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For July 4th, a Washington Times article by Kerry Picket took note of my book, “Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left”.
Mr. Greenfield calls it a “200-plus year war” against the left’s takeover of America which he said dates back to when the French Revolution went in a more violent and politically wayward direction than the earlier American Revolution.
“It’s something that you see in the correspondence of some of the Founding Fathers. As the French Revolution exposes what it is. It’s a radical movement. It’s a violent movement,” Mr. Greenfield said.
He continues, “John Adams would later write to [Thomas] Jefferson, ‘You certainly never felt the Terrorism, excited by Genet, in 1793. when ten thousand People in the Streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Washington out of his House, and effect a Revolution in the Government.’”
Not long before we won our independence from the British, we were forced to fight the Left.
George Washington becomes the only sitting president to command troops in the field in order to stop the wave of anarchy and terror that American leftists had begun to spread around the country.
Washington warns that if the Left triumphs, “we may bid adieu to all government in this Country, except Mob and Club Govt.”
It’s not hard to see that we’ve been run by Mob and Club Govt for some time now. And this is a theme that I also picked up in today’s article, “July 4th Marks Our Struggle Against the Left”.
Where the American Revolution had emphasized the independence of the individual from the state, the French Revolution focused on building up the state as the guarantor of freedom.
It was this distinction that confined most of the ugliness between key figures in the American Founding to nasty letters while the streets of Paris ran with the blood of political opponents. The new regime was so busy enforcing equality against everyone accused of aristocratic and reactionary tendencies that no one had any rights left against state or mob violence.
“If the progress of Jacobinism is to be arrested at all, it is by fighting it,” a letter from Abigail Adams quoted. ”And if there be a Nation on Earth capable of going the necessary lengths, and making the proper Sacrifices to stop its course,—it must be one that is already possesed of substantial Liberty, that knows how to appreciate it, & how to distinguish between it, and that Sort of Liberty which France is trying to propogate throughout the World. To every other Nation & people, the french liberty is perhaps equal, if not superiour to their own.”
That was what America could uniquely offer. Individual freedom over a massive program of state-dominated social transformation.
To most countries, the French Revolution might seem no worse in its abuses and better in its liberties, but America offered an opposing model. And yet we’ve had the leftist model, the French Revolution model, imposed on us anyway, as I wrote a while back in a classic Independence Day article.
To the Democrat voters of the welfare state, this is Fireworks Day. Every country has its fireworks days and this is the day that this one chooses to light up the night sky. The day means nothing to them because though they are surrounded by free things, they aren’t free. The difference between freedom and free things has been progressively erased so that many think that the American Revolution was fought because the British were racists or weren’t providing free transgender surgery to the colonies.
There is a big difference between a free country and a country of free things. You can have one or the other, but you can’t have both.
The American Revolution was not a struggle for another nation, one of many, but for a free nation. It was not split off to accommodate the national strivings of an ethnic group or their historical destiny. Its guiding idea, like its national holiday, was independence, but independence means very little unless it reaches the individual.
This is not Fireworks Day. It’s Independence Day and unless independence reaches the individual as freedom of action, not subjugation to an ideal society, we’re not living the American Revolution, but the French one.
After the American Revolution against monarchy, we fought the French and the Left in the Quasi-War to secure our freedom from the totalitarian programs of the Left. We won then, but can we win now?
(Daniel Greenfield will be appearing at the AFA’s Literary Cafe on July 14th, Bastille Day, at the Luxe Sunset Boulevard Hotel, to discuss the American and French revolutions and the origins of our struggle against the Left.)
Back im those days there was not Fake News No Dan Blather Tom Brokejaw No 60 Minutes CBS Sunday Morning and the NYT’s and certainly No Hollywood which has turned sharp left since making junk like REDS back in the 1980s
I don’t expect that we are going to be able to vote our way out of this. No one has ever voted their way out of a communist coup imposed on their country and that is exactly what we have now, instigated by the Deep State, the Dems, the RINOs and their globalist masters.
Our Founding Fathers were willing to sacrifice their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor for the cause of Freedom.
Unless a great many of us are willing to do the same, we are not going to keep the Freedom that they paid so dearly to create for their descendants.
Daniel, you are teaching so much to us all about another side to our founding. So, the struggle against the coercively egalitarian Left started long before Marx. And it just goes on.
Indeed. It’s been the siren song all along. Let us craft a truly just society.
I’m most of the way through Daniel’s book and am continually astounded by all the things I was never taught in school. Please read the book – I don’t want to misrepresent anything.. But it is interesting that prior to the Civil War some elements of the left, meaning the Democrats, equated the capitalism of the Northern industrial base with Southern slavery. And John Wilkes Booth was chummy with the guy that President Pierce appointed as consul to London. Daniel expands of the close philosophical union between the early American left (Democrats) and the terrorism of the extremists of the French Revolution.
I’m really glad to hear that.
It’s easy to understand when viewed as elements of a common leftist philosophy. The pre-civil war Democrats had the same problem as their modern day counterparts, their power rested on an incompatible coalition whose aims they had to reconcile with their larger political program.
Do you get a commission on each book sold? If not, I’m going to buy a used copy on Amazon. If you do get a commission I’ll buy a new one. Everybody deserves to be compensated for their work.
Maybe I don’t understand the complexity of the civil war but as i branched out and looked at more alternative history, often meaning less edited or censored perspectives, it seemed clear to me that Lincoln was forced into war by the southern states and he tried every concession and other things to stay out of the war. A big part of the southern hatred for the north was the passing of protectionist laws that only allowed a lot of heavy industry to only be accessible in the north. So my view has been that the war was about slavery, which almost everyone felt would die out over time, but the north sowed the seeds of deep hatred and mistrust by the unfairness of repressive economic laws, which I don’t think the war would have half the chance of being waged without the acts. Learning this after HS also surprised me.
As the election campign lurches on, each live voter now needs to assess candidates in a systematic, productive way. I suggest a type of troubleshooting flow chart for each candidate. The Trump and overall GOP campaigns can assist by proposing their own.
The first decision point should be:
Is Candidate X an American patriot? YES/NO
As the election campaign lurches on, each live voter now needs to assess candidates in a systematic, productive way. I suggest a type of troubleshooting flow chart for each candidate. The Trump and overall GOP campaigns can assist by proposing their own.
The first decision point should be:
Is Candidate X an American patriot? YES/NO
I still can’t believe that in a nation of 300+million no one knows how to fight back and what to attack and how to do it nor is there any constructive effort to do so. None. We aren’t even close. The left owns us and it is all our fault.. We only fight on their ground.
Must be nice to be one of the orcs and watch our paralysis and inability to identify the mechanisms that are needed to fight back… So is our failure because we are waiting for the guy next to us to actually do something or is it because we lack common sense or maybe can’t see something right in front of our face?
I never see any conservative writers that put forth real solutions mainly because they don’t identify the real problems and definitely do not offer the mechanisms by which they can be fought.. No one at Front Page, Gateway Pundit, Ace of Spades, Red State, etc has a clue or even offers realistic ways to combat the assault. Until people can articulate what is wrong there will be no strategy to fight it.