You have to check out this video. Democratic strategist James Carville delivers.
Understand what’s happening to the Democratic Party. They’ve become radical Jacobins.
Remember those dudes? Back in the French Revolution. They started out as republicans and secularists, but under the leadership of radicals like Maximilien Robespierre, they became increasingly extreme, paradoxically arguing that terror and “virtue” were necessary to protect the revolution from internal enemies.
Who were their enemies? Moderates and conservatives—you know: “reactionaries.”
Doesn’t all this ring a bell?
Robespierre chaired the Committee of Public Safety (oh boy) and used that post to spread fear and suspicion across French society.
This was called the “Reign of Terror,” and the Jacobins relied on coercion and violence to prosecute a war on the clergy and political opponents.
The madness didn’t stop until reasonable Frenchmen stopped it and held unreasonable Frenchmen accountable—Robespierre and his closest allies were arrested without trial and guillotined. Extreme in itself, to be sure, but desperate times call for desperate measures.
Robespierre died on the same device he used on tens of thousands of his victims. Due process notwithstanding, there’s poetic justice here: Robespierre had made a rod for his own back.
It is a legend that Henry Kissinger, or perhaps another US diplomat, and Zhou Enlai, the Chinese Premier under Mao Zedong, were discussing the French Revolution in the early 1970s. When asked about the effects of the French Revolution, Zhou reportedly said: “It’s too early to tell.”
Western observers took this as a sign of China’s long historical perspective—that Zhou viewed history over centuries and, having occurred only 180 years ago, the full consequences of the French Revolution were still unfolding. However, later research suggests that Zhou Enlai was probably referring not to the eighteenth-century French Revolution, but rather to the French student protests of 1968, which had happened just a few years earlier.
Even better. I have argued on this platform that the student protests in the West in the sixties were, at least in part, inspired by Mao’s Cultural Revolution. When they finally grew up, those radicals gravitated to the Democratic Party in America. They now teach our children using the curricula they developed. It’s all about how awful the West is, and men can be women.
Whichever moment in the history of French radicalism Zhou was assuming, he was right: it was too early to tell.
freedom and reason 