Dems Party Like It Was 1789

Not the American 1789, But—Sigh!— the French One

The geniuses who drafted “Workers Deserve More,” the manifesto of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), either don’t know their history or don’t care about it or, most likely, both. In any event, they seem hell bent on recreating the events of 1789 and the years following. Not America’s 1789, but France’s.

On April 30, 1789, President-elect George Washington arrived at Federal Hall in New York City. There he was greeted by both Houses of Congress, and at 2 p.m. he was sworn in as the first president of the United States. In the inaugural address that followed, Washington paid homage to that “Almighty Being who rules over the Universe.” Washington elaborated, “No People can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand, which conducts the Affairs of men more than the People of the United States.”

In that same year, 1789, in Paris, a caucus of increasingly radical deputies broke away from an Estates General that included both the nobility and the clergy and formed their own National Assembly. In the days to come, the deputies added weak-kneed members from the other estates who feared being left behind. From that point on the outspoken “progressives” in France progressed and pulled their feckless followers increasingly leftward.

The parallels to today’s Democratic Party are hard to miss. In 2016 and 2020 the Democratic Party establishment sabotaged the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders fearing he was too far left to be elected. Although still the figurehead of the Democrat Socialist movement, he has all the makings of an American Robespierre, a radical Jacobin leader who gets offed—in Sanders’ case, likely metaphorically—by the revolution he helped launch.

Hang on with both hands, Bernie

The Democrat Socialist movement parallels the French Revolution most conspicuously in its call for an end to the U.S. Senate and two-party democracy. Just as the French Old Order yielded to the uni-cameral National Assembly, so DSA commissars demand an abolition of the electoral college. Scarier still, they want a uni-cameral people’s Congress to appoint both the president and the Supreme Court, both of which would be “subordinate to Congress.” As in France, Congress would be subordinate to the mobs, but the drafters of “Workers Deserve More” have left that part out.

In 1791, the French National Assembly drafted the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.” Although democratic in its concept, one clause would forever distinguish this declaration from America’s founding documents: “The source of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body, no individual can exercise authority that does not expressly proceed from the latter.”

By contrast the Declaration of Independence argues that men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The elevation of the nation over the individual would set the French revolutionaries on a statist, collectivist, godless path that inevitably led to their undoing.

While Jacobin-led mobs were dictating justice in the streets of Paris, here at home the separate states were peacefully deliberating on a Bill of Rights, one crafted by the very first Congress to protect the citizen’s God-given freedoms. In 1791, Congress ratified ten of the proposed twelve amendments.

The first of these remains the most essential: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” The Second—“The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”—guaranteed the First.

In France, the revolutionary government was quickly consumed by the anti-Christian chaos it helped create. America, however, endured and prospered. In recent decades, however, America has developed its own increasingly faithless elite, one that eerily mimics the French Jacobins. Thinking themselves wiser than the God that humbled the nation’s founders, these new Jacobins have set out to “fundamentally transform” America in their own light.

As in the early days of the French Revolution, America’s Jacobin elites stage managed the fervor of the masses. They paid lip service to the progressivism they used as bait to attract the woke among their intersectional ranks—the blacks, the browns, the greens, the gays, the lesbians, trans, the feminists, the Muslims, and any other “marginalized” group willing to make noise in the street. But for club members in the know, the ultimate goal was power, global power. Having transcended the nation state, they allied themselves with Jacobin elites throughout the world.

Historian Victor Davis Hanson crystalized this class’s way of thinking: “We are morally superior to the old America. This is a new America, and that gives us the right to use any means necessary to achieve a morally superior end.” The old America—grounded in faith, family, Judeo-Christian morality, property rights, and the freedoms enshrined in the U.S. Constitution—stood in the way of the Jacobins’ “new America,” the cornerstone of a “new world order.”

America’s Jacobins presumed too much. The emergence of New York Mayor Mamdani and his communist allies has shown our Jacobins that they have already lost control of their own revolution. As in France, the clergy and the elite will soon find themselves expendable as will the gays and the feminists and other weak-willed followers.

America’s “reign of terror” has already begun, but it has confined itself largely to the Democratic Party. Party leaders are not being assassinated, not yet at least, but they are being shouted down routinely. Bernie Sanders still has his head, but if I were he, I would hold on with both hands.

The DSA revolution will overwhelm the Democratic Party but will soon exhaust itself. America’s founding documents have imbued millions of American patriots with a will to resist and the arms to resist with. I doubt we will be forced to the barricades, but if we are, this may be the one case in which God actually does takes sides.