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It’s a simple equation: Do you, fabulously rich person, want to be hated like Republicans Richard Mellon Scaife and David and Charles Koch—or do you want to be widely admired as a great philanthropist and lover of mankind like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates?

As Eugene Lyons described the posh opinion in favor of the Soviet Union in the thirties, “Marx and martinis, bridge and dialectics, social consciousness and social climbing were all mixed up on the banks of luxurious private swimming pools.”38

Poseurs are everywhere—Wall Street Marxists, the chubby college coed wailing about global warming, the MSNBC host posting on his door a list of semifamous people who watch his show, other MSNBC hosts holding nightly smirkathons in order to bond with their insecure viewers, and professors defending morons with ed school degrees while denouncing actually educated conservative speakers in the name of freedom of speech. All this is the result of groupthink.

Mobs “stand in need of ready-made opinions on all subjects,” Le Bon says, and the “popularity of these opinions is independent of the measure of truth or error they contain.” The power of prestige “entirely paralyses our critical faculty, and fills our souls with astonishment and respect.”39 The weak-minded just go with the crowd, ridicule the designated scapegoats, and then pass out awards to one another for their courage.

The same mob mentality that leads otherwise law-abiding people to hurl rocks at cops also leads otherwise intelligent people to refuse to believe anything they haven’t heard on NPR. To improve their social standing with the crowd, people will passionately assert whatever the official groupthink position is. Power today comes not from the guillotine, but from self-regard.

*Anonymous.

FIFTEEN

INHERITORS OF THE

FRENCH REVOLUTION

LIBERALS MOBS

Democrats are heirs to the French Revolution, the uprising of a mob. Conservatives are heirs to the American Revolution and the harmonious order of a republic. (Even the flakiest, most out-of-step, financially irresponsible founding father, Thomas Jefferson, was an apparent God-believer, immediately taking him out of the running as a modern Democrat.)

That’s why liberals avoid mentioning the French Revolution, except to absurdly claim that it was in the great tradition of the American Revolution—everyone move along now, there’s nothing to see here.

Every single American knows about the Third Reich, a more recent and more efficient barbarism than the French Revolution. But Hitler got his playbook from Robespierre, as did all the great liberal “reformers” of the twentieth century, from Lenin to Hugo Chávez. It was the Rousseauian idea of a few select individuals exercising the “general will” that gave the world the gulag, the concentration camp, the killing fields, the reeducation camps, and corpse upon corpse, without end.

And yet for all it is studied, the French Revolution might as well be a history of the Maori settlements of New Zealand.

Cornell University doesn’t have a single course on the French Revolution in the 2010–11 academic year. It has fifteen on Asia, including “Pop Culture in China” and “East Asian Martial Arts.” Isn’t the French Revolution at least as important as “A Social History of Food and Eating” or “Women and Black Nationalism in the United States”?1 The French Revolution was the precursor to Women and Black Nationalism in the United States! But liberals don’t want anyone to make that connection, so we never hear about the French Revolution, except in chirpy op-eds on Bastille Day claiming the French Revolution was the spitting image of the American Revolution.

With dozens of course offerings, UCLA’s history department doesn’t have a single course on the French Revolution, or even a course that would seem to cover Western Europe during that period. There are courses on European history in the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as from 1450 to 1660. And there’s a Western