The Left’s Revolutionary Confusion

 

[French Finance Minister Jacques] Necker, you remember, asked the people to come and help him against the aristocracy. The people came fast enough at his bidding, but, somehow or other, they would not go away when they had done their work. I hope Lord Grey will not see himself or his friends in the woeful case of the conjuror, who, with infinite zeal and pains, called up the devils to do something for him. They came at the word, thronging about him, grinning, and howling, and dancing, and whisking their long tails in diabolic glee; but when they asked him what he wanted of them, the poor wretch, frightened out of his wits, could only stammer forth, “I pray you, my friends, be gone down again!” At which the devils, with one voice, replied:

“Yes! Yes! We’ll go down! We’ll go down! But we’ll take you with us to swim or to drown!”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Specimens of the Table Talk (1835)

As I have noted in these pages before, one of the greatest, most interesting, and most destructive quirks of history is the temporal proximity of the American and French Revolutions. The two revolutions had nothing whatsoever to do with one another, yet because they occurred so closely to one another, they have been permanently conflated in the American popular imagination.  The real-world consequences of this erroneous fusion are visible throughout American society and politics, as the noble but narrow ends of the former “revolution” are subsumed by the ignoble, far-reaching, and deranged ends and consequences of the latter. This is especially true today, as Americans gratuitously and mistakenly take to the streets to avail themselves of their “rights” without fully understanding the consequences of their actions, much less the general foreignness of those actions to the American experience.

To repeat myself: “The American ‘revolution’ was less a revolution than an assertion of existing rights, properly termed a ‘War of Independence,’ waged by Englishmen against Englishmen and made necessary only by the geographical peculiarities of ‘Empire.’” The French Revolution was something else altogether, a full-blown rebellion against the entirety of existing society, animated not by a desire to restore liberty and tranquility but by arrogance, intemperance, and a profound hatred for the order of Creation.

The American Revolution, of course, gave birth to the American nation and its brilliant and judicious yet farsighted Constitution. It nurtured a country and a people that savored and advanced liberty, that produced economic and scientific advances beyond imagination, and that saved the world more than once from the depredations of totalitarianism. The French Revolution, by contrast, gave birth to many of those very depredations. The mass murderers of the twentieth century—Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and the rest—were the ideological successors to the Jacobin Club, the great-grandchildren of Danton and Robespierre, and inheritors of the French revolutionary recklessness.

Despite all of this, American intellectuals and politicians tend not to concede the differences between the two revolutions, largely because they want to claim the mantle of the American Revolution’s nobility while simultaneously embracing the rage, violence, and retribution of the French version.

Today, it is not uncommon to hear leftist intellectuals and celebrities, as well as Democratic politicians, describe members of the Trump administration and even its supporters as Nazis, an insult unsurpassed in their stunted imaginations. Nor is it uncommon to hear them compare those who are in this country illegally and who may have committed heinous crimes to the Nazis’ innocent and justly revered victims.

Worse still, some in power throughout the country hate the Republicans so profoundly that they threaten to prosecute them after Trump leaves office, to treat them as the Allies treated the remnants of Hitler’s regime at Nuremberg, or even to “hunt them down” as the Mossad righteously hunted down Eichmann in Argentina.

Those who hate Trump and hate ICE are rarely asked to justify their absurd and obscene rhetoric. They revile and defy the majority of Americans, who wish to see the nation’s immigration laws enforced, but are seldom made to explain how their words and actions constitute “defending democracy.” When they are, on vanishingly rare occasions, called to account, they inevitably invoke Americans’ history of and dedication to liberty. They profess that they are merely defending the Constitution against monsters and that they only wish to uphold the vision and the spirit of the Founders. Inevitably, they insist that “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism,” that “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” and that we should all be given liberty or given death. It doesn’t seem to matter much to them that the first of these proclamations is entirely made up; that the second was written by a “gentleman-farmer” who spent the American Revolution on a diplomatic mission in France and then, mindlessly, supported the French Revolution, even after it turned bloody; and that the third was uttered by a simpleton who was never really an American and who actually served in the French Revolutionary government.

In short, they do everything they can to try to rile their constituents to battle by citing sentiments expressed in support of the American Revolution but far more truly aligned with the spirit and conduct of the French Revolution. Whether they do so out of ignorance or malice is irrelevant, although one suspects they have no idea how pathetic and historically illiterate it all makes them appear.

The other day, the inimitable Victor Davis Hanson made an unexpectedly yet eagerly welcomed early return from cancer surgery to call Minnesota the “South Carolina of our age” and to note how perilously close Trump-hating politicians are to reenacting the events that precipitated the Civil War. As is his wont, Hanson is inarguably correct. And I made a similar case on Twitter/X, comparing Tim Walz to General Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard, the South Carolina commander who ordered the bombardment of Fort Sumter.

All of that said, today’s Democrats remind me more of the men who started and then intensified the French Revolution, the arrogant fools like Jacques Necker, who thought they could unleash the mobs upon their enemies and could reign them in once their dirty work was done. Of course, Necker was lucky. He returned to Switzerland, outlived both the Revolution and the French First Republic, and died of natural causes. Most of the others were not so fortunate. Marat was humiliatingly assassinated during a bath, while Danton and Robespierre met their ends at the guillotine.

American politicians who rally mobs today and tacitly encourage them to commit violence against those with whom they disagree should consider themselves forewarned. The forces they are unleashing are not guaranteed to remain on their side, even as they are guaranteed to continue to demand ugly retribution for the government’s crimes, real and perceived. Violence in opposition to the government is simply not an American tradition, no matter how desperately some may wish.