The French Revolution brings you... The American Revolution!

Oh, wait a minute: shouldn't that be the other way around?

Sorry to have been absent for a while. I’ve been walking around with my mouth open, watching as the Goddess Fortuna spun the Wheel of Fortune and revolutions happened…for that is, after all, what “revolution” means. The wheel turns, those on top fall off, others ascend, and the King of the Wheel doesn’t stay on top forever.

So: the plummet from grace of Alice Munro, the resignation of Joe Biden, Trump’s descent from the heady heights of guaranteed win-dom, the rapid ascension of Kamala Harris, and now Ukraine turning the tables and invading Russia for a change. Astrological friends have not been slow to point out that the stars have not been in this position since (shh!) the time of the American and French Revolutions. The Wheel turns; so does the worm.

There has been talk on the Right of a new American Revolution, though it is not clear that either the French Revolution’s Enlightenment ideals nor those of the original American Revolution will be the inspiration for it.Upturning the established order, Yes. With terror and/or bloodshed, Yes. Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, plus “All men are created equal,” not so much. In fact, not at all. This new Rightist American Revolution aims for the revolutionary vengeance and upending, but not in the service of egalitarian ideals.

What seems to thrill them is the idea of laying waste and seizing control. “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power... I don't think there's a compromise that we're gonna come with... Unless we overthrow them in some way, we're gonna keep losing,”  said J.D. Vance, on May 18, 2021.

Earlier revolutionaries at least paid lip service to some higher ideal while urging ruthlessness, overthrowing, and no compromises. Here’s Lenin:

“We should have taken to arms more resolutely, energetically and aggressively; we should have explained to the masses that it was impossible to confine things to a peaceful strike and that a fearless and relentless armed fight was necessary. And now we must at last openly and publicly admit that political strikes are inadequate; we must carry on the widest agitation among the masses in favour of an armed uprising and make no attempt to obscure this question by talk about "preliminary stages", or to befog it in any way. We would be deceiving both ourselves and the people if we concealed from the masses the necessity of a desperate, bloody war of extermination, as the immediate task of the coming revolutionary action.” (“The Lessons of the Moscow Uprising,” 1906.) “What we need is a Terror,” he is said to have said later. Russia got the Terror in spades, both during the Red/White civil war and a little later, during Stalin’s purges.

You can find this video on YouTube. The gent in the pic is Robbespierre. He fell off the Wheel, a victim of the very laws he himself had instituted.

The first exponent of Terror as an instrument of virtuous reform was of course Robespierre, one of the chief architects and eggers-on of the French Terror, who said: “If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs.”

Cute! Who’s next?

All these men were all obsessed — as the Revolutionary Right is in America right now — with levelling existing structures. That’s the kind of chat that’s been going on around the now-notorious Project 2025: There should be a new “American Revolution,” https://apnews.com/article/project-2025-trump-american-revolution-6e02a297fb91b55de01ba7e86615bb08, one that will sweep away all present-day institutions and replace them with those of the sweepers’ choosing.

The French Revolutionaries named September 22, 1792 — when the monarchy was abolished — as the first day of Year Zero. History did not start until then, said they. Pol Pot did the same thing in Cambodia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot — another kind of Year Zero, in which one of the goals seemed to be Zero Citizens, since he killed so many of them. (Everyone with glasses had to go, by the way: he didn’t want any reading going on.)

The killing fields… Does the end justify the means? And what exactly is the end?

Start over from zero, says Vance. Everything must go. It must all be rebuilt. One must be ruthless.

What is this “everything”? We’ve seen a partial list. The Department of Education, Social Security, kids’ school lunches, Medicare and Medicaid, women’s control over their own bodies — and once you start on that, men will lose control of their own bodies too. (I cite the history of forced sterilization in the interest of “eugenics.” Yes, it happened, to both men and women both. The latest case I heard of was a seven-year-old boy who was sterilized because he was blind).

To which I add: Workers will lose the right to strike for better treatment and pay, and the Justice System will become a mere limb of the Fearless Leader, as under Stalin. So will the military. Oaths will no longer be sworn to the Constitution, which will be in the trash bin, but to the Fearless Leader. This is very likely to be Vance himself, should Trump be elected, since the old guy will join the list of Mad Kings, thus losing his usefulness for the ambitious strivers supporting him at the moment. I’m betting he’ll be fed a cup of polonium tea or take a regrettable dive out a window – tactics for which he has admired Putin.

Either that, or Vance himself will suffer an untimely exit. There ain’t room for both of them in this town. A Fearless Leader must be ruthless. No compromises.

One thing that revolutionaries (or groups of power-grabbers) do once they’ve won is to begin a struggle among themselves to see who will seize the Iron Throne. Dynastic wars were not left behind in the age of monarchies: far from it.

The Iron Throne. It’s not even that comfy.

There will be purges: there always are. Robbespierre went down partly because he injudiciously said that the National Convention had to be purged because it was full of traitors, but refused to name names. Then, of course, everyone in the Convention thought he meant them. That was after he’d eliminated his rival revolutionaries, including those to the left of him, those to the right of him, and his best friends of former times, Danton and Desmoulins.

Danton is very annoyed.

During Stalin’s purges, he similarly nuked his erstwhile comrades, the Old Bolsheviks: they were still dreaming the impossible dream, and he was not. For good measure, he did in his old pal Trotsky. The first victims of Hitler during the Night of the Long Knives were his former cronies, the Brownshirts under Roehm, because they were getting too powerful. Oh, and his men shot a few industrialists who’d backed him while thinking they could control him and use him for their own ends once he was in power. (Just sayin’, M**k and Th**l: you’re going out the window for being too pushy, as are all moderate Republicans, especially Cheney and Kitzinger. And Mike Pence, unlikely though genuine saviour of the democratic process, will finally be hanged. One must be ruthless. Disloyalty cannot be tolerated.)

The original American Revolution was less a civil war than — by that time— a protest against foreign rule. It was relatively civilized and surprisingly non-vengeful. The losing army went home, because they could. Those opposed to the Revolutionary project were not massacred en masse, but relocated: not very thoughtfully, but at least they weren’t heaps of skulls. Property changed hands, as it does in these things, but at least some efforts at compensation were made. https://loyalist.lib.unb.ca/atlantic-loyalist-connections/loyalists-z-part-1

American Revvie agit-prop flag. There’s another snake flag with “Don’t Tread On Me.” Some people waved it while storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, claiming to embody the American Revolution.

Franklin, Ambassador to France in 1776-1778, was adulated both by the French court and the people at large as a kindly, virtuous embodiment of agrarian simplicity and Rousseaian ideals combined with scientific genius (electricity!), and played it to the hilt. There was more merch with his image on it than all the MAGA hats combined: pictures, mugs, brooches, you name it. Did it go to his head? Seems not. Or not much.

Franklin being lionized at the French Court. I wonder what he thought of the wigs?

Though entrepreneurial, Franklin was indefatigably community-minded. If you were going to pick one of the Founding Fathers who might most resemble the idea of a decent, on the whole fair-minded middle-American, reasonable, hard-working and compassionate, it would be him.

He died before the Terror really got going. I’m glad: I think he would have been disappointed, if not horrified. I wonder what he would have made of it? And what would he have thought about “ruthlessness,” “starting from zero,” and “no compromises?” “What sort of country do you want to live in?” he might have asked.