When to Worry

“A state without the means of some change, is without the means of its own conservation.”

― Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

This morning, when I should have been already leaning into my day at 6:30, I ran across an interesting discussion in the Atlantic magazine online about the sanguine appraisal of Trumpism by one of Maine's congressmen.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/09/jared-golden-maine-trump-harris/679698/

Representative Golden sees the country waking up the day after the election and heading off to work, as it's always done. He blames both sides for fomenting hysteria by painting this as a moment of existential crisis for American democracy.

Maybe.

But later I spent a few minutes with this massive novel I'm reading, A Place of Greater Safety, which tracks the lives of the various leaders of the French Revolution. We get to know, and sort of like, Robespierre, Danton, Desmoulins, and even the distinctly Trumpy Mirabeau. This morning it was a spring day in 1792, and Desmoulins and Danton sat gossiping about the politics of the Assembly and the homely daughters of the merchant family where Robespierre was boarding. The great issues of their moment--imminent invasion by their European neighbors, the nature of freedom, the various approaches to representative government--all mixed with quotidian talk of women and who's sleeping with whom.

At this point in the Revolution, three years along in fact, there has been very little bloodshed, only some mob murders in the very beginning followed by Lafayette leading a massacre at the Champ de Mars. Jacobins and Cordeliers and Royalists jockeyed and accused each other of intrigue, but no one was dying. Even poor fat Louis still held his tenuous throne, but now as Louis Capet.

But within two years, all of them would be dead, even the minor characters whose names float in and out of the saga.

There was always a violent undertone to the whole revolutionary period, but by the middle of 1793 it turned into a murderous rampage. What happened?

I reckon the book will get there. My general understanding is that each faction painted the other as a existential threat to the country, there was intrigue with foreign powers determined to undermine the revolution, folks who were hungry when they stormed the Bastille four years earlier were even hungrier now. That whole toxic stew led to an orgy of institutional murder. I've never understood French pride in all that. It was humanity at our very worst.

One could draw analogies here, given that every element in that formula for mayhem in 1793-94 seems present at some level today. But Mark Twain was right: history doesn't repeat itself, although it sometimes rhymes. Things change, things stay the same. Trying to draw analogies and warning signs from the long-dead requires a simple minded erasure of details that are sometimes critical to understanding that moment, and our own. We have plenty in common with the citizens of Paris at the end of the 18th century, but we haven't gone so nuts as to remake our calendar and start boarding cattle in our churches (although I've been in some that have been turned into quite comfortable bars).

But this still feels like a hazardous political moment for the country. I don't think that factious threat of violence in the air these days is entirely a product of our media-industrial complex. And we are so heavily armed, compared with the sans culottes, that if things turn ugly they could turn very ugly indeed.

So I guess in the end I don't share Golden's calm confidence in the strength of our institutions, particularly when one party has made it a platform goal to dismantle them. At the same time, I don't see signs that many beyond the radicalized true believers in either party have much appetite for violence. I'm betting on inertia to keep the peace.

But then again, maybe Danton and Desmoulins were, as well.