Politically convenient projection is the course of the day in 2020.
“For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction.”
-Newton’s Third Law Of Motion
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been driven insane by this Tweet from Daily Wire commentator Michael Knowles:
We’re living through the consequences of an entire generation’s never learning that the French Revolution was a bad thing.
— Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) June 11, 2020
You might remember Yoram Hazony using The French Revolution as an example of the evil of “abstract Enlightenment philosophy,” in his video for PragerU. In 2017, Joshua Charles used the same comparison except it was about the evil of secularism.
The issue however is that the French Revolution happened for reasons unrelated to Enlightenment ideals or secularism. It happened because the people of France were sick of being ruled by an oligarchical system that was unapologetic of its repression of the common man. While the system of governance was replaced with one that was extreme in its secularism and dedication to sections of enlightenment philosophy, this was not the goal of the average French citizen when the Revolution took place. How could it be? The vast majority of the population was unable to read, so they had no way of reading Enlightenment philosophy.
This is why revolutions often have dividing factions. In the early years of the American republic, in the aftermath of the American Revolution, there were Hamilton’s hard-core Federalists and Jefferson’s Republicans. The Russian Revolution was not just supported by authoritarian Marxists, but also Social Democrats, Socialists, and Anarchists, all of which united to remove the Tsar.
Teaching the Russians about the benefits of market economies would not have stopped the Russian Revolution, because while communism was the end result, the revolution was not about communism. The revolution was done to get the Tsar who had failed so badly in World War One out of power.
Here’s another example: Hitler becoming ruler of Germany was not some massive statement that Germans supported fascism, because while Hitler was a fascist the Nazi party becoming popular was more a reaction to Germany’s bad economy (blank pieces of paper were worth more than the German currency) and the shame Germany was given through the Treaty of Versailles.
This is because, as Issac Newton said, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Said reactions can sometimes be obvious. For example, the Black Panthers and the rise of Malcolm X among African-Americans in the 1950s and 1960s was the result of three centuries of being treated less than equal by white Americans. Hence why a 1959 television documentary on the Black Panthers was literally called The Hate That Hate Produces.
Here’s another example: when Barack Obama was elected President in 2008 on a platform that included moderate gun control, gun sales spiked. Gun sales also spiked after Democratic politicians promised gun control after the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012. They also spiked in 2018 after David Hogg’s March For Our Lives movement started gaining public traction.
This is commonly misunderstood among big-government conservatives. In his article “Against Peacetime Conservatism” Will Chamberlain wrote:
“Peacetime conservatives worry about setting precedents that Democrats could exploit in the future. Wartime conservatives recognize that Democrats do unprecedented things all the time.”
The specific event he was referencing was when Donald Trump talked about declaring a national emergency over his border wall instead of getting the funding through Congress. The debate was over what precedent would be started, although, oddly enough, none of these people asked why the President has the power to bypass Congress in the first place.
This is why arguments like “we have to use state power to suppress our enemies because our enemies will suppress us” make no sense. In part because, if your enemies are being suppressed, all that does is make your enemies more sneaky.
Hence why if, hypothetically, a Senator from Wisconsin was to hold up a letter from the Secretary Of State to a Congressman and claim it’s a list of 105 Communists working in the State Department, that doesn’t make the entire concept of Communism disappear from the public light. All it does is cause those who argue the same, when the greater proof is being put forward, to be laughed at while a politician running for President who once identified as communist now calls himself a “Democratic Socialist.”
(This is also why Haggard’s Law, or the idea that someone who is vocally homophobic is secretly gay, is nonsense. If someone really wants to keep the fact that they’re gay a secret, and they live in a society that stereotypes the vocally homophobic as gay, they’re not going to be vocally homophobic because that would give the game away. Like all dog-whistles, by the time you’ve figured it out, they’ve moved on to something else.)
If someone is that determined to come after you, they’ll find some loophole to get around whatever small law you put in the way. Just as, to paraphrase Mr. Enter, if someone really wanted to kill you, you’d be dead right now.
In truth, the only way to stop suppression done by your enemies is to make the entire concept of suppression through government impossible. This is the only way you do not have to worry about the shifting powers, or about your enemies hiding in the shadow.