Do you see what is happening in France? The streets of Paris are erupting in violence, with masked agitators setting fires, destroying businesses, attacking police, and turning public grievances into opportunities for chaos and destruction.
These are the revolutionary anarchists. Every culture, every generation has them.
The revolutionary anarchists were the actors and the fuel of the French Revolution of 1789, and they remain ever-present opportunists, waiting for the cracks in a civilization to widen so they can exploit its decline.
They are the destroyers of systems who promise liberation but leave destruction in their wake. And from the chaos they create, they build dictatorships.
Alexis de Tocqueville understood this. Writing in the 19th century, he examined the American and French Revolutions and recognized a fundamental difference in the principles that drove them.
One was a revolution for Liberty. The other became a revolution in the name of freedom. The difference is everything.
Liberty demands something of us. It is rooted in morality, self-government, personal responsibility, and stewardship. It recognizes that we are not merely individuals seeking our own advantage. We are members of a society whose choices affect the lives and liberties of our neighbors.
Liberty requires the discipline to govern ourselves so that we do not become a danger to others. It asks not merely what we can gain, but what we are obligated to preserve.
Freedom, when divorced from morality and responsibility, becomes something altogether different.
It becomes the demand to do whatever we want, whenever we want, without regard for the consequences to anyone else. It is the pursuit of personal gratification at any cost, with no sense of duty, no restraint, and no accountability.
Liberty is self-government. It is freedom plus morality. Self-indulgence is not. And a people who refuse to govern themselves will eventually find themselves governed by someone else.
This is more than a distinction between two revolutions. It is a distinction between the principles upon which civilizations are built and the principles by which they are destroyed.
When people abandon morality, responsibility, and self-restraint, opportunists step into the vacuum. They exploit grievances, turn discontent into destruction, and promise a new order in place of the old.
But destroying a system is not the same as building a just one.
Tearing down institutions is easy. Establishing a society capable of preserving liberty requires something far more difficult: a people who understand the principles of self-government and are willing to exercise the discipline to live by them.
If we do not want to repeat the failures of history, we must teach this generation and the next to embrace the principles of Liberty and reject the selfish pursuit of personal gain at any cost.
Prosperity is only a blessing when it does not come at the expense of our moral character or the moral foundations of our society.
This is not about imposing one religion upon another. It is about understanding that a free society cannot survive without moral responsibility, personal discipline, and the people choosing to govern themselves.
We must also understand the difference between the voluntary responsibility of a free people and the compulsory sacrifice demanded by socialism.
Socialism claims the virtue of selflessness while granting government the power to determine what individuals must surrender for the supposed good of others. Liberty recognizes both the right to pursue personal prosperity and the moral responsibility to exercise that right without violating the rights of our neighbors.
Genuine generosity, charity, and stewardship are choices made by free people, not obligations imposed through government coercion.
A society cannot manufacture virtue by compelling its citizens to surrender their Liberty.
Do you think America is at risk of replicating France’s current chaos?
The principle is not complicated, and the historical evidence is centuries deep. When a people abandon self-government, they create the conditions for chaos, and from that chaos comes the demand for a strong hand to restore order.
Too often, that hand belongs to a tyrant.
America was founded upon the principle of individual Liberty and the capacity of a people to govern themselves. That inheritance was never guaranteed to survive us: a Republic, if we can keep it.
It must be understood, taught, practiced, and passed on. If we fail to educate ourselves and our children in the principles of Liberty, America will not be immune to the fate of other nations.
We, too, can usher in an era of dictatorship. And our children will then be forced to fight to recover the very liberties we were entrusted to preserve.
That will be our failure, not because we lacked the wealth, the opportunity, or the knowledge. It will be because we were too preoccupied with securing our own comfort and prosperity to sow the seeds of Liberty for the generations that would follow us.
Liberty is not preserved by people who merely enjoy its benefits. It is preserved by people who understand its principles, practice its disciplines, and teach them to the next generation.
John Philpot Curran warned in 1790: “It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt.”
Our children will inherit the consequences of what we teach them or what we fail to teach them. The question is whether we will leave them a nation prepared to preserve Liberty, or a nation in which they must fight to reclaim it.
The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website. If you are interested in contributing an Op-Ed to The Western Journal, you can learn about our submission guidelines and process here.
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