Does He Realize What He is Saying?

2020 was the year we were made expendable with our life, liberty +property destroyed, and our safety outsourced to BLM terrorists. That sun is setting. 2021 will be the year when we #FightBack in the mold of the American, not French revolution https://t.co/D9iE0lzZnT #NewYear

— Daniel Horowitz (@RMConservative) January 1, 2021

Jacobinism

JACOBINISM
Friends, in French Jacobinisms maps exactly to my nightmare: a centralized nation-state w/IYIs running it, coupled with a monolithic national identity (anti-localism, anti-minorities, anti-multiculturalism).
What would be the corresponding English term? pic.twitter.com/0hnG3ijKvZ

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) August 13, 2020

However, the lamentable nationalist trends did not start with the Jacobins, even if the French Revolution further consolidated state power.

As for "anti-minorities," I am not sure what Taleb means by this.

"Dialogues des Carmélites"

Was Hilaire Belloc a liberal?

Ite ad Thomas has the links to the arguments presented at Tradition in Action, which I would not deem to be a reliable website for "traditional" Catholicism. A copy of Belloc's The French Revolution has been put online by Google. (LibriVox, Project Gutenberg) How does his history compare with Toqueville's? I remember starting Belloc's history, but I never got past the introduction -- I did flinch at what seemed to be a positive appraisal of modern French republicanism. I should re-examine Belloc's republicanism/political theory--I would be shocked if someone who should be so critical of the modern nation-state would nonetheless accept one form of it as being an ideal.

Thought and Action: Belloc and the French Revolution

Freedom of Expression

Dr. Fleming:

Once again, I have to remind you all, that the Ancien Regime, while it interfered in the political process and regulated economic affairs, did not stick its nose into private life. Even so, it used the technique, so familiar to us, of encouraging a bogus public “freedom of expression” to encourage the delusion that people free to discuss stupid ideas have the reality of political liberty. “Since Frenchmen must always be allowed the sop of a little flexibility, to console them for their enslavement, the government allowed them to discuss very freely all kin of general and abstract theories in matters of religion, philosophy, ethics, and even politics. It was quite willing to tolerate attacks against the fundamental principles upon which society then rested and even arguments about God Himself, provided that is most menial agents were not the subject of their ramblings.”
Today, of course, attacks on God and society are the principles on which the regime rests, but it is quite comfortable in tolerating the pseudo-opposition of talkshow hosts and websites so long as they do not get in the way of business. When someone does, say Julian Assange, he finds himself the target of malicious prosecution.

Mr. Sanjay responds: "Does that mean TV talking heads and pundits are just a group for encouraging faux pas freedom of expression in politics while allowing more room for enslaving elderly TV viewing politics enthusiasts?"

So there is this reply from Dr. Fleming: "Precisely, and, to anticipate future questions, yes also to the conservative websites that encourage unhappy and powerless people to vent their frustrations. So long as people waste time on FreeRepublic, they will never live in one or even come to understand what a free republic might be like."

Someone then asks for an illustration of a free republic.

Dr. Fleming on the centralization of power in Europe

Dr. Fleming is leading a discussion of Alexis de Toqueville's L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution:
L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution
L’Ancien Régime Book I
L’Ancien Régime Book II

He writes this in response to a question:

I think we can distinguish three phases or aspects of centralization: 1) an inevitable and probably necessary process of expansion and state-building in response to internal and external threats. If Philip Augustus had not expanded his realm and begun to centralize control, he could never have fought off English aggression, and his successors would have lost France permanently to predators like Edward III and Henry V. The second phase was a non-ideological campaign to turn France into the Great Nation, able to beat back challenges both from England and the Empire. If phase I organized and centralized feudal France, phase II subordinated and destroyed feudal France. Phase III was the egalitarian ideological nationalism of the Jacobins, transmitted by Napoleon, who disciplined it, to subsequent generations. While it is true that we can see how each phase leads to the next, I think it a mistake to attribute motives across the ages or even assign guilt. If Philip Augustus, his grandfather Louis the Fat, and his grandson Saint Louis. had not strengthened France, it would never have survived.