Sam Tanenhaus is writing a biography of William F. Buckley Jr. He is a former editor of the New York Times Book Review.
Internal assaults on American government usually come with the promise of greater freedom. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” Thomas Jefferson wrote. He was referring to Shays’s Rebellion, an uprising of 4,000 Massachusetts citizens in protest of taxes imposed by the state’s governor to liquidate Revolutionary War debt. Seventy-five years later, the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, explaining another rebellion, said the South had no choice but to “take up arms to vindicate the political rights, the freedom, equality, and State sovereignty which were the heritage purchased by the blood of our revolutionary sires.”
To its participants and their emboldened intellectual allies, the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was another such “battle cry of freedom” - a patriotic exercise against tyranny. President Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi might deplore this as an “assault on our democracy,” but “what they mean by ‘our democracy’ is theiroligarchy,” the author and journalist Roger Kimball said in a September speech at Hillsdale College. The protest against them may have become unruly, but it was by no means an insurrection.
He may be right, though for reasons different from the one he gave. Militant protest, as Garry Wills wrote in “A Necessary Evil,” his history...
Read Full Story: https://www.adn.com/opinions/national-opinions/2021/12/12/the-coup-next-time-jan-6-wasnt-an-insurrection-it-was-vigilantism-and-more-is-coming/
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