The Rise of Jacobin Justice

October 30, 2023 By Jack Cashill @ American Thinker

 

Editor's Note:  I've not asked for nor have I received permission to publish this in full.  But I think this article needs as broad a distribution as possible.  If the author or American Thinker object, I will break this down to a link. RK

Earlier this week, I attended the theatrical debut of Dinesh D’Souza’s compelling new documentary Police State.  As much as I liked the movie, there was one subject left unexplored: the ironic fact that, today, among those most vulnerable to the “police state” are local police.

Searching for a more inclusive metaphor than “police state” to describe our current state of peril, I reached into the past and came up with “Jacobin Justice.”  In the way of background, the left-wing Jacobins were the most powerful political faction to emerge during the French Revolution.

The power of this bourgeois elite derived from their ability to manage the Parisian mobs.  To satisfy the mob’s bloodlust, the Jacobins imposed a state of revolutionary justice untethered to any traditional sense of Judeo-Christian morality.  The result was a reign of terror that saw more than 10,000 people tried and executed. 

There have been outbreaks of mob justice throughout American history, but it is only really in the last ten years or so that America’s Jacobins, our “best people,” gave mob justice their blessing.  To be sure, Jacobins have been using mobs since the emergence of the Soviet Union a century ago, but largely for propaganda purposes.

In cases from Sacco and Vanzetti to the Central Park Five, the Jacobins in the media would muster the evidence that seemed to exonerate the accused and suppress the evidence that convicted them.  The mobs would rally and nurse their grievances until the next election.  Win-win.

Hollywood, meanwhile, created characters that embodied a romantic notion of Jacobin justice.  In the way of example, screenwriter Reginald Rose describes Juror #8, the hero of the 1957 movie Twelve Angry Men, as “a man who sees all sides of every question and constantly seeks the truth.  A man of strength tempered with compassion.  Above all, he is a man who wants justice to be done and will fight to see that it is.”  Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird reflects the same virtues, as do a thousand lawyers in a thousand preachy TV shows.  The Jacobin, citizen or attorney, resists public pressures and demands justice for the marginalized.

By the year 2012, however, the Jacobins were finding common ground not with Atticus Finch, but with Robespierre.  Instead of resisting the mob as Atticus did, they sided with the mob, managed it, encouraged it.  Instead of defending the transparently guilty, they felt free to condemn the transparently innocent.  Oddly, almost no one noticed what may have been the darkest turn in judicial history.

In February 2012, in Florida, a battleground state, the Jacobins put their revised strategy to the test, transforming a Hispanic, Obama-supporting civil rights activist into a murderous white supremacist.  A neighborhood watch captain, George Zimmerman shot and killed the deeply troubled young Trayvon Martin in self-defense.  Zimmerman aspired to be a police officer.  He never got the chance.

With a president to re-elect, the media flaunted their growing indifference to the truth.  In the seventeen months between Martin’s death and Zimmerman’s acquittal, they would violate all accepted journalistic standards in their effort to help Jacobin handyman Al Sharpton and his cronies convict a transparently innocent man.  This was a milestone, the first time in anyone’s memory that the national media writ large conspired to enable so conspicuous an injustice.

With the help of social media, mobs, both real and virtual, descended on Florida to demand justice for Martin.  As Los Angeles filmmaker Joel Gilbert proved beyond doubt in The Trayvon Hoax, prosecutors used as their star witness a woman who was not a witness at all.  The media pretended not to notice the most flagrant corruption of the judicial process in their careers.

Fortunately for Zimmerman, the six women on his six-person jury paid no attention to the news.  For those outside the jury room who did pull their news from the Jacobin media, Zimmerman’s acquittal in July 2013 came as a profound shock.  One of them, Alicia Garza, was moved to compose a post on Facebook under the heading “Black Lives Matter.”

In August 2014, protesters chanting “black lives matter” rioted in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri.  With a major assist from the media, BLM activists convinced much of America that once again, an innocent, unarmed black teen — in this case, Michael Brown — was murdered by a white racist, police officer Darren Wilson.  Only an honest St. Louis County prosecutor saved Wilson from prison.  The Democrats rewarded Robert McCulloch by driving him from office in the 2018 primary.

The template had been set.  In the years after Ferguson, the Jacobins were on the lookout for new “victims” of systemic racism and new white supremacists to pillory, facts be damned.  In Minneapolis, in May 2020, they hit pay dirt.  The Scottsboro Boys got a fairer trial than the four Minneapolis police officers, two of them non-white, accused of murder in the death of chronic felon and drug-abuser George Floyd.

The case against the four officers was rigged from the beginning.  As she recently revealed in a deposition for a sexual harassment suit, prosecutor Amy Sweasy spoke with Hennepin County medical examiner Dr. Andrew Baker the day after Floyd’s death.

“I called Dr. Baker early that morning to tell him about the case and to ask him if he would perform the autopsy on Mr. Floyd,” said Sweasy.  “He called me later in the day on that Tuesday and he told me that there were no medical findings that showed any injury to the vital structures of Mr. Floyd’s neck.  There were no medical indications of asphyxia or strangulation.”

By the end of that day, with Minneapolis already in flames, Baker said to Sweasy, “Amy, what happens when the actual evidence doesn’t match up with the public narrative that everyone’s already decided on?  This is the kind of case that ends careers.”

As is well documented, Roger Mitchell, the D.C. medical examiner and a well-connected black political activist, called Baker once he learned about Baker’s finding that Floyd had not been strangled or suffocated.  Mitchell threatened to ruin Baker unless he added “neck compression” to his assessment.  Baker gave in, and four innocent officers went to prison for a crime they did not commit.

“There was extreme premium pressure, yes.  The city was burning down,” Sweasy’s fellow prosecutor, Patrick Lofton, said in his deposition.  He and Sweasy withdrew from the cases against Chauvin’s three colleagues — Thomas Lane, Tuo Thao, and Alex Kueng — for the simple reason they were guilty of no crime.  “I can tell you that everyone that I associate with to any degree, professionally or personally, agreed with our decision,” said Lofton in the deposition.  The pressure on the prosecutors, he said, was “insane.”

In this last decade, Jacobin justice has been unleashed on everyone from school board protesters to local police to a former president of the United States.  Much of it flows directly from the DOJ, but state and local prosecutors have been keen to launch witch hunts of their own.  In doing so, they have corrupted evidence, rigged juries, allowed fear to dictate outcomes, and abandoned all traditional notions of equality before the law.

For the time being the Jacobin alliance with the mob seems to be working.  As history reminds us, it worked for Robespierre as well — that is, until it didn’t.

Jack Cashill’s new book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities, is available in all formats.

Rise of the Jacobins: America’s Socialists Want Your Help

“The idea that socialism, other than various forms of voluntary communities in which people choose material privation and seek agreed equality, is the answer to anything runs against human experience.” ~ Doug Bandow

  Doug Bandow  – January 13, 2022  @ American Institute for Economic Research

 Revolutions are common. Good revolutions, well, not so much. Indeed, the American Revolution was one of the few that yielded a generally free society based on the rule of law and democratic governance. Only a few years later came the French Revolution. Many Americans initially looked with favor at the overthrow of a genuinely despotic monarchy, in contrast to the more constrained British system. The increasingly bloody toll as contending factions struggled for power, however, turned even former fans hostile.

Violence reached its crescendo under the Jacobins, who began as members of the Jacobin Club, initially known as Society of the Friends of the Constitution. With Maximilien Robespierre at their head, the Jacobins created the Committee of Public Safety and Committee of General Security and instituted the infamous Reign of Terror. Heads rolled—literally, as the guillotine was put to prodigious use. By one count 17,000 people were beheaded before the Jacobins lost power a little more than a year later. Then Robespierre and other leading Jacobins suffered the same fate, being dispatched from this world by what revolutionaries termed the people’s avenger.

Although discredited in France, the Jacobins were admired elsewhere as history passed by. The Bolsheviks looked to the Jacobins as models, for example, despite seeing the French Revolution as a bourgeois affair. The lack of sentimentality and determination to eradicate enemies appealed to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin & Co. Leon Trotsky contemplated trying Tsar Nicolas as the French Revolutionaries did Louis XVI. The Soviets even erected statues to Robespierre and his confederates.

The Jacobins really were surprisingly gutless when it came to murdering their political enemies and anybody else who fell afoul of their judgment. It was the Bolsheviks, particularly with Joseph Stalin at the head, who put real terror into “Reign of Terror.” RJ Rummel, author of Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900, reported on life under the infamous Man of Steel: “[M]urder and arrest quotas did not work well. Where to find the ‘enemies of the people’ they were to shoot was a particularly acute problem for the local NKVD, which had been diligent in uncovering ‘plots.’ They had to resort to shooting those arrested for the most minor civil crimes, those previously arrested and released, and even mothers and wives who appeared at NKVD headquarters for information about their loved ones.”

Alas, the murderous excesses of the Reign of Terror ruined the Jacobins’ reputation in America. In the US early supporters of the French Revolution, such as Thomas Jefferson, were derided as Jacobins. And it wasn’t just conservatives who used Jacobins to discredit their opponents. In 1964 Sen. Barry Goldwater and his supporters were tagged “Cactus Jacobins.” Jacobin became a term of derision, used to paint someone as an ideological extremist, even a violent radical, certainly someone with no legitimate place in American politics.

Until recently, at least. A decade ago a young Bhaskar Sunkara launched Jacobin, a website, publication and foundation. They continue and he wants your support. It’s that time of the year, of course.

Sunkara appealed for funds: “It’s the best time to be a socialist in the United States since the 1970s. The bad news is that it’s still not a very good time to be a socialist in the United States.” When he talked about socialism, he meant, well, socialism. Not the pantywaist, liberal-faux, pretend-revolutionary silliness espoused by posturing progressives, and not even the Bernie Sanders approach. How revolutionary can a millionaire with three homes, who secretly loves capitalism since it provides the cash that he wants to redistribute to his political supporters, be?

It’s possible that Bernie once was a real socialist. In 1988 he had nice words for the Soviet Union: “The revolution there is far deeper and more profound than I understood it to be. It really is a revolution in terms of values.” Eight years before he was an elector for the Socialist Workers Party. Of course, it’s hard to follow all the twists and turns in commie politics, but the SWP was Trotskyite. That meant it nominally followed Leon Trotsky.

He was a critic of Joseph Stalin, which made him look quite harmless, like a typically disheveled, and distracted academic with few skills other than theorizing about how many revolutionaries could dance on a pinhead while singing the Internationale. In fact, Trotsky did not just dabble in violence. He commanded the Red Army—as the People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs—during the Russian civil war and later crushed the Kronstadt rebellion, in which sailors and others demanded freedom and elections. He was a serious thug, theorist, butcher, politician, and terrorist rolled into one.

Bernie may be an obnoxious sanctimonious hypocrite—shouldn’t he give away at least one of his homes?—but he’s no Leon Trotsky. Nor any kind of real socialist.

But it seems that Sunkara is. Indeed, he admitted a fascination with Trotsky and defended the murder of the royal Romanoff children by the Bolsheviks. Sunkara also knows the only way to make a socialist America is to seize power and steal everyone’s property. Though he doesn’t put it quite that way. When Jacobin was created, he wrote, “Our contributors didn’t always agree, but they shared a desire to win a tiny, fragmented left back to fundamentals: a class-based analysis of the world that knew (if not exactly how) that the Left’s task was to rebuild working-class organizations capable of capturing and transforming state power.”

He would, no doubt, like to do good once in a position to send forth lefties determined to eradicate capitalism, essentially political locusts empowered to consume Americans’ wealth. Wrote Sunkara: “Our ideas were marginal, but they captivated us: the dream of a society without exploitation or oppression, without unnecessary suffering, where every person could reach their potential. A world with our animal problems solved, so we could start dealing with our human ones.” Sounds pretty good. But what does any of that have to do with socialism?

Sunkara tried to explain: “We publish pieces that reveal the truth about capitalism: a system based on exploitation and the degradation of the human spirit. Most of our daily online posts don’t seem to go deeper than that. But we also have a vision of a world after capitalism, one built from wealth and abundance around us. We want to radically extend democracy into spheres liberalism has always shied away from—the social and economic realm—and challenge private property in order to foster the type of collectivism that can truly create conditions for individual flourishing.”

He concluded: “Socialism is the name of our desire, but it may not be what the movements that will one day transform the world will use. In the meantime, we hope we can continue to play a role keeping alive the dream of liberty, equality, and solidarity.”

The idea that socialism, other than various forms of voluntary communities in which people choose material privation and seek agreed equality, is the answer to anything runs against human experience. Noteworthy is how little support worldwide there is for the ideology a century and a half after Karl Marx publicized his version of utopia.

That is certainly the case in America. Admitted Sunkara: “We have no illusions about how marginal we still are. Going from a few hundred to 62,000 subscribers in a decade is a nice story, but it only matters if our political mission is advancing.” And it isn’t, if we are talking about real socialism, as opposed to redistributionism, which is more a political strategy than ideological movement.

Nor is serious socialism viable elsewhere in the world. The Soviet Union, its Eastern European satellites, the People’s Republic of China, and a handful of other nations—Cuba, North Korea, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia—implemented economic variants which included substantial state ownership of the means of production. And the result was consistent. Catastrophic. Disastrous. Horrendous. And worse.

Indeed, all these states engaged in mass repression. Several conducted mass murder. Many carelessly, inadvertently, or callously killed prodigiously while seeking to create a new man and society. The total number of dead runs in the tens of millions, though we will never have an accurate count. Rummel figured about 109 million killed. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression estimated between 85 and 100 million dead. The numbers boggle the mind.

No doubt, Sunkara would respond that he does not advocate such a system, though over the years more than a few lefties have shown disturbing fondness for the guys with the guns, including in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and Cuba. Some still do. 

The only way to impose real socialism, in the end, is by force. Both the Soviet and Chinese communists won power by promising land to the peasants. Only when in power did the newly empowered socialists unveil their true intentions and seize farmers’ lands. Agricultural collectivization and state industrialization in both the USSR and PRC brought extraordinary hardship, including mass starvation, killing tens of millions. This was socialism, real socialism, and its “beneficiaries” paid a very high price.

Even the socialist grandees in these regimes had little idea of the economic world around them. Among the most famous “aha” moments came when Boris Yeltsin, then a former Soviet Politburo member, visited a Houston supermarket in September 1989. Wrote Pacific Legal Foundation’s Mark Hill, Yeltsin “visits a small town in Texas and makes an unscheduled stop in a grocery store. It’s the kind of store where all Americans regularly shop to find everything they could want to satisfy a hunger or household need. What Yeltsin found would not surprise us, but it amazed him. The local Texas newspaper recounted how Yeltsin ‘marvel[ed]’ at the produce, the fresh fish, and the checkout counter. ‘Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,’ remarked Russia’s future leader.” Such were the consequences of real socialism.

All of this forced most of the hardcore “socialist” regimes to turn toward capitalism. Most dramatic was the experience of the PRC. Ethnic Chinese, among the most entrepreneurial of people around the globe, proved equally adept economically at home when Deng Xiaoping dismantled the lunatic, murderous, inefficient, and impoverishing Maoist state. Without subsidies previously received from the Soviet Union, Cuba’s Castro regime suffered an economic crisis and was forced to abandon its socialist quest. It allowed development of private businesses. At the start such enterprises were to be family owned and staffed, but entrepreneurs joked with me about the many “cousins” they hired, a polite lie ignored by the authorities. Even North Korea has loosened state controls, though Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un recently reversed course, perhaps fearing the politically corrosive impact of South Korean culture on his rule.

Outside of terror systems, what country has implemented anything close to true socialism? Certainly not the Scandinavian countries. They are highly redistributive but have the money to be so because their economic systems remain capitalist. Indeed, in certain ways they represent better market systems than the US, with less special interest regulation used to reward elites with access to political power. Across the world today systems sometimes called socialist are almost always social democracies, Berniesque systems of economic redistribution which rely upon capitalism to produce abundant resources to plunder.

Some non-communist systems made an effort to attain socialism. The post-World War II United Kingdom grabbed control of important industries but fell far short of creating a socialist paradise. In Latin American nations such as Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and most recently Venezuela, politicians seized major economic enterprises but again, the results were not recognizably socialist. Often the looting looked very similar to that of nominally right-wing systems, such as the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos, Indonesia under Suharto, and more. Moreover, the economic results were uniformly dreadful, probably the most important reason such systems did not spread far.

Imagine a “democratic” system of socialism in America, in which the means of production were taken over by the state—essentially, mass theft on an enormous scale. Implementation would not be pretty: many Americans would do all they could to avoid, evade, obstruct, and sabotage such a transfer. Nor would human nature be mocked. Russian and Chinese farmers already have shown that they work harder for themselves than for “the people,” meaning political overseers and commissars. The usual intellectual elites could wring their hands at the “greed” exhibited by people who should be motivated by “solidarity,” but sanctimony piled ever higher would only deepen the cynicism of most people, especially in the working class.

Lack of knowledge and perverse incentives would wreak havoc. Socialism could only work by modeling capitalist systems. How could socialists price anything and produce everything without markets? The notion that labor determines value would fail to sustain a functioning economic system since any calculation of value is inherently subjective. State monopolies rarely perform well, especially when manipulated for political purposes, as they always are. The highly subsidized state sector in China does little for socialism while wasting vast amounts of the people’s resources. The lack of competition, both from existing alternatives and new creations, would ensure inefficiency and waste.

Finally, socialism is most likely to produce what Sunkara blames on capitalism, a system “based on exploitation and the degradation of the human spirit.” Certainly, making economic gain the center of one’s life, contributing to a society that elevates materialism, greed, and envy, risks sacrificing vital aspects of the good life. But these vices have little to do with the nature of the economic system. Human nature transcends capitalism and socialism.

In any case, systems unable to satisfy material needs intensify the desire for a better life. People always queued for the barest human necessities in “people’s democracies.” And elites in socialist systems inevitably used their political power for economic gain. When I visited the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, I headed to the hard currency store for soda and snacks; the shelves groaned beneath pricey consumer goods, including fancy electronics, available only if you had Western cash to exchange for the foreign, blue and green won, rather than the local, red and pink won. In Cuba a colleague and I, visiting legally on a journalism trip, were tossed out of a similar shop after snapping pictures of what those with access to dollars or euros could buy, but which those with only Cuban pesos could not.

Moreover, when the state extends its control over economic resources, it inevitably limits other human activities. A market economy is but one part of a free society, which is filled with nonmarket institutions: families, clubs, churches, associations, friends, charities, and much more. A free economic system expands their opportunities and scope despite its imperfections.

In contrast, when politicians decide how to allocate resources, they have no objective standards. Experience demonstrates that those in disfavor, whether journalists, clerics, politicians, activists, or anyone else, inevitably come up short. It really doesn’t matter whether anyone intends socialism to act in this way. It will inevitably do so.

Thankfully, I believe Sunkara’s drive to impose socialism in the US is doomed. Young people may talk about socialism without any understanding of what it would really mean. Once they realized someone up the bureaucratic chain would decide what kind of smartphone they could buy and apps they could use—indeed, if they could do so at all—their enthusiasm for the concept would quickly cool.

Still, I hope he keeps Jacobin afloat. It is a serious venture with a serious mission that deals with serious ideas, in contrast to the mostly braindead officeholders in both the Democratic and Republican parties. While serving in the Stanford student senate when I was supposed to be studying law, a socialist coalition took. They were loopy lefties but recognized that America faced serious problems and advocated systemic reforms, in contrast to the squishy liberals who were, well, essentially useless for any and all purposes. America needs a serious debate over its future. I hope socialists—real socialists, like those affiliated with Jacobin—join in.

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Doug Bandow

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, specializing in foreign policy and civil liberties.

He worked as special assistant to President Ronald Reagan and editor of the political magazine Inquiry.

He writes regularly for leading publications such as Fortune magazine, National Interest, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Times.

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Our American Inheritance

We must not forget our forebears’ sacrifices. 

Mark T. Mitchell July 2, 2021 @ City Journal

As Independence Day dawns again, the United States seems disoriented and on edge. The one-two punch of Covid-19 and urban riots, coupled with a sense of economic fragility and impending inflation, has left many feeling drained and nervous about the future. Institutions that once served as the ballast for national well-being have shown themselves to be untrustworthy. Americans brace for the next wave of disruption.

When Twitter, Facebook, and cable news frame the issues of the day, it’s hard not to be discouraged. We are polarized and angry, and the radical Left is to blame—or maybe it’s the fascist Right. The despair is often accompanied by a self-righteous assurance that things would be better if only our political opponents would disappear.

But another America still exists, beyond the sound and fury of Twitter and the Beltway. It lives quietly in homes, where parents try to raise their children well. It exists in schools, where dedicated teachers show up day after day to teach. It flourishes in neighborhoods, community centers, and diners, where neighbors gather for conversation and a shared story. It pervades churches, synagogues, and mosques, where families pause from their busy lives to return thanks to God. Indeed, despite the turmoil and uncertainty, we have much to be grateful for.

If citizenship, properly understood, begins with gratitude, gratitude begins when we recognize that we are the beneficiaries of a great and multifaceted inheritance, as Edmund Burke understood. Writing at the outset of the French Revolution, Burke anticipated with remarkable clarity the disorder and devastation that was coming. Today, American society flirts with revolutionary sentiments that recall the attitudes that motivated the Jacobins. We would do well to listen to Burke’s warnings, for we risk squandering our inheritance—a fateful civilizational move.

Burke criticizes those revolutionaries who have learned “to despise all their predecessors.” Such despising led to “a great departure from the ancient course.” This wholesale rejection of the past represents, for Burke, the height of carelessness mixed with naïveté about the nature of human beings and human societies. He levels his attack at those who willingly ignore what they have inherited: “You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you.” 

For Burke, common possessions—our social and political institutions—flow from an inheritance. To reject that inheritance is to reject the very ideas, forms, customs, practices, and institutions that constitute a people. It is a kind of social and political suicide. Ironically, such a rejection of the past in the name of a better future represents a serious threat to the future in whose name the rejection is made, for “people will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”

If we truly wish to secure a good, stable, and just future, we should begin with our inheritance: recognizing the good therein; lovingly improving upon that which has been received; and, in due time, passing that improved inheritance on to the next generation. In this way, “the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of transmission; without at all excluding a principle of improvement.”

What Burke describes is stewardship. When we understand ourselves as stewards, we see that we are inheritors of cultural and political goods that must be cultivated if they are to survive. Civilization is not automatic; a free society is not natural. In fact, political freedom is a remarkable achievement that required generations of sacrifice, experimentation, discipline, and practice. In America, we inherited an English tradition in self-government that developed over centuries. The Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights—not to mention the Bible—stand behind the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. America’s founding documents are unimaginable apart from the principles and practices articulated and fostered by the Founders’ predecessors.

Today, we enjoy the blessings of freedom won by the sacrifices of our forebears, who hoped that their offspring would live free. When we take these things for granted, when we act as if political freedom is a natural occurrence, or a right that can simply be demanded; and when we believe that life in a free society entails only benefits to be enjoyed and no responsibilities to be shouldered, we are consuming finite cultural capital.

Stewardship of this cultural and political inheritance means living gratefully and responsibly in such a way that we strengthen our institutions and pass them along to the next generation. We must seek to inculcate in ourselves and our children the habits and practices necessary for sustaining and improving what we have been given. Ignoring this task means squandering the very things that make a free society possible.

On Independence Day, set aside some time to remember and celebrate America’s founding principles. Let us recommit ourselves to the responsibility of upholding those principles with fidelity and steadfastness born of gratitude. Let us take seriously the responsibilities, and not just the rights, of citizenship. Americans are inheritors of great but fragile gifts; gratitude should foster a commitment to steward them well.

Mark T. Mitchell is the dean of academic affairs at Patrick Henry College and the author, most recently, of Power and Purity: The Unholy Marriage that Spawned America’s Social Justice Warriors.

City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank. Are you interested in supporting the magazine? As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations in support of MI and City Journal are fully tax-deductible as provided by law (EIN #13-2912529). DONATE

America’s New Jacobins

Victor Davis Hanson Tuesday, October 2, 2018 @ Hoover Institute

Maximilien Robespierre and his Jacobin “Committee of Public Safety’ highjacked the late 18th-century French Revolution. As supposedly more authentically radical revolutionaries, Jacobins did away with their supposedly less radical first-generation Girondists, who themselves had helped to liquidate the French monarchy and many of the Ancient Régime.

What followed Robespierre’s “Reign of Terror” were cycles of revolution until the appearance of Napoleon’s military autocracy. The United States, mutatis mutandis, currently seems on the verge of a new cycle of such leftwing radicalism in spirit and substance—as the old Democrat Party appears to be withering away and a new Socialist Democrat Party assumes its place.

We can see the changes in Washington. Emboldened leftwing protestors recently disrupted the Senate Supreme Court confirmation hearings on Judge Brett Kavanaugh. A bewildered Majority Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley vainly tried to restore order by insisting on decorum and custom.

Yet it proved hard for an overwhelmed Grassley to distinguish the shouting in the gallery from the even more disruptive antics of the Democrat senators at his side who were vying with the protestors to authenticate their leftwing fides.

After the appearance of Christine Blasey Ford, angry young women cornered Sen. Jeff Flake in an elevator, shaking their fingers at him, and screaming in his face. And the melodrama of the mob worked. A shaken and flushed Flake altered his original position and backed away from his earlier vow to confirm Kavanaugh outright. The new radicals had taken the erstwhile advice of Barrack Obama to “get in their faces” and “punish our enemies,” but took it to a new, more literal level. Or in the words of Rep. Maxine Waters, progressives were now to hit the streets: “If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd, and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

Republican senators in the confirmation hearings were written off by congressional Democrats and the media as “old white men,” illegitimate inquirers due to their age and race. Traditional liberal Democratic fixtures in the Senate like Diane Feinstein and Chuck Schumer sought to move hard left in the twilight of their careers, and now appeared as aged firebrands mouthing 1960s rhetoric.

Presidential press conferences, always boisterous and messy, have become akin to street theater. Reporters try to hijack the proceedings, as if they were to be both questioners and answerers. Even a loud and often uncouth President Trump seems shaken when told by journalists whom he should call on next.

In Senate hearings, ancient ideas like due process, innocence until guilt is proven, cross-examination, the inadmissibility of hearsay, the need for corroborating testimonies and physical evidence, and statutes of limitations fall by the wayside, dismissed as irrelevant, problematic or counter-revolutionary.

“Fake-news” is a misnomer for partisan journalism when the New York Times falsely claims UN Ambassador Nikki Haley ordered $50,000 drapes for her office, or other media report that a teenage Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted a woman in a boat off the coast of Rhode Island. The media is not merely an extension of the progressive movement, but now proud to affirm why its old professed adherence to disinterested reporting is considered outdated—given that the perceived threats of a Trump presidency deserve overt opposition, not mere coverage.

Senatorial inquisitors with their own questionable backgrounds pose as ethicists in their dismantling of the character of Brett Kavanaugh. Just as Jacobins demolished their opponents for lapses that they themselves had freely shared, so progressive senators went back in time to tag Kavanaugh with alleged teen-aged indiscretions, even while their own adult wrongdoings were forgotten.  Thus Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s made-up Vietnam veteran persona is now a mere indiscretion. Sen. Corey Booker’s yarn of an imaginary friend T-Bone is a long-ago construct. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s fanciful Native American heritage is a slight memory lapse. And Sen. Joe Biden’s fictional coal-mining family and past plagiarism are the stuff of normal exaggeration.

Yet the new radicalism is not just one of style or hypocrisy.

If five years ago Sen. Bernie Sanders was considered an eccentric socialist relic from the 1960s and twenty-something Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was a Manhattan bartender moonlighting as a social activist, today both in popular culture have eclipsed paleo-Democratic functionaries such as Schumer, Feinstein, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi.

They, and others such as Sens, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Kirsten Gillibrand, are the new faces of a rebranded Democratic Socialist party, whose chief agendas are universal free college tuition, the cancellation of over $1 trillion in student debt, the extension of Medicare to everyone, the abolition of ICE, the rapid end to fossil fuel use, and a vast reduction in the defense budget. When asked how to pay for it all, they do not sheepishly shrug their shoulders, but confidently and boldly promise to take the money from those who have it by far higher taxes on the “rich”. The European Union and the United Nations, not the US Constitution, are more their paradigms of social justice.

What were the conditions that created these new Jacobins?

It was not just the ascendance of the hated Donald Trump, although the election of the first president to have neither political nor military experience both scared and inspired the new socialists.

Trump terrified them, because he sought to craft a conservative populist workers’ movement that threatened to erode the natural Democratic base. And he did so with slash-and-burn tactics, antithetical to the traditional Marquess-of-Queensberry Republican rules that had emasculated past Republican presidential candidates.

But Trump also inspired radical leftists by encouraging them also to ignore precedent, and normal political perquisites. Instead, they should similarly consider their own political elite—especially the old Clinton machine—as being as irrelevant and expendable as the Romney and Bush wing of the Republican Party.

Far more influential than Trump for the Jacobins, however, was the Obama legacy, both its perceive advantages and downsides.

On the plus side for the Jacobins, Obama’s two successful elections encouraged the new radicals to believe that open borders, changing demography, radicalized identity politics, bloc voting and an increasingly self-destructive and shrinking white working class had ensured a new progressive electoral future, based on a permanently different sort of American electorate.  How we appear would now be as important as who we are—especially in a salad-bowl America that had transcended the old melting pot. Black, brown, Asian, female, gay, bisexual, or transgendered were essential clannish concepts that, if properly massaged and aggregated, would result in a 51 percent popular majority. A candidate’s or activist’s political credibility hinged on belonging to one or more of such tribes.

But on the minus side, the Democratic Party undeniably had suffered its greatest setbacks in more than half a century between 2009-2017, even as Obama became a mythical figure in party lore.  Democrats had lost the House, the Senate, the majority of governorships and legislatures, and de facto the Supreme Court. Yet the new Democratic socialists sought to square that circle of Obama’s successes and their own party’s failures by insisting that Obama’s ancestry and leftism had been essential to his success, but that the Democrat Party’s retrograde traditionalism had let Obama down and eventually proved toxic and fatal on down ballots.

More rational observers might have concluded that Obama took the party too far leftward, ignored its alienation from the working classes, and focused instead on his own identity politics; and that, selfishly, he had seen his own transformational candidacy and presidency as something apart from his party’s viability and future. But instead, the Jacobins moved even more radically to the left.

There were also other parents who birthed the new Jacobinism. The campus now led the progressive movement, as everything from identity politics to safe spaces was imported and institutionalized as the new Democratic Socialist party dogma. Again, nowhere was that more apparent than in the Kavanaugh hearings. Democrats more or less appropriated the hearings and turned them into a campus-like inquest into sexual harassment charges—thereby discarding calcified constitutional traditions such as due process and the rights of the accused to a presumption of innocence, rigorous cross-examination, and the protections from hearsay and accusations well beyond any statute of limitations.

The Halls of Congress resembled the campus protests that had met a Ben Shapiro or Charles Murray when they dared give  a campus speech. Protestors bullied senators as enemies of the people and turned the senate gallery into a veritable campus quad. On the theory that both parties were controlled by aging white people soon to be irrelevant (given their spent and tired constituencies), the youth and diversity of the campus also inspired a national radical drift.

The new sectarianism has also inspired the Jacobins. Globalization, open borders, deindustrialization, and red- and blue-state polarization have intensified old political divides into new additional regional animosities. The Democratic Socialists are the party of the coasts and of the cities, where most of the high-tech industries, national politics, and universities are anchored. The hipster profile of a thirty-something, unmarried, childless, urban renter and loft-dweller is the new Democrat icon, not the blue-collar, lunch-pail bloke fighting commuter traffic in his used car to get home to his working wife, kids, and mortgaged tract house. Think of the recent Democrat campaign film, “Life of Julia,” or the “Pajama Boy” Obamacare ad. The new radicals believe that they are not just the future of the Democrat Party, but also are avatars of global culture itself, especially ecumenical ideas such as using the state to replace fossil fuels, subordinating nationalism to continental or world governance, and recalibrating the U.S Constitution as something akin to the looser protocols that govern most other countries.

What is next?

The Jacobins will either overreach and soon rendezvous with something like a Thermidor correction. In American political terms, that would mean that after going off a McGovern cliff and marginalizing the party, Democrats will regroup, and climb back to a Jimmy Carter or Bill Clintonian center. Remember, that until Obama, for 44 years (from 1964 to 2008) no Democrat presidential candidate had ever won the popular vote without a southern accent, the old public stamp of Democratic moderatism.

Or, in contrast to a centrism correction, we may see even more radical street theater: walking out on Senate votes; taking to the streets; mainstreaming Occupy Wall Street, Antifa, and Black Lives Matter; seeking to remove an elected president by weaponizing the FBI, DOJ, and CIA, turning to impeachment, the 25th Amendment and the Emolument Clause, states’ rights nullifications of federal law, or using deep-state Resistance members or liberal courts to subvert executive governance.

If the Democrats do not capture the House, and thus cannot impeach Trump and send him to the Senate for trial, and thereby stall his agendas, then the Jacobins will face their own Thermidor reaction.

But if they prove successful, then everything is imaginable—and nothing is sacred.

Hanson explains the fascinating history of how both factions trace their roots back to Roman times - the urban radicals who favored equality, and the rural traditionalists who favored liberty. You'll learn the important parallels between these ancient movements and their modern counterparts in both progressives and conservative populism.

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The “Know Nothing” Republicans Have Gone the Way of the Whigs

By Jonathan Henderson

(Editor's Note: This appeared in August but it's worth remembering now!)

I have voted in every general election since I was first eligible in 2000. Not once have I ever cast a ballot for a Democrat. Philosophically, the party violates my core principles as a Christian conservative. Democrats proudly spit in the faces of Christian conservatives, Zionist Jews, libertarians and any political conscientious objectors. They organize riots whenever a random black man, woman or child is killed if involving even one white person. That petulant demographic comprising just 13 percent of the national population is responsible for better than half of all crime. And the vast majority of blacks are not only upstanding civilians, they are proud to be Americans, where at least they once knew they were free. They are dealt raw deals from all directions.......

The GOP is another sock puppet of Jacobins: filthy rich off Dow Jones, herding hated Mr. Jones’ beasts of England across the Manor Farm. Conservatives must be prepared to ask “What difference, at this point, does it make?” while waiting for Godot, who will unfortunately never arrive.

Reince Priebus’ Romanovian arrogance is an indicator the establishment’s narcissism yields no intention to support its conservative majority, which it labels more radical than ISIS. The party now engages in Machtpolitik which in the aftermath of Thad Cochran’s senatorial primary, may have led to the ostensible murder of Mississippi Tea Party official Mark Mayfield......To Read More....