July is nearly upon us and with it the hot weather that comes with a typical summer. Following their revolution in 1789, the French renamed the month of July “Thermidor’, derived from the from Greek thermon or “summer heat”. Their 1793 revolutionary calendar was imposed for about 12 years until 1805, and was designed in part to scrub religious and royalist influences from the calendar. The French, not satisfied to simply overthrow the king, also overthrew conventional references to the months.
Their zeal to toss out things like the calendar is not entirely dissimilar to what we are seeing currently in the streets of America. In particular is Seattle, Washington where anarchists have taken over 6 blocks of the downtown area and renamed it “CHOP”, short for “Capitol Hill Occupied Protest”. For now, they seem satisfied to retain the current calendar system, even as they make life miserable for the residents and business owners of the area, to say nothing of defying law and order. Things could change. One of them could read some French history, even as their philosophical fellow travelers in other cities deface and destroy public edifices in an effort to erase history they do not find to their liking.
The common denominators don’t stop there. Law and order is out: vigilantism is in. More disturbing is the facile response of the governors and mayors when anarchy is on the rise. They have retreated from their responsibility—indeed their oaths—to uphold the law. Better, they reason, to accommodate the anarchical lion who, they wrongly believe, will soon lay down with the mollycoddling lamb. They fail to appreciate that radical revolutionaries are rarely sated. These faux elected leaders are on the menu and haven’t taken the time to discover that they will be among the “specials of the day.”
For many Americans who are passively observing all of this, the idea of violence, looting, arson, and the deprivation of life is horrifying. It is counter to every notion of a civilized society, particularly a republic where the Constitution and the rule of law, not the rule of man—including mobs—are the standards by which we demonstrate our worthiness for self-governance. That’s not all that’s on the minds of many people in America.
We are a nation that has been shaken by the COVID-19 pandemic. But we have also been taken aback by the government’s power to constrain our freedom and livelihoods. People are beginning to take the measure of this and are legitimately asking the question if we took this too far? Indeed, was the cure worse than the disease now that we have shattered our economy and destroyed countless jobs in the process?
We are also a nation bitterly divided. People can hardly miss that sad point and have frankly grown weary of it. The more radical among us seek to completely overthrow authority. The defund-the-police movement is testimony to the insanity that informs the passions of those who think that police misconduct—as we have seen in the George Floyd murder—is the norm. It isn’t. But many policies of the radical left would transform America into a socialist state, where the Constitution is malleable according to the passions of the day. Socialism has failed miserably. Capitalism is not without defect, but is more consistent with the notion of freedom. Winston Churchill put this choice aptly:
“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
To the radicals of this age, that distinction is without validly. To the majority of Americas, it’s an observable fact.
July is typically a hot month in America. And in 2020, the temperature will not merely be a matter of meteorology. Passions are running high now and the majority of people are unhappy with much of that public expression and its accompanying behavior. Most citizens recoil at the violence we see and the absence of efforts to contain it by our leaders. Many are worried by the overreach of government power to “save us” from disease while killing the economy. We are stunned by the “cleaning of history”, the very thing totalitarian governments do.
In France on July 27, 1794—the 9th of Thermidor by their revolutionary calendar—the counter revolution began. The majority of people in France, fully exhausted with the violent and governmental excess, overthrew Maximilien Robespierre and the tyranny he orchestrated though his “Committee of Public Safety.” It marked the end of his “Reign of Terror” by the decentralization of executive powers and a turn from the radical leftist policies toward more conservative positions.
The revolutionaries of our age would do well to consider the counter revolution that could beset them in November following the Thermidor of our discontent. It cometh.
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