The March of the New American Leninists

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, December 16, 2021

 

Steve Bannon, the recently indicted Trump sycophant and ex-Breitbart jackass, sometimes describes himself as a “Leninist.” I believe him. And he isn’t alone.

 

For Vladimir Lenin, a revolution required three preconditions: The masses had to be unwilling to accept the status quo, the ruling class had to be unable to enforce the status quo, and, as a result of the first two, there had to be an outbreak of political fervor and activity among the masses. Once these conditions were satisfied, Lenin would be ready to move on to the question of revolutionary instruments, which in his case were war, terror, and executions.

 

(It is worth keeping in mind that Bolsheviks wanted to outlaw capital punishment, and Lenin overruled them: “How can you make a revolution without executions?”)

 

Americans are a little sentimental about revolutions, because we had one of the very few good ones. But the revolutionary family tree gets pretty ugly pretty quickly: The American Revolution helps to inspire the French Revolution, with its purges and terror; the French Revolution provides a model for Lenin and his gang; the Russian Revolution informs the Iranian revolution. The line from the Boston Tea Party to the Iran hostage crisis is not a bold, straight one, but it can be seen, if you want to see it. Revolutions are dangerous, often in ways that are not obvious at the time and become understood only decades later.

 

Lenin, who wrote about the world in terms of capital-H History, was also a practical man. (Hence the terror and the executions.) And so he probably would have understood, as Steve Bannon and others of that ilk (from Bernie Sanders to Eric Zemmour) understand, that there are additional practical considerations.

 

One of those, which we can see emerging in the United States on both sides of the political aisle, involves a question of loyalty. Loyalty is very much on the minds of American political partisans, with each side denouncing the other as “traitors” and “seditionists” and “insurrectionists” and the like. If you are not used to the intellectual compartmentalization required of an American politician, it can be jarring to hear, e.g., Senator Sanders demanding “revolution” at 10 a.m. and denouncing “insurrection” at 10:15 a.m.

 

But the most relevant issue involving loyalty is this: We are in a pre-revolutionary situation because the regime — by which I mean not the Biden administration but the American constitutional order itself and the principal institutions associated with it — is being made to compete for the loyalty of Americans against individual politicians (Donald Trump), particular political organizations and movements (BLM), and less well-defined political tendencies (right-wing identity and left-wing identity). There has always been partisan fanaticism, and there have always been demagogues. When loyalty to a political leader or a political movement supplants loyalty to the regime, the nation grows dangerously close to revolution in proportion to the degree to which such tendencies are general and widespread.

 

When some significant share of citizens feel themselves more closely identified with a particular politician than with the constitutional order per se, then you have the conditions for a coup d’état and a caudillo; when some significant share of citizens feel themselves more closely identified with a party or a movement than with the constitutional order per se, then you have the conditions for a more broad-based revolution. The first gets you an Augusto Pinochet or a Francisco Franco, and the second gets you a Russian Revolution or a French Revolution — both of which eventually produced caudillos of their own, meaning that they ended up in much the same place.

 

As far as the events of January 6 go, the “stolen election” fiction was a moral-permission slip for acting on loyalties (and the social demands associated with such loyalties) that long preceded the 2020 election and will long outlast it. Some of these revolutionists invaded the Capitol, but the more important ones work there. And what they hope to do is to achieve what Lenin wanted: “unrestricted power based on force, not law.” The legal pretexts feverishly dreamt up by such ghoulish amoralists as Rudy Giuliani were exercises in publicity, not exercises in law. The lawyers are the marketing department of the revolution.

 

There are reasons for hope. Donald Trump failed to overturn the 2020 election, and the republican spirit remains alive in such robust institutions as the jury-trial system, as Charles C. W. Cooke notes.

 

This being the United States of America, our revolutionary fervor is driven in some non-trivial part by cynical profit-seeking, with media figures as superficially different but fundamentally identical as the daft galaxy of Fox News and MSNBC pundits feverishly working to convince Americans that our society and our institutions are not in need of reform but are in fact so irredeemably corrupt that they must be overthrown. These arguments are made almost purely for commercial purposes — there isn’t a lot of money to be made from sensible conversations about incremental reform — but their influence extends well beyond the balance sheets of their corporate parents. I used to say, with unwarranted confidence, that the real world isn’t Twitter, and Twitter isn’t the real world. That turns out not to be true.

 

There is plenty of cynicism at work in the media business, but it would be wrong to think that figures such as Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow create revolutionary fervor on their own — they are only supplying a preexisting demand in the market. They do not create demand any more than Purdue Pharma or Pornhub do. The ultimate source of the revolutionary fervor is in the people themselves, in the “masses,” as the creaky old Marxists still call them.

 

Lenin would understand our situation. He might even be a little bit proud.