Reclaiming the Spirit of 1789 in our Modern American Struggle
There is a fire that once lit the hearts of men, a passion that shook the boulevards of 1789 France—not in the orgy of blood to come, but in the early cries for Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!
Before the guillotine blades fell on the innocent and the noble alike, before Jacobins trounced tyranny only to replace it with terror, there was a moment of honest and earnest defiance—a moment where an old world cracked, and the light of a new one shone through.
That moment matters.
That moment will always matter.
In that flicker of revolutionary dawn, we met men like the Marquis de Lafayette, who fought alongside George Washington and then tried to transplant the seeds of liberty in his own French soil.
We found Abbé Sieyès, who declared that the common people—le tiers état—were not only a part of the nation, but the very soul of it.
We heard the voices of the Parisian poor demanding bread, and the Enlightenment philosophers whispering through pamphlets quickly passed in the night, rebels shouting in debates in the hidden salons, and citizens displaying defiance through subversive theater and other arts.
It was not guillotines but ideas that first toppled the French monarchy.
The tragedy of the French Revolution is not that it was too radical—it’s that it lost the plot. Power, ever hungry, devoured the ideals many heroes once carried on their banners. But we must not throw the revolution out with the blood. We must not forget that before the Terror, there was a vision worth fighting for:
The end of absolute monarchy.
The dignity of every citizen.
A government bound to serve we the people—not an elite few.
The United States, in 2025, stands before its own Versailles. We are a nation ruled by spectacle, swollen with inequality, governed by oligarchs who cosplay as populists while consolidating power behind smoke and mirrors.
Our public squares are derided as Fake News with a soundtrack of applause for the avoidance of knowledge, not the attainment of it.
Our elections are reduced to a handful of battlegrounds and the weaponry is made of pure gold.
Our citizens—overworked, underpaid, and gaslit daily—are told they are free, while every institution around them quietly reminds them they are not.
It is here, in this sanity-starved present, that the spirit of 1789 must rise again.
Not with vengeance. Not with blood. Not with violent revolution.
But with discipline, clarity, active participation, and a defiance of anything tyrannical.
We must vote—not once every four years, but every single day.
We must vote with our labor.
We must vote with our wallet.
We must vote with our voices and our bodies in the streets.
We must vote by boycotting corporations that bankroll these despotic overlords.
We must vote and speak the truth in the rooms full of polite and evil liars.
We must vote by resisting silence, reminding each other freedom is not an inheritance but must continually be seized—through unity, not division.
Let the modern Lafayette wear no uniform but the armor of principle.
Let our Estates-General be forums of the people—public, messy, but real.
Let our Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen be written daily—online, in classrooms, in blogs, on stages, in art, and around every dinner table where someone dares to ask:
What kind of world do we deserve?
What kind of people are we?
The system will not reform itself. The tyrant—now a familiar face in a red tie—sits comfortably atop his throne while centuries of Constitutional precedent rot away, shoved into the basement. He is not surrounded by powdered wigs and courtiers, but by mealy mouthed ass kissers, dollar signs, and a nation numbed by all their noise.
Trump is not Louis XVI, but if we fail to pursue a wiser course, we, like our French brethren of yesteryear, may once again mistake collapse for justice.
We must not make the same mistakes of 1789 and revolt simply to destroy or the ideals we claim to fight for will die in the wreckage.
If we don’t choose a smarter, more principled way to topple authoritarianism, we risk repeating the same pattern of destructive overreaction—where a corrupt system falls not because it’s replaced with something better, but because it is destroyed in rage and vengeance and ultimately ends in chaos.
Let us not become Robespierre, cannibalizing our cause—turning our revolution inward and devouring it in the name of purity
Let us be Danton in passion and ideals, but unlike him not lose our soul in the whirlwinds of radicalism.
Let us be Condorcet in intellect—defiant in reason, unwilling to trade blood for justice or ignorance for peace—but wiser in knowing that when emotion and ideology gather force, reason alone is not enough.
Let us not seek to destroy, but seek to rebuild.
Let us storm not palaces, but narratives.
Let us topple not only monarchy, but apathy.
Let us sharpen not blades, but minds.
And when they ask us:
“Who dares to defy the crown?”
Let us answer together:
We all do. We all will. Every fucking day.