On Chesterton's Fence and the Imperfect Vision of the Past

I have always had an uneasy relationship with political labels. I find that people who enjoy self-describing as having some kind of political belief (especially if they offer such a label unprompted) usually like the idea of themselves as belonging to a group, or movement, or something larger than themselves. In this view, they are tapping into the aspects of political beliefs that are less about a set of questions about the world that one decides on case by case, and more a kind of tribal affiliation. The people interested in such affiliations are usually, in my experience, quite uninteresting. But the Scylla of not wanting to embrace too much of a dumb label must be balanced against the Charybdis of claiming that one's beliefs are so unique, special and nuanced that it would be impossible to put any kind of a label on them. This, of course, is nearly always false, even if other people might pick a label that one finds unflattering. So to balance these aspects, I find myself sometimes persisting in using these labels just as a shorthand - a kind of crude summary of the main principle components of belief-space. 

Among these labels, it has been a long time since I would have described myself as a Conservative (the capital C version, of the explicit political movement). It is hard to have much stock in that in contemporary America (and, indeed, the reasons are exactly the same as R. L. Dabney identified 150 years ago, in his hilarious skewering of Northern Conservatives). But the difference between small-c conservatism, and reaction, is more nuanced. I lean more towards the latter, but the argument for the former is difficult to dismiss. 

The shorthand way I used to describe the difference between these groups was that a conservative primarily wants to keep things as they are. A reactionary, by contrast, actively wants to move backwards. This is usually said as a joke in polite company, for whom the idea of reversing progress is almost unthinkable. Whig history has become so ingrained that the very label of "progress" blurs the "good things are happening" version with "progressivism", the leftist political movement that communists used to use as a euphemism for themselves. 

Of course, Uncle Ted aside, not many people actually want to turn their back on literally everything about the modern world. Nearly always, what it actually means is identifying the problems of modernity that are actually creations of modern institutions and beliefs, mostly by having reference to a wider set of beliefs and ideas from times long past. Among Moldbug's most powerful intellectual ideas is to contemplate what people of the past might say if they could actually talk back to you. For instance, if a progressive who loves to smear the founding fathers as all being racist had to actually have a conversation with a resurrected George Washington, how do they think it would go? Bear in mind the first thing you'll have to do is define concretely what being "a racist" actually is, since he won't know. Then you'll have to convince him that there is a moral and practical imperative that he stop being racist, when he doesn't feel any moral valence in the term at all. Are you sure you can anticipate his rebuttals and refute them? This may be harder than you imagine - both the convincing of the hypothetical Washington, and even just modeling the hypothetical Washington. You need to read a lot about the person and think a lot, especially if you actually want a faithful version of the historical person, and not just a lazy strawman ( Moldbug did a great version of several figures here).

In this respect, the point of these hypotheticals is to embrace the observation of G. K. Chesterton (one of the great defenders of conservatism). Tradition, he said, is the democracy of the dead. And his idea of deference to their views was not just an ancestor worship notion. It was based on the idea that man's understanding of things is fallible, and existing structures may well be solutions to problems we don't understand: 

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

When we phrase it this way, however, we can see that the position of a conservative is an easier one to defend in this respect than that of a reactionary. In particular, Chesterton's Fence is an argument for preserving continuous, living institutions. That is, the fence that is still there, and we just don't want it recklessly torn down. The job of a reactionary, however, in some sense the opposite problem. The fence was torn down 10, or 30, or 60, or 150 years ago. There are now cattle wandering all over the road and getting run over. Some factions say that this is actually a good thing that they get run over, or that it's cruel to fence them in, or that fences never did much to stop the problem anyway. Meanwhile, all the people who built fences or knew how to maintain them died a hundred years ago, so it's hard to ask them how it actually worked. 

Which is to say, the reactionary runs into his own version of the George Washington dialogue problem above, where "what would George Washington think" is an easy exercise to state, and a hard one to implement with certainty. That is, the reactionary is trying to reconstruct something from the lessons of the past, but he has only an imperfect understanding of what that past actually was. Even if he gets power (something we're not in great danger of at present), he risks creating a version of the fence that doesn't solve his problems, because it wasn't in important respects the same as the fence that was created in the first place. 

The extent to which this is true depends, of course, on how good the sources are in question. But sources are only ever a tiny snapshot of life - the summation of "who was doing the writing, what they thought was important enough to write down, what parts survived to this day, and which parts you actually read among the many possible sources out there". Sometimes, this will probably be good enough - for understanding major wars, for instance. But other bits you have to work harder to imagine the range of outcomes. 

For instance, consider the question of relations between the sexes. What was the distribution of day-to-day life like for married couples in, say, New York in 1880? In London in 1620? In Rome in 350 A.D.? 

Whig history supplies a ready answer for this. Women existed under "the patriarchy". This was a set of norms that meant that men had enormous power within a marriage to physically assault their wives, to rape them, to make them bear as many children as the man wanted, to prevent them from working or from leaving the home, and to force them to do house work and hard physical labor. It is never quite said that this was the state of all women, but it is usually implied that this was the lot for most of them, for most of history. 

But if this is what modern feminists believe, what do the men's rights / manosphere types believe? Well, at the risk of simplifying the matter, a lot of them seem to agree on nearly all the claims above - they merely want to add at the end "...and that was awesome!!!"

The obvious problem is that very few of them actually made a study of history themselves. Without realizing it, they just took at face value the claims of feminists. Well, do these people strike you as good historians? The first clue that something might be amiss is when all times and places before 1960s America are lumped together as being "basically the same thing". Okay, it's all the patriarchy, fine. Were there any interesting or important variations in that patriarchy across history? Bueller? As Matt Damon said - do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter?

Reader, it is worth considering the possibility, even just as a hypothetical, that even if you restored everything that feminists describe as "the patriarchy", it might make less difference in practice than most people think. 

So we may need to investigate a bit ourselves, once we realize that we can't just trust this received wisdom. You can start with the legal status, obviously. For instance, here's Blackstone's Commentaries from 1770:

By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law[l]: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing; and is therefore called in our law-french a feme-covert; is said to be covert-baron, or under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture. Upon this principle, of an union of person in husband and wife, depend almost all the legal rights, duties, and disabilities, that either of them acquire by the marriage. I speak not at present of the rights of property, but of such as are merely personal. For this reason, a man cannot grant any thing to his wife, or enter into covenant with her[m]: for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence; and to covenant with her, would be only to covenant with himself...

Okay, that sounds pretty tough. Bear in mind, though he doesn't say it explicitly, this single personhood meant, among other things, that this tended to preclude the possibility of marital rape. But even here, it's a little murky - Blackstone doesn't go into it in detail himself, and Wikipedia's description is:

Sir Matthew Hale's statement in History of the Pleas of the Crown did not cite a legal precedent for it, though it relied on earlier standards. In a case of Lord Audley's (1593–1631), for instance, Hale cite's the jurist Bracton (c. 1210 – c. 1268) support of this rule, said to have derived from laws of King Æthelstan (r. 927–939) where upon the law holds that even "were the party of no chaste life, but a whore, yet there may be ravishment: but it is a good plea to say she was his concubine".

But even in this seemingly straightforward question, when you actually look up Lord Audley's case, he in fact got executed for (among other things) rape of his wife! In this case, it was for restraining her while some other guy raped her.  (He also sodomized some men, which contributed to the execution too). But it certainly doesn't seem like "do whatever you want to your wife sexually, the law is cool with it" was actually an operating principle of the law in the way you might think. 

But surely he could just beat the hell out of her, no? Well, if you scroll further down Blackstone's commentaries, you find other things like this: 

The husband also (by the old law) might give his wife moderate correction[h]. For, as he is to answer for her misbehaviour, the law thought it reasonable to intrust him with this power of restraining her, by domestic chastisement, in the same moderation that a man is allowed to correct his servants or children; for whom the master or parent is also liable in some cases to answer. But this power of correction was confined within reasonable bounds[i]; and the husband was prohibited to use any violence to his wife, aliter quam ad virum, ex causa regiminis et castigationis uxoris suae, licite et rationabiliter pertinet[k]. The civil law gave the husband the same, or a larger, authority over his wife; allowing him, for some misdemesnors, flagellis et fustibus acriter verberare uxorem; for others, only modicam castigationem adhibere[l].-433- But, with us, in the politer reign of Charles the second, this power of correction began to be doubted[m]: and a wife may now have security of the peace against her husband[n]; or, in return, a husband against his wife[o]. Yet the lower rank of people, who were always fond of the old common law, still claim and exert their antient privilege: and the courts of law will still permit a husband to restrain a wife of her liberty, in case of any gross misbehaviour[p].

What does this mean in practice? Great question. It seems almost certain that "moderate correction" as understood in 1770 is a lot more coercive than it would be interpreted as today. But still, what exactly could you do, at what points in time? It's not as simple as it might seem. 

Bear in mind that what you are describing is a question of power. And as I've said before, in some sense, all power is informal power. People face lots of constraints on their behavior, not just being thrown in prison. 

Let's take as given that Sir Matthew Hale is right, which seems likely, and if you decided to rape your wife, the law wouldn't care. Well, were there any other constraints? 

If the average man had the option to rape his wife whenever he felt like, how many times per week, month or year, do you think he'd actually be up for this? If your model of male sexual desire is that what is sought is "penis in vagina, plus orgasm", then the answer is probably quite a bit. But this is an absurdly reductionist model of male desire, as I've argued in the case of strip clubs (where people pay more money to not bang strippers than they would to bang hookers). The alternative view, even in the case of a monarch, is still best summarized by Joseph Heller. As I said previously:

"In his novel, God Knows, Joesph Heller describes the situation of an aging King David. He has his various courtesans, but can no longer get aroused by them. The only woman who still holds his sexual interest is his wife, Bathsheba. But Bathsheba no longer desires him - her only interest is to try to get David to make her own son, Solomon, the next king in place of his elder son, Adonijah, whom he had with another woman.

Heller describes very aptly the paradoxical situation of the absolute monarch who, due to the difficulty of male desire, cannot have what he really wants

Abishag showed him the door and petted my heaving chest until she felt my exasperation abate. Then she washed and dried herself, perfumed her wrists and armpits, and removed her robe to stand before me a moment in all her wonderful virginal nakedness before raising a leg gracefully to enter my bed on one of her biscuit-brown knees to lie down with me again. Naturally, it did no good. I got no heat then, either. I wanted my wife. I want my wife now. Bathsheba does not believe this and would not let it make a difference if she did.

“I don’t do things like that anymore,” Bathsheba responds firmly each time I ask, and, if out of sorts, adds, “I am sick of love.”

She lost her lust when she found her vocations. Her first was to be a queen. Too bad that we had no queens. The next was to be a queen mother, the first in our history, the widowed mother of a reigning sovereign. I refused to trade and I refused to grovel. I could order her into my bed with a single cursory command, of course, and she certainly would be here. But it would be begging, wouldn't it? I am David the king, and I must try not to beg. But God knows that, by one means or another, I am going to lie with her at least one more time before I give up the ghost and bring my fantastic story to an end.

Worldly absolute power does not, alas, extend to making other people actually want you on the terms that you would like."

At the risk of sounding ridiculous or insensitive, it is worth considering all the boring and practical ways that marital rape might not actually be that much fun for most men. There's social aspects like that she might complain to her friends and neighbours, which would embarrass you. Okay, let's assume you can stop this with the generous "physical discipline" exemptions you were also granted by the law. But what if she were just really sad and miserable all the time? What's the plan then - beat her some more until she's happy all the time? How's that going to work? What if, once you start raping her, she's just not very horny for you any more, which is probably what you really wanted in the first place? What if, once you start raping her, rape is now the only way you can bang her at all? Was this ... what you wanted?

And this is even while treating the women as mostly passive in this equation - having no options other than just being sad. What if there's a risk she might poison you (which definitely happened)? What if she's just well experienced at manipulating you into doing what she wants? 

To put all this in stark terms - what fraction of married men in, say, 1700, above age 40 or 50 or whatever, who had been married for some extended period of time, had vaguely unsatisfied sex lives where they didn't bang their wives as much as they wanted, or didn't bang very often, or just didn't bang at all, lax marital rape laws notwithstanding?

I genuinely don't know. I suspect it was higher than most people think, though probably lower than today, but that you should probably have quite wide confidence intervals over this question. What historical sources would we turn to to answer this question? It's tough. What man is likely to commit to paper words to the effect of "Wife still won't bang me, I'm still annoyed at this fact" given the costs of publishing at the time, not to mention the embarrassment involved in the admission?

Among the many things you could read, let me point you to just one snapshot to ponder - not for this question specifically, but the related question of daily marriage dynamics. This comes from one of Australia's great poets, Henry Lawson. It's from 1897. If you prefer song form to poems, Slim Dusty wrote an excellent song from it

Written Afterwards 

So the days of my tramping are over,
And the days of my riding are done
I’m about as content as a rover
Will ever be under the sun;
I write, after reading your letter
My pipe with old memories rife
And I feel in a mood that had better
Not meet the true eyes of the wife. 

You must never admit a suggestion
That old things are good to recall;
You must never consider the question:
‘Was I happier then, after all?’
You must banish the old hope and sorrow
That make the sad pleasures of life,
You must live for To-day and To-morrow
If you want to be just to the wife. 

I have changed since the first day I kissed her.
Which is due Heaven bless her! to her;
I’m respected and trusted I’m ‘Mister,’
Addressed by the children as ‘Sir.’
And I feel the respect without feigning
But you’d laugh the great laugh of your life
If you only saw me entertaining
An old lady friend of the wife. 

By-the-way, when you’re writing, remember
That you never went drinking with me,
And forget our last night of December,
Lest our sev’ral accounts disagree.
And, for my sake, old man, you had better
Avoid the old language of strife,
For the technical terms of your letter
May be misunderstood by the wife. 

Never hint of the girls appertaining
To the past (when you’re writing again),
For they take such a lot of explaining,
And you know how I hate to explain.
There are some things, we know to our sorrow,
That cut to the heart like a knife,
And your past is To-day and To-morrow
If you want to be true to the wife. 

I believe that the creed we were chums in
Was grand, but too abstract and bold,
And the knowledge of life only comes in
When you’re married and fathered and old.
And it’s well. You may travel as few men,
You may stick to a mistress for life;
But the world, as it is, born of woman
Must be seen through the eyes of the wife. 

No doubt you are dreaming as I did
And going the careless old pace,
While my future grows dull and decided,
And the world narrows down to the Place.
Let it be. If my ‘treason’s’ resented,
You may do worse, old man, in your life;
Let me dream, too, that I am contented

For the sake of a true little wife.

I find this poem wonderful, hilarious, and above all, utterly credible. It fits the observation I remember from Ben Folds that writing about a character can be a way of writing about oneself without it being lewd. At 130 years old, it still reads as quite fresh - the main things that give away its age are technological references - they ride horses, rather than drive cars, and they write letters, rather than phone or send emails.

But count the themes that you might not have expected from Australia in the 19th century. 

-The narrator had affairs with women when he was young and single

-These sounded less like "relationships" and more like "getting boozed with your friends and picking up women" 

Parenthetically, it's also worth wondering who these women were - they might have been prostitutes, but also might just be ordinary girls. Remember, there's an adding up constraint that makes the average number of sexual partners equal at all times. So "men having sex before marriage" has to map to either "regular non-prostitute women also having sex before marriage", "married women having affairs with single men" or "a lot more prostitutes, with these being the only option for single men". For reference here, some estimates are that a third of rural New England brides in the 1780s and 1790s were pregnant at the time of marriage, and even the low estimates at that time are around 10%.

-He is now married, and while overall grateful for this fact, finds it less exciting than single life in some respects, and feels himself somewhat whipped and constrained

-He endeavors to conceal all of the above from his wife, out of consideration for her feelings. 

The last part is especially worth pondering. He wants to protect her from finding out about his past dalliances because it will make her sad, and he loves her. This is described, over and over, as a constraint on what he can say and do. It doesn't carry any force of law, but it doesn't need to. Power is messy and complicated. Does he have the power to make his wife miserable? Well, sort of, in principle, but don't we all? He's probably not worried about being divorced, but it still doesn't seem like much fun. 

Now, I'm not saying that "this is just like modernity!", or that if we could see their day-to-day lives, we'd think them the same as ours (for one small snapshot, his children refer to him as "sir"). But this is obvious - the ways in which the past was totally different in sex relations are taken for granted. The ways in which they might be basically the same are much harder to see.

To take one final example that's a good test of patriarchal authority. Let's define the minimum set of conditions that we can all agree a patriarch would want. If you love your wife, and control her sexually, and can threaten her with violence for misbehaving, what is the minimum thing you probably want to prevent?

You would want to prevent her from flagrantly banging many other men against your wishes.

Surely this would go triply so if you were a man of wealth, strength and power. Surely, surely, this would apply if you were the most powerful man in Europe, and probably the world?

Like, say, Napoleon Bonaparte?

Read this amazing twitter thread. Some especially choice parts:

In 1796 Napoleon wrote:

“You do not write me at all, you do not love your husband; you know the pleasure that your letters afford him, and you do not write him six lines of even haphazard scribble.”

Joséphine had the GALL to come visit Napoleon with the man she was cheating on him with. And when Napoleon came for her, she was nowhere to be seen:

“I arrive at Milan, I rush into your apartment, I have left everything to see you, to press you in my arms…you were not there”

How much power did Napoleon Bonaparte have over Josephine? How much did the patriarchy help him here? Lest you think this is an isolated example, King George IV was not able to divorce his wife Queen Caroline despite the long rumors of her infidelity. Which is to say, at a bare minimum he was not able to prevent her acting in ways that generated persistent rumors of her being unfaithful to him, even though this annoyed him greatly, and he was the King! You can find similar rumors (though disputed) about Marcus Aurelius' wife. Obviously, this model doesn't apply to all men either, or even most men either (the model that "all wives could cheat on their husbands with impunity" as applied to several hundred years ago is surely a worse model than "zero wives could cheat on their husbands with impunity"). But these examples are telling you that the reality was considerably more complex than either of these.  

The narrow lesson here is that we don't actually know how much the things we call "the patriarchy" actually constrained day-to-day life for most married couples. It definitely would do some things, maybe even a lot (birthrates were certainly very different, but contraception was probably also a lot less reliable. Divorce rates were enormously different). But there are reasons to think it might matter less in many day-to-day aspects than most people (certainly most feminists) imagine. Even Augustus, with all his power, was unable to substantially reform Rome's sexual morality. 

But the broader lesson is worth pondering - power is often informal, and so the officially written down rules may not always affect things on the ground in the same way. Pushing on "laws" and "policies" may not solve as many things as we think it will. Laws are nearly always buttressed by social aspects whose actual application and level of enforcement in day to day life may be hard to know. If we implement our best idea of what things used to be like long ago, they may work in different ways than we think, or may not work at all. 

Or as the great Samuel Johnson put it:

How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!
Still to ourselves in every place consign’d,
Our own felicity we make or find.

Why You Don't Hear About the Haitian Revolution

Let me ask you a question that has both nothing and everything to do with Haiti.

How many people do you think died in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 1998 and 2003?

The most commonly cited guess of excess deaths (mostly from disease and malnutrition) is 5.4 million. Obviously there's some standard errors on that number, and other people put it at 860,000, but it's fair to say that the answer is a shit ton.

How much media coverage did you hear about that war? Either now, or at the time?

Would you say that the answer here is approximately zero?

Weird, no? What exactly is going on here?

The standard leftist narrative always used to be that the media doesn't care about black deaths. This seems, uh, shall we say, not exactly operative in the age of George Floyd, where they care about them a great deal, and sometimes seem to care about little else. But fine, this is Sub-Saharan Africans. Maybe people just don't care about black deaths there. 

But in 2012, the internet got briefly and strangely exercised about Joseph Kony, trying to get him arrested for war crimes in Uganda. It's not necessarily weird that they should care about war crimes, mind you, but by the time they cared, the crimes themselves were mostly over a decade in the past. And the press definitely got extremely concerned over the genocide in Darfur, which started around the time that the Congo War was wrapping up.

Evidently there is some capacity for caring about gruesome mass deaths in Africa. So what happened in this case?

Well, to understand it, let's start with Wikipedia's list of belligerents. 

Huh?

Let me give you the summary. It's a complete, absolute mess. It's notable that the wikipedia entry doesn't even attempt to give you a summary of what the war was about. Not only are there a ton of different nations and militias, but most of them are pretty unsympathetic characters. Seriously, read the wikipedia article and try to make sense of it. 

The overall attitude seems to just end up being the line at the end of Burn After Reading

Simple narratives get re-told, and complicated narratives do not. 

You can say people are being lazy, but that's not it. The whole war just seems to be an anti-meme. (So is the English Civil War, at least to me, although not to the same extent). No sooner do you read one bit than it's slipping through your mind like a sieve. The reality is that people just can't retain everything they read. If you remember it, it's because you remember a compressed version of events, especially one that has the important parts to update your mental models of the world. These events also tend to be remembered more easily when they fit the pattern of familiar narrative structures, stories and plotlines that are satisfying to our sense of how drama should proceed. Modernity, being addicted to fairytales and Manichaeism, likes simple stories between good and evil, and where good triumphs in the end. (If it can't have that, it sells ridiculous versions like Kony 2012 where everything that happened in Uganda is just a prologue for the real hero of the story, you, the viewer, to get justice done by posting links to social media to spread awareness). 

But if you can't have a happy ending, the closest narrative that people want to fit mass murder into is the Holocaust. Reduced to its barest symbolic components, a large group of innocent and helpless civilians gets genocided for no military reason by a group who personifies evil. It's very hard to hammer the war into this narrative, because it just seems to be everyone killing everyone else, deaths from disease and malnutrition don't have the same grisly industrial horror as mass executions, and there's no simple descriptions of who exactly was getting killed, or who was doing the killing, other than that everyone was black. So what then?

Modern readers (ha! Let's say "viewers", to be more honest) dislike simple stories between evil and evil. They have no clue whatsoever about what to do with a 20 sided war where you suspect everyone is pretty nasty, and it's hard to even make sense of what they're fighting over.

The Haitian Revolution has a fair amount of this problem. Not as much as the DRC, but a decent amount. You can condense it into a single sentence that would be very popular today. That sentence would be:

A black slave colony rose up in revolt and secured its independence....

Sounds great! As long as you ask exactly zero additional questions, this is a heart-warming tale made for modernity. But it's such a great story, we have to hear more. 

...and immediately genocided all the white French civilians on the island. 

Hmm, that doesn't sit nearly as well. Are the slaves now the bad guys? Did the women and children civilians deserve to be genocided? Avante Garde lefist activists are probably willing to flirt with this line these days, but it still sits pretty uneasily with people. But we'll soldier on regardless. 

The slave armies had fought off the French, but honestly only a small fraction as much as Yellow Fever fought the French...

This part definitely isn't fitting the glorious military victory aspect. It's hard to piece together the exact numbers from the Leclerc expedition to retake Haiti, but it seems like at least 2/3 of the French deaths were from Yellow Fever, and maybe much more. One rather suspects that without this, it would have been a pretty short war to reimpose slavery. 

Honestly, this is one of the maddest aspects of the whole French project there. The French kept turning up at this place that just killed them horribly in a short period of time. It's like nature's way of saying "go somewhere else". But they wouldn't do it. 

Power had also been greatly consolidated after the Slave leaders, principally black leader Toussaint Louverture, defeated and massacred the supporters of colored leader André Rigaud, ...

And at last, no matter how much we try to gloss over it, by about 4 sentences into any possible history of the Haitian revolution, you have to talk about the role of the free coloreds, or the mulattos. The Haitian Revolution was, even in racial terms, a three-sided war, not a two-sided war. Those who had one white parent and one black or mulatto parent, and were thus part black in racial terms, formed a very distinct social group. Their existence is a total repudiation of all of modern, US-centric theories of race. For starters, they didn't see themselves, nor were they seen by others, as straightforwardly "black". They sure weren't white either, but that's not quite the same thing. The US operates on something that's not quite the one-drop rule, but heading in that direction. There are no anguished articles written about whether Barack Obama should be considered black or not. Whereas in Haiti in 1794, there would be no question - he would be a mulatto. (In Kenya, where his father was born, he'd probably be white).

And not only do these guys not think of themselves as black, for most of the history of the revolution, they stubbornly refuse to play the part that modernity would want, of showing solidarity with the blacks. Far from it. In fact, many of the mulattos were very strong defenders of slavery. A number of them had wealthy French fathers and had been educated in France (like Alexandre Pétion, who was 1/4 black and later a president of Haiti). In fact, they were often richer than a lot of the poor whites who worked in town jobs and clerical roles (the "small whites", as opposed to the large plantation owners, the "big whites"). Many of the mulattos owned slaves themselves, and were not at all interested in abolishing slavery. What they were interested in, however, was abolishing explicitly racial distinctions, especially for free coloreds themselves, that would see them face legal impediments to citizenship. 

This leads to some hilarious scenes like when Robespierre is arguing before the Revolutionary government that we need to abolish slavery based on the fundamental rights of man, and then he's followed up by mulatto activist Julien Raimond arguing that France needed to recognize the rights of free coloreds as a way of helping shore up support for the important institution of slavery. 

The coloreds were also willing to do things like arm slaves in revolt against the big whites with promises of freedom, only to later renege on those promises in part because they didn't actually want to set too many precedents of slaves getting freed en masse.

They are a peg that stubbornly refuses to be hammered into either of the "black" or "white" holes that modernity wants. 

Not that the early black slave revolt leaders were much better, mind you. Jean-François Papillon, when attempting to negotiate with the French for an end to one of the early slave uprisings, was willing to trade the slaves in his army back into slavery as long as the terms included freedom for him and the other officers. 

If you go back to the very beginnings of the independence movement, it's actually something like a six sided conflict. In addition to slaves and free coloreds (some of whom were fully black in racial terms, but who had been granted freedom), you had different groups of whites. The big whites in Haiti, the rich plantation owners, were big supporters of independence, chafing against trade restrictions imposed by France, and fancying that they could get a better deal running the country themselves. As Mike Duncan notes, they look and act a lot like the liberal nobles in the French revolution, who also ended up getting eaten by the forces they unleashed. This is a lesson that keeps coming up. The small whites were more driven by the importance of racial distinctions, which were their main source of potential status over the free coloreds. But on top of that, you had the Royal authorities in the colony, who often played one off against the other in order to keep their authority. In the early days of the Haitian revolution, this often meant allying most strongly with the free coloreds, who they saw as the most reliable supporters of monarchy. Finally, you've got the revolutionaries back in France, where developments of political events back in Europe ended up determining a lot of the course of events in Haiti. It's only very late in the story that it sounds like the Haitians being the primary drivers of events. And despite the fact that some of the revolutionaries were often big pushers of abolishing slavery, after the French revolution you also had various slave armies originally claiming to be fighting on behalf of the deposed King! This is without even getting into the role of the Spanish, or the English, or the Americans. 

Like I said - we're not at Congo War levels of confusion, but this is a story that resists simple morality tale narratives, especially if you want these to fit in with contemporary American racial preoccupations. 

But there is one final large and embarrassing reason why you don't hear much about the Haitian revolution. 

If you want this to be a morality tale, you have to end it in 1804. Because the other question you absolutely can't ask is "So what happened after that?", because the answer is that it's a horrible depressing dysfunctional mess for the next 220 years. And this destroys so much of the mythical allure of it all. Half the people who "ended slavery" didn't even mean by that term that you were free to walk off your plantation and do some different kind of work in some other locale. Oh no, you were now part of the Louverture Labor Code, which basically reinstituted slavery in all but name, but with slightly nicer conditions and different colored owners. The plantation system only really came to an end when the country was so completely destroyed that there was no infrastructure left to sustain a plantation. Unsurprisingly, this did not lead to large welfare improvements for the Haitian in the street. And so the whig history progressive has to spend the rest of the time spinning excuses for why none of this is the Haitians' fault, because the French demanded a large debt indemnity, and the Americans lost interest in trade, and then there were all these coups that nobody could have foreseen, and then the US invaded in the early 20th century, and then there was Papa Doc Duvalier who was a complete monster, and recently they had this earthquake...

It's a mess. It's a total mess. If there is anything much optimistic to discuss in the two-odd centuries after independence, it sure doesn't come up in the Mike Duncan brief history. 

I used to actually use this as a trolling example to leftists. Suppose you have a former colony. It finally gets its independence, and it's got problems. Mostly, we attribute those problems to the legacy of colonialism. But this presumably can't last indefinitely. If the place is still a basket case in a 1000 years time, it's probably not the fault of the British. So what's the Statute of Limitations here? What's the maximum length of time you'd need before you'd be willing to say "you know, this probably isn't due to colonialism?"

They will usually start thinking of Africa. They'll estimate how long it's been, then like Sandra Day O'Conner with affirmative action, grant themselves extra breathing room to make sure they're not proven wrong any time soon. "100 years" is a common answer. Maybe 150. 

Well, Haiti (which is almost never the example they have in mind, because nobody hears about Haiti) has been independent for 220. This is quite awkward. 

And what's the latest situation?

Curtis Yarvin was hilarious and scathing in a recent substack:

As a monarchist, I can tell you that Haiti could probably use Emperor Jacques back, genocide or no genocide, since it currently has no elected officials and is under the de facto control of a gang leader known as “Barbecue”—whose Wikipedia page notes:

Chérizier has denied that his nickname “Babekyou” (or “Barbecue”) came from accusations of his setting people on fire. Instead, he says it was from his mother's having been a fried chicken street vendor.

¿Porque no los dos? 

And so, this leads to a nagging alternative worry. What if the problem isn't actually just that the Haitian revolution resists summary? What if the problem is that the one sentence summary that captures the full thrust of events doesn't fit the progressive world view at all? What if the shortest summary of all the events is actually

A nation of slaves rose up in revolt, and after a messy and nasty war, genocided the whites and led to misery and poverty essentially forever.

I do not assert that this summary is true, by the way. Even aside from the general problem that summarizing any revolution in a single sentence is a fraught exercise guaranteed to miss a lot of important detail, a great deal hinges upon how exactly you define "led to". It was certainly chronologically antecedent to it. Whether it was causal is always a much thornier issue, as with everything in history. This is without even getting into what a full range of counterfactuals would be, because there are surely options other than "Haitian revolution" and "Haitian slavery continues forever". 

But even to state such a potential summary is deeply disturbing to modern sensibilities, because reading it simplistically it makes it sound like Haitian slavery was thus a good thing. Nobody, as far as I know, is eager to reinstitute slavery. And while there are serious scholarly works arguing that American tobacco and cotton slavery had material conditions close to that of a free laborer, and likely better than a Welsh coal miner at the same time, I have never heard anyone assert the same thing about French Caribbean sugar slavery. It was hell on earth, where you got worked to death over a short number of years under absolutely brutal conditions. Nobody wants to bring it back. And when I say "nobody", I mean "levels of support seem to be minimal even among people who routinely espouse positions far outside the Overton window". 

Yet the chronological sequence is there, and undeniable. They had a successful slave revolt. They genocided the whites. It has been a complete mess ever since. What you wish to make of those facts is up to you, and there are many other facts you could choose to add to those above, but there are not many good news stories to tell out of it.

And so the glorious one sentence successful slave uprising ultimately gets ignored in favor of fictional slave uprisings that never happened. Which is a shame. Because the Haitian Revolution is a fascinating story if you have an attention span longer than a summary of three sentences. 

The Abyss

[This was my entry for this year's Passage Prize. Didn't get short listed this time, which either means my poetry is getting worse, or the competition is getting better, or both. The good news is that you now get the poem for free. The bad news is you get what you pay for.]

The Abyss

“I inform you, great king, I announce to you, great king: aging and death are rolling in on you. When aging and death are rolling in on you, great king, what should be done?”

“As aging and death are rolling in on me, venerable sir, what else should be done but to live by the Dhamma, to live righteously, and to do wholesome and meritorious deeds?”

Death, like the sun, cannot be stared at too long.

But death, also like the sun, cannot be avoided entirely,

Without ending up withered and emaciated inside.

The stunted, rickets-plagued character that results

From staying indoors, never facing the world as it is,

Subsisting on a diet of saccharine fairy tales,

Manufactured junk-food doom-scrolling distractions,

And the slippery, seed oils

Of the present-tense, oleaginous outrage-of-the-day.



Like the Strange Blind Idiot God of Evolution,

Creeping and slow, without an agreed upon plan,

Society has assumed the role of Suddhodana.

The old man and the sick man still serve some useful purpose.

The former as an important marketing demographic,

At least until his 401K dwindles,

Whereupon he gets shunted to Death’s Waiting Room in Florida

Where it’s always 75F, and the phone only rings on Thanksgiving.

The sick man is valuable, at least in the abstract,

For highlighting the importance of “dem programs”.

But the corpse, young Siddhartha,

That simply will not do.

It is for your own good, you see.

(The monk, of course, barely even exists,

So needs no concealment.)



Reader, having officially reached middle age,

I can only remember seeing a corpse once.

At a distance, on Santa Monica Beach,

A hobo having expired somehow,

Lying supine on a bed of concrete,

The lifeguard urgently performing CPR,

But the paramedics from the ambulance,

Ambling without urgency.

They knew.

Meanwhile, the hero of the play, with only the best of intentions,

Kept the show going, lest the tourists get alarmed.

He shall be taken to the hospital.

Yes, the hospital. That’s where ambulances go.



If you escape misfortune, your first introduction

Into the Society of Those With Open Eyes

Will be when your own parents die.

The happier your life is,

The later will you learn its most important lesson.

And standing over their grave,

You shall face Siddhartha’s choice.

The heavy oak door swings open a crack,

Revealing a strange light,

And murmurings that beckon from outside the palace.

Shall you walk out into the night?

Or stay in the bedchamber?

How few, how mad with truth,

Those who follow in his footsteps.



It is a trick, of course.

Everyone resolves to leave.

They even walk a few hesitating paces.

A few hours later,

Nearly all of them go back.



But modernity, like Suddhodana,

Never entirely succeeds in tossing out nature with its pitchfork.

There is a crack through which light occasionally seeps in,

When the sun is aligned just right,

The Stonehenge gap in the Machinery of Moloch,

An ancient monkey-brain relic that can’t quite be erased.



As the tarmac rises up to meet your meandering plane,

And the engines whine with a different tenor,

A chance cross-breeze lifts you up,

And for one terrible, glorious second,

As the primordial panic knots your stomach,

You are aware, acutely, incisively,

That you will die.

Not just eventually.

But maybe right now.

The moment, like death itself, is shared with no one,

No matter how close by.

But everybody knows.

And what you think, right then,

Has a clarity of vision,

Both sublime and prosaic.



(It would be very sad if my daughter grows up without a father.)

(Christ, I still haven’t gotten the life insurance sorted. That’s incredibly stupid.)

* In breath, out breath *

(I wish I’d called my parents more.)

* In breath, out breath *

(If this is it, I am happy that, broadly, I have done my duty.)


*Thud!*


The wheels touch down.

The engines roar into reverse.

The world returns.

The Forever War of Deposit Insurance

Serious question. What is the least moronic rationale you know of for why the system of deposit insurance in the US has a cap of $250,000? 

It is the nature of a lot of government policies that they start out as a proposed solution to a narrow problem. Then, they either fail to solve that problem, or they solve it so well that it threatens the viability of the jobs the program creates. But in either case, new rationales spring up, usually which the policy achieves increasingly poorly. In the end, you get a solution in search of new problems, but the solution itself never goes away. 

At first, we had to go to Afghanistan to kill those bastards who blew up our buildings. Then when we had only limited success in that, because said bastards were quite hard to find, we had to go there to blow up the Taliban, who supported the guys who blew up our buildings, and implicitly the Afghans who supported them. Then we had to stay there to fight terrorism in Afghanistan so we didn't have to fight it in New York. Then we had to stay there to liberate the poor Afghans from the Taliban, and impose women's rights and gay rights on goat herders in the mountains. At some point, nobody knew why the hell we were there, and Joe Biden's few cogent thoughts managed to steel enough resolve to finally get America out, albeit chaotically and humiliatingly.

Similarly, in the 1960s, we needed affirmative action because blacks were already as competent as whites, and only hostile, taste-based discrimination was keeping them out. Then when that didn't seem to be true on the test scores, we needed to get the first generation of black leaders in as role models for the younger generation to study hard earlier on, so they could see that they would also be able to be doctors and engineers, at which point it wouldn't be necessary. (Hilariously, Sandra Day O'Connor in Grutter v Bollinger actually committed to this principle and put a time line on it  - by 2028, it won't be necessary!) Then once that had gone on for a generation, and the test scores still weren't budging, we decided that actually having more blacks in these places was actually an end in itself. Unlike the Afghanistan War, this one shows no signs of going away. 

Deposit insurance has a similar flavor. It is still around, and bigger than ever. But the reasons why keep changing over time.

Which is to say, there is not much mystery as to why originally there was a limit on account size. The original idea was that bank runs were just a fact of life, and when they happened, we wanted to make sure that small depositors were protected and didn't lose their life savings. But since nobody was much interested in protecting fat cats with enormous amounts of cash, they weren't covered. 

Over time, instead the idea (cemented in Diamond Dybvig 1983) was that deposit insurance was actually important for preventing bank runs. At this point, you might already be starting to wonder whether the cap makes sense. Are there enough large depositors who aren't insured to cause a run? If there are, then suddenly the cap just looks counterproductive. This is especially so since the stated claim (not unreasonably) is that deposit insurance is actually much cheaper in practice than the size of the guarantee, because in equilibrium you don't actually need to pay out the guarantee if you prevent the run. Of course, the massive regulatory apparatus needed to manage the moral hazard created by the guarantee is far from free, but you're already paying that anyway, regardless of what the cap is. But we're still on the idea that the purpose here is protecting the depositors. Maybe the big guys don't get it, and we end up with some costs we didn't need to have, but too bad. We're not here to bail out fat cats. 

By 2008 in particular, the rationale had shifted again - we need to prevent bank runs not because they're bad for depositors (thought they are), but because they're bad for everyone else. Financial crises lead to reductions in the money supply (like in the depression, in the Milton Friedman description), and lead to large asset price declines, and both lead to reductions in real economic activity. We need to make sure that these don't occur - ex ante, we implement deposit insurance and regulation to prevent runs from happening, and ex post we grumblingly bail out systemically important financial institutions if they go under anyway. 

Of course, this new rationale is enormously larger and different in scope than what came before. The list of institutions where investors may have a run is basically anyone dependent on overnight financing, even if they're not a standard commercial bank. Bear Stearns. The Reserve Primary Fund. Lehman Brothers. AIG. And each one that goes down increases the likelihood of chaos elsewhere, even among places like AIG that didn't seem primarily dependent on overnight financing (but had sold credit default swaps to institutions who were). The Fed didn't seem happy about the implications of this. Are they suddenly guaranteeing everybody, everywhere? No, they said. No more bailouts. This policy was announced with Lehman's bankruptcy on the Monday. The policy lasted two days. AIG, which had written credit default swaps on Lehman, was now toast. If they'd gone down, Goldman and Citibank would have been next. So bailouts it was. 

But now you see the problem (especially for values of "you" that includes crypto institutions). Deposit insurance was brought in originally as something that was a reluctant admission to the demands of grateful depositors clamoring for protection. It eventually morphed into something you can't avoid even if you want to. If there's any chance you might have contagion to anything, anywhere, well now you're going to be regulated, notionally for your own good, perhaps for everyone else's good, but assuredly, because every bureaucracy wants to grow its power and influence. 

Parenthetically, I have a friend involved in a bank startup outside the US. I once asked him: "Do you ever think about how much easier it would be to run your entire bank using Tether or USDC, and base it in Yemen or Singapore, as long as you could just get a letter from the United States Government promising to leave you alone?"

His answer: "Every single day."

But, of course, like the schizophrenia of Afghanistan policy where we were simultaneously trying to punish and save the Afghan people, the strange carveout exception for depositors over $250K is still there, just hanging in the breeze. It's now one of the proximate causes of Silicon Valley Bank going bankrupt. Like nearly every bank run, the line between solvency and liquidity is blurry. The post mortems emphasize their unusual exposure to interest rate risk. If your risk management strategy is "assume the Fed will never meaningfully raise interest rates" ... well, actually, that was a disturbingly good bet for a very long time, until one day it wasn't. Still, don't let this distract you from the additional cause. Whatever problems this would have had, if you didn't have ~80% of depositors being above the FDIC limit, and thus uninsured, you wouldn't have had the run play out in the same way, and may not have had it at all. 

Janet Yellen couldn't make up her mind. Like the "no bailouts" policy, on the Sunday morning shows she was saying that large depositors wouldn't be protected. Whoops. That policy lasted about 8 hours. By the evening, they were. 

And even before this, you'd had these sob stories about how all these hard working startups were totally boned because they'd held their money in SVB. While it's easy to enjoy the schadenfreude of the supposedly brightest investors like Y Combinator reduced to writing petitions begging the Feds for a bailout, there is an actual point here. You can't plan to make payroll each month in any serious-sized firm while holding less than $250K in cash. You can try to minimize the size of your exposure by holding larger amounts in treasuries or money market funds or something, but still, there's going to be a fair bit of straight cash that you need to leave on hand one way or the other, for some large fraction of days. Is it desired policy that these guys just have to eat the bank run risk of wherever they end up? Apparently it is, kinda sorta, unless we change our minds ex post.

Why is all this so bizarre? 

Because bank runs are a solved problem even without deposit insurance!

Well, at least for the version of the bank run problem of "where can you safely store your money without the risk of it being lost or stolen, and not have that institution at risk of collapsing on you?"

In the modern world, your bank has an account with the Fed. You give your money to Citibank. Citibank deposits that money at the Fed. The Fed pays Citibank interest on those reserves. Citibank pays you approximately nothing. To which you might ask - can I just put my money in the Fed directly and earn that interest? No, of course you can't. And a bunch of creative finance types tried for the next best thing - they tried to create something called a narrow bank, whose only purpose is to take your money, give it to the Fed, and pass on nearly all the interest to you. What happened? The Fed repeatedly denied those licenses. 

You may think I'm exaggerating, or being conspiratorial here. But here's John Cochrane, neither a fool nor a conspiracy theorist, saying much the same thing. 

So why do they do it? Well, there's a few answers. 

One is that the Fed is effectively captured by the big banks. They like the subsidies from interest on reserves. They like too big to fail. They like the fact that you don't have anywhere else you can stick your deposits, and instead you have to give it to them if you just want the lowest chance of losing your money. You may not like it, but that's why you're nobody, and they're Goldman Sachs.

The charitable explanation, which actually overlaps with the first but gives it a more positive veneer, is that this is actually a tool of monetary policy - we want the fact that your deposits get lent out to small businesses and home buyers, because this expands the money supply, keeps interest rates low, and keeps the economy growing. We don't want you depositing your money with the Fed to just sit there going nowhere. We presumably also don't want the Fed to then have to get into the business of lending the money out directly. Although you may start to wonder why not - we regulate so much else of the lending process, but perhaps it would be a little embarrassing to go mask-off and just have the Fed lend to everyone directly. It would also hurt the shareholders of the big banks - see the previous explanation. 

Now, the first thing to question is whether we really have exhausted the range of possibilities - either a) subsidize Citibank and deny narrow banking licenses or b) money supply collapse and economic catastrophe. Are we sure that there is absolutely no other alternative? Bueller?

But hell, let's be charitable and assume that this really is the whole action space. We're crowbarring people into having their deposits be needlessly risky to keep lending flowing and the economy growing, but in return we protect them from bank runs ... unless they hold more than $250K. If they do, stiff shit! Why is that, under the current reasoning? Herp a derp, great question. 

Of course, in practice, they'll still probably bail them out ex-post, for the same reason they bailed out AIG. They'll just do it it randomly in an ex-post manner that creates lots of uncertainty, sometimes doesn't materialize (like Lehman), and sometimes creates needless bank runs (like this week). 

If you were Doug Diamond, pondering your legacy, it would be disturbing to wonder whether the deposit insurance idea, which actually isn't a terrible one, could turn into something so cumbersome and kafka-esque. But here we are.

So let's clarify the question at the start to make it more damning. What is the least moronic explanation you can come up with for why deposit insurance has a limit of $250K, and the Fed repeatedly denies licenses to narrow banks?

I'm not holding my breath for an answer.

There is a kind of reverse Gell-Mann Amnesia effect of government policy. Everyone looks at the chaos and inefficiency of government in general, and just assumes that policy is likely to be a shitshow run by clowns. But in the area where you personally have expertise, and especially if you have any conceit of being able to influence policy, you see all sorts of sophisticated rationales for why it might actually make great sense and be a clever balancing of tradeoffs. 

Now, maybe this is actually the right take, and government everywhere is more sensible than you think. But the alternative is worth pondering. If you have some expertise, and still it doesn't seem to make sense, maybe the general perspective is right. Maybe it is just a dumb, historically accidental clownshow. Even if it's the thing you study. Maybe this is true more broadly, and your expertise mostly leads to rationalization. 

The Fed, it is worth noting, is one of the less incompetent bits of the government. They still hire mostly high IQ economists with PhDs from top institutions. This doesn't mean that their assumptions about the world are right, or beneficial, but in general they aren't fools. There are some affirmative action midwits like Lisa Cook, but they are the exception, not the rule. In any case, the Fed is almost shockingly non-partisan. It would be very easy for them to massively jack up interest rates two weeks before the 2020 election to throw things into chaos to get Trump booted out. But they didn't, and they never have. However bad you think current policy is, it could be much, much worse. It probably will get much worse. 

And yet. The external position has a fair amount to recommend. We can see some part of policy that seems crazy, arbitrary, and historically anachronistic. What we are left to haggle over is how much this is tip, and how much this is iceberg. 

The French Revolution and the Inertia of Government

If I had to summarize in a sentence the biggest common thread between both the English Civil War and the French Revolution, it’s how much all governments are governments of inertia. For good or bad, any government whose institutions and norms have been around for a long time is a pretty stable equilibrium. The biggest problem that its enemies have is simply convincing a critical mass of people that it might actually be possible to achieve major reforms, if not complete replacement. People tend to be unimaginative on alternative institutional arrangements. This applies doubly so towards changes that don’t map to obvious and mentally accessible historical templates. Something like Curtis Yarvin’s sovereign corporations, or Robin Hanson’s futarchy, are notable because of how rare they are. Even when they get proposed, they have a very futuristic feel – which is to say, one can imagine them somehow, somewhere, far in the future. Imagining a clear path from here to there is much more difficult.

The obvious consequence of this, which is everywhere on display around you, is that dysfunctional or substandard government can persist a very long time. This holds true even if lots of people would prefer a change, or sometimes even if lots of elites would prefer some kind of change. But for forecasting the future in the conditional sense (where the stakes are probably highest), the flip side is actually almost as important. Once the revolution has gotten going, the new institutional arrangements have none of the old inertia benefit. Which is to say, revolutions look a lot like the golden rule of affairs – there’s never just one.

And this isn’t just the case in France, either. Russia had the February Revolution (we’ll have constitutional government under Prince Georgy Lvov) and the October Revolution (get ready for misery - horrible communist misery). America, after its war of independence, had the Congress of the Confederation, a period so dysfunctional that it tends to get left out of American history altogether, before it had the Constitution and the Federalists. In the English Civil War, it only took 9 years of Cromwell’s dictatorship after the execution of Charles I in 1649 for everyone to decide that they weren’t much interested in extending this after Cromwell’s death, and so King Charles II was installed in 1660.

And so it is in France. Actually, France takes this to a new level, because the chaos eventually gets so continual and extreme that you stop counting in terms of discrete events. You may think you’re just establishing a constitutional monarchy under the constitution of 1791. But since that’s just some document that a bunch of guys came up with a year ago, why should anyone pay it any particular heed? So next thing you know, King Louis is being executed and you need a new constitution of 1793, since it’s awkward to have the last constitutional document refer to a guy who’s dead. Except that never really actually gets implemented, so then you need the constitution of 1795, which lasts about three months until another coup, and eventually you get the constitution of 1799…

Constitutions are useful markers here not because they’re sacred, inviolable documents. Quite the contrary – often they’re barely even implemented. But they represent the fervent desire to establish some kind of precedent that will bind everyone else. The alternative, which the French revolution has a lot of, is the endless shifting of power, horse trading and back stabbing that happens when there’s no formal structure and lines of authority to decide who is really in charge. New constitutions are thus somewhat useful markers of when the reality of power has gotten so disconnected from the previous piece of paper that the current mob feel the need to justify the difference.

Parenthetically, this reveals the brilliance of the current constitutional order in the US. If the option is available, you are much better off referring to the same piece of paper and saying that you’re totally still the legitimate heirs of 1789. A shockingly large number of rubes will fail to notice that the modern government bears almost no resemblance in any of its practical arrangements to the government of 1789, so maybe, just maybe, you’re not actually governed by the piece of paper after all, and the government can very easily change with the paper staying the same.

All of which to say, if politics had the equivalent of a VIX index of implied future volatility, it is going to be high for quite some time after a revolution. Most of the participants at the Festival of the Federation in 1790, must have assumed that all the unpleasantness was over. A year after the storming of the Bastille, here was the King, and Lafayette, and Talleyrand, and Marie Antoinette, and everyone else saying what a great outcome it all was and how chuffed they were with France’s glorious new future. Instead, it was actually a great time to be selling your French property and getting out of dodge while nobody was yet trying to restrict you from doing so. Out of the celebrants, Lafayette had fled the country and wound up in an Austrian prison in 1792, Louis and Marie Antoinette were both executed in 1793, and through good luck and good management, Talleyrand skipped town for a few years, slightly ahead of a warrant for his arrest.

And this brief list highlights the overwhelming general trend here in both personnel and causes – there is an alarmingly high turnover of both. It is striking how many figures grace the stages early in the story, only to just disappear later on. Take Jacques Necker, Louis’ on and off again Finance Minister over whom so much of the pre-revolutionary controversy centered, but who eventually just gets politely shuffled off stage in 1791 to exile. Or consider the Parlement, whose conflicts with Louis XVI formed such a large part of the initial series of conflicts, but which had already sunk into irrelevance such that by the time it was abolished in 1790, you barely even noticed. The sacred rights of nobles to have a say in legislation was not a concern of long duration. Maybe that’s something worth thinking about before you kick off your list of complaints to the king. Are you on net a beneficiary of the current institutional arrangements, relative to the space of possible things that might come about if everyone starts to believe that institutional arrangements are much more malleable than they seem?

My favorite example of this is that Jacques-Louis David, who was basically Albert Speer with a small side of Goebbels, started doing his masterpiece painting, “The Tennis Court Oath”. Unfortunately, too many of the figures present got purged or executed before it could be finished, and he decided that it would be more prudent to just scrap the whole thing.

The grim upside in this monstrous affair is that once the initial round of executions is done, and most of the sympathetic reactionary figures are dead or exiled, it turns into a black comedy where each round of people gets killed for being insufficiently revolutionary. The Girondins, the “moderate” revolutionaries who supported the King’s removal, but argued only that he shouldn’t be put to death, were led to the guillotine still singing La Marseillaise. You’d need to have a heart of stone to not laugh at this, these nitwits determined to not be hit with the clue stick on the way out. Maybe, just maybe, something in our original worldview wasn’t quite right. It’s like the original version of so many modern memes:




“Jacobins are the real reactionaries!”

“So much for the tolerant left!’


The longer it goes on, the more you have to work to find the “comedy” amongst the “grim”. The most memorable summary of just how far all this changed within a few years, and how much of a shock it would have seemed, comes from Moldbug, quoting Hippolyte Taine, translating La Harpe. La Harpe was actually one of those pro-revolutionary artists who did get hit with the clue stick, becoming both reactionary and Christian by the end. In his fictionalized dialogue from the salons of 1788, he places himself as one of the incredulous guests laughing as Cazotte (who ended up guillotined himself for monarchist sympathies) prophesies the path of the French revolution. Even without knowing the full biographies of all the characters, the sentiment is quite jarring.

It seems to me, La Harpe says, as if it were but yesterday, and yet it is at the beginning of the year 1788. We were dining with one of our fellow members of the Academy, a grand seignior and a man of intelligence. The company was numerous and of every profession, courtiers, advocates, men of letters and academicians, all had feasted luxuriously according to custom. At the dessert the wines of Malvoisie and of Constance contributed to the social gaiety a sort of freedom not always kept within decorous limits. At that time society had reached the point at which everything may be expressed that excites laughter. Champfort had read to us his impious and libertine stories, and great ladies had listened to these without recourse to their fans.

Hence a deluge of witticisms against religion, one quoting a tirade from ‘La Pucelle,’ another bringing forward certain philosophical stanzas by Diderot… and with unbounded applause… The conversation becomes more serious; admiration is expressed at the revolution accomplished by Voltaire, and all agree in its being the first title to his fame. ‘He gave the tone to his century, finding readers in the antechambers as well as in the drawing-room.’ One of the guests narrates, bursting with laughter, what a hairdresser said to him while powdering his hair: ‘You see, sir, although I am a miserable scrub, I have no more religion than any one else.’

They conclude that the Revolution will soon be consummated, that superstition and fanaticism must wholly give way to philosophy, and they thus calculate the probabilities of the epoch and those of the future society which will see the reign of reason. The most aged lament not being able to flatter themselves that they will see it; the young rejoice in a reasonable prospect of seeing it, and especially do they congratulate the Academy on having paved the way for the great work, and on having been the headquarters, the center, the inspirer of freedom of thought.

One of the guests had taken no part in this gay conversation; a person named Cazotte, an amiable and original man, but, unfortunately, infatuated with the delusions of the visionary. In the most serious tone he begins: ‘Gentlemen,’ says he, ‘be content; you will witness this great revolution that you so much desire. You know that I am something of a prophet, and I repeat it, you will witness it… Do you know the result of this revolution, for all of you, so long as you remain here?’

‘Ah!’ exclaims Condorcet with his shrewd, simple air and smile, ‘let us see, a philosopher is not sorry to encounter a prophet.’

‘You, Monsieur de Condorcet, will expire stretched on the floor of a dungeon; you will die of the poison you take to escape the executioner, of the poison which the felicity of that era will compel you always to carry about your person!’

At first, great astonishment, and then came an outburst of laughter. ‘What has all this in common with philosophy and the reign of reason?’

‘Precisely what I have just remarked to you; in the name of philosophy, of humanity, of freedom, under the reign of reason, you will thus reach your end; and, evidently, the reign of reason will arrive, for there will be temples of reason, and, in those days, in all France, the temples will be those alone of reason… You, Monsieur de Champfort, you will sever your veins with twenty-two strokes of a razor and yet you will not die for months afterwards. You, Monsieur Vicq-d’Azir, you will not open your own veins but you will have them opened six times in one day, in the agonies of gout, so as to be more certain of success, and you will die that night. You, Monsieur de Nicolai, on the scaffold; you, Monsieur Bailly, on the scaffold; you, Monsieur de Malesherbes, on the scaffold; … you, Monsieur Roucher, also on the scaffold.’

‘But then we shall have been overcome by Turks or Tartars?’

‘By no means; you will be governed, as I have already told you, solely by philosophy and reason. Those who are to treat you in this manner will all be philosophers, will all, at every moment, have on their lips the phrases you have uttered within the hour, will repeat your maxims, will quote, like yourselves, the stanzas of Diderot and of “La Pucelle.” ’

‘And when will all this happen?’

‘Six years will not pass before what I tell you will be accomplished.’

‘Well, these are miracles,’ exclaims La Harpe, ‘and you leave me out?’

‘You will be no less a miracle, for you will then be a Christian.’

‘Ah,’ interposes Champfort, ‘I breathe again; if we are to die only when La Harpe becomes a Christian we are immortals.’

‘As to that, we women,’ says the Duchesse de Gramont, ‘are extremely fortunate in being of no consequence in revolutions. It is understood that we are not to blame, and our sex.’

‘Your sex, ladies, will not protect you this time… You will be treated precisely as men, with no difference whatever… You, Madame la Duchesse, will be led to the scaffold, you and many ladies besides yourself in a cart with your hands tied behind your back.’

‘Ah, in that event, I hope to have at least a carriage covered with black.’

‘No, Madame, greater ladies than yourself will go, like yourself in a cart and with their hands tied like yours.’

‘Greater ladies! What! Princesses of the blood!’

‘Still greater ladies than those…’

They began to think the jest carried too far. Madame de Gramont, to dispel the gloom, did not insist on a reply to her last exclamation, contenting herself by saying in the lightest tone, ‘And they will not even leave one a confessor!’

‘No, Madame, neither you nor any other person will be allowed a confessor; the last of the condemned that will have one, as an act of grace, will be…’ He stopped a moment.

‘Tell me, now, who is the fortunate mortal enjoying this prerogative?’

‘It is the last that will remain to him, and it will be the King of France.’ ”

Indeed, when one reads the path of all this, the contemporary French attitude towards the whole thing seems ghastly, glib, and frivolous. To view this as a noble story of the people shrugging off the shackles of a despotic king and implementing freedom and democracy requires zooming out to such a large distance and squinting at what details are still evident that you’re left with a narrative to be told to a small child, and not a very inquisitive child at that.

Zoom in any more on the narrative, and it quickly seems monstrous – François Joseph Westermann apparently writing to the Committee of Public Safety after ordering no quarter given on fleeing Vendée rebels

There is no more Vendée, Republican citizens. It died beneath our free sword, with its women and its children. I have just buried it in the swamps and the woods of Savenay. Following the orders that you gave to me, I crushed the children beneath the horses' hooves, massacred the women who, those at least, will bear no more brigands. I do not have a single prisoner to reproach myself with. I have exterminated them all.

This was somewhat hyperbole, but it was much less hyperbole when, months after any of these rebels still posed any military threat, Louis Marie Turreau lead his troops through the Vendée and exterminated everyone they came across, around 20% of the population, 20-40,000 all told.

Or Jean-Baptiste Carrier gleefully drowning 4000 people at Nantes, women, children, nuns, priests, in his “Republican Baptisms” (on top of the 2000 odd executed in a quarry, such as by blasting them all with a cannon).

The Committee of Public Safety during the Terror executed tens of thousands of people being suspected of being insufficiently revolutionary, old men, women and children included. When put this way, it all tends to just turn into a blur, where you might imagine that somehow this is just them being the equivalent of a Duterte or a Bukele, executing the equivalent of drug dealers and gangs. But no, focus in a little on the mechanism by which this came about, and it really is horrifying. The Law of 22 Prairial was the reform by which the messy process of accusation, trial, and deliberation was massively sped up. Defendants were no longer allowed to call witnesses, nor were they allowed to have lawyers – that is to say, they weren’t really allowed to defend themselves anymore. The line between “accusation” and “conviction” become very thin indeed. The list of crimes was expanded to include new offenses like “seeking to inspire disagreement”, “slandering patriotism”, and “spreading false news”. Only two verdicts were allowed – acquittal, or death. And, finally, citizens were required to denounce these crimes – failure to denounce is also a crime, which, like all crimes, is now punishable by death.

It's basically all the crazy untrustworthiness of the Soviet Union, where everyone denounces everyone else, but with the grim discipline of the NKVD replaced with Haitian anarchy.

And lest you think that this was all some accident, Robespierre had laid out his vision in a speech on the Republic of Virtue, that this was in fact the aim – terror is an emanation of virtue, and without it, virtue will be weak.

If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs.

Mike Duncan (from whose Revolutions podcast a lot of this history is taken) does a great job of summarizing the atmosphere shortly before Robespierre met his end:

“The authorities had already had to move the guillotine of the Place de la revolution, to a spot east of the city, where the Place Bastille is now, and then move it further east again after residents complained of the blood and the stench. Executions were no longer a glorious public celebration, they had become a grim and mechanical daily routine that just wasn’t much fun anymore. No one was enthusiastic when Cecil Renault and her entire family – mother, father, sisters, brothers, were led off en masse to be killed for their role in this alleged plot to kill Robespierre. And it was really to no one’s great rejoicing when on July 17th, a herd of old pious Carmelite nuns were led off for the crime of living together communally. When a child pick pocket was led up to the scaffold, the sympathetic onlookers started shouting ‘No more children!’.”

As they say – you executed the King, for this?

The one minor note of optimism here is the – well, not even schadenfreude, more like thankful justice, that many of the worst characters here got eaten by the same forces they eagerly unleashed. Westermann was guillotined for being aligned with Danton. Carrier was recalled after even Robespierre found his activities too much, and then executed after the Thermidorian reaction. Robespierre himself was undone by the Thermidorian reaction, after threatening too many people with being involved in a conspiracy that they decided to get him before he could get them. He tried to organize an insurrection, but that failed. He tried to shoot himself with a pistol, but only succeeded in blowing off half his jaw. He lived in agony for another day before being guillotined himself. It’s grisly, but couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke.

The other terrible indictment of the project is that the French also want to idolize the man who shortly afterwards did more to undo all the principles of the revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte. And even then, 19th century French history is a complete mess until at least after the Paris Commune in 1871. Seriously, there’s a reason that most people don’t know much about France between the fall of Napoleon and it entering World War 1. It’s a total shitshow.

But aside from viewing it as a kind of grotesque cautionary tale that runs counter to the prevailing narrative, I think there is quite a lot to learn by putting oneself in the shoes of a potential reactionary at different points in the story. What exactly should you have been hoping for, anyway? At least before the ending of the story is known, it’s harder than you’d think. One sees a strange tension between supporting monarchical principles, and supporting monarchical tradition. When the king is still in power, there is not much of a contradiction here. But once the King is executed, are you specifically interested in restoring the legitimate heir of the Bourbon dynasty? What if he's 7 years old? What if, once he’s dead at age ten, it’s not straightforward whose claim you should support? Or are you just interested in solving the Carlyle problem of finding the most able man, and giving him absolute power? Because it’s pretty clear that by a certain point in the story, that man was Napoleon. The question of when exactly you would recognize him as such is not nearly as obvious as you might imagine. It is a funny exercise imagining the leaders of the French Directory, feeling like they’re on top of their game and in charge of France. But when a historian tells the story of that time period, for much of their reign, the actual tale being told is “what was Napoleon doing at this time?”

When you look into it, a curious regularity is that many of the great authoritarian leaders came to power supporting the governments they later overthrew. Julius Caesar lead the populares against the traditional aristocratic privilege of the Roman Senate. But did this matter once he’d assumed power? Did it stop his rule from being further right than what came before – monarchy, instead of oligarchy? Not one bit. Same thing with Napoleon. It’s well known that he was willing to use “a whiff of grapeshot” to defeat the mob, which sounds pretty based. But it was a Royalist mob, attacking the revolutionary government! Those who just wanted competent authority invested in the ablest man would have been much better off supporting the man shooting at them, though it was very hard for them to know that at the time. Even in modern times, Augusto Pinochet led the crackdown on anti-Allende protests in 1972!

All of which is to say, that it’s not nearly as obvious as you might think where exactly the next competent authoritarian might come from. It is a mistake to place too much weight in the man’s politics before he seizes power. Those destined to rule seem to instinctively know that the first thing to do is actually acquire the power to rule, by whatever means necessary, otherwise all your grand visions amount to very little. Of course, this adds a pretty big risk component once political opposition is swept away. As Moldbug is fond of pointing out, the Democratic Party platform of 1932 is almost the exact opposite of what FDR actually implemented once he took control of the US government. It can cut both ways.

And this tension between supporting the man and supporting the institution can even be extended back to the period when monarchs were in power. King Louis XVI was, in many ways, contemptibly weak, and not up to the task of dealing with the moderate problems he faced. But J.F. Bosher makes a great case, over and over, of all the alternatives Louis XVI had in front of him, whether shaking down the debt holders and effectively defaulting, or sending in troops to arrest the members of the National Convention at the Tennis Court Oath, or a bunch of other options. How much did he deserve your support?

Well, he was a hell of a lot better than what came immediately afterwards. Because even with his weakness, the inertia of governing structures kept things sane.

This isn’t the only view, though. Thomas Carlyle took the opposite position in Latter-Day Pamphlets, when assessing the various revolutions of 1848. You would think that, being a supporter of monarchy, he would be straightforwardly appalled at all these events that overthrew the monarchies of Europe, and offer a strong support of the deposed monarchs. But hating democracy misses the broader point, that nature abhors a weak and fake king:

[W]e had the year 1848, one of the most singular, disastrous, amazing, and, on the whole, humiliating years the European world ever saw. Not since the irruption of the Northern Barbarians has there been the like. Everywhere immeasurable Democracy rose monstrous, loud, blatant, inarticulate as the voice of Chaos. Everywhere the Official holy-of-holies was scandalously laid bare to dogs and the profane:—Enter, all the world, see what kind of Official holy it is. Kings everywhere, and reigning persons, stared in sudden horror, the voice of the whole world bellowing in their ear, "Begone, ye imbecile hypocrites, histrios not heroes! Off with you, off!" and, what was peculiar and notable in this year for the first time, the Kings all made haste to go, as if exclaiming, "We are poor histrios, we sure enough;—did you want heroes? Don't kill us; we couldn't help it!" Not one of them turned round, and stood upon his Kingship, as upon a right he could afford to die for, or to risk his skin upon; by no manner of means. That, I say, is the alarming peculiarity at present. Democracy, on this new occasion, finds all Kings conscious that they are but Play-actors.
…

These rulers were not ruling at all; they had merely got on the attributes and clothes of rulers, and were surreptitiously drawing the wages, while the work remained undone? The Kings were Sham-Kings, play-acting as at Drury Lane;—and what were the people withal that took them for real?

It is probably the hugest disclosure of falsity in human things that was ever at one time made. These reverend Dignitaries that sat amid their far-shining symbols and long-sounding long-admitted professions, were mere Impostors, then? Not a true thing they were doing, but a false thing. The story they told men was a cunningly devised fable; the gospels they preached to them were not an account of man's real position in this world, but an incoherent fabrication, of dead ghosts and unborn shadows, of traditions, cants, indolences, cowardices,—a falsity of falsities, which at last ceases to stick together. Wilfully and against their will, these high units of mankind were cheats, then; and the low millions who believed in them were dupes,—a kind of inverse cheats, too, or they would not have believed in them so long. A universal Bankruptcy of Imposture; that may be the brief definition of it. Imposture everywhere declared once more to be contrary to Nature; nobody will change its word into an act any farther…

Such a spectacle, can we call it joyful? There is a joy in it, to the wise man too; yes, but a joy full of awe, and as it were sadder than any sorrow,—like the vision of immortality, unattainable except through death and the grave! And yet who would not, in his heart of hearts, feel piously thankful that Imposture has fallen bankrupt? By all means let it fall bankrupt; in the name of God let it do so, with whatever misery to itself and to all of us. Imposture, be it known then,—known it must and shall be,—is hateful, unendurable to God and man. Let it understand this everywhere; and swiftly make ready for departure, wherever it yet lingers; and let it learn never to return, if possible! The eternal voices, very audibly again, are speaking to proclaim this message, from side to side of the world. Not a very cheering message, but a very indispensable one.

Alas, it is sad enough that Anarchy is here; that we are not permitted to regret its being here,—for who that had, for this divine Universe, an eye which was human at all, could wish that Shams of any kind, especially that Sham-Kings should continue? No: at all costs, it is to be prayed by all men that Shams may cease.

One shudders to think what Carlyle would make of the Republican Party in 2023.

But what Carlyle has in thundering and principled rhetoric, he doesn’t obviously have in terms of practical strategy. Because outside of the specific sham-monarch question, one of the other practical lessons of the ups and downs of the French revolution seems to be the opposite – holding institutions is useful, even (or especially) institutions that have been illegally purged of one’s enemies. Institutions do two things. First, they are opportunities for co-ordination and concentration of power. Second, they are public-facing sources of legitimacy, a kind of vaguely agreed upon sense that these guys are in charge. Often, it doesn’t even matter what the institution’s exact mandate even was. The National Convention was voted in in 1792 to draft a new constitution. But just being the convention meant that it operated as a de facto parliament with general powers, which it then delegated most of to the Committee of Public Safety, which then basically became a dictatorship by committee. None of these aspects, you will note, have anything to do with drawing up a constitution. But it didn’t matter.

Even expelling members doesn’t seem to be much of a problem. Once the Girondins got purged (admittedly, at the hands of a massive stirred up mob), the rest of the National Convention proceeded just fine. Same thing when the members of the Paris Commune were also expelled later on (this time, for being too leftist). The even more striking version, to briefly switch revolutions, was the Rump Parliament in the English Civil War. You might think that shamelessly expelling 180 of the 470 members of a legislative body for disagreeing with you might seriously weaken its legitimacy, but this is probably because you’ve lived under democratic lies too long. A better question is “whatcha gonna do about it?”. Because if you don’t have an answer to that question, then you’ve gotten weaker, not stronger.

It is possible to organize from out of power, of course. Mostly this seems to involve building parallel institutions to subvert the existing regime. Georges Danton was a great example. If you don’t know his story, read through the section on “Revolution” and try to work out at what point he actually held a major position in an important public office – it’s surprisingly late. He did most of his early work in the Jacobin club, which operated as a kind of shadow government for the left. He was involved in the local government of the Paris Commune, but most importantly helped organize the mobs that stormed the palace in the insurrection of August the 10th, which precipitated the King’s removal and eventual execution. In other words, you don’t have to be in the current legislative body (in this case, the Legislative Assembly) if you can just gin up a massive mob to overthrow the monarch presiding over said assembly. His first real post then came when he was appointed minister of justice, but this was mostly just a reflection of the informal organizing role he already had. Once you can stir up the mobs to carry out the September Massacres, executing all sorts of royalists and suspected Royalists, and effectively get away with it, it won’t be long until you’re finally voted into the National Convention (the new legislative body created after you totally crushed the old one), and ultimately in the big leagues of the Committee of Public Safety. Of course, his whole career looks a lot more like Vladimir Lenin than it does like Carlyle. Say what you will about the tenets of Bolshevik Communism, but they understood how power works. They may not have understood anything else, but they understood that. Danton was acting like a government in waiting long before he held real office, including directing a mob substantially at his command. One man’s mob is another man’s national guard.

What you definitely don’t want to do is what the outgoing Constituent Assembly did in 1791, when setting up the Legislative Assembly, and decree that none of the members in the current body should be eligible to sit in the new body. Great job! Now everyone who set up the new system won’t be serving in it, and the ones that do will have pretty damn ambivalent feelings about the constitutional structures you love so much. Giving up power, walking out of institutions without a plan of what to do next, boycotting elections – these are all symbolism without a concrete plan, and counterproductive symbolism at that.

Indeed, what’s most useful about all this is not so much studying what happened, but thinking about possible counterfactuals to what might have happened, and what they reveal about the general laws of politics and human behavior. The resemblance of the later French revolutionaries to straight-up communism is quite palpable. Especially Babouef, who explicitly wanted to abolish private property (“Society must be made to operate in such a way that it eradicates once and for all the desire of a man to become richer, or wiser, or more powerful than others."). And his idea of this was defending Robespierre and the other executed leaders of the Terror. Babouef, humorously, wrote under the pen name Gracchus, which is funny given the role of the rabble-rousing Graccchi brothers in kicking off a process in the Roman Republic that eventually led to … the Caesars. Babouef, who never actually made it to power, is just one more end point of each group deciding they could rile up a coalition of lower ranks who were out of power to overthrow the people at the top. The Parlement organized against the King, then the National Assembly organized against both the Parlement and the King by harnessing the power of the bourgeois citizens, then Danton organized the Sans Culottes into a mob that overthrew the power of the others, until the trend to that point stopped when Thermidor prevented things going further leftward. Religious reforms started out as being making the wealth and role of priests more equal, then it moved to abolishing tithes, then it moved to seizing Church property, then in moved to requiring priests to swear an oath of fealty to the Republic over the Church, then it moved to just abolishing the Church altogether and replacing it with a Cult of Reason.

The point is that there is a logic to these progressions. They in fact represent taking the established principles (which blog.jim described as “knocking over the apple cart in order to get the apples”) further each time. Thankfully, it’s not like this process always gets taken to its horrible logical conclusion. Existing elites can sometimes realize that enough is enough, and reverse the current trend to try to cement more right wing changes (Thermidor, the Federalists, the Restoration of Charles II). But there’s also no reason this process has to stop on its own. And to see it taken to its fully logical end point, you get Zhang Xianzhong, who Wikipedia politely refers to as “leading a peasant revolt” that led to “massacres in Sichuan that depopulated the region”. Translation: everyone got killed. Everyone. Like Robespierre’s homage to terror, this doesn’t seem to be an accident. His most famous contribution to literature is his Seven Kill Stele:

Heaven brings forth innumerable things to nurture man.
Man has nothing good with which to recompense Heaven.
Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.

Like they used to say about Zimbabwe – it can always get worse.

I think the clearest application to the present, if you are a nobody and not an aspiring Georges Danton, is “Be extremely wary of the first revolution.”

By way of an example, in June 2020, during the height of the George Floyd mayhem, there had been a bunch of protests during the week, leading up to a big organized event on the Saturday night. There were thousands of protestors banging on barricades outside the White House. As it turns out, the security services managed to keep them under control, just. But what if it hadn’t gone that way? What if the mob had broken through the barricade, and the security services had started shooting them? Or what if they’d failed to shoot, and the white house got overrun and burned to the ground? What if Trump got chased out of office as part of a color revolution, or tracked down by a mob?

None of these things happened, of course. Which either means we got lucky, or that the protests were in fact controlled (since the left already holds the levers of power). But what would the French Revolution perspective be on these events? Are you really sure that Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi will really stay in charge of a fully unleashed mob that got out of hand? You’d be a bold man to bet that way. Events have an alarming way of taking on a life of their own. You can call up a mob to the front of the White House, but your ability to control it in the heat of the moment may be less than you think. 

For my part, I had a modest position in VIX call options over that weekend. Nothing came of it, of course. Like every bad trade, when it fails, you can always call it a hedge.

I can tell you this, though. If the White House had actually gotten burned to the ground, or Trump got color revolutioned out of power that week, I would have begun planning my life around it being time to leave America.

The good news is that, historically, you actually have a decent amount of time to do this. Things don’t tend to go completely bananas in the next day, week, month, or often even year.

But after the first revolution, you are much better off being an Émigré, waiting to see whether the next big change is a reaction from the right, or further leftward. High political volatility is great if you’re a young, clever, ambitious man looking to quickly advance up the ranks. It is a disaster for everyone else though.