Genevan journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan was more right than he could have imagined when he wrote that “the revolution devours its children.” Du Pan made his observation in 1793, just as the first French Revolution was heading into the Reign of Terror. The same might be said of increasingly radicalized Democrats devouring their young, given their response to first-term Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) refusing to kowtow to his party on issues related to Israel and antisemitism, among others. He is not ideologically pure enough.
Fetterman is no conservative wolf in liberal sheep’s clothing. As a congressional Democrat, he’s solid. The AFL-CIO gives Fetterman a 100 percent rating, so his union bona fides are well recognized. The congressional scorecard from the Human Rights Campaign, which focuses on LGBTQ issues, also gives Fetterman a 100 percent score. Fetterman earned a trifecta of unanimity with a perfect score from Planned Parenthood.
On the other side of the partisan divide, Heritage Action, which grades Members of Congress based on their votes, gives Fetterman a conservative rating of zero percent. Similarly, the conservative group Americans for Prosperity gives Fetterman a zero rating.
Special interest groups aside, GovTrack rates members of Congress on ideology, and Fetterman has a rating of .20 on a scale in which 1.0 is most conservative (Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL)) and .00 is most liberal (Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)). Fetterman’s rating is more liberal than 31 of his fellow Senate Democrats.
Fetterman is a good soldier within his party. So why is he now in the crosshairs of his colleagues and the radicals within his party? His purity is suspect. Fetterman refuses to submit to his party’s anti-Israel policies and marginalizing Jews. He’s also been critical of Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, his party’s nominee for Senate in Michigan, and El-Sayed's consorting with the America-hating Democrat influencer Hasan Piker. For these crimes, Fetterman must be punished.
Fetterman did himself no favors within his caucus when he appeared via video at the Republican Party’s midterm event in Dallas on September 9. But he drew his party’s ire before that when The Wall Street Journal published a September 3 article about him, which many called a hit piece. Other news outlets and his fellow Democrats were eager to pile on, and did so with the timing, rhythm and ferocity that suggests a coordinated effort. For all we know, Fetterman’s video message to Republicans last week might have been a deliberate middle finger to his party’s leadership.
Fetterman is rock solid with Big Labor and union activists, the LGBTQ crowd, the pro-abortion lobby, is further to the left than most Senate Democrats, and gets a uniform goose egg rating among conservative groups. But that’s not good enough. Democrats demand 100 percent submission on 100 percent of the issues 100 percent of the time. Anything less is unacceptable.
Democrats did not invent this authoritarianism. It was on display in the time of du Pan, quite vividly, during the French Revolution. Consider Georges Danton. A lawyer by trade, Danton was an exemplary revolutionary whose oratorical skills earned him the nickname The Thunderer in the spring of 1789. After the storming of the Bastille in July, Danton became leader of a neighborhood militia in Paris.
Danton was later named minister of justice in August 1792, and used his position to authorize house-to-house searches for counter-revolutionaries and those sympathetic to King Louis XVI. By the spring of 1793, he became the first head of the notorious Committee of Public Safety, which later that year launched France’s Reign of Terror.
As the Terror took hold, thousands of French men and women endured kangaroo courts in the Revolutionary Tribunal, which was established with Danton’s help. He was completely toeing the revolutionary party line and had been loyal for years. But then something happened. His party went from revolutionary to ultra-revolutionary, and Danton found himself on the wrong side of a rivalry with Maximilien Robespierre, the dictatorial Jacobin who shifted the Reign of Terror into high gear.
Like Fetterman, Danton was a reliable party man until he wasn’t. Not agreeing with the bloodletting advocated by ultra-revolutionaries like Robespierre, Danton was arrested and given a sham trial in the Tribunal he helped create. On April 5, 1794, he became one of roughly 17,000 people sent to the guillotine. Before meeting the blade, Danton reportedly told his executioner, “Show my head to the people. It is worth seeing.”
When liberals like Danton, Fetterman, or others stray from strict leftist orthodoxy, bad things happen. Liberals, especially when co-opted by Democratic Socialists, tend to devour their children. Fetterman need not fear the fate that befell Danton 232 years ago; Democrats have less grisly means of dealing with ideological impurity. But it appears Fetterman is holding firm to his pro-America support for Israel and American Jews, and it is a far, far better thing that he is doing than his party’s leadership.