History rarely repeats itself exactly. More often, it rhymes.

Many commentators searching for historical parallels to today’s Democratic Party instinctively reach for the French Revolution. They imagine the Jacobins overthrowing the Girondins, moderates swept aside by ideological zeal, and political purity replacing practical governance. While the comparison has some merit, a more compelling historical warning lies elsewhere—not in Paris, but in Petrograd. The real cautionary tale is the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The Fatal Mistake of the Moderates

The tragedy of Russia was not simply that the Bolsheviks were ruthless. It was that the moderates consistently underestimated them. The Mensheviks believed they could coexist with the radical left. Alexander Kerensky’s Provisional Government assumed Lenin represented only one voice among many in a broad socialist coalition. They imagined institutions, democratic norms, and political compromise would restrain the revolution’s most extreme faction.

Instead, every concession strengthened Lenin’s position.

Moderates defended radicals against their conservative opponents. They tolerated increasingly revolutionary rhetoric. They insisted unity was more important than confronting extremism within their own ranks. By the time they realized the danger, the Bolsheviks had already captured the party machinery, dominated the streets, and seized the state itself. The result was not simply a change in government. It was the destruction of political pluralism, decades of dictatorship, state terror, economic catastrophe, and the deaths of millions.

The Mechanism, Not the Men

The value of a historical analogy lies entirely in its mechanism, not its melodrama.

I am not suggesting that any faction of the contemporary Democratic Party resembles the Bolsheviks in aim, method, or moral character. Nobody in American politics is storming a Winter Palace. What 1917 illuminates is not a personality but a dynamic, a recurring failure mode of coalitions that contain a disciplined, ideologically confident minority and a larger, less coordinated moderate majority.

The mechanism runs like this. A broad coalition forms around shared opposition to a common adversary. Within it sits a vanguard: smaller in number but greater in conviction, energy, and willingness to enforce conformity. The moderate majority, reasonably enough, prizes coalition unity. It worries far more about the external opponent than the internal one. So it makes a series of individually sensible accommodations—defending the vanguard from outside attack, declining to police rhetoric it privately finds excessive, and treating any internal criticism as a gift to the enemy.

Each accommodation is rational in isolation. Their cumulative effect is to transfer the coalition’s moral center of gravity toward its most committed wing. The vanguard does not need to win a majority. It needs only to make its positions the ones nobody is permitted to question. This is the genuinely useful lesson of Petrograd, and it requires no Leninism to operate. It is a structural truth about how motivated minorities capture institutions when majorities mistake conflict-avoidance for strategy.

Where the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)