The American Left and the French Revolution
When frustrated, I’ve been heard to utter, “When I’m king of the world, things will be different! A few heads will roll, and some blood spilled, but a few heads and some blood will be a small price to pay for a better world.”
I’m not alone.
History books are filled with the names of infamous tyrants who not only believed they could change the world but had the ways and the means to do so.
Today, their efforts are chiefly remembered for millions of dead and imprisoned and oceans of blood and tears.
As the adage goes: “Come the revolution things will be different. Not better, different.”
The French Revolution comes to mind.
The Wall Street Journal recently named Edmund Burke’s 1790 “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” a literary “masterpiece.”
Endorsing the award, author Edward Short classifies “Reflections” as “one of the world’s great books … because its brilliant defense of constitutional order at a time when the revolutionaries of France were calling into question all order gives it perennial appeal.”
Short cites Burke’s “prophetic immediacy.”
That “prophetic immediacy” is alive and well in the U.S. today with Burke’s foreshadowing of the battle raging between a coterie of celebrity revolutionaries hell-bent on scrapping America’s deeply embedded values, traditions and constitutional order and those hell-bent on preserving those values, traditions and order.
The parallels between then and now are stunning.
Celebrity revolutionaries Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and fellow progressives are 21st-century embodiments of their 18th-century forebears.
Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan writes that the French Revolution was a revolution run by sociopaths.
“Robespierre, the ‘messianic schoolmaster,’ saw it as an opportunity for the moral instruction of the nation.”
Then, as now, everything was politicized.
“The first year of the New Republic was no longer 1792, it was Year One. There were no more weeks, just three ten-day periods each month.” The months were renamed.
The New York Times recently unveiled its “1619 Project,” a date commemorating the August 1619 arrival in America of a ship bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans.
According to the Times’ website, the goal of the 1619 Project initiative is to propose “a new point of origin for (America’s) national story” and to replace the Fourth of July as the country’s true birthday.
Good-bye 4th of July. Hello, 1619.
Progressives also have the Electoral College and their dream of tyranny by the majority in their sights.
1792 redux.
The Democrats’ Green New Deal dovetails nicely with Robespierre’s “moral instruction of the nation.”
If elected, president Bernie Sanders promises to declare a national emergency and push through “a wholesale transformation of our society” (note the operative word, “push.”).
The Wall Street Journal warns that the GND would “unleash the federal government to fine-tune every aspect of American life.”
Supporters of the GND best be careful what they wish for. Short cites Burke’s “indictment of the revolutionaries’ confiscatory egalitarianism” (with foreshadowing) not only the Terror but the rise of Napoleon. Fever dreams of utopia often turn into hellish nightmares.
Things were different in the wake of the French Revolution: king and queen beheaded, mob rule, blood in the streets. Not better, different.
Many will protest that that could never happen here. Tell that to the radicals on the left.
Maybe not in 2020, or 2024, but a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren presidency could inexorably bring the U.S. one step closer to an Americanized version of 1792.
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