Reflections on the West’s Non-White Demographic Revolution: Edmund Burke and the Totalitarian Future of the West
In May of 1789, an armed Parisian mob stormed the Bastille, a potent symbol of the ancien regime’s autocratic power. Their eventual aim was to forge a new social and political order based on the utopian theories of the French Enlightenment. This was historically unprecedented. The cry of the revolutionaries, “Liberté, fraternité, égalité, ou la mort,” reverberated across the Atlantic; it served as the inspiration for revolutions in the Caribbean and Latin America in the years between 1791 and 1826. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, drafted with the help of Thomas Jefferson, was adopted by France’s National Constituent Assembly in August of 1789. This document is the primary ideological basis of modern-day human rights. Over a century after the French Revolution, Bolsheviks and other radicals were still drawing inspiration from the original revolt against Gallican church and aristocracy. The preponderance of liberal, secular democracies among the world’s sovereign political entities is lasting testimony to the widespread influence of Jacobin thought.
Across the channel, the Whigs, one of the two political parties of the old British parliamentary system–the other being the Tories–openly sympathized with the aims of the French Revolution. Charles James Fox, a noted Whig leader, believed that it was a continuation of the Glorious Revolution, which had ended the threat of Roman Catholic absolutism in Britain by establishing a constitutional monarchy. Months after the storming of the Bastille, a prominent Whig, the dissenting clergyman Richard Price, delivered a sermon in the Old Jewry, a Presbyterian meeting-house. He enthusiastically praised the French Revolution, drawing a favorable comparison between the recent turmoil in France and the events of 1688. Price’s discourse was on the fundamental “principles” of the Glorious Revolution, which he identified as liberty of conscience, resistance to tyranny and the right to “chuse our own governors; to cashier them for misconduct; and to frame a government for ourselves.”
Edmund Burke, an Anglo-Irish Whig with strong Tory leanings, vehemently objected to the idea of cashiering errant rulers for misconduct. Fearing that an unchecked Jacobinism would fan the flames of revolution across Britain, he responded with an impassioned defense of the old order, Reflections on the Revolution in France, written in 1790. Price’s interpretation of the Glorious Revolution and its significance was mistaken, Burke argued. King James II, through his actions, was considered to have abdicated the crown; William of Orange was then invited to depose James and rule in his stead. By invading Britain, he would save it from the prospect of a Catholic dynasty and a resurgent Catholic faith. Far from being an instance of cashiering and electing “our own governors,” what happened was “a small and a temporary deviation from the strict order of a regular hereditary succession.” The vacant throne would be filled by Mary, the eldest daughter of James; William, her husband, would rule alongside her as co-regent. Read more














