Earlier this week, I attended the theatrical debut of Dinesh D’Souza’s compelling new documentary Police State. As much as I liked the movie, there was one subject left unexplored: the ironic fact that, today, among those most vulnerable to the “police state” are local police. Searching for a more inclusive metaphor than “police state” to describe our current state of peril, I reached into the past and came up with “Jacobin Justice.” In the way of background, the left-wing Jacobins were the most powerful political faction to emerge during the French Revolution.
The power of this bourgeois elite derived from their ability to manage the Parisian mobs. To satisfy the mob’s bloodlust, the Jacobins imposed a state of revolutionary justice untethered to any traditional sense of Judeo-Christian morality. The result was a reign of terror that saw more than 10,000 people tried and executed.
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