Some French Revolution history from Victor Davis Hanson:
Almost everyone who originally had opposed the absolute monarchy, and, like the Americans, wished for a constitutional replacement, was eventually executed by revolutionaries who were then executed by more radical revolutionaries. The longer and more radical the revolution ran, the meaner, dumber, and more deadly the revolutionaries who emerged from the woodwork.
Finally, what could not go on, did not go on, as French society unraveled. Then the so-called Thermidors put an end to the madness of the Robespierre brothers and their sidekick, the 26-year-old Saint-Just, and did to them what they had done to thousands.
Not just what they had done to thousands, but what they were planning to do to the Thermidors themselves. For example:
Many feared their own survival depended on Robespierre’s removal; during a meeting on 29 June, three members of the Committee of Public Safety called him a dictator in his face.
Robespierre responded by not attending sessions, allowing his opponents to build a coalition against him. In a speech made to the convention on 26 July, he claimed certain members were conspiring against the Republic, an almost certain death sentence if confirmed. When he refused to give names, the session broke up in confusion. That evening he repeated these claims at the Jacobins club, where it was greeted with demands for execution of the ‘traitors’. Fearing the consequences if they did not act first, his opponents attacked Robespierre and his allies in the Convention next day. When Robespierre attempted to speak, his voice failed, one deputy crying “The blood of Danton chokes him!”…
He was executed on 28 July with 19 colleagues, including Saint-Just and Georges Couthon, followed by 83 members of the Commune.
Back to Hanson’s essay:
We are swept up in similarly scary revolutionary times, after the perfect storm of the 2020 rioting, the COVID destructive lockdowns, and a radical socialist takeover of the old Democratic Party…
We have not descended to the guillotine yet, but we are getting there with online cancel culture, doxxing, deplatforming, boycotts, mandatory diversity statements, indoctrination training, ostracism for an incorrect word, and violence redefined as activism.
Black Lives Matter ended when its supposedly Marxist architects all vanished into comfortable bourgeoise estates and cushy retirements—along with the millions of dollars they shook down from guilt-ridden corporations.
#MeToo sputtered out once the mantra of “believe women” turned its attention to candidate Joe Biden and Tara Reade. It turned out that she most certainly must not be believed when she swore the Delaware Democrat had sexually assaulted her.
VDH is a smart man and a good writer, but I’m not seeing what he seems to be seeing. BLM as an organization may have somewhat fizzled, but not the slogans and ideas it espouses. MeToo is alive and well and living in prosecutions of Republicans, as we’ve seen with the Jean Carroll trial. Tara Reade is a non-event for most Democrats, but that doesn’t mean that had she accused someone on the right she wouldn’t have been their darling.
Hanson goes on to describe how many elements of society have collapsed – many cities, respect for government agencies like the FBI and the military, the quality of education, and more. He thinks the backlash is already starting:
New polls showed scant public support for open borders, for multiple sexual identities, and for biological men competing in women’s sports. Reparations from an insolvent government to black Americans—on the principle that those whose ancestors might have been enslaved eight generations ago were owed money from those whose ancestors might have owned slaves eight generations ago—is widely rejected by the general population.
When corporations like Anheuser-Busch or Disney tried to ingratiate themselves to the woke Jacobins, they lost billions in revenue—just as the woke Pentagon has lost thousands of recruits.
Woke networks like CNN have smaller audiences than some one-person podcasts.
All of that is true. But will it matter? I don’t have the answer, but I fear it might not, for the simple reason that the left doesn’t care about public opinion at this point because they think they can keep power without it and crush those who disagree with them. Of course, so did the French revolutionaries.
It seems to me that for a Thermidor reaction to happen here, the rank-and-file Democrat members of Congress – not the high-profile radicals like AOC, but the lesser-known Democrats in Congress who pass themselves off as moderate and yet vote for every single radical proposal anyway – must start consistently refusing to do so. Till something of that sort happens, even if the populace isn’t happy with what’s going on, I believe the left will stay in power because the right has become so demonized that a lot of people will continue to vote for Democrats even when they implement policies they don’t like. When New York City or San Francisco start electing Republican mayors, then I might start believing something is really changing. Or when supposedly moderate Democrats in Congress start refusing to follow the dictates of their leaders, then I might start believing it as well.
