"And then what?"
In matters of regime change, whether foreign or domestic, natural, or induced, that is a question that should be asked but it seldom is. Once you go messing with an established authority, you need to know with what you are going to replace it.
I was reading a X thread this morning about how the French intellectuals replaced the Gregorian calendar after the Revolution with a calendar consisted of twelve 30-day months, each divided into three 10-day cycles that looked like weeks, plus five or six intercalary days at the end to fill out the balance of a solar year. It was designed in part to remove all religious influences from the calendar and replace them with “reason.”
Josh Dholani, the author of the tweet thread wrote:
“By denouncing all authority as arbitrary, the revolutionary finally harms himself. On what grounds will HE govern once the king is gone?
If the old dogmas were random, why are the new ones any better?”
Quite sure the French intellectuals did not do the “And then what?” thing because the change totally disrupted the rhythm of French society. It ended when Napoleon took over.
Contemporary “intellectuals” have learned nothing from history – they are like a cat chasing a laser spot or a dog who sees a squirrel – it is all about the new and exciting and not at all about the factual and sobering. This fascination with shiny objects is simply a characteristic of the influential “intellectuals” (and pseudo-intellectuals) modern academia has built - they are driven to think of new things, to innovate, to create. In doing so, they put entirely too much value in the “what might be” of the future, and too little on the “what has been” of the past.
I am not saying futuristic thinking or innovation is a bad thing, but something tells me when they were cooking up new things like transgenderism and Queer Theory, they were not too interested in the “What comes next” – largely because none of these are working out all that well. As it turns out, denouncing iron clad, unbreakable rules of nature as “arbitrary” is not such a good idea, even worse and more societally destabilizing than decimal time or the French Revolutionary Calendar.
There are many parallels between the protests/riots of the last few years and 1789 French Revolution. History records how the French Revolution worked out – spoiler alert – not well. Our revolutionaries are all about tossing out the old in favor of something new, something they have in common with good old Chairman Mao. He also wanted to get rid of the “Four Olds”: the “old ideas,” “old culture,” “old customs” and “old habits.”
Tossing out a system of governance is a serious matter, especially crap-binning a system (and civilization) that has resulted in so many benefits of independence and self-rule is not the answer, for once it is in the dustbin of history, with what do we replace it?
What is it that can improve on the basic principles of liberty previously enshrined in the body of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights?
Because I know history, I can conceive of no such improvement.
Since I believe most of those covered by your article are Democrats, I can say with great confidence, they NEVER concern themselves with logical consequences or unintended consequences. Especially if those lie beyond the next election.