Politics · Analysis · May 11, 2026

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The Democratic Party
Is Dead. What Replaced
It Has Been Tried Before —
and It Ended With 17,000 Executions.

Hoover Institution historian Victor Davis Hanson named it on May 7, 2026: the modern Democratic Party isn’t the party of FDR, JFK, or even Bill Clinton. It has been replaced by something older, more radical, and historically recognizable. The Jacobins. The Club des Jacobins, founded in 1789 and in control of France’s Committee of Public Safety by 1793, ran the most concentrated campaign of ideologically motivated political violence in the Western world’s pre-industrial history. By the time it ended, 16,594 people had been officially executed. Estimates of total dead — including summary killings and prison deaths — reach 40,000 to 50,000.

The comparison is not metaphorical decoration. It holds on every operational dimension: the purge of moderates from within, the show-trial enforcement culture, the insistence that neutrality is treason, the demolition of existing institutions, and the eruption of political violence dressed up as righteous justice. The evidence isn’t rhetorical — it’s documented, dated, and sourced. A decade of it.

The historical question that hangs over all of it: the Jacobins were eventually stopped — not by external enemies, but when enough of their own allies concluded the purge machine would eventually consume them too. That moment was called the Thermidorian Reaction. Whether American politics is approaching its own Thermidor is the only question that matters now.

• 16,594official Jacobin executionsDuring the Reign of Terror, 1793–1794 — plus an estimated 20,000 summary killings without trial. Most victims were commoners, not nobles.
• $1–2BBLM 2020 insured lossesThe most expensive civil unrest event in American insurance history — surpassing the 1992 L.A. riots. Insured losses only; total destruction is higher.
• 95,000DSA peak membership (2020)From 6,500 members in 2016 to 95,000 at the 2020 peak — driven by the Sanders movement and the Floyd riots. Rose again to 80,000+ after Trump's 2024 win.
• 0jury convictions — inauguration riots234 arrested, 214 indicted on January 20, 2017. Zero jury convictions in D.C. Superior Court. The rioters walked. January 6 defendants: 99.4% conviction rate.

Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson — classicist, military historian, and author of The Dying Citizen — published the Jacobin diagnosis on May 7, 2026, and it immediately circulated across every major right-of-center platform. Hanson is not a polemicist. He is a scholar of classical and early modern history who spent 20 years farming in California before joining Hoover. When he says the Democratic Party resembles the Jacobins, he is making a specific historical claim — not a campaign talking point.

“The current Democrat Party is no longer truly democratic at all. Its new spirit and methods resemble the radical Jacobin Party of the French Revolution.”

Victor Davis Hanson · Hoover Institution · May 7, 2026

Hanson's column went further: “The Jacobin Democrats of today are systematically destroying the legacy of the Democratic Party. Their model is not the American Founding, but the radical mandated equality — and violence — of the French Revolution.” He drew the iconoclasm parallel directly: “It was holistic. It was culturally 360 degrees. It wanted to rename the days of the week, the days of the month… just like the 1619 Project. It was an iconoclastic movement.” And the class-war paradox: “It was run just like the Democratic Party by very wealthy people — the Robespierre brothers and some of the turncoat landowners, the aristocracy.”

The Club des Jacobins began in 1789 as the Society of the Friends of the Constitution — a broad coalition of anti-royalist deputies who met at a Dominican monastery on the Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris. Their early ideology was unremarkable by revolutionary standards: republican democracy, secularism, universal equality, abolition of the monarchy. They included both radicals and moderates. The moderates had a name: the Girondins.

The radicalization arc followed a predictable ratchet: each crisis — foreign invasion, food shortages, internal dissent — justified expanding emergency powers. The Law of 22 Prairial (June 10, 1794) was the terminal point: it enumerated broad categories of “public enemies,” required their denunciation, stripped the accused of meaningful legal recourse, and made non-denunciation itself a crime. Once enemies could be defined by accusation alone, the system became self-accelerating.

“Terror is nothing else than swift, severe, indomitable justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.”

Maximilien Robespierre · Address to the National Convention · February 5, 1794 · Fordham University Sourcebook (primary document)

The Girondins were fellow revolutionaries — they wanted to overthrow the monarchy, they supported the republic, they believed in the cause. They simply favored federalism over Paris-mob rule and were skeptical of concentrating emergency power in a committee. That was enough. On May 31 – June 2, 1793, armed sans-culottes surrounded the National Convention Hall under Jacobin direction. Under coercion, 29 Girondin deputies were expelled and placed under house arrest. By October 31, 1793, 21 of them had been guillotined.

The Jacobins did not seize power overnight. The arc from moderate coalition to guillotine committee took roughly four years, 1789–1793. The modern Democratic radicalization arc follows a comparable trajectory, compressed differently but structurally identical.

The Jacobin parallel is not merely rhetorical. The historical Jacobins governed through organized political violence — show trials, mob action, armed insurrection against moderates, and summary executions. The modern American left has not replicated the guillotine. But the decade-long record of organized political violence, directed at political opponents, enabled by sympathetic prosecutors, and covered by a media apparatus committed to euphemism, is documented and verifiable. This is that record.

The Jacobins had the Ami du Peuple — Marat’s newspaper, which named enemies of the revolution and called for their execution. The modern progressive movement has something more sophisticated: a network of prestige outlets whose editorial instinct, during the 2020 riots, was not to document the violence but to contextualize it away.

Robespierre's foundational doctrine was simple: if you’re not actively for the revolution, you’re against it — and to be against it is to be an enemy. The Law of 22 Prairial formalized this by making non-denunciation of enemies a crime. The modern progressive equivalent — “Silence is violence” — makes the same claim in four words: neutrality is a form of attack.

The Jacobins established the Revolutionary Tribunal on August 17, 1792. By 1794, under the Law of 22 Prairial, trials were perfunctory — no defense counsel, no cross-examination, conviction the near-universal outcome. The accused were defined as enemies before they entered the room; the tribunal existed to formalize the verdict, not determine it.

The Jacobins did not reform the monarchy — they abolished it. They did not reform the Church — they nationalized it, then suppressed it. They did not reform the calendar — they replaced it with a new one beginning at Year One. The progressive program follows the same demolition-first logic. Reform is insufficient; the institution itself must be dismantled.

• The Police:Defund. Disband. Dismantle.Omar: 'Rotten to the root.' AOC: 'Defunding police means defunding police.' Tlaib: 'Dismantle the whole system of oppression.'
• The Supreme Court:Pack it. Expand from 9 to 13+.Multiple progressive members of Congress called for court expansion to override the conservative majority — not reform it.
• The Electoral College:Abolish it.Senators Schatz, Durbin, and Welch proposed a constitutional amendment. Schiff called for its elimination.
• The Filibuster:Eliminate it.Schiff, Mucarsel-Powell, and others pledged filibuster abolition — not reform, elimination.
• ICE:Abolish it.Omar: 'I continue to push for ICE to be abolished.' Supported by multiple Squad members.

The Thermidorian Reaction of July 27, 1794 ended the Terror. It was not a triumph of moderation over radicalism — it was a self-preservation vote. Convention deputies turned on Robespierre after he gave a speech warning of internal enemies without naming them. Every deputy feared the next denunciation would be theirs. When enough former allies concluded the purge machine would eventually consume them too, Robespierre was arrested within 24 hours. He was guillotined the next day.

The 2024 election results carry Thermidorian features. Trump won working-class voters without college degrees 56%–42%. Union households — the core of FDR’s New Deal coalition — split 53–45, barely a margin. An estimated 19 million Biden 2020 voters stayed home. The working-class coalition that made the Democratic Party the majority party for two generations walked away from what the party had become.

But the Progressive wing did not moderate. DSA membership surged back to 80,000+ after the 2024 loss. The Squad expanded. AOC became the most-cited 2028 presidential contender on the left. The internal Democratic response to defeat was not Thermidor — it was doubled-down radicalization. Michael Lind at the New America Foundation, writing in Tablet in December 2021, observed this precisely: progressives, like the Jacobins, view electoral defeat as evidence of insufficient radicalism, not excess.