Fighting madly, but with no clear plan
Reading stories about the uproar in the Middle East, it occurred to me that, like teenagers, the citizens of those nations are rebelling (although, unlike most teenagers, they actually have cause to do so) without any clean plan beyond the rebellion itself. In this regard, they differ significantly from America’s Founding Fathers, who were men with a deeply coherent freedom philosophy, one that they immediately put into effect once they triumphed. It required some refining (hence, the Bill of Rights), but it always flowed on the river of freedom.
The inability to think coherently, the presence of rage coupled with the absence of knowledge or analysis, is something that my friend Patrick O’Hannigan examines in Egypt and the Death of Argument, an article he wrote for The American Spectator. Of course, rage without purpose is anarchy.
