posted June 12, 2011 09:01 AM            

June 11, 2011
Coulter's new book describes 'The mob mongering left'
Richard Butrick
6/11/11

Coulter links the left to Robespierre and mob mongering.

The ideological axis of leftist ideas and ideals is generally taken to be the M&M team of Marx and Mao. What is intriguing about Coulter's new book Demonic is precisely that it takes the French Revolution as the seed bed of leftist nirvana mongers.

Like any historical hypothesis it is a question of how well the general category of core events and memetic themes cluster to the hypothesis. It seems to drill right through the seminal leftist works of The Frankfurt School all the way to the pious Marxism of the Dali Lama. To use an overworked concept, Coulter's work constitutes of a paradigm shift from M&M to R&R - Rousseau and Robespierre. Intriguingly, this is themed in with the psychology of mob behavior. This RR&M hypothesis works very well, as it tests out against the Kuhnian analysis of scientific paradigm shifts and his linking of science and the humanities.

Crucial to her foundational shift is her account of the French Revolution. This is not the "glorious" French Revolution account generally given in high school and even college texts. This is the French Revolution of the blood-lust of the French street mobs seeking revenge and egged on by Robespierre. In a breathtaking Orwellian twist Robespierre launched his rhetoric as head of the Committee of Public Safety:

If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country. ... The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.

Terror = virtue? The result? Mass executions, political purges, priests imprisoned or executed. It is the Maoist, Leninist, Pol Pot urge to eliminate opposing ideas by eliminating those who hold them - the ultimate leftist deconstruction.

It is hard not to get a "that's it" moment when Coulter links core leftist power to rhetoric that creates and inspires a mob mentality. From Makay's account of the madness of crowds to Gustave LeBon's ground breaking study of crowds to Freud's study of group psychology, Coulter's current account of the mob menatality is compellingly adroit. Her account:

an irrational, childlike, often violent organism that derives its energy from the group. Intoxicated by messianic goals, the promise of instant gratification, and adrenaline-pumping exhortations, mobs create mayhem, chaos, and destruction, leaving a smoldering heap of wreckage for their leaders to climb to power.

It links. It coalesces. It breaches the façade of intellectual pretension. It even explains the work of community organizers "the Democratic Party is the party of the mob . . . Indeed, the very idea of a 'community organizer' is to stir up a mob for some political purpose." It even presages the mob mongering going on now in Wisconsin.

posted June 12, 2011 11:01 AM            

Ann Coulter's chilling two-chapter recapitulation of the French Revolution is worth well more than the price of her new book, "Demonic," but that's just a bonus.

Also priceless are Coulter's plethora of one-liner skewerings of the liberal mob, but I digress. What make this her best book are her incisive demonstration that the revolution was the mother of the many totalitarian "revolutions" it spawned in the name of the people, her dissection of the mob mentality that drove it, and her case against today's American liberals as exemplars of this mob mentality.

She first establishes her base line, defining the mob as "an irrational, childlike, often violent organism that derives its energy from the group. Intoxicated by messianic goals, the promise of instant gratification, and adrenaline-pumping exhortations, mobs create mayhem, chaos, and destruction, leaving a smoldering heap of wreckage for their leaders to climb to power."

Sound familiar? It should, because "the Democratic Party is the party of the mob . . . Indeed, the very idea of a 'community organizer' is to stir up a mob for some political purpose." No truer words.

She then systematically identifies the Democratic Party's mob characteristics and how its leaders' appeal to them — through distortions, inflaming passions, demonizing opponents, and substituting propagandist images and sound bites in place of facts, ideas and persuasive argument.

The Democratic Party is nothing if not a repository of hackneyed slogans ("the laws of logic have no action on crowds"), repeated mindlessly and incessantly and designed to thwart the rational consideration of ideas with appeals to incendiary, false rhetoric: "Bush lied, people died." "No blood for oil." "Tax cuts for the rich."

Next, Coulter takes us on a gripping tour of the murderously barbaric and ghoulishly bloody years of the French Revolution and its philosophical underpinnings, which were inspired in part by Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Rousseau, as you know, is one of the left's celebrated secular political philosophers. Anticipating modern liberals, he twisted words and concepts to turn common sense on its head.

Rousseau was a proponent of the "general will," but his idea of the general will did not remotely resemble any bottom-up expression of the people en route to republican government. It more closely resembled the process whereby autocrats impose their "superior" ideas on the masses in the name of carrying out the people's will.

As Coulter puts it, "a select group of elites with absolutely no grasp of human nature will figure out the program, inflexibly impose it on the people and thereby regenerate mankind."

Coulter's guided tour of the French Revolution (and her contrasting summary of the American Revolution) is hardly a mere historical joyride. For in the book's last section, she makes her closing argument, highlighting the inescapable parallels between today's liberals and the revolutionary French.

She writes that "all the bloody totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century have drawn inspiration from Rousseau and the French Revolution." All the "great liberal 'reformers' of the twentieth century, from Lenin to Hugo Chavez," got their "playbook from Robespierre" — probably the worst and most radical of the French revolutionaries — "who argued, following Rousseau, that a 'Republic of Virtue' could only be achieved by 'virtue combined with terror.'"

Democrats, says Coulter, "are heirs to the French Revolution, the uprising of a mob," whereas "conservatives are heirs to the American Revolution and the harmonious order of a republic." Indeed.

She details the leftists' attraction to tyrants in the past 75 years, from Soviet leaders to Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, and Hugo Chavez, and its reflexive opposition to democratic leaders and movements, from Chiang Kai-shek to the Nicaraguan Contras.

In the name of peace, American liberals removed our support for the South Vietnamese and Cambodian governments, and a gruesome bloodbath ensued in the entire region.

But it's not just the liberals' choice in regimes that parallels the French revolutionary tradition. It is their strategy to advance their policy agenda through exploitation of mob psychology, a phenomenon we are witnessing with alarming frequency today, especially under the Obama administration.

It's no accident that the Democrats' campaign for Obamacare was bathed in unconscionable lies, beginning with the grossly inflated numbers of uninsured, and then forced into law over the people's strenuous, well-known objections — a perfect illustration of the totalitarian outworking of the "general will."

Just as predictable is the Democrats' obscene obstruction of entitlement reform proposals that offer the only possibility of salvaging these programs without bankrupting the nation. All the while, they boast that they are protecting the elderly and downtrodden, whom, in fact, their obstruction is guaranteed to devastate.

Whether or not you agree with Coulter's trenchant analysis, she has done her homework and applied tight logic, two things you can be sure her leftist critics will eschew in favor of the mob-style tactics of name-calling, innuendo, distortions, and demonization.

posted June 12, 2011 11:26 AM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by jwhop:
Hmmmm Ami, wrong Limbaugh!

---

What do you mean Jwhop? Do you mean David is the dangerous one?

posted June 12, 2011 02:39 PM            

Of the 2 brothers, Rush has a decidedly larger audience and more political influence and clout.