Lately everyone is looking for historical parallels for America's continuing crisis--French Revolution, Russian Revolution, etc. Commenter aNanyMouse has drawn attention to a question posed today by Audacious Epigone (more on the rest of his blog post, Hard Left: Police Have It Coming, later):
Many young leftists are in a revolutionary mood.
Will America get their revolution, her own Sulla, or end the hate and separate?
AE's question is provocative and well worth considering in depth. To put things in context, consider who Sulla was. Sulla was a Roman general who intervened in Rome's civil strife and sided with the Power Elite (the Senatorial class, the Optimates) against the Populists (the Populares).
Sulla, was a Roman general and statesman who won the first large-scale civil war in Roman history and became the first man of the Republic to seize power through force.
He ... crushed the Populares and ... then revived the office of dictator, .... He used his powers to purge his opponents, and reform Roman constitutional laws, in order to restore the primacy of the Senate [the Power Elite] and limit the power of the tribunes of the plebs [We the people]. ...
Sulla's military coup ... permanently destabilized the Roman power structure.
Related issues are raised--in spades--by Christopher Roach in a terrific article at American Greatness:
Night of the Generals
The unelected parts of the government, including the military, are revolting against the electoral control by the people enshrined in the Constitution.
Obviously Roach is taking our generals to task--Mattis, Kelly, McMaster, Milley, Mullen. But Roach goes further and identifies our generals--like Sulla--as acting (for now, because power corrupts) in the interests of our modern Power Elite. And he identifies that Power Elite, as well.
The article itself is lengthy, so I'll just give you a flavor. In what follows I've selected passages plucked out of their proper context but arranged to hopefully provide a coherent argument. Please read the entire original:
