Wild in the Streets

Napoleon emerges: 13 Vendemiaire; the "whiff of greapeshot"

Good luck, all my fellow superannuated hippies. You know that revolution we were all calling for in the Sixties? Looks as though we might finally get it.

What we are seeing in the US is starting, I think, to look like a revolution in progress.

We are at that inflection point at which nobody seems to be in charge, and events move so quickly that it is like a spinning wheel—the basic image of the “revolution”—and you cannot guess where that wheel will stop. The situation seems to change daily. Now we seem to be in the Jacobin phase, when everyone is rushing to the most extreme position they can think of to try to stay in front of the mob—and to seize control, which seems up for grabs, for themselves. Rioting? Defund the police!

How will it end? Actually, we can guess pretty easily where the wheel will stop. Revolutions almost always end in a more authoritarian government: a Napoleon, a Hitler, a Mao, a Lenin, a Cromwell, an Ayatollah Khomeini. A few revolutions that do not: those with a generally recognized leadership from the beginning, who can impose some order. That is something we conspicuously do not have here: who are the leaders of Black Lives Matter? Do any names come to mind? Who are the leaders of Antifa?

Archbishop Vigano has written a letter to Trump, claiming that the “Deep State” is behind all this, and behind them, the Freemasons. I do not believe in such conspiracy theories. There is nobody in control. It all looks planned for destruction because there is a Devil—evil itself has an independent intelligence, a Logos, and works in transpersonal coordination towards its purposes.

When things devolve into chaos, the common man then craves nothing so much as order. From any quarter. This is a golden opportunity for any prospective dictator.

No, if it comes to that, it isn’t going to be Trump. If this is the revolution, the dictator is almost always someone insignificant in the eyes of the world at this early stage. Nobody knew much about Stalin in 1917; or about Hitler, a mere corporal, in the Great War; or Napoleon, in 1789.

First, the revolution devours all existing leadership. Then it devours its children.

Nothing seems more pathetic than, yesterday, images of a worried-looking Mitt Romney leading a march declaring “Black Lives Matter.” Or police chiefs lying prostrate, or washing the feet of the nearest man with dark skin. They imagine this will save them. Whatever happens now, such people will never again hold positions of leadership. The revolutionaries will want someone uncompromised. And so will the reactionaries.

With any luck, the machinery of civil society that the founders set up, that has withstood everything for perhaps two hundred and fifty years, will weather this tempest too. With any luck, Trump is the man who can hold things together. If he just stands absolutely firm in his rhetoric—only his rhetoric--and things hold together well enough to hold a real election in November, things can still work out. Democracy is designed to inoculate against revolution and mob rule.

But we are suddenly remarkably close to the breaking point.