David Brooks writes:
But if you look at who actually leads change over the course of American history, it's not the radicals. At a certain point, radicals give way to the more prudent and moderate wings of their coalitions.
In the 1770s, the rabble-rousing Samuel Adams gave way to the more moderate John Adams (not to mention George Washington, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton).
As the author of a biography of Samuel Adams, I can say this is so far from accurate historical truth as to be laughable. Both Samuel Adams and John Adams signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and served in the Continental Congress. While John Adams was off in Europe on a diplomatic mission, Samuel Adams did the hard work of patiently navigating the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 through revisions and ratification. Even in the 1780s, Samuel Adams served as president of the Massachusetts State Senate. In 1788, Samuel Adams played a key role in Massachusetts' ratification of the federal constitution. Samuel Adams served as lieutenant governor and as governor of Massachusetts into the 1790s. It's just not accurate to say that Samuel Adams "gave way" to the "more moderate" John Adams. Even the depiction of Samuel Adams as "radical" is not so clear cut; as I write in Samuel Adams: A Life, Adams "saw himself as a conserver of the New England Puritan tradition of his seventeenth-century forefathers and was motivated more by biblical stories of the liberation of slaves than by Enlightenment ideas of a new man."