Over the past few years, a recurring theme in my columns has been the divide between the transnational elite and the ordinary citizen. In many ways, it is the load-bearing framework for most of what I write.
There’s no way I can condense my thinking into a few hundred words, but I am going to take a stab at it anyway. I am toying with the idea of writing a short book on how all the major divides between Left and Right come down to the argument between the American Founders and the French Revolutionaries.
The Founders explicitly understood their project as building a Republic based on a governing structure tailored to the people of the United States, whose political traditions were rooted in English Common Law, Christian ideas of virtue, and the “Rights of Englishmen.” The structures matched the aspiration for maximum liberty with the practical need to ensure that humanity’s baser instincts were checked by competing power structures.
It’s all very British, and the ideas trace back to the Scottish Enlightenment, which explains why the Declaration of Independence sounds very much like John Locke, only updated.
That’s why we speak of the Magna Carta as one of the ancestors of the Founding, even though almost nothing in it directly relates to the circumstances we found ourselves in then or now. It established the principle that the King is not an absolute ruler, which set us on the path to popular sovereignty.
The Anglo-American political tradition is about reconciling tensions among individual liberty, a prosperous economy, social harmony, and government power, and finding mechanisms that harmonize these competing goals.
That’s the vision of 1776. Start with the rights of individuals as the seat of sovereignty, and then find practical solutions to maximize liberty in tune with solving practical problems such as balancing liberty and order, the need for competing power structures, and dealing with barriers placed by flaws in human nature that create conflicts that make the balancing act difficult or impossible.
The competing model was proposed in the 1789 French Revolution, whose goal was simply to wipe the slate clean and build an entirely new order, with new norms, a new morality, a reshaping of human nature, replacing the Church with the State, and rationalizing everything, down to the way we measure time, the year, and the inherent worth of individuals.
If you ever wondered where the idea of a “New Soviet Man” or a “Cultural Revolution” came from, it all has its roots in the vision of 1789. Wipe away the old, up to and including human nature, and rebuild it from scratch. There is no such thing as history, norms, culture, or permanent shared knowledge. Everything can be restructured along lines that a technocratic elite can design and implement, reforming the malleable clay of human beings and institutions.
1776 begins with a people with a shared history and culture, and an understanding that individuals have competing goals, that the needs of order compete with the liberty of individuals, that state institutions tend to accumulate power in destructive ways, and that politics is a means of resolving disputes as peacefully as possible, and will never achieve utopia. Madison put it well in Federalist 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary”
1789 begins with the idea of human and institutional perfectibility, and that a class of philosopher-kings or technocrats can shape people and institutions in a manner that can achieve something akin to utopia. You just have to wipe away the barriers, and the barriers are recalcitrant people (solution: The Terror), competing particularistic outsiders (hence the wars of expansion against France’s neighbors), and restarting society from what they called “Year Zero.”
Yes, they literally restarted their Calendar.. They even changed the clock, the week, and the measurements. They redefined everything to rationalize it. Only the measurement changes stuck, though, because history and culture really are sticky.
The state replaced the Church and culture as the moral arbiter. The history of European conflicts, the revolutions of the 19th century, Marxism, and today’s Critical Theory all have their roots in the vision of 1789.
Europe is still trying to implement the vision of 1789, only this time through the European Union’s institutional mechanisms. They often speak in terms of creating a “United States of Europe” and use language that more closely mirrors that of the 1776 crowd, but the mechanisms they have built are pure 1789, only nicer. Speech controls, censorship, Narrative™ control, and even immigration policy aim to erase individuals’ distinctiveness and national cultures, creating a moldable populace that will more easily implement the technocrats’ vision.
When they say “diversity is our strength,” what they are saying is that a nondiverse population is too difficult to reshape and mold into the New European/transnational man. You must first break down the culture to remold it. Break the eggs to make the omelet, and the eggs are the individuals.
Liberty is not the goal, because liberty means individuals pursuing their own vision of the good, shaped by their preferences, which in turn are partly based on their participation in shared religions and their longstanding culture. The whole point is to eliminate friction by reshaping every aspect of society, including the individual.
“You will own nothing and be happy” fits perfectly into this model. Citizens become good little cogs.
Ironically, mass migration and the problems associated with it clearly disprove this model, as did communist societies, and even the failure of the French Revolution. Import the Third World, get the Third World. You can’t wipe away the history and culture, no matter how hard you try.
But they keep trying, because that is who they are.
Editor’s Note: The Democrat Party has been infected by socialism, and it’s spreading FAST. Democrats are claiming there’s nothing to worry about, but we know the truth.
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