In 2010, Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Angelo Codevilla reintroduced the notion of "the ruling class" back into American popular discourse. In 2017, he described contemporary American politics as a "cold civil war." Now he applies the "logic of revolution" to our current political scene.
They’re Not Gonna Stop
The deal with the devil is made. Kamala Harris is determined to see it through.
Everyone beware because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before election day in November, and they’re not going to stop after election day. And everyone should take note of that…they’re not going to let up—and they should not. And we should not.
It would seem that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have now made explicit what was always implied in their campaign: as Joe becomes less and less compos mentis, the Democratic proposition on the table becomes, in the words of the candidates themselves, a “Harris-Biden administration.” So it behooves the American people to be as clear as possible not only about who Biden is, but who his VP (read: replacement) pick really is.
Both Biden and Harris have recently issued tepid, nonspecific calls for an end to ongoing street violence. They don’t really mean it of course, which is why they couldn’t bring themselves to explicitly name Black Lives Matter or Antifa as the perpetrators and organizers of the ongoing civil unrest.
The reality is that Biden has no ability to fulfill this promise. The nature of extortion requires the victim have some reasonable assurance that you really can keep his store from burning down. But Biden could not call off the dogs even if he wanted to, as his own vice-presidential candidate has already told us.
In her June 18 interview with Stephen Colbert, Harris committed the classic “Kinsley gaffe”: she accidentally said something she knew to be true. She knows that the BLM “protests” (i.e., the deadly riots) will not stop, even after the election.
“Everyone beware,” She told Colbert with an uncomfortably massive grin that seemed oddly incongruent with her words, “because they’re not gonna stop.”
When, as expected, they did not stop, she and her running mate were forced onto the defensive. Harris warned against confusing ”peaceful protests and peaceful protestors” with “those” persons—conspicuously unidentified—who are “looting and committing acts of violence,” such as burning down family businesses and executing innocent Trump supporters, crimes conspicuously unnamed. Rather than singling out Antifa and BLM for condemnation, Harris instead mentioned “the shooter who was arrested for murder,” namely Kyle Rittenhouse, who defended himself from imminent murder at the hands of Antifa criminals.
Harris left no doubt as to how her remarks were to be interpreted. “The reality,” she claimed, in a characteristically bald-faced lie, “is the life of a Black person in America has never been treated as fully human.” Translation: America, not Antifa, deserves the greater blame.
Just a week after Harris’s Kinsley gaffe, CNN’s Don Lemon warned that the riots were not polling well and needed to come to an end. That a CNN anchor believes the BLM/Antifa insurgents burning cities from Portland to Kenosha care about how their violence impacts the media’s preferred candidate goes to show how self-deluded some have become about our dangerous and revolutionary situation.
But Harris herself clearly has no such delusions, and she’s already made her choice. The Democrat vice presidential candidate’s background as a prosecutor made her so unpalatable to the Democrats’ radicalized base that she failed to pick up a single delegate during her own presidential bid. Sanders’s delegates in California even vocally opposed Harris getting the VP nod. But just three days after the Minneapolis 3rd police precinct was burned to the ground by BLM/Antifa rioters, “Kamala the Cop” called for donations for the bail fund responsible for springing alleged murderers, rapists, and rioters from behind bars.
Senator Bernie Sanders—whose own campaign workers threatened violence if he were not nominated—recently confirmed Harris’s view when he intimated that the campaign to pressure the Democrat ticket further leftward would continue well after the election: “the day after [Biden] is inaugurated we are going to rally the American people to make certain that we implement the most progressive agenda in modern American history.”
It seems like bold talk for Sanders, whose own primary bid was headed off after establishment Democrats fled to the perceived safety of Joe from Scranton. But note that despite agreeing to settle for Biden, the establishment Left still finds the streets of their Blue cities awash in revolutionary violence.
Sanders is on to something, as was ex-Black Panther Angela Davis when she wagered Biden could be “most effectively pressured” to do what she and her comrades want. Biden, who has held government power for over half a century and was the author of the 1994 Crime Bill, and Harris, a former prosecutor, are turning over the policy agenda of their prospective administration to revolutionaries and insurrectionists who viscerally despise them, in hopes that those Marxist brownshirts will threaten the American public into electoral submission.
This may be one of the most cynical quid pro quos in modern political history: You give me position and prestige, I’ll give you power to terrorize the American people and eat them alive.
It would certainly not be the first time that a sclerotic elite disastrously misjudged their own ability to harness revolutionary energy to their advantage. The nature of revolutions is inherently cyclical: always turning inward on itself, picking up steam. The cycle of revolution continuously winnows down and purges the least radical among the ranks. As Lenin wrote in his 1903 What is to be Done?, “the opportunist rearguard will be ‘replaced’ by the genuine vanguard of the most revolutionary class.”
Of course, Lenin was speaking about infighting within the Russian Social Democrat Party, and it would be twelve long years before that he achieved his victory. But his logic was sound. It is ultimately the hardest of hard-core revolutionaries who win intraparty fights during revolutionary periods. And after many failed attempts, this time the revolutionaries may have found their moment—much to the chagrin of Biden and Harris, who definitively epitomize “rearguard” and “opportunist,” respectively.
Having invited into their midst genuine revolutionaries—desirous of their ability to organize, their enthusiasm, and ultimately, drawn to their willingness to project power through violence—Biden and Harris are beginning to see there is no going back. The Democrats—win, lose, or draw—are the BLM/Antifa party now. The party of tearing down statues and launching public struggle sessions against innocent restaurant patrons.
As a vandal in Portland helpfully recorded, the BLM/Antifa insurgents will happily proclaim that “Liberals Get the Bullet Too.” But for Kamala Harris and today’s modern Democrats, ousting Trump and getting to cling—however briefly—to that brass ring of power is worth it. Even though one day, the name being purged will be their own.
Like drug addicts, Democrats promise they can quit their craving for political violence any time they want. But every few decades, they have a relapse. This time, they’re not gonna stop—until they O.D.
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