Thanksgiving Interrupted – It’s Halftime in America
The political monopoly of our Neo-Puritan overlords may be breaking, but much political and economic uncertainty has yet to resolve. Let the games begin!
I post below links to my Thanksgiving essay about Paleo-Puritans and the revolution in individual rights that their excesses inspired. But first, a note about a summer weekend in Paris:
On a Saturday morning, Maximilien Robespierre marched off to the National Convention to get on with what his team of people had been up to for ten months: Labeling inconvenient people enemies of the state and condemning them to appointments with the guillotine. And, there were a lot of appointments to schedule—hence the bit about working on weekends—such that by late July, 1794, his clique had managed to impose this business on tens of thousands of people, all in the name of “Public Safety!”
By Sunday afternoon, a competing faction in the National Convention had organized the arrest of Robespierre and his people and sent them off that same afternoon to their own appointments with “France’s razor.” No messing around. People were fed up.
That marked the beginning of the “Thermidorian Reaction” of 1794 or, the same thing, the end of the Jacobins’ “Reign of Terror.”
It was all sunshine and smooth sailing after that. Right?
No. That may have marked the end of one dark chapter in French history, but it also marked a period of great instability, and it was out of that instability that Napoleon and his regime ultimately emerged. The following age of Napoleonic Wars involved projecting that instability across the whole of Europe. The wars ended in 1815.
I would surely not be the first person to suggest that this month’s election results illuminate something of a Thermidorian Reaction. The grip of the ruling clique on many levers of power may soon be relieved, but the clique is not done with us. It is escalating war in Ukraine, distributing hundreds of $billions it does not have—that we do not have—to its friends in the NGO-sphere while it still can, and it is financing its spending with short term debt. (January 20 cannot come soon enough.) It is thus leaving the incoming administration with something of a debt bomb and inflation bomb. Wouldn’t it be great, they might be thinking, if those bombs would yet explode and hobble the economy before the next mid-term elections roll around?
Even so, I will suggest that one can’t help but have some optimism. Bombs may not explode, although debts will have to be retired and managed. Cutting off spending to the NGO-sphere alone might relieve a few $trillion in annual spending. But, no matter what, there is a lot of structural damage that will require attention—or will make itself manifest.
On election night, I pulled up Gary Oldman’s rendition in Darkest Hour (2017) of Winston Churchill’s “fight on the beaches” speech. The scene was early June, 1940. France would imminently submit to Nazi domination, and Britain would be alone. Could it hold out, or should Britain cut a deal with Nazi Germany? Winston rallied support for holding out, or, as Edward R. Murrow put it, “He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle...”:
[W]e shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, …
And here’s the part I was waiting for:
… until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.
The New World is looking kind of ragged after thirty years of accelerated and planned de-industrialization, human trafficking and Imperial over-reach, so it might not be in a position to come to anyone’s rescue just yet. But a fever has broken. A restoration of sanity seems to be taking hold. Perhaps the New World can yet inspire restoration elsewhere in the Anglo-sphere, all of which is either feverish or smoldering.
Meanwhile, it seems more like injury time than half-time in Ireland. Ireland holds elections imminently. It is hard not to expect that the electorate will collectively vote for more rule by the ruling clique. In Inger-land, however, something of a revolt may be coalescing. It has become common knowledge in the electorate that most people in that same electorate are more than frustrated with the ruling clique. People are getting frustrated with the obvious subversion of the social compact. Many of them have been frustrated for some years, but many others are just now finding their inner Wat Tylers, having become frustrated over the course of the last two months as a new Labour government has gone for broke in breaking all of its empty promises so that it might implement its Neo-Jacobin plans. Over just the last two days, a petition demanding new elections has already secured more well more than two-million signatures. An object of the petition as well as of the farmers’ protests of this week is to inspire debate in Parliament. Let the games begin!
Back to our regular programming. A link to my perennial Thanksgiving essay:
A Tale of Three Thanksgivings in Two Acts
Table of contents:
Act I – In which English settlers and native Americans resolve to collaborate rather than fight
Act II – In which America begins to realize a revolution in individual rights