What it was like in France immediately before the French Revolution occurred. And why it matters now in America.
History repeats. It’s often frightening just how it repeats.
We do not really know how the French aristocracy felt and acted during the months leading up to the French revolution. Few penned records survive. We do know, however, that the wealthy elite dismissed the reports. They called them “deplorable peasants” and instead of admonishing them to “learn to code” they told them “to eat cake”.
Rather than get involved in a discussion of how the successful French kept themselves isolated from the “ignorant Neo-peasant riff-Raff”, let’s look at how a similar situation is manifesting today in America.
The following is a great write-up. It is titled “Our Elites Are Steering Us Towards Civil War” and it was written by Glenn Ellmers when he posted it on 01.07.2020. All credit to the author. I would suggest everyone to visit the original site and give them a look around. Some really good stuff there.
They are as clueless as the ancien régime.
Along with the Upper West Side of Manhattan and a few other redoubts, my suburban neighborhood near the Maryland border represents the heart of what some pundits call the “blue church.”
It is increasingly a dream world.
I drop in periodically at Politics and Prose, a prominent bookstore
in Northwest D.C., to browse and shop. Lately I find it more and more
difficult to avoid eavesdropping on the conversations of the elderly
white women (lifelong Democrats, of course) who make up 80% of the
regular clientele.
Not that I try especially hard to tune out, because it is fascinating to hear what they say in their unguarded chit-chat.
No Japanese soldier on a remote Philippine island in 1947, oblivious
to the emperor’s surrender, was more disconnected from the real world
than these educated, well-spoken women. They read the Washington Post and listen to NPR every day, and therefore have no idea that they are imprisoned on a kind of island of the mind.
The bookstore’s regular customers, mostly retired professionals, are
the kind of well-to-do urbanites that used to be called limousine
liberals. But my bibliophile neighbors, with their casual shoes and
canvas tote bags, generally prefer a Prius to a limo. Even so, they
enjoy lives of comfortable physical ease, security, and culturally
enriched leisure. One might think this would make them nice. And on many
topics (grandchildren, for instance) they are.
But their conversations turn easily and often to politics—in particular, the illegitimacy of our odious president and the racist underclass that elected him—and then their tone becomes suddenly and shockingly nasty. That nastiness arises in part, no doubt, from an aversion to an uncomfortable truth: that the cozy world of these coastal urban elites is far from natural or normal.
It is the product of an artificial, often dishonest patchwork of legal, political, and cultural practices that have been distinctly unfair to millions of disenfranchised Americans.
It was said of the ancien régime—the nobility that reigned prior to the French Revolution—that “they learned nothing and forgot nothing.”
In his monumental book on Lincoln and the principles of self-government, A New Birth of Freedom (2000), the late Claremont professor Harry Jaffa expounds on this observation:
“They could forget nothing, namely their undeserved and socially useless privileges; and they could learn nothing, namely that their fellow countrymen would no longer tolerate the continuance of their privileges.”
One might think that this world of artificial nobility is dead and
gone. But in deep-blue sanctuaries like my local bookstore—that bubble
of bubbles, the summa bubblica of America’s leftist oligarchy—a version of this same decayed aristocracy is still holding on.
These liberal ladies (and a few distinctly milky gentlemen) are
harmless enough in one sense. They aren’t abusing the working class in
any direct or obvious way—certainly not in their own minds! Unlike the
French gentry, they do not dwell in ostentatious luxury while serfs
labor in hunger. Even less are they complicit in anything like the
gruesome brutality of chattel slavery in the Old South.
Still, they do partake in their own shallow way of an intellectual and moral presumption that is not at all harmless. Like every privileged class in history, they are convinced that they deserve what they have, however slight their own efforts may have been in the smooth glide-path of their lives.
The recognition of unearned privilege can sometimes turn
psychologically sideways, with sublimated guilt erupting into
destructive revolutionary fervor. Rarely, alas, does it flower into
genuine humility and charity. But the complacent retirees with whom I
rub elbows are not directing their unconscious guilt (if they have any)
into overthrowing the system.
To the contrary, the oligarchy they represent frantically wants to preserve, or bring back, the pre-2016 uni-party establishment in which they flourished. Because they cannot comprehend that their fellow countrymen will no longer tolerate their socially useless sinecures, they retreat ever further into monasteries of self-deception.
But this cannot continue; something must give, and it seems ever likelier that the way forward will be rough.
In New Birth and other writings over the course of his long
career teaching political philosophy, Jaffa explained that the American
Founders solved the crisis of religious warfare (which had plagued
Europe for centuries) through the separation of church and state. The
power of government would no longer be used by believers who were in
authority to persecute different believers who were out of authority.
Yet the danger of religious warfare can return in secular form when
people no longer agree on the basic principles of republican government
and regard each other as political heretics rather than fellow citizens.
“Elections,” Jaffa wrote, “may properly decide only between those whose
differences of opinion are not differences of principle.”
For example, in 1861 the Confederacy endorsed the idea of slavery as a
“positive good.” This doctrine of “you work, I eat” replaced the equal
natural rights doctrine of the Declaration of Independence as the
South’s new faith. Driven by this alternate conception of politics based
on inequality, many of the slave states rejected the results of Lincoln’s election in 1860, and the nation was plunged into war.
Today, we face a parallel problem.
The true believers (who, not coincidentally, were also the true beneficiaries) of the blue church administrative state have also become alienated from the idea of republican government and shared citizenship.
This can be seen most clearly in their unwillingness to accept the results of the 2016 presidential election, and the demonization of Trump voters.
Like most privileged elites, their faith is immune to facts or persuasion. It is simply too hard to give up the notion of natural or divine sanction for the socio-economic superiority they have enjoyed.
With each passing day, this crumbling oligarchy seems to become more
fanatical, more fixated on its own righteousness, and more impatient
with the supposed iniquity of its political opponents. But the rejection
of dialogue and compromise undermines the very possibility of a common
citizenship. Without a shared dedication to republican principles,
self-government cannot continue.
The peaceful transfer of power that accompanies a free election is
only possible on the basis of civic friendship and trust; each side must
believe that, win or lose, the rights of the minority will be protected
by those who take power. On both sides today, that trust seems to be
slipping.
While most Americans acknowledge the fact that America is deeply divided, many of our leaders remain in denial about the potential result of this growing, fundamental distrust.
We are confronting again the dire situation New Birth describes prior to the Civil War:
“both parties [see] the contest as a zero-sum enterprise in which the advantages of one side [are] losses to the other. From this viewpoint, ballots can never really substitute for bullets.”
Not for the first time in our nation’s history, if this state of
affairs continues force may be embraced as the only alternative when
reason fails. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
We must fervently hope that things will change before they become
violent. But if the clueless attitudes of our sclerotic elite remain
unaltered, it is not hard to see what’s on the horizon.
Conclusion
History repeats. I can easily see parallels between what is going on in Washington DC today, and what transpired in France right before the French Revolution. Of course no one in Washington and the establishment will agree with me. But for me, a “deplorable” outsider, it is clear as the nose on my face.
People, prepare for some spicy times ahead. This situation is not sustainable and a change will happen.
Whether it will be a revolution that follows the bloody French model, or a Orwellian dystopia, no one knows. All that I do know is that the next four years; 2020 through 2024 will be exciting and pivotal.
They really do want an armed conflict. The Sleeping Giant is even more alert... And the puppet master Bloomberg will be guarded by several heavily-armed Stasi as he visits his kingdom. The kingdom of “peasants” he wishes to disarm. “... Mike Bloomberg’s planned visit to Virginia, intimating the bill was passed as a way of paying homage to him: “With their billionaire benefactor coming to Richmond next week to headline a Democratic Party fundraiser, however, it is clear that House leaders would rather bow to out-of-state interests than listen to their constituents and fellow lawmakers.” -Intro to the article; VA Democrats pass bill requiring destruction of 'High Capacity" magazines.
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