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Jean Paul Marat, one of the key leaders of the French Revolution, once mocked the notion that liberty could be established by his fellow revolutionaries since, apart from a few tragic scenes, the revolution has been nothing but a web of farcical scenes.

Welcome to the modern French Revolution. The tragic killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis resulted in an important focus on race relations and justice in this country. However, it is being lost to an emerging radicalism that challenges people to prove their faith by endorsing farce. Across the country, political leaders and commentators are outdoing each other to demonstrate fealty to this new order, attacking core institutions and values. A growing radical element is fighting to out-shout each other as leaders of a careening movement, with politicians joining calls to defund the police and commentators calling for censorship. Moderate voices seem to be fading with the escalating demands that leaders denounce the values that define them.

Take those calls to defund the police. Once the mantra of only the most extreme elements in society, it has been picked up by elected leaders. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) has said that defunding all police should not be brushed aside. Brian Fallon, former public affairs director at the Justice Department and Hillary Clintons 2016 campaign press secretary, has declared support for the movement.

Said Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who represents part of Minneapolis: The Minneapolis Police Department has proven themselves beyond reform. Its time to disband them and reimagine public safety in Minneapolis. Thank you to @MplsWard3 for your leadership on this!

Other politicians have joined pledges to go after police budgets or entire departments, even as their officers continue to maintain order and stop looting. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti declared that, despite the huge cost of the riots, he will refuse to expand the police budget. Instead, he said his administration has identified $250 million in cuts and pledged to give as much as $150 million from the police budget to the black community as well as communities of color, and women and people who have been left behind.

In Minneapolis, city council member Jeremiah Ellison assured the public that We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. And when were done, were not simply gonna glue it back together. Others, including Council President Lisa Bender, agreed. During the protests and rioting there, Ellison publicly proclaimed support for antifa, a violent and vehemently anti-free speech movement. In 2018, his father, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, supported the antifa movement as deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee, tweeting that it would strike fear in the heart of @realDonaldTrump.

Many politicians seem eager not to be left alone in the ideological center amid this rapid shift to the far left. Democratic socialist and New York state senator Julia Salazar expressed her delight: To see legislators who arent even necessarily on the left supporting [defunding or decreasing the police budget] ... feels a little bit surreal.

That surreal feeling is likely even more pronounced among looting victims whose stores are left unprotected while politicians and experts excuse such crimes entirely. Socialist Seattle council member Tammy Morales dismissed concerns about looting, insisting that what I dont want to hear is for our constituents to be told to be civil, not to be reactionary, to be told looting doesnt solve anything. New York Times Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah Jones said that Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence while, on CNN, Clifford Stott, a professor of social psychology at Keele University in England, said looting is expression.

Northwestern University journalism professor Steven Thrasher declared: The destruction of a police precinct is not only a tactically reasonable response to the crisis of policing, it is a quintessentially American response ... Property destruction for social change is as American as the Boston Tea Party. Of course, the patriots in Boston did not keep the tea for themselves, unlike the looters running out of Target stores with flat-screen TVs.

As politicians rallied around defunding police or defending looting, the media had its own storming of the Bastille this week. Some journalists at the New York Times denounced the newspaper for publishing an opinion column by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on the use of troops to quell riots. Despite the outcry and calls for editors to resign, Times editorial page editor James Bennet and publisher A.G. Sulzberger gave full-throated defenses to using the opinion section to hear all sides of such national controversies.

That was a highpoint in journalistic ethics. It did not last. Hours later, Times editors confessed they had sinned in allowing a ranking U.S. senator to express a conservative viewpoint on the newspapers pages; they promised an investigation and a reduction in the number of opinions. The only thing we were spared was the appearance of Bennet and Sulzberger being rolled down the street in a French oxcart for public judgment in Place de la Concorde.

Even art and creative work apparently must be censored or erased in this new orthodoxy. In Dallas, the well-known statue of a Texas Ranger has been removed because an article in D Magazine referred to racist history connected to the rangers. USA Today reported on the possibility that TV cop shows, from Dragnet to NYPD Blue to Law & Order, must be taken off the air now, so as not to glorify police work.

History suggests, however, that such demonstrations may not be enough. As proven by the French Revolution, todays revolutionaries are tomorrows reactionaries or victims. Pierre Robespierre led that revolutions Reign of Terror until he was guillotined as one of its last victims, and Marats farcical scenes ended with his own stabbing in a bathtub in retaliation for his bloody excesses. It is a cycle repeated in revolutions throughout history: When the music stops, fewer and fewer chairs can be found by those who readily embraced extreme measures.

That is why many of our leaders should consider the words of Abbe Sieyes, a Catholic clergyman and author of the French Revolutions manifesto, What Is The Third Estate? When asked what he had done during the revolution, he simply responded, I survived.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. You can find his updates online @JonathanTurley.

Read more:
Can this American version of the French Revolution bring change? | TheHill - The Hill