I can’t find it at the moment, but Conor Friedersdorf tweeted something about how the Tea Party was like V for Vendetta and OWS was like Fight Club’s Project Mayhem (see what I did there?). Of course, the Tea Party hasn’t, you know, blown up parliament (or even dumped tea into Boston Harbor), preferring orderly, peaceful protest and later, political advocacy and campaigning. Nor, it should be said, have the OWS set yet orchestrated the controlled demolition of the headquarters of the world’s major banks (though perhaps we shouldn’t give them any ideas).

But there is one respect in which I find the comparison apt, and telling. V was a revolutionary, even a terrorist. He didn’t deny it. But he also understood revolution as necessarily an interregnum between two periods of order. In his case, between a period of Orwellian totalitarianism and what he hoped was a return to liberty. So complete was his commitment to the reestablishment of order after revolution that he was willing to die to help ensure it. He knew the kind of lawlessness and destructiveness of his terror plot was antithetical to a free society, and that it could not be allowed to stand. Call it a kind of civil disobedience in extremis.