Both the American and French revolutions rocked the late 18th-century world. Victor Davis Hanson explains for National Review Online readers why he believes President Obama and his administration prefer the French form of revolution.

At the end of the 18th century, there were two great Western revolutions — the American and the French. Americans opted for the freedom of the individual, and divinely endowed absolute rights and values.

A quite different French version sought equality of result. French firebrands saw laws less as absolute, but instead as useful to the degree that they contributed to supposed social justice and coerced redistribution. They ended up not with a Bill of Rights and separation of powers, but instead with mass executions and Napoleonic tyranny.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration is following more the French model than the American.

Suddenly, once-nonpartisan federal bureaucracies have become catalysts for fundamentally transforming America. Often-ideological bureaucrats have forgotten their original mission. NASA might do better to ensure that our astronauts are independent of Vladimir Putin’s Russian rockets rather than claiming that its primary mission is to reach out to the Muslim community.

Intelligence directors vie with one another to please superiors with fatuous but politically correct analysis. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper assured us that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was largely secular. CIA director John Brennan once termed a now-emerging Islamic caliphate as “absurd.” Former Director of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano once warned that returning veterans and right-wingers were the chief domestic terrorist threats, not Islamic jihadists. …

… Official stories change to fit larger agendas. One day the White House has full confidence in Secret Service director Julia Pierson, the next day she is gone. One day leaving Iraq was the president’s stellar achievement, the next day someone else did it. We are at war and not at war with the Islamic State — both a manageable problem of some jayvees and an existential threat. The Free Syrian Army is both a fantasy and plagued by amateurs and yet the linchpin of our new strategy on the ground against the Islamic State.

We are back to the daily revisionism of the Affordable Care Act, keeping and not keeping your doctor and health plan, with deductibles and premiums going down and going up.

Stopping the fracking of gas and oil on federal lands is good, but so is the cheaper gas that fracking brings.

Once-nonpartisan federal agencies are now in service to the goal of changing America from cherishing an equality of opportunity to championing an equality of enforced result.

Our revolutionary inspirations are now Georges Danton, Jean-Paul Marat, and Maximilien de Robespierre, not the Founding Founders.