Vice President Kamala Harris will try to use her debate on Tuesday against former President Donald J. Trump to argue that Americans are ready to turn the page on the politics of the past decade, with its turmoil and social animus.
But the main reason I’m posting about the book is a much much longer excerpt, about six pages in my paperback edition, an impassioned cri de cœur about government and monarchy and freedom. I copied and pasted the following paragraphs from an online edition of the book. I found the second paragraph below, about the French Revolution, especially compelling, but am providing the other paragraphs as well, for context.
“They all looked unhit, and said they didn’t know; that they had never thought about it before, and it hadn’t ever occurred to them that a nation could be so situated that every man could have a say in the government.”
And now here I was, in a country where a right to say how the country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its population. For the nine hundred and ninety-four to express.
Dissatisfaction with the regnant system and propose to change it, would have made the whole six shudder as one man, it would have been so disloyal, so dishonorable, such putrid black treason.
So to speak, I was become a stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of direction and took all the dividends.
Americans are ready to turn the page on the politics.
Under that gospel, the citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth’s political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor.
Regnant system and propose to change it, would have made the whole six shudder as one man, it would have been so disloyal, so dishonorable, such putrid black treason. So to speak, I was become a stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of direction and took all the dividends.
That he may be the only one who thinks he sees this decay, does not excuse him; it is his duty to agitate anyway, and it is the duty of the others to vote him down if they do not see the matter as he does.
In a country where a right to say how the country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its population.
