Trump’s Insurrection: Pandemic Violence, Presidential Incitement and the Republican Guarantee

Our own experience has corroborated the lessons taught by the examples of other nations; . . . that seditions and insurrections are, unhappily, maladies as inseparable from the body politic as tumors and eruptions from the natural body; that the idea of governing at all times by the simple force of law (which we have been told is the only admissible principle of republican government), has no place but in the reveries of those political doctors whose sagacity disdains the admonitions of experimental instruction. Should such emergencies at any time happen under the national government, there could be no remedy but force. Hamilton, Federalist Paper 28. Hegel says somewhere that great historic facts and personages recur twice.

He forgot to add: “Once as tragedy, and again as farce.” Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.