MAGA Turns on Itself

There’s a wonderfully bleak rule of revolutionary politics I’ve shared with you before: eventually, the people who build the guillotine find that their own necks fit perfectly into the National Razor.

Maximilien Robespierre learned this in July 1794 when his head plopped into a wicker basket. As Trump flounders, rots before our eyes, and his legacy becomes one of abject failure and destruction, MAGA is learning it now.

MAGA is devouring itself in an entirely predictable pattern of revolutionary excess; results are going to be both hilarious, bloody, and like all things Trump, spectacularly ugly. For them, I mean. For the rest of us, it’s going to be delicious.

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For years, Robespierre and the Jacobins had converted revolutionary purity from a political aspiration into a bloodthirsty tool for purging anyone deemed insufficiently fervent.

They found enemies everywhere. Girondins. Hebertists. Dantonists. Counter-revolutionaries, real and imagined. Moderates. Royalists. People insufficiently enthusiastic about murdering the previous group of insufficiently enthusiastic people.

In April 1794 Robespierre had Danton, who had once been his ally and one of the great figures of the Revolution, executed by the guillotine. Three months later Robespierre delivered a speech in which he threatened to carry out further purges without conveniently naming all those whom he intended to purge.

His colleagues did the math. On 9 Thermidor, they arrested him.

The next afternoon, the Apostle of the Terror took the same ride to the Place de la Revolution he had arranged for so many others. There is something almost mechanically and historically predictable about this.

Revolutions start with enemies outside the gates. They inevitably discover more enemies within them...