We can see operating in the current Democratic backlash against Republican inaction on common sense gun legislation, that within any "backlash" there lies an inherent danger--the danger that any backlash against an enemy will itself come to resemble the same enemy it was intended to counter.
The bloodiest example of this phenomenon remains Robespierre's Reign of Terror which grew out up out of the bloody soil of the French Revolution to rule France, an expediency of reactionary violence.
Developments from around that time are so similar to what's happening in Congress right this moment that it is almost eerie.
"In September 1793, the impatient sans-culottes again invaded the Convention to exert pressure on the deputies. A delegation of the forty-eight sections of sans-culottes urged the Convention to ‘make Terror the order of the day!’ The Jacobins responded: the Law of Suspects was passed on September 17th, 1793, giving wide powers of arrest to the ruling Committees, and defining ‘suspects’ in broad terms. Unlike the meaning of ‘terrorists’ as people who use violence against a government, the terrorists of the French Revolution were the government. The Terror was legal, having been voted for by the Convention." (www.historytoday.com)
With this in mind then, we might do well to consider that when Democrats, in fighting Republican inaction, push for ANY KIND of action whatsoever, even if, as indicated in this article by William Boardman, those actions amount to, "autocratic measures carried out by anonymous officers with no systemic accountability," we have reached the end of any real effectiveness when it comes to the current constellation of Washington politics.
Their day is done. They have served their time. As such, our institutions are no longer useful; nor are they viable. And the result we see reveals that they, like some ruptured vestigial organ, have been leaking poison into our systems for a good long while now.
Some of us voice concerns that the emergence of a Bernie-based Third-Party might somehow resemble the Tea Party of Sarah Palin. What I am seeing instead, is evidence that--at this exact political moment in time--the Pandora's Box that is the Tea Party was pried open long ago and its uncivil vulgarities, having gained a real foothold, are running murderously amuck on The Hill in prolonged embattlements, self-destructive institutions whose sheer pointlessness and exhaustion wreak of finality. It’s as if the Republicans and the Democrats have entered a kind of murder-suicide scenario.
It's over. We are hearing the death-rattling of an era. Trump and Clinton are Star Trek Klingons, or the Dark Fathers of yet another beat-it-to-death George Lucas
epic, arriving in outmoded and unwieldy 20th century warships--invaders attempting to usurp the galaxy's store of 21st century starlight. If there is any indication that we really do need a Third Party--a party that looks in from outside the established order, rather than what we have, which is Two Parties peering out at us from inside D.C. politics--this is it.
The Constitution itself has been reduced to petty, squabbling ideological frames. Our political life, what little we've enjoyed to date, is over. Functionalism's gears have seized. It's time for something beautiful to happen.