(Morning! Sad day yesterday- the passing of an old friend, the end of something long and hard in a place far away where many had served. Emotional. I was going to run portraits of Messrs Sunstein and Ayres to go along with this piece. They are architects of the new ruling class, and to recognize their accomplishment in overthrowing the former Sole Remaining Superpower. But this image is actually French, and reflects a society that has played out all sorts of mischief in the brief ascendancy of Western Civilization. Our society is currently doing something like what they have tried in the past, and the poignant face of a mother who must deal with the consequences of folly seems to sum it up much better. Welcome to America’s Second Republic).
– Vic
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I have mentioned with tiresome frequency my observation back at the beginning of The Plague Year that this was a historic time that should be remembered. Considering it was the deliberate commission of the largest crime in the 233 years of our Republic, I will stand with that assessment. But as the enormity of what happened finally began to sink in, I wondered what the historians, or whatever the digital successors to that discipline might call it.
The times have changed, and the old ones, enveloped in the new digital age, have passed away largely without comment. We now live in a New Republic, different than the one we knew before. A second Republic, erected with digital skill and open conduct in a manner that would have startled the Framers.
The digital world has overwhelmed the old protections we had in place to protect our speech, our ability to defend ourselves and the privacy of our papers. To complete the totality of the operation, you can throw in the billeting of a foreign army of invaders on our property. That they have sympathetic faces or small children does not change anything about the climactic nature of the invasion. Abandonment of border is abandonment of state.
The working group thought about our latest revolution, and whether to start capitalizing the words for it as something real and significant. The French have been our partners in change for as long as we have been an independent state. Often it was in agreed frames of reference, and sometimes not. Their second attempt at a republican government was a product of something they knew as the Révolution de Février, the February Revolution. That is when astute readers, uncertain of the reference, pause for a moment and Google Wiki to see what it means- or meant- before their activist editors changed things around to meet the new history.
This one is simple: “The 1848 Revolution in France, sometimes known as the February Revolution, was one of a wave of revolutions across Europe. The events swept away the Orleans monarchy that succeeded the Bourbon Restoration (capitalized) and the Bonapart hysteria and led to the creation of the nation’s second republic. Lower case, mind you.
The Orleans monarchy lasted only a little less time than our adventure in Afghanistan. It was billed as a more liberal and constitutional monarchy, governed by a conservative-classical liberal political system in which the right, under Monsieur Guizot was opposed by a progressive center-left loyal opposition. To the left of the dynastic parties, the monarchy was criticized by Republicans (a mixture of remnant radicals and forward-thinking socialists) for being insufficiently democratic.
Stop me if you have heard this before in the persistent maundering about the oppressive patriarchal cis-gendered racial inequity that now hangs limply across all our institutions. But in the history they allow us to retain, the situation is described as being based on a narrow and privileged electorate of property owners. That reflects Americans who used to have their own zoning regulations to maintain certain agreed community standards. Remaining historic accounts still call those not so empowered as “workers.” The overhaul of the old Marxism has adapted nicely by now characterizing that class as “persons of color.”
During the 1840s, several petitions requesting electoral reform were issued by the Guardia National, their version of the National Guard, and included things like universal suffrage for men. The centuries do work their ways, don’t they? We remember the similar and emotional struggle for the rights of women. Both then-existing political factions rejected the notion. Political meetings dedicated to the issue were banned by the government, and electoral reformers therefore bypassed the ban by holding a series of ‘banquets’ in the run-up to the 1848 revolt. They were characterized as something else, of course, and disguised as dinner speechifying. As with all things, economic issues penetrated to the core of public discussion more far-ranging than discussions after foie gras.
Still, the Guizot government felt the heat and banned the banquets, finally declaring they constituted illegal political assembly. If you wish, you can compare the BLM/Antifa rioting last summer as a sort of recurrence of human nature. Back in February, 1848, striking workers and republican students took to the streets, demanding an end to Guizot’s government, and erected barricades. The government declared a state of emergency, intending to use the standing force of the guard to crush the uprising. Instead, the smart guys in the Guard sided with the revolutionaries, protecting them from the regular soldiers who had, by then, had been called in.
If this seems sadly familiar, we have not quite come to the moment when protestors have been shot, as they were outside the Guizot homestead. On the 23rd of February, the cabinet resigned and barricades were raised after the shooting of protestors outside the Guizot manor by regular soldiers.
In the face of the trouble, King Louis-Phillipe abdicated in favor of his grandson, who in turn elected to rule in the name of the provisional government centered on the reconstituted Chamber of Deputies under the pressure of the Parisian mobs.
They sorted things out in a new form of semi-democratic and uniquely French fashion as The Second Republic.
I could use the line attributed to Monsieur Twain about history not repeating itself but having a certain human rhyming, but I think you know what I mean. We didn’t understand the one that is happening to us now. There are smart people who had a better clue about that. We could talk about that smart but monstrous fellow Cass Sunstein, or his inimical rich-boy terrorist buddy William Ayres. They have been working on this for most of their lives, giving dinner speeches for which they have not paid any particular price.
If you are not familiar with them, that would be worth another rumination, since they are the architects of the new society and it’s government.
We should have been paying more attention as the digital world neatly sidestepped the bulwarks erected by smart guys who used quill pens. We are living in another world that we helped construct without recognizing the consequences of surrendering every scrap of our personal information, movement and intent. And we invented a new class of affluent oligarchs to tell us when we should stay home, mask up, pay more or shut up.
It is not our Second Republic. It appears to be theirs. Did you think you would live in a time in America when you felt a mild relief that we will not have to endure the full consequences of what these people have done to us? I do worry about the kids and grandkids, though.
They are going to have to live in a Republic they did not make. The Second One.
Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com