Who should Americans blame for the iconoclasm on display during the “protests” in virtually every American city this past weekend?
Not the Left. They are the easy targets, and not without culpability. The washed up hippies teaching in American classrooms at every level have certainly been a major component of the cultural Marxism that now saturates American society.
But they are in the open about it. They are the real revolutionaries, the conspicuous Jacobins in this vast culture war most Americans are just now realizing is taking place. Rioting, looting, and vandalism will have that effect.
No. The real problem in American society are the Girondins on the “right,” the social justice conservatives who constantly chirp on major media outlets that “traitors” like Robert E. Lee and “racists” like John C. Calhoun should not be celebrated in public spaces while at the same time offering bewildered looks when anyone attacks George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, the same Washington and Lincoln who were racists, and in the case of Washington a so-called “traitor,” at least to the British, the kingdom he swore allegiance to as an officer in the British Colonial Militia.
You can’t have it both ways. These social justice conservatives agree with the arsonist leftist thugs on Confederate monuments. Take them down and put them in a museum they say. Except we see what happens to museums. Just ask the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Richmond. Their “museum” was burned and vandalized. It appears that not even museums are safe from these vigilantes.
Allen Guelzo, Richard Brookhiser, Dinesh D’Souza, Stephen Knott, Bill O’Reilly, Victor Davis Hanson, Harry Jaffa and a host of other Lincolnite nationalists have decided that Lincoln’s war to save the “nation” was a conservative reaction to some insidious plot to foist a radically different America on the ruins of a proposition nation where all men are created equal. Their Constitution is Daniel Webster’s, Alexander Hamilton’s, James Wilson’s and John Marshall’s, the Constitution that would have failed to make it out of Philadelphia in 1787, and that was rejected by the majority of the ratifying conventions in 1788. The ratifiers were told they weren’t agreeing to a national government with unlimited power or to one size fits all domestic policies. No one in Virginia wanted to be governed by Massachusetts, and the delegates to the Massachusetts ratifying convention openly voiced their opposition to being controlled by slaveholders in the South. Nothing had changed in 1861.
More importantly, these social justice conservatives implicitly support Lincoln’s second revolution, a revolution the communist Eric Foner calls “The Second Founding.” Take for example this Tweet from “conservative” journalist and author Brookhiser when asked what books to read on Reconstruction:
Social justice warriors could not find a better ally than the “conservative” History Channel star.
Any objective observer during the War understood a “new America” would be the result. Lincoln’s fabrication of American history at Gettysburg created a “new nation.” By advancing the narrative that Lincoln channeled the founding generation in his pithy little address, social justice conservatives are conceding the field to the Jacobins. As United States Senator James A. Bayard pointed out in 1867, the Republican legislation to “recreate” the Union was “utterly subversive of the semblance of free government [and would end] in one of…two alternatives–either a concentrated, consolidated bureaucratic despotism or anarchy.” Can anyone in 2020 suggest Bayard was incorrect?
These modern American Girondins are the collaborators in their own destruction. After all, the French Revolution only began because a bunch of aristocratic malcontents decided to cozy up to the radicals in the Third Estate. They all eventually lost their heads.
The third American Revolution will not be kind to these invertebrates. This is not a political war where voting Republican or for “law and order” will save society. And denouncing the violence while concurrently subscribing to the Lincoln myth of American history serves no purpose other than to add fuel to the fire. The radical left has now taken control of the narrative of American history, and the American Girondins on Fox News are as responsible for the attack on traditional America as the Stalinists on every major American university campus and the leftist keyboard warriors on social media.
Confederate monuments were targeted over the weekend because they represent traditional America, the America of the founding generation, the America every petty tyrant on the left wants to destroy. This third American Revolution is about power, nothing more, and judging by the conciliatory response to the riots by people on both the left and the right (we want to understand you!), the founders’ America is already gone. It’s not a matter of if but when the entire fabric of American society will be torn to shreds.
We can thank Honest Abe for this. Or better yet, thank the American Girondins.
