Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [64]
Both revolutions are said to have come from the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers, the French Revolution informed by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the American Revolution influenced by the writings of John Locke. This is like saying Presidents Reagan and Obama both drew on the ideas of twentieth-century economists—Reagan on the writings of Milton Friedman and Obama on the writings of Paul Krugman.
Locke was concerned with private property rights. His idea was that the government should allow men to protect their property in courts of law—as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall realized—rather than have each man be his own judge. Rousseau saw the government as the vessel to implement the “general will” and thereby create men who were more moral. Through the limitless power of the state, the government would “force men to be free.”
The theories of the French revolutionaries, as summarized by historian Roger Hancock, were founded on “respect for no humanity except that which they proposed to create. In order to liberate mankind from tradition, the revolutionaries were ready to make him altogether the creature of a new society, to reconstruct his very humanity to meet the demands of the general will.”3
Contrary to the purblind assertions of liberals, who dearly wish our founding fathers were more like the godless French peasants, skipping around with human heads on pikes, our founding fathers were God-fearing descendants of Puritans and other colonial Christians. As Stephen Waldman writes in his definitive book on the subject, Founding Faith, the American Revolution was “powerfully shaped by the Great Awakening,” an evangelical revival in the colonies in the early 1700s, led by the famous Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards, among others. Aaron Burr, the third vice president of the United States, was Edwards’s grandson. The churches were so integral to the philosophy behind the revolution that there are books of Christian sermons on the American Revolution. In fact, it was the very irreligiousness of the French Revolution that appalled the Americans and British alike, even before the bloodletting began.
Americans celebrate the Fourth of July, the date our written demand for independence from Britain based on “Nature’s God” was released to the world. The French celebrate Bastille Day, a day when thousands of armed Parisians stormed a nearly empty prison, savagely murdered a half-dozen guards, defaced their corpses, and stuck heads on pikes, all in order to seize arms and gunpowder for more such tumults. It would be as if this country had a national holiday to celebrate the L.A. riots.
Among the most famous quotes from the American Revolution is Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death!”
Among the most famous slogans of the French Revolution is that of the Jacobin Club, “Fraternity or death,” recast by Nicolas-Sébastien de Chamfort, a Jacobin who turned against the revolution, as “Be my brother or I’ll kill you.”
Our revolutionary symbol is the Liberty Bell, first rung to herald the opening of the new Continental Congress in the wake of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, and rung again to summon the citizens of Philadelphia to a public reading of the just-adopted Declaration of Independence.
The symbol of the French Revolution is the “national razor”—the guillotine.
Of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, all died of natural causes in old age, with the exception of Button Gwinnett of Georgia, who was shot in a duel with a fellow officer during the Revolutionary War, though