Walking up Lexington Avenue the other morning, past the famed 69th Regiment Armory here in New York City (just around the corner from where Herman Melville lived out the end of his life), I started thinking about how people abbreviate Lexington Avenue to Lex. Lex, they’ll call it, which happens to be a Latin word completely unrelated to the name Lexington. And yet, since Lex means law, these words may not be completely unrelated after all.

Lexington Avenue, if you didn’t know, is named after the Battle of Lexington that, along with Concord, would come to be recognized as the beginning of the American War of Independence. And what was this war all about? According to John Adams there were as many reasons for the war as there were people fighting in it. Everyone had their own reason. “The principles of the American Revolution may be said to have been… almost as diversified as the individuals who acted in it.”

In general, though, as the story goes, people were fighting against tyranny. And they were not just fighting against the tyranny of King George III (who, as a limited, constitutional monarch, had far less power than an absolute monarch such as Charles I had, who was beheaded for his excesses in 1649, or as much as Trump or Musk would like to acquire). As the distinguished historian Gary B. Nash recounts in The Unknown American Revolution, all the appeals to liberty led people to revolt against oppression and exploitation generally. Slaves and workers fought against the tyranny of slave owners and bosses. Tenants rejected the tyranny of landlords. Women revolted against the tyranny of men and patriarchy. Native Americans rose up against the exterminationist pressures of empire. And one of the agreed-upon antidotes to this tyranny was self government, political autonomy as opposed to heteronomy. As John Adams memorably put it (paraphrasing the utopian political theorist James Harrington), “a government of laws not men.” In other words, rather than the principle that the law is whatever the king dictates (Rex is Lex), the law should be king (Lex is Rex). This brings us back to the relationship between Lexington and Lex, and the importance of both to the War of Independence.

But one needn’t walk along any of the Lexington Avenues or Concord Streets of this country to think of this. All one needs to do is to look at the calendar and realize that this April 19 marks the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, those initial battles that broke out the day after Paul Revere’s iconic midnight ride. How will this country celebrate this anniversary? With fidelity to this country’s seminal rejection of kings and tyranny? With faithfulness to the ideals of democracy and equality, irrespective of their shortcomings (not to mention respect for the general welfare and reasoned, informed thought as opposed to superstition) that provide the basis for this country’s legitimacy? With the prioritization of human rights over property rights? Or by the renunciation of these fundamental political and moral principles and the acquiescence to the tyranny of billionaires? Rex or Lex? It shouldn’t be a difficult decision.

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