Like Ibsen and Henry George, I have little respect for political revolutions, for I never knew of one which in the long-run did not cost more than it came to. Beheading a Louis XVI to make way for a Napoleon seems an unbusinesslike venture, to say the least of it.
Passing from the tyranny of Charles I to the tyranny of Cromwell is like taking a turn in a revolving door; the exertion merely puts you back where you started.
If every jobholder in Washington were driven into the Potomac tonight, their places would be taken tomorrow by others precisely like them. Nor have I any more respect for what the Duke of Wellington called “a revolution by due course of law” than I have for one of the terrorist
type. In this country, for example, unseating predatory and scampish Republicans to give place for predatory and scampish Democrats, and vice versa, has long proved itself not worth the trouble of holding an election.
I have also been extremely cautious about taking revolutionary “ideologies” at anything like their face value. I have found that the façade of ideology counts for little; it is the too, too solid flesh of the human material behind it that really counts.
-AJ Nock
