American Thermidor?: Post-woke what happens?

Change.

In college I took a seminar that focused on “revolution” taught by one of the leading lights on the subject, Dr. John Kramer. I could never quite get a bead on the guy. He seemed both Cold Warrior and ex-hippie. He taught at the Naval War College but he was no military guy. He seemed absolutely a child of the sixties but he didn’t wear a ponytail or have a ponytail personality. He did have kind of a professorial lefty beard though. But whatever his politics he knew about revolutions and it was in his class that I was first introduced to some of the ideas that drive a good bit of my current thinking and writing.

Revolution is the radical transformation of society. Sometimes this happens in an instant. Other times it happens over many years, even decades. In Dr. Kramer’s class we learned about them all. We discussed the agricultural, industrial, and information revolutions of course, but we focused particularly on the “political” revolutions, the American, the French, the various uprisings throughout Europe in the 19th century, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, and the various revolutions that defined the post-war end to colonialism in the 20th century.

One of the books from my revolution class. I go back and read it every few years still.

It was in this class that I was first introduced to the concept of thermidor, the violent counter to the violent French Revolution. The revolution sought to upend every facet of human life in France. Gone was religion, and the old calendar, and a million other things. The revolutionaries lead by Robespierre instituted a rein of terror where “enemies” of the revolution often found their heads lopped off and at the bottom of reed baskets. The killing went on for a year.

But one day everyone got fed up.

James Howard Kunstler writes;

By the summer of 1794 (in their renamed month of Thermidor), everybody else finally had enough of the Jacobin nightmare. On July 27, Robespierre was at the rostrum once again denouncing his enemies and crying for blood when the out-group members present started throwing food at him and shouting him down. That was the magic moment when everything flipped — the shock of recognition that the Jacobins had lost power. Just like that! The chamber fell into a melee, a lot of shoving and shouting. . . Robespierre and his cronies were chased across town to the city hall (Hôtel de Ville) and barricaded themselves inside. The mob broke through and arrested them. Somewhere in the confusion a policeman shot Robespierre in the face, shattering his jaw (no more speeches for you!). . . and the very next day, Robespierre, Saint-Just, and twenty of their associates had their appointment with “the national razor.”

We have had a bit of an attempted revolution of sorts in this country over the last decade. (Or so.) We won’t go into it much because everyone reading this has lived through it. Some call it “woke”. Others call it “intersectionalist”. Whatever. We use the term “woke” here because everyone knows what that means - an absurd focus on race, gender, equity (instead of equality), a hyper focus on feelings, the idea that “silence is violence”, that just treating others as you would want to be treated is not enough - one must actively profess to be on the side of all that is woke, that one must constantly be conscious of the differences between people instead of focusing on the commonality of all people, and all the rest.

As the intersectionalists really got going in academia and politics in the mid 2010s, and then spilled into real life I was struck by the degree to which these kids screaming their heads off at their professors and doing everything they could to shut down discussion everywhere, reminded me of Mao’s Red Guards which I first learned about in college.