What Burke Would Say about the Riots

Surprise. As soon as street agitators got bored with knocking down statues, they started knocking down people. And as soon as the gunshots started ringing, the moderate Biden took off his mask and turned out to be Kamala. Be wary of the adult who bares each and every tooth when smiling. A look at history, especially at that of France and its enlightened guillotine, suggests something quite unpleasant: America is not in the throes of a simple electoral campaign but rather seems to be at the beginning of an extreme leftist revolutionary process. Perhaps the first thing the Right ought to do, if it has any intention of putting up a defense against totalitarian harassment, is to admit it. Nothing that is happening on the streets is the product of chance, unless you consider that the invasion of Poland in 1939 was just bad luck.

It all happened so fast, like a magic trick. Suddenly, there is violence, there is hate, there is fear, there is exceptionality, there are lies, there is resentment, there is division, there is chaos, there is cowardice, and there is looting. In other words, we already have all the best ingredients for baking a real revolutionary cake. The violence still seems to be residual, and that is its greatest danger: that we underestimate it. Check their Twitter accounts: Not a single one of the world’s totalitarian and extreme-Left leaders has missed his appointment with BLM, including the most despotic of them. Xi Jinping is ecstatic: First he exports a pandemic to the enemy, and now the strongest democracy in the West is about to fall into his hands by his preferred means, revolution. It’s like tweeting in capital letters for a week.

What frightened Edmund Burke most about the French Revolution was not the revolutionaries, but the sympathies they aroused among a number of English conservatives. That is what impelled him to speak out against the great farce sponsored by an Enlightenment determined to see blood spilled. Something similar is happening today on American soil. The worst thing is not the savages trying to subvert order through violence, but the complicit attitude of the Democratic Party, which makes less and less effort to hide its enthusiasm for this kind of postmodern revolution, where it makes no difference if a television set is stolen, or someone gets shot, or a Republican politician narrowly escapes a lynching. The truth is that the Left moves in chaos like a fish in water.