Reflections on the Revolution in Portland
Although Edmund Burke was initially favorably disposed to the French Revolution, the seizure of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette by a crowd of Parisian women (a wall of moms?) in October, 1789 turned him into an ardent foe. After reading a pamphlet by an English divine, Richard Price, which compared the events in France to the English “Glorious Revolution” of 1688–an event that Burke revered–Burke was spurred to action, and in 1790 penned Reflections on the Revolution in France.
The book was a sensation, and effectively defined, intellectually anyways, the divide between contending view of the Revolution. Burke’s book resulted in immediate retorts, notably by Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine.
In some ways, Burke and his opponents were in complete agreement. Both believed that the Revolution was freeing France from the shackles of the past. The difference was that Burke viewed this with horror, whereas the Wollstonecrafts and Paines (and even some of Burke’s Whig colleagues, like Edward Fox) greeted it with enthusiasm, rapture even.
At the time, Burke’s interpretation was attacked as exaggeration, but events proved that he had a better, and far more realistic, understanding of the revolutionary dynamic, and the consequences of shattering the shackles. Insofar as exaggeration is concerned, yes, Louis and Marie were knocked about a bit, and humiliated, and the scenes between Versailles and Paris were chaotic and shocking to someone of Burke’s sensibilities. But they remained royalty, and remained alive.
But Burke saw that the forces of anarchy and what we now call nihilism (the word was not coined until the mid-19th century, and then in Russia) had been unleashed. He saw that there was no limiting principle in the revolutionary rhetoric. He took seriously the vaulting ambitions of some to revolutionize society root and branch. He had a tragic view of humanity: he referred to “the causes of evil which are permanent,” and believed that the complete dissolution of the institutions that kept these evils in check (perhaps with their own attendant evils) would result in disaster.
Within a few years, events would vindicate him. The execution of Louis and Marie. The Terror. And ultimately, something that Burke had predicted–the emergence of a military strongman who would restore order.
Burke, in other words, was a Cassandra. A seer who accurately foretold doom, but was dismissed and abused by those who were doomed.
Burke was not a reactionary. He had supported the American Revolution, and as I noted already, revered the Glorious Revolution. He was also famous for his prosecution of Warren Hastings for corruption in India and–critics of colonialism take note–accused the East India Company of doing untold damage in India.
But he believed that society required institutions, rules, and morals to restrain ugly human impulses. And he believed that attempts to revolutionize society root and branch would result in chaos and mass human misery.
Burke came to mind in watching the events in Portland–and copycat anarchy in other cities like Seattle and Oakland. The rioters there–I will not dignify them with the moniker “protestors”–avowedly desire the complete eradication of the United States and its institutions. Like the most radical of the French revolutionaries of 1789-1796, they believe that the entire system has to be overturned and replaced by an entirely new, utopian one.
Don’t believe me? Just ask them.
Like Burke’s critics, you might dismiss my attention to the radicals. They are just a fringe, you might say. Hell, if you are of the mind of Jerry Nadler (if so, you have my pity), you will dismiss the above as a “myth” deserving of no attention whatsoever: indeed, you will attribute my attention to partisan malice.
But what Burke perceived is that the radicals, the hard men–and today, hard women–have a decided advantage. Indeed, their hardness is their advantage. In war and politics, will matters. Those of iron will exert influence and power far beyond their numbers.
No major revolutionary movement–not just in France, but in Russia in 1917, or in China in the 1940s, or in Cuba in the 1950s-60s, or in Cambodia in the 1970, and on and on–has been remotely in the majority. Indeed, the defining idea of Leninism is that a small, dedicated elite cadre, not a mass of the people, is the driving force in revolution.
We are already seeing that the ruling class in the United States is largely deferential to the radicals. The Democratic Party defends them: as I write, the spittle-spewing morons on the House Judiciary Committee are hectoring AG William Barr for daring to defend federal property against the New Jacobins.
Fools. Do they not realize that they would be sent to the guillotine if the black-clad “scrawny, pasty white booger-eating communist shitheads” prevail?
Societies that have self-confidence crush such anti-social, radical, extremist thugs. Societies that don’t crumble before them, and pay the price in blood and treasure.
In the US today, many of the elite believe that standing up to anti-social, radical, extremist thugs is supposedly authoritarian. If those voices prevail, the rest of us will reap what the elite have sown.
This isn’t about George Floyd, or any particular episode of injustice. Those on the streets in Portland and elsewhere believe this is about the fundamental, irredeemable injustice–and evil–of America. An original sin for which there is no salvation, and which can be redeemed only by destruction. George Floyd is just a pretext (a concept that Burke explored in detail in Reflections).
Burke said other things that resonate today, in particular the assault on history, and the assessment of guilt on the descendants of alleged sinners of generations past:
They find themselves obliged to rake into the histories of former ages (which they have ransacked with a malignant and profligate industry) for every instance of oppression and persecution which has been made by that body or in its favour, in order to justify, upon very iniquitous, because very illogical principles of retaliation, their own persecutions, and their own cruelties.
And
It is not very just to chastise men for the offences of their natural ancestors; but to take the fiction of ancestry in a corporate succession, as a ground for punishing men who have no relation to guilty acts, except in names and general descriptions, is a sort of refinement in injustice belonging to the philosophy of this enlightened age.
It’s almost as if Burke foretold not just The Terror, but White Privilege and the Six Degrees From Slavery frenzy.
Those things, like many other things he wrote in Reflections, rhyme in America despite the passage of 230 years and the distance of thousands of miles.
So go ahead, and dismiss Portland (and its echoes in other cities) if you will–just as the “enlightened” of 1790 dismissed Burke. But before doing so, read Burke in the light of what happened almost immediately afterwards.