Daniel Miller has offered us a critique of American political culture by way of European reactionary thought, with an emphasis on analogies from the French Revolution to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His argument is primarily conceptual, meaning that he identifies key concepts as primary drivers for the events. The central and eponymous concept, American counterrevolution, is never directly defined. But toward the end of the essay he slips in the following unannounced:

Perhaps the most important shared fact [between the French Revolution and American counterrevolution] is the presence of the centralized administration which began to replace the French nobility under Richelieu, and ultimately found itself strengthened by the French Revolution. This same phenomenon exists today in the form of a globalized administrative state incorporating a political police apparatus that now dominates cultural, political, and corporate power in every Western country. More than the semi-literate brainwashed cadres of the interminable current year it is here where the roots, or rather, the absence of roots of our political difficulties lie.

How is this a counterrevolution? Miller requires the reader to do much of his work for him to answer this question. Rather than define the term itself, Miller investigates the origins and use of the term “revolution” from its use as an astronomical term describing the motions of planets to the downward circling of regimes from virtue to vice. The modern redefinition of revolution has moved away from its original circular meaning to a linear one that progresses in a normative direction, but revolutions themselves retain their cycles of decline:

Revolution inaugurates a rupture in the continuum of history itself: all the old laws are suspended; everything is made new. This messianic delusion is recurrent to the revolutionary phenomenon: in fact, almost nothing in history is more predictable and less singular. Despite the invariable rhetoric of the radically groundbreaking, an identical cycle repeats itself endlessly whenever revolution appears.

The American Revolution established a constitutional republic with representative bodies legislating according to enumerated authorities, one which eventually settled on the Constitution as its covenant among the people of the United States. The contemporary administrative state amounts to a counterrevolution in that it revolts against everything that grounded this constitutional order—from its theological underpinnings to its political institutions.

The old constitutional order of the United States, then, is like that of the French ancien regime, while the American administrative counterrevolution after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is like that of the French Revolution.

With these definitions made plain, one can see the problem with the essay. Analogies are fine for pointing out similarities, but deploying analogies requires recognition of the differences between the two cases. The differences between Miller’s two cases are numerous, but the most important ones are not conceptual. Because Miller argues only on the level of concepts, he misses the differences and, subsequently, cannot see that his comparison of the French Revolution and American counterrevolution is flimsy. Miller explains how two nations decline and how these two declines look similar. Unintentionally, he also illustrates why his analysis requires a movement beyond purely conceptual approaches. Doing so reveals that these differences are more significant than the similarities.

America Exceptional After All

The first difference is that of regimes. Miller is right to point out, by way of Tocqueville, that the Bourbons defanged the French aristocracy by freeing them of their responsibilities to their tenants and safely pickling them in champagne at Versailles. Miller seems to think this bears a resemblance to the way administrators have drawn power away from Congress and states and to themselves in the weed-clouded streets of our nation’s capital. At best, one could call these both “declines” but declines from what exactly?

The French ancien regime could not better exemplify what Publius called in Federalist #1 a constitution created by “accident and force.” France as a kingdom spent much of the Middle Ages growing and shrinking its borders throughout feudal conflicts, with its borders more or less settled by the Reformation. The Bourbons centralized power only after a century of religious warfare had exhausted the aristocracy and annihilated their manpower. As national conflicts supplanted religious ones, the aristocracy depended on the creation of a modern state to ensure their mutual protection. By the time of the French Revolution, a corrupted people seized power from a corrupted monarchy who had seized power from a corrupted aristocracy many of whom had seized power from what they thought was a corrupt Church who had seized power when the Western Roman Empire had collapsed. Sure, the French built some nice churches along the way, but an image of civic virtue France is not and never has been.

As for the American counterrevolution, I am not convinced that it has happened. Of course, much of the federal bureaucracy is very progressive, but so what? The United States still holds elections. Congress still meets, and their inactivity is primarily the result of the closeness of election outcomes producing unstable majorities. Also, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act and Citizens United have moved candidate selection away from parties and to partisan donors. The Supreme Court has a conservative majority with a sometimes sympathetic progressive in Associate Justice Elena Kagan, and its recent decisions have almost entirely favored a restoration of the original reading of the Constitution, particularly targeting the excesses of the administrative state. Miller ignores that two cases currently before the Court, Loper Bright v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Department of Commerce, have provided the conservative court the opportunity to overturn Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council. If that happens, then judicial deference to the administrative state is dead, and, with it, Miller’s case for counterrevolution. Indeed, the Court has already begun dismantling it with SFFA v. Harvard, which effectively ended affirmative action.

We have an American constitutional republic that has endured some degree of centralization but has realistic pathways for reversing it. While the other problems facing the federal government are serious, they remain routinized in proper procedures enumerated in the Constitution and the broader American political tradition.

European Reactionaries Cannot Comprehend America

The second issue with this essay is an overreliance on continental reactionary thought. Miller is right to use Tocqueville as a source for understanding America, but his other sources leave much to be desired. Antoine de Rivarol was possibly a noble pretender who abandoned his wife and died in exile. Ernst Kantorowicz was brilliant but remained captive to the romantic anti-modernism of George-Kreis. Thomas Molnar admired Charles Maurras and lamented the decline of hard-right French institutions as “the agony of France.” Neither Louis de Bonald nor Joseph de Maistre could comprehend republicanism as anything other than a radical attempt to overturn all legitimate institutions, rendering them unable to understand anything like America. Finally, there is Andrew Lobaczewski, a Polish psychiatrist, who Miller calls “increasingly influential.” I am not sure who Lobaczewski is influencing, but I have not heard of him. His role in Miller’s argument is apparently to explain how mentally ill elites use language to construct debates. This line of inquiry is not promising, especially when Kenneth Burke is available to say the same thing without the long-range, time-traveling psychoanalysis.

Not all of these thinkers are bad, but none of them has anything useful to say about America, being too wrapped up in their esoteric fantasies of a “Secret Germany” or a victory at Vendée. For all of them, constitutional republicanism was a canard because America was incomprehensible to them. Their own nations were either too corrupt to achieve it or else able to do so only under American protection from communist invasion. As ridiculed as the concept is today, the explanation for this is American exceptionalism. Given the very different development of American political institutions, continental reactionary thinkers cannot break from an idealized French royal state to understand alternatives and must, therefore, imagine America as France. We do not need to share in their failure, and Miller does not even attempt to explain why we should.

The Civil Rights Act is Good, Actually

Finally, there is Miller’s account of America after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Building on the work of Christopher Caldwell, Miller says of it:

Instead of a doctrine of limited government bound by natural law, the Civil Rights Acts introduced a new constitutional model in which government has arrogated to itself the power to limit natural rights in the cause of philosophy of history imagined as a soteriology of progress.

As a matter of history, this position is nonsense. Americans had long believed in “progress” of some kind since the Puritans arrived at Plymouth. These Puritans saw themselves as bound up in the providential mission to purify Christianity in the wilderness. After the Founding, figures like John O’Sullivan saw America as having a “manifest destiny” to conquer the West, with Lyman Beecher and Samuel Morse calling for its conquest to bring Protestant civilization to natives laboring under the legacy of Catholic Spain. Of course, the Progressives secularized these providential narratives into progressive ones, but even here there remains the same commitment to abrogating natural rights. The Puritans chased off Roger Williams, with Anne Hutchison following and soon to die at the hands of Siwanoy raiders. Jacksonians like O’Sullivan and divines like Beecher believed the West belonged to white American Protestants, thus needing to displace those already governing the territory. Progressives are very much in continuity with this, with early progressives seeking to use eugenics to preserve the racial superiority of white Americans and later ones a scientific administrative state.

Advocates for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 saw it as fulfilling the long-overdue promise for full enfranchisement of African Americans, because that was what it did. The soteriological vision most associated with it was that of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who originally called it the “Second Emancipation Proclamation” and couched it in terms of “Hebraic-Christian” foundations, even citing St. Thomas Aquinas, and finishing the task begun imperfectly by Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. The “rights” the Act circumscribed were not rights at all—being forms of racial discrimination in hiring, educating, and other public-facing ventures. There is no right to do injustice. That this law passed is not wrongly framed by a soteriology of progress; it is progress. It is good that this law passed. It is good that the government can punish people for violating the rights and liberties of African Americans and other minorities who had experienced wrongful discrimination.

Progressive elites today sometimes shroud themselves in the Civil Rights Act to advance their causes, but that is because conservatives let them. Conservatives do not need to adopt the rhetoric of white grievance politics, and doing so rightly worries ordinary Americans who suspect that the issue is not progressive overreach but with original aims of the Act itself. It is not good that progressives use the Civil Rights Act as a way of steering institutions receiving public money to obey all kinds of mandates not originally intended under the Act, but conservatives could explain how they would like to see the Act adjusted to prevent needless interference without undermining legislation needed to protect historically marginalized groups. Worryingly, Miller does not give us any of this.

Instead, what he has done is simply flip the soteriology of progress into a soteriology of decline—a kind of Claremonster jeremiad.

Miller concludes with Maistre’s words on what a counterrevolution requires, but Maistre’s counterrevolution never came—except infamously for a brief while at Vichy. France is still, as ever, a nation subject to accident and force. America remains exceptional, having at its disposal stressed (always stressed) but functional institutions that can remedy present excesses and problems. This is obvious to most people outside of online bubbles, which is why warnings resemble not so much a Jeremiah prophesying to the people of Israel about the wages of their sin, but a wild-eyed doomsayer wearing a sandwich board saying, “The end is nigh. Repeal the Civil Rights Act” on one side and “the creation of the cosmos from the ‘tohu-va-bohu’ or ‘khora’ or ‘Xibalba’ of chaos and fear through unfolding distinctions of metaphysical thought” on the other. Sensible people will avoid eye contact and walk quickly by.

Take a Deep Breath

To conclude, Miller’s essay reveals how unhelpful the shift has been in the thinking of certain pockets of the right. Having convinced themselves that there is a state of emergency, they are constantly seeking a way to heat up the “cold civil war” to provoke popular backlash against total progressive victory. Such a cause has left them blind to many conservative victories of the past few years and incapable of understanding their own country or their fellow citizens. It would seem more beneficial to drop the dramatic narratives of conceptual warfare in favor of the more fruitful, albeit less exciting, work of studying American institutions and looking for improvements to remedy them and achieve a consensus for reform.