against their will. The Boston Massacre. Imposition of unfair taxes against the colonists' wills.

Protest, assembly, the press flexed its muscles. Referenda, petitions -- then riots, chaos. Then came the miracle of the American Revolution -- the chaos organized itself. Out of it came some of the most intellectual, well-thought out rebellion human history's ever seen. In a triumph of democratic writing, the people of America came together to produce a document issuing King George a list of grievances, backed by the logic to judge the validity of those grievances.

"He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them....

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers...

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance...

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever..."

Thirteen specific grievances spanning the gamut of ethical and systematic corruption, though the emphasis remained squarely on the latter. Taxes were rising, regulations being put into practice that neither seemed necessary nor fair. The power of the legislature at home was ceremonial in comparison to a more powerful one far across the body of water between them.

But think about it -- the revolution that started this country, our country -- it was started by a bunch of sassy expats who didn't want to pay their taxes. I mean -- how dare they! Privy to the extraordinary benefits of the brilliantly linked government/corporate alliance that was the British Empire, the East India Company, and all the rest -- they had no right. None. No right to snub their noses at their monarch, no right to disrespect British tea, or assert that they should have proper representation. They had the glories of the British Empire! What more could they want?

We have to remember, 240 years later, that the Declaration of Independence didn't go uncontested. On October 31st, 1776, King George III responded, and his response was so exquisitely apt - well, look at it for yourself.

"My Lords, and Gentlemen,

Nothing could have afforded Me so much Satisfaction as to have been able to inform you, at the Opening of this Session, that the Troubles, which have so long distracted My Colonies in North America, were at an End; and that My unhappy People, recovered from their Delusion, had delivered themselves from the Oppression of their Leaders, and returned to their Duty. But so daring and desperate is the Spirit of those Leaders, whose Object has always been Dominion and Power, that they have now openly renounced all Allegiance to the Crown, and all political Connection with this Country. They have rejected, with Circumstances of Indignity and Insult, the Means of Conciliation held out to them under the Authority of Our Commission: and have presumed to set up their rebellious Confederacies for Independent States. If their Treason be suffered to take Root, much Mischief must grow from it, to the Safety of My loyal Colonies, to the Commerce of My Kingdoms, and indeed to the present System of all Europe. One great Advantage, however, will be derived from the Object of the Rebels being openly avowed, and clearly understood. We shall have Unanimity at Home, founded in the general Conviction of the Justice and Necessity of Our Measures.

. . .

My Lords, and Gentlemen, in this arduous Contest I can have no other Object but to promote the true Interests of all My Subjects. No people ever enjoyed more Happiness, or lived under a milder Government, than those now revolted Provinces: the Improvements in every Art, of which they boast, declare it: their Numbers, their Wealth, their Strength by Sea and Land, which they think sufficient to enable them to make Head against the whole Power of the Mother Country, are irrefragable Proofs of it. My Desire is to restore to them the Blessings of Law and Liberty, equally enjoyed by every British Subject, which they have fatally and desperately exchanged for all the Calamities of War, and the arbitrary Tyranny of their Chiefs."

By modern standards, the American Revolution could be construed as petty. Fought over idealistic principles like subsidiarity, the Americans "hyperbolized" the British government because it undermined the common good, the rule of law and sovereignty of legislators, harassed and made people vulnerable, and made war on the people that were supposedly their own. This wasn't any Syria, though. It wasn't the Arab Spring. It wasn't even France, back when the French were breaking free of their intensely limiting and oppressive tripartite class hierarchy. It wasn't the slave uprising of the Haitian Revolution.

It was a bunch of middle and upper class expatriates from the greatest Empire in the world bothered about high taxes, a lack of adequate representation, "unfair" regulations, and large, distant government interfering in day-to-day life.

Brexit, in other words.

There was no American Spirit at hand during the American Revolution. It was just British Spirit, under external pressure that the people no longer felt any connection to. It was the same spirit that brought King John to the negotiating table in 1215 to sign the Magna Carta. It's the spirit that brought the Golden Revolution rumbling through the British elite. It's the spirit of roiling parliamentary debates -- Wilberforce, Churchill.

"We will fight on the beaches," goes the famous refrain. "We will never surrender."

Not to Nazi Germans -- not to the to the EU Council of Ministers.

Or, in the American case - not to King George, not to Parliament on the other side of the Atlantic.

The British only surrender to themselves. When the original British no longer seem as British, as in the case of the American Revolution, we made a new Britain. And when the original British felt their rights as Englishmen were being compromised, they, at any economic cost, threw off the EU in indignation.

There is another way to recognize corruption and kill a government. It's the kind the Remain supporters have accused the Leave campaign of fumbling into naively. It's the recognition not of actual corruption, but of perceived corruption. It's the concept of a people traditionally disposed toward their system being a certain way, and their system actually being that way but them not recognizing it either due to their own naiveté or because of some unintentional failure of transparency at the higher level. It's not necessarily symptomatic of systematic corruption - merely obfuscation of whether or not systematic corruption exists, thus giving the appearance of ethical corruption.

So when the Leave campaign was accused of identifying perceived corruption, the Remain supporters may well have had a point.

Unfortunately, recognition of perceived corruption and recognition of real corruption aren't actually different, simply because government is created when the people concede their basic right to personal justice innate in the state of nature to some broader, rule-making entity, thus establishing civil society. But, when the bureaucracy loses its legitimacy with the people who have given it power, then the Government encased within it shrivels up, because the Government was created by the consent of the people. The bureaucracy's just a consequence of its existence - something that takes longer to shrivel up. The Government was corrupt, not merely perceived to be, because when the people decide it is, it is.

The bureaucracy might not actually be ethically corrupt or even systematically corrupt, but because the concept of government is semantically tied to the consent of the people, if the people no longer consent, then the government dies, and the bureaucracy loses its actual purpose with respect to those specific people.

That's where both Brexit and the American Revolution really start showing their unique theoretical cards.

First off -- look at this weird sentence: "The United States of America is a country."

Not seeing it? Okay, how about this one: "The United States of America are a country."

Funky, right?

As it turns out, there's a reason we don't use the latter anymore. The Founders used it back when we were setting up camp and they referred to Delaware as a country (sorry Delaware, but by any sensible non-Monaco metric... nope) but as we moved away from the Anti-Federalism of the Articles of the Confederation and developed the American Identity beyond the British Spirit the Founders had, we, in our good old days of being as populous as New York City is now -- we became Americans, in the hot-dog eating sense. Unified as one - a full national identity thrived, and we ended up fighting a war just to make sure that the South didn't Brexit on us.

In other words, after we jumped the ship on the whole British Empire project, we, the people of the United States of America, with our comparative political equality and culture of reciprocation and all that good jazz, unified around things like good jazz and hot dogs and hurling stuff into the air at high speed and being free.

In other words, the specific people of the United States of America, united against a common pesky king, developed a national identity around things like the Declaration and The Constitution and official, documented ideas that were quite newfangled for the times. While the British Empire's government lost its legitimacy with its specific constituency in the American colonies, the American government didn't lose its legitimacy with its specific constituency -- the entire newly cultured American people.

Two more sentences:

"The European Union is a country."

"The European Union are countries."

The first sentence comes across being so untenably wrong that the second not only needs to revise the number of the verb, it needs to alter the number of the predicate as well. What is the EU, after all? It's a supranational organization -- a conglomerate of 28 countries, "united in diversity."

What differentiates the fledgling EU's 28 countries from the fledgling US's 13 "countries?"

Put simply -- it's that the 13 original US states never had national identities remotely as strong as the EU's member countries had. The 17 million Brits that voted to leave -- their identity as British people, British people who believed strongly in the Magna Carta, and self-government, and subsidiarity, and freedom to regulate themselves or retain the supremacy of their own laws, much like the British people who believed themselves to be suppressed by the Empire's bureaucracy 240 years prior was an identity that had been nurtured for almost a thousand years. But unlike the British people in the Americas who cast off the control of the British Isles -- the British Isles in 2016 found themselves not only beneath a government that trivialized the British people through sheer population mass -- but made them just one of a smorgasbord of other cultures, identities, convictions, and ideals, all conflicting for attention, and only allowed to them get one measly twenty-eighth of it.

Yes -- leaving the EU was economically idiotic. Yes -- leaving the EU was asking for an angry note from everyone on the planet, an angry note that goes much like this:

"No people ever enjoyed more Happiness, or lived under a milder Government, than those now revolted Provinces: the Improvements in every Art, of which they boast, declare it: their Numbers, their Wealth, their Strength by Sea and Land... My Desire is to restore to them the Blessings of Law and Liberty, equally enjoyed by every European Subject, which they have fatally and desperately exchanged for all the Calamities of War, and the arbitrary Tyranny of their Chiefs."

How dare they.

But perhaps leaving the EU transcended the bounds of conventional stupidity. Perhaps, as a predominantly pro-Europe youth, we ought to realize that the stupidity of the Leave campaign was some sort of Enlightened Stupidity -- much like the stupidity exhibited by the Americans so many years before. I mean, when it comes to economic idiocy -- yikes.

The Americans, in 1776 -- they didn't have a plan. They had a Declaration! Proclaiming their rights as Englishmen to the world, the American Leave Campaign naively severed ties with the smartest, most powerful, most sensible entity on the planet.

They replaced English Common Law with the Articles of the Confederation -- an unequivocal disaster.

But you know what? They figured it out. They believed in themselves and they found themselves a national identity so strong the latter half of the 20th century was a conflict about whether or not it was a worthwhile identity to have. They forged a Constitution so remarkable that everyone else's constitutions have been remarking on its principles for the 240 years that followed its ratification.

No -- Brexit wasn't a revolution, per se. Call it a renaissance, if you'd like. But either way - let's try to understand the British people who voted to Leave. For this Independence Day, America is going to turn out to celebrate America, a country that was founded on the same principles the Leave campaign succeeded with - British Spirit. Let us not forget the Tories of the United States - those who tried their utmost to reconcile their idea of government with the idea of government the Empire had, and the parallels between our Tories and the current British Tories who voted Remain - hoping that the EU could be reformed to give the British people the representation they felt they were entitled to.

Let us not fault Texas, nor California, for mulling over secession - for we have to understand that both of those states have elements of the American Spirit within them -- and as their individual identities stabilize as their populations bloom, they diverge from the EU-like body the USA has seemingly become today.

Let us not forget that while not bureaucracy, government isn't merely an entity to pass down laws and regulations, but an element of culture itself -- and when government no longer matches the common ideology of the people, it ceases to exist, leaving a massive, rotting husk of a bureaucracy behind.

Let us commiserate with Iran. With China. With Russia. With Syria. With Sudan. Let us remember that finding a government that reflects the values and beliefs of a people and legislates accordingly is a task incredibly difficult to pull off effectively.

Let us contemplate what Brexit means for us -- a country six times the population of Britain. Should we wish to stay together -- we must once again unite, not just as a coalition of states, but as a community of individual people sharing the ideals that make us American, not just Texans, or New Yorkers, or Scots, or Londoners, or Englishmen. The observations of our political elite must not go unnoticed either -- for those that supported Brexit on the basis of economic explosion and free travel have fundamentally departed from the ideals expressed in the Declaration, those ideals that we believed so strongly in that anyone who abstained from voting to ratify it at the Second Continental Congress was compelled to resign. Are our leaders still American? Do they still embody that hallmark British spirit that would allow them, so many years later, to eventually rise to the positions they now hold? Or have they become Europeans, allowing the immediate concerns of economics and superficial unity to triumph over their ideals, beliefs, and convictions? Would they, truly, "mutually pledge to each other [their] Lives, [their] Fortunes, and [their] sacred Honor" in support of our Declaration?

King George III predicted Brexit when he said "If their Treason be suffered to take Root, much Mischief must grow from it, to the Safety of My loyal Colonies, to the Commerce of My Kingdoms, and indeed to the present System of all Europe."

Let us, for the sake of what we believe in, and what we celebrate today, not let our insubordination against the British Empire some 240 years ago destroy what is swiftly amounting to a new Europe here in North America.

Let us remember. Let us remember as we watch the fireworks. Let us remember as we listen to our candidates debate as Election Day approaches. Let us remember as we walk into the voting booths across the country.

We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in the alabaster cities. We shall fight above the amber waves of grain. We shall fight beneath the purple mountains. We shall fight from sea to shining sea. We shall never surrender.

Let us remember what it means to be British. And, by Jove, let us remember what it means to be American.