OPINION:
In the wake of the first victories of the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre decided that the threats to the revolution were too numerous and too serious to allow for due process. Consequently, his Committee of Public Safety started executing anyone — friends, enemies, bystanders — they believed posed a threat to the First Republic.
Eventually, Robespierre’s own friends decided that the best and perhaps only way to protect themselves was, of course, to execute Robespierre himself before he got around to executing them.
A bit more than a century later, in the wake of the 1917 revolution — which had been punctuated by the execution of the Romanov family in a basement in Ekaterinberg in July 1918 — Russia found its Robespierre in the person of Josef Jughashvili, whose nom de guerre was, of course, Josef Stalin. Stalin had been a functionary in the Russian Revolution, but after legitimate government in Russia had disintegrated, he became a most energetic enforcer of revolutionary orthodoxy.
Stalin presided over the Great Purge, designed (in theory, at least) to eliminate those who were insufficiently committed to the goals of the Communist Party, including, ironically, many of the “Old Bolsheviks” who had launched the revolution. When he was done, millions had been tried and sentenced in show trials and were dead or in camps.
A generation later in China, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution in an effort to assert his authority and eliminate unreconstructed elements within the country. The Red Guards targeted scholars and others perceived to be enemies of the revolution, including, of course, officials who came to power as part of the revolution. Inevitably, the Red Guards turned on themselves and the People’s Liberation Army had to get involved, but only after a couple of million people had died.
The story is same in almost every revolution on this planet (with the notable exception of the American Revolution). Sooner or later, revolutionaries turn on each other. Whatever the initial impulse, they tend to spiral into violence, usually against fellow revolutionaries perceived as insufficiently committed to the cause.
This seems relevant in character, if not in scope or scale, to our current situation. President Trump has led one of the most successful, if quiet, revolutions in American history. In his brief career, he has destroyed traditional media, much of the ruling party’s intellectual and electoral foundations — and make no mistake, the Democrats have been the ruling party in the United States since 1932 — and three political dynasties (Clinton, Obama and Bush).
He has altered the federal bureaucracy, demolished much of the praxis of Article I of the Constitution and changed the relationship of the citizenry to the federal government, especially with respect to national law enforcement.
Unfortunately, however, Mr. Trump is now at that moment in his revolution where absolutists insist that every choice is binary and everyone must be aligned on every issue with at least as much intensity as the least committed absolutist.
Should the administration release the entire docket on Jeffrey Epstein? Without a doubt. Is it the most important thing happening in public policy at the moment? It’s not even in the top 100 things happening right now. Should the president be given some leeway in this instance? Absolutely. Should we allow podcasters and “influencers” to become our own modern, digital version of the Committee of Public Safety or the Red Guards? Of course not.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.
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