I CERTAINLY HOPE NOT: 2020 Is Tumbling Toward 1917.

In June, the great Russian literature professor Gary Saul Morson told The Wall Street Journal that America was starting to feel eerily familiar. “It’s astonishingly like late 19th-, early 20th-century Russia, when basically the entire educated class felt you simply had to be against the regime or some sort of revolutionary,” he said. Even the moderate Kadet Party could not bring itself to condemn terrorism against the czar, any more than a modern Democrat could condemn Black Lives Matter: “A famous line from one of the liberal leaders put it this way: ‘Condemn terrorism? That would be the moral death of the party.’”

Today, the Resistance is already signaling that they won’t accept a Trump victory in November any more than they accepted one in 2016. After the last election, they attempted a soft coup by means of the Russiagate scandal and impeachment. What kind of coup will come next? By looking at the Russian precedent, we can evaluate the risk that this country might enact our own distinctively American version of 1917—and how close we have come to it already.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I don’t think it’s 1917. But in 1917, it’s obvious in retrospect that the only moral and practical thing to do was to kill Bolsheviks, starting at the top. An unparalleled human traged could have been prevented, had the Czarists, or the Mensheviks, been willing to act appropriately.