If you look up “French Revolution” on the website of High-Beam Encyclopedia, you will find an online ad for Barack Obama.
The Democratic primary is all about the French Revolution.
This election fight isn’t about the specific attributes of either Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton.
This election fight is the New Order vs. the Old Order.
The Democrats are in the middle of the French Revolution and Hillary Clinton is not playing Robespierre. She is Marie Antoinette.
Obama is merely a vessel for all of the frustrations that the electorate has had with the last 20 years of American politics.
When he says, “Yes we can,” he means “Off with their heads.”
His experience cannot be used against him because if he had any experience, he would be dangerous to the revolution.
He only needs to proclaim “libertie, egalitie, fraternite” — or hope, the American version — and he gets supporters.
This election isn’t so much about how great Obama is, because let’s face it: Nobody knows how great he is because he hasn’t done anything. The election is about how much people dislike what Hillary Clinton represents, which is the Old Order.
The Old Order values experience. It values hereditary claims to the throne. It values the past (or at least the distant past). The New Order hates the past. It despises hereditary claims to the throne. It discounts experience.
The French Revolution started as a bourgeois reaction to a broken political system. It then spread to the peasantry — the sans-culottes — who gave it even more muscle. The Obama Revolution started with the moneyed elite of the Democratic Party and has now spread to the lower middle class, which now supports the young revolutionary over the defender of the Old Order.
Hillary Clinton may have thought she was the revolution, but actually, because of her husband, she has become the target of the revolution.
John McCain needs to heed the example of Napoleon, who picked up the pieces after the Reign of Terror collapsed. Napoleon didn’t go out of his way to defend the Bourbon kings. He offered a more rational form of revolutionary leadership after the real radicals collapsed from exhaustion, destruction, murder and chaos.