Our French Revolution

By Victor Davis Hanson   6.4.23

We are in a Jacobin Revolution of the sort that in 1793-94 nearly destroyed France. And things are getting scary.

The Democratic Party vanished sometime in 2020.

It was absorbed by hard-left ideologues. They were bent on radically altering, or hijacking, existing institutions to force radical, equality-of-result agendas that otherwise do not earn majority support.

The American people want affordable power and fuel and energy autonomy. They do not want a Green New Deal that results in dependence on the Middle East.

They want fiscal sobriety, not a permanent stagflationary economy marked by bank failures, soaring interest rates, crony capitalism, and subsidies for those who choose not to work.

They know no country can exist without a border, much less while offering blank checks to foreign cartels that kill 100,000 Americans yearly.

They demand realist deterrence abroad, not the current woke military whose erosion is spelling the end American credibility and global stability.

Racialists are eerily embracing discredited Neo-Confederate notions of racial chauvinism, discrimination, segregation, and the old-one-drop rule of racial obsession. They are turning America toward a Balkanized war-of-all-against-all.

To implement such an unpopular program, the new Left must radically alter our institutions.

So the “Democrats” periodically threaten to pack the courts, end the filibuster, destroy the Electoral College, and override the states’ prerogatives to establish balloting laws.

They deny the committee assignments of the House minority leader. They engage in stunts like tearing up the State of the Union address on national television. With impunity they mob the homes of Supreme Court justices to leverage their decisions.

This revolution is run by elites and is a top-down operation.

University deans all but prompt students to disrupt invited campus speakers. District attorneys release violent arrested criminals without bail. Woke generals call their Chinese counterparts to warn them against their own commander-in-chief.

The Pentagon lectures the country on its supposed innate racism—even as the United States continues to lose wars abroad, abandons billions of dollars of equipment to terrorists, and allows communist China to surveille domestic American military bases with complete impunity.

Words change their meanings. “Racist” now means “don’t dare object.” “White” became the pejorative stereotype used by racists. “Diversity” means tired orthodoxy. “Equity” is a synonym for bias. “Inclusion” ensures exclusion.

Institutions are no longer recognizable. The FBI as we knew it no longer exists. Three former FBI directors either lied under oath to federal investigators, or pleaded amnesia in congressional testimonies.

Our highest former national intelligence officers lied under oath to the Senate. The IRS is weaponized against political opponents of the Democrats. The Department of Justice is more likely to send the FBI after grammar school parents than mobs threatening the homes of Supreme Court justices.

Still, to thoroughly erase America, our Jacobins must radically alter our customs and traditions.

So under the cover of the COVID quarantines, Election Day was made irrelevant. In the new America, 70 percent did not vote on the designated day but, fueled by third-party vote harvesting and relaxation of audits of non-Election-Day ballots, extended the vote over a period of several weeks.

Like the Jacobins, names and dates had to be radically transformed. 1619, not 1776, is now America’s birthdate and, we are told, it was an ignominious one.

Statues are toppled, careers Trotskyized.

Biological males suddenly have hijacked women’s sports—destroying five decades of women’s hard-won efforts to achieve equal treatment and respect in athletics.

What triggered the collective madness and this Jacobin takeover?

The Left’s perfect storm of the 120 days of riot, death, arson and looting of 2020? The COVID pandemic? The disastrous two-year lockdown? The 2016 election of the outsider Donald Trump?

All those catalysts and more.

As the country collapses under leftist nihilism, the revolution’s last gasp is to destroy Donald Trump—by empowering him. That is, the leftist legal vendetta is designed to win him just enough empathy to be nominated the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, but then to keep on indicting, gagging, and hemorrhaging him legally until Election Day 2024.

Trump was the first president to be impeached twice, to be tried by the Senate as a private citizen, and to have his private home raided by the FBI. Now he is the first president to have been indicted, effectively ending America’s moral authority abroad.

America now has three potential futures and two are bad.

First, the Jacobins have two more years to finish what they started as the founders’ dream descends into our worst nightmare.

Second, the revolution has so warped our legal system, our voting on Election Day, and the FBI, the CIA, the Justice Department, and the IRS, that even a despised, unpopular Left will “win” elections.

The third is that New York prosecutor Alan Bragg has jumped the shark.

His pathetic prosecution is so patently incoherent, illiberal, and in spirit anti-American, that two-thirds of the country will soon conclude the center is not holding. The Jacobins’ reign of terror is unsustainable. And so in 2024 the Left will not be defeated, but so defeated so that it is utterly discredited.

The choice is ours.

April 6, 2023 | 11 Comments »

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11 Comments / 11 Comments

  1. Sebastien Yes, after I posted my comments I realized I forgot the 1968 Convention riot,
    How was I misquoting you? I was responding to Chocopot.

  2. @Honeybee I guess you don’t know that the moment that historians of SDS give as the moment that the radical left took over the Dems was the Chicago Convention I spoke about where rioters battled police. Rudy Dutschke was also 60s. Have to correct myself there.

    IN 1968!

    You are also misquoting me.

  3. Sebastien The democratic party started losing its base in the 60ties during the VN war. The McGovern convention dug the grave [remember Shirley McLain in Chinses drag] and Carter threw the dirt on the corpse.

  4. @Choco Quite true. The Communist Party USA devoted itself to working within the Democratic Party following the McCarthy Era and much later, much of the rest of the radical left followed suit. Rudy Dutschtke coined the term, “the Long March Through the institutions” in the 70s.

    The first real turning point was the riots at the Chicago National Convention of 1968 led by Jane Fonda’s ex-husband, Tom Haydn, and the second, I believe, was the election of Bill Clinton who appointed Leon Panetta to the first of a numbet of key positions as did Obama. I suspect he was a key player in appointing subservive deep state operatives.

    John Brennan was another who Clinton started on his merry way. And, of course, his wife, Hillary Clinton, who like Obama, was a disciple of Saul Alinsky.

    Carter was a confused liberal, an antisemite, and a bumbling fool, as president but I don’t think he played a role in this well-organized plot though it was he who lost Iran.

  5. Edgar –

    Agree 100% with your history lesson and observations/conclusions. My point is that, over the last 50+ years, the Democrat Party, never any friend to this nation or its citizens, has adopted, almost to the last letter, the same policies and goals as the Communist Party adopted and published in, I believe, 1963. They have, indeed, essentially become the Communist Party as it existed in the 1960s.

  6. chocopot-

    I don’t know that you are entirely correct. The Democratic Party has always been massively corrupt. .The Boss Tweed stories have not been just “stories” but fact. Tammany Hall has always been a seething pot of Democrat corruption on steroids.

    Frank Costello the Mafia Don, who took over from Lucky Luciano, was the Chief of Tammany Hall pre-war and up to sometime in the early1950s when he was finally caught and jailed. The Senate investigation was called the Kefauver Commission. One or more of the Kennedys was involved with him there.
    He used to select every political candidate, judge and lesser officials for New York State and reaching across other parts of the country.
    He was affably referred to as “The Prime Minister”, a title a title which delighted him. One could say that he was the model for the movie “The Godfather”
    A vignette…When he got out of prison, one of his hobbies was to meet every day with other retired gangsters, at a certain washroom, They would stand in a row urinating, and betting on the last to finish
    How do I know al this ??…I have a couple of Costello biographies, as well as several other detailed books.

    Just read some of the social history of the immigration of masses of Jews, and the way the Democrat ward heelers made it their business to meet them at Ellis Island, and look after them with food and lodging, including showing how non-citizens could vote 3-4 times in the same election. THIS is why the vast majority of American Jews are Democrats to this day.

    The Democrats could always show a crook how to be a better one.

    When you talk about the 60s you are only scratching the surface of modern Democrat corruption with Kennedy’s (and mayor Daley’s) crooked “win” over Nixon. At the time, although Nixon could have disputed it and most likely won, he said he that out of respect for the Presidency he would not.

    This was a big mistake since Kennedy got them into Vietnam and the massive slaughters. I recall about that time, I found a tennis partner, brown as an Indian, who, upon my asking where she got the tan, said she’d just come back on leave from Vietnam. {I don’t think I’d ever heard of Vietnam then}. Further, she said -and it was like a prophesy and a true one, unlike most Biblical ones, actually before the fact.

    She said, “we have about 5000 advisors there now; they’re actually planners and, within a year or two, there’ll be maybe a half million troops there.” She actually said this. I was not really interested at the time, but later I wondered what position she held. She was a very serious person.. l. .We only spoke of it that one time.

    I’ve always felt that the Kennedy-Daley swindle increased Nixon’s paranoia during his Presidency. And I’ve always believed that history in the future, will reassess his terms and place him higher on the “List”….

  7. I think that it will either be (1) or (2). One of the polls I noticed indicated that 60% of those polled think that there is some merit in the accusations against Trump. I also understand is that Trump is next due in court in December unless his lawyers can get a dismissal of the case. If they cannot, the trial will be held during the campaign season of 2024. By that time the other sources of legal proceedings against Trump will no doubt have started. The rationale is to keep Trump tied up in court hearings that he cannot properly be a candidate.

    There is a way to bring this matter to a head: some Republican D.A. in a Republican state should move to bring charges against all of the Biden family including the demented fool in the White House. Without delay.

    This is no time for abiding by the Marquis of Queensbury rules: the Republicans have to strike and strike hard or it’s all over but the crying.

  8. “The Democratic Party vanished sometime in 2020.”

    Sorry, Professor, but what was once known as The Democrat Party began disappearing during the 1960s, and by the late 1980s had morphed into The New Communist Party of the USA.