How did America become a country of two extremes, with no tolerance of those having a different opinion?

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I’ve been studying history on and off for some time now, trying to answer this question. I believe the answer can be found in the events of the French Revolution.

When Louis XVI was deposed, a group of community leaders started meeting in the Tuileries Palace to determine the new direction of France. There were some five hundred statesmen that needed to be accommodated, the available rooms were either all too large or too small. So they settled on too-large.

These were big meetings, held out in the open. Members of the public could wander by and watch the proceedings, as well as offer loud vocal influence, and sometimes physical, through the throwing of objects.

Have you ever wondered why liberals are called “the left” and conservatives are called “the right”? It’s from this period of history. Those who sat on the left side of the room generally affiliated themselves with the Jacobin clubs, fiery revolutionaries that wanted self-rule, now, at any cost.

Those who sat on the right side of the room favored a gentler transition with greater deference given to the existing ruling class. Everyone there was at least ‘on paper’ committed to the cause of Révolution, they just differed on the specifics. In the middle, La Pleine, the centrists who would end up with the deciding votes.

The easy votes, those on which everyone could find agreement, were settled first. Eventually the tricky political question of what to do with the king had to be answered. More and more, the Montagnards, which is what the leftists called themselves, wanted the king to be executed, while the Girondists, wanted to keep him around.

The centrists eventually listened more and more to the left, and so the king was tried and executed. The vote against the king was unanimous, however the question remained of whether to execute him. One deputy proposed delaying the execution.

And so there were two votes. One to determine whether the king would be executed, and then after his execution was affirmed, whether to grant a reprieve. 721 deputies were present. 387 voted for, 334 opposed, with 26 voting for wanting a reprieve. With the king’s fate settled, they put to the vote whether to grant a reprieve. 380 votes against, 310 for.

3 days later the king’s head was separated from his body with the aid of the machine invented for the purpose of civilizing the carrying out of the social justice of the day.

A few lessons came out of that ordeal. What doomed the king was the splitting of the vote of the Girondists. They didn’t present a unified front, neither in the vote to execute the king, nor the vote to grant reprieve. People noticed that moderation only led to getting overruled and overridden, and so the Revolution moved into a bloodier, tenser phase.

Soon after, political deadlock was the order of the day, with debate after debate degenerating into verbal brawling. No decision could be made by the Assembly, and so the two sides had to start getting into bed with dangerous partisans, men and women who were willing to use force to accomplish their aims.

Soon the Girondins would be forced to allow the creation of the Committee of Public Safety, of which Robespierre would emerge, as the single most powerful politician in France, until his execution some 18 months later, in the period of time immortalized in history as the Reign of Terror.

The initial composition of the Committee was 13 leftists, 9 from the right, and 3 from the middle. If you do the very simple math, you can see that if the leftists stuck together, they could overrule the other side. Of course this was by design. Along with its mandate to protect France against the numerous plots against her, inside and out, this allowed the committee to amass immense power.

Records state that more than 16,000 people were executed under the Reign. The sans-culottes, those who’d helped the revolutionaries ram the Committee down the throats of the Girondists, looked with pride at the ever-busy guillotine, the instrument of democracy that was to level social distinctions, starting with the king himself. Culottes were the pants that were fashionable in Paris at the time, anybody who was anybody in Paris wore them, they were a status symbol not unlike a new car is today.

What ended the Terror? Well, Robespierre got greedy. 8 months in, he started guillotining politicians, and not just royalists. He was acting against his own faction, accusing moderate Montagnards of counter-revolutionary activities. He made enemies out of friends, and that’s never a good move.

Robespierre may have overplayed his hand, but it’s said he tried to moderate his speeches towards the end, but the bloodthirsty crowd demanded to know which traitors were next to lose their heads. His colleagues called him a dictator straight to his face, and in this cacophony, suddenly nobody would listen to him. 20 Jacobins, including Robespierre, were guillotined.

The Girondins, back in power, turned the terror back on the revolutionaries. This was called the “White Terror” after the white ribbons worn in the hats of the royalists.

The tide would turn back and forth a few more times until Napoleon decisively seized the reins of power in what history would call the First French Empire. War was favored by the royalist faction and eventually war is what prevailed. What we call the two world wars today was really begun by Napoleon, and the First Napoleonic War is the real World War I. It was a full century of veritable nonstop bloodbath, and the only thing that stopped that was the sad realization on the part of the powers of Europe that colonialism and empire aren’t just horrific, but worse, unworkable.

The culmination of the events began by the French Revolution should be properly seen as the creation of the European Union and the project of global political union, and Brexit and the forces of populism the final obstacle to that inexorable march.

What is the lesson here, how can we relate this to our current political situation in the United States?

Essentially, we need to recognize the fundamental weakness of democracy. Those who advocate for violent divisiveness have the mechanics of mob justice on their side, even if eventually, those mechanics will ultimately come back and bite them. When you hand the reins of power to those who have been the most disenfranchised throughout history, in France’s case the sans-culottes, the newly-empowered rarely decide to moderate their aims or the means by which those aims are accomplished.

This means that democracies are fundamentally unstable, vulnerable to the likes of strongmen like Napoleon. Whatever great question the nation faces itself with, be it Brexit, whether to remove the king’s head from his body, or the question that America asks itself every four years as to who gets to decide the direction we get to go, fortune favors those with clear, understandable priorities and means to accomplish them. Nuance, such as that shown by the Girondists who couldn’t agree on whether to spare the king’s life, only serves to split your vote.

People need safe, comforting understandings of where they’re at and where they’re going. Removing the king from the equation was easier for France to wrap her collective mind around than sitting around wondering what he’s going to do in the future.

Nuance, centrism, caution, these things can only bear fruit when there aren’t any more pressing issues to debate. Even when there’s not more pressing issues, those who can manufacture those pressing issues will find their political careers enriched by their ability to get other people to believe those issues are pressing.

And so the conservative faction of the United States has been manufacturing issue after issue to rally the base around for decades. They’re on the losing end of the current tide, so they’ve been radicalizing in the same way that the royalists did after the moderate Girondists lost the fight to hold onto the king. And this radicalizing is forcing the left to do so as well, lest they be weakened by lack of resolve.