- Coulter, Ann.
Demonic.
New York: Crown Forum, 2011.
ISBN 978-0-307-35348-1.
-
The author has a well-deserved reputation as thriving on
controversy and not hesitating to incite her intellectual
adversaries to paroxysms of spittle-spewing rage by
patiently demonstrating their hypocrisy and irrationality.
In the present volume, we have something substantially
different from Coulter's earlier work. Drawing upon
Gustave Le Bon's 1895 classic
The Crowd, Coulter
traces the behaviour of mobs and their influence upon
societies and history from classical times to the present
day.
The leaders of the American revolution and founders of the
American republic were steeped in the history of mob behaviour
in ancient Greece and Rome, and how it ultimately led to the
downfall of consensual self-government in both of these polities.
They were acutely aware that many of their contemporaries,
in particular Montesquieu, argued that
self-governance was not possible on a scale larger than that
of a city-state. The structure devised for the new republic in
North America was deliberately crafted to channel the
enthusiasms of the citizenry into considered actions by a
distributed set of institutions which set ambition against
ambition in the interest of stability, protection of
individual liberty, and defence of civil society against
the will of a moment's majority.
By contrast to the American Secession from the British Empire
(I deem it a secession since the main issue at dispute was
the sovereignty of the King and Parliament over the
colonies—after the conclusion of the conflict, the
newly-independent colonies continued to govern themselves
much as before, under the tradition of English common law),
the French Revolution a few years later was a mob unleashed
against the institutions of a society. In two well crafted
chapters Coulter sketches the tragic and tawdry history of
that episode which is often known to people today only from
romantic accounts which elide the absurdity, collective
insanity, and rivers of blood occasioned by the actual events.
(For more details, see
Citizens [October 2004], which
is cited here as a source.)
The French Revolution was the prototype of all the mob
revolutions which followed. Whether they called themselves
Bolsheviks, Nazis, Maoists, or Khmer Rouge, their
goal was to create heaven on Earth
and if the flawed humans they hoped to forge into their
bright shining utopia were unworthy, well then certainly
killing off enough of those recalcitrant dissenters would
do the trick.
Bringing this home to America, Coulter argues that although mob
politics is hardly new to America, for the first time it is
approaching a tipping point in having a near majority which pays
no Federal income tax and whose net income consists of transfer
payments from others. Further, the mob is embodied in an institution, the
Democratic party, which, with its enablers in the legacy media,
academia, labour unions, ethnic grievance groups, and other
constituencies, is not only able to turn out the vote but also
to bring mobs into the street whenever it doesn't get its way
through the institutions of self-governance. As the (bare)
majority of productive citizens attempt to stem the slide into
the abyss, they will be pitted against the mob, aroused by
the Democrat political apparatus, supported by the legacy
media (which covers up their offences, while accusing orderly
citizens defending their rights of imagined crimes), and
left undefended by “law enforcement”, which has
been captured by “public employee unions” which are
an integral part of the mob.
Coulter focuses primarily on the U.S., but the phenomenon she
describes is global in scope: one need only see the news from
Athens, London, Madrid, Paris, or any number of less visible
venues to see the savage beast of the mob baring its teeth against
the cowering guardians of civilisation. Until decent,
productive people who, just two generations ago, had the self-confidence
not only to assume the progress to which they were the heirs
would continue into the indefinite future but, just for a lark,
go and visit the Moon, see the mob for what it is,
the enemy,
and deal with it appropriately, the entire heritage of civilisation
will remain in peril.
July 2011 