The Leveller is a new media project founded in early 2015, to provide a platform for the voices of underrepresented writers who care about social justice and media diversity, and to offer political narratives built by ordinary people.
The Leveller defines itself against obedience to the narratives of state and capital, and joins a new generation of internet-only outlets whose journalism is combative and whose biases are worn on their sleeves. We intend to be a fist that punches only upwards. Anyone can write for us. While we insist on well-written and properly fact checked articles, one of our core principles is that your voice matters. Our submission guidelines set out a high standard that still gives an unknown writer the chance to get their work out there.
The name of the site is a reference to the historical Levellers, a radical political movement that operated around the time of the English Civil War who agitated for full suffrage, economic redistribution, a free press, freedom of worship and freedom from tyranny. Many of their members were imprisoned and killed for their activism. Despite their betrayal at the hands of Oliver Cromwell, their legacy survived as many of the political rights we now take for granted.
During the founding of the United States of America, the Levellers were cited by Founding Fathers as the democratic extreme which should be averted. James Madison famously asked: “symptoms of a Levelling spirit, as we have understood, have sufficiently appeared in a certain quarters to give notice of the future danger. How is this danger to be guarded against on republican principles?”
Basing our work in both the UK and USA, it seems appropriate to name ourselves after a movement of radicals whose name was dirt to the treacherous elites they called out in either country. The Levellers were used by parliamentarians to defeat the royalists, and then stabbed in the back; so too were the radicals in early American history, whose work was co-opted and whose ideals were corrupted by wealthy slave owners and bankers who had no love for real democracy but created a Republic designed to restrict it. We wish to honour the memory and the future of all Levellers, by calling those same elites to account and asking rude questions about their democratic credentials.
There is always an alternative.
