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“The French Revolution was the origin of Marxism / statism”

I’d say Marxism derives in part from the French, but not in the revolutionary era. Moreso 19th century French socialists/positivists like Saint-Simone and Comte, and most importantly German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. For the nuts-and-bolts economics, Brit David Ricardo, but who follows pure Marxian economics, anyway? After the revolution, everyone makes it up as they go.

As for statism deriving from the French Revolution, I have to heartily disagree. That’s been around as long as there’s been a state, which is a long, long time. Of course, the revolutionists were statists, and influentially so, to an alarming degree.

If American conservatives take after the 1789 revolutionaries, then they aren’t conservative (that’s oversimplifying, of course; there were many revolutionary factions; let’s say the Jacobins, as opposed to the Girondins or the royalists). I wonder if the author realizes that our beloved political spectrum, i.e. Left-Center-Right, derives from this period? On the left were the Jacobins/Moutain, radicals who wanted to expand the government and wage war on the church/aristocracy/monarchy/foreign monarchies. In the Center were the moderates, who maybe were republicans, but didn’t want to go too far. On the Right were royalists and republicans, who wanted as far as possible to keep things as they were, and perhaps to turn back the clock.

That’s the lineup. On one side you have the champions of expanding the central government. On the other, you have the defenders of private power and either defenders of the central state as it is or those who want state power to be more diffuse. A decent book on the subject is Bertrand de Juvenal’s (a Frenchman himself) “On Power”. We are the latter. We are conservatives.

On one side you have the champions of expanding the central government.

Your knowledge of this period is clearly much deeper than mine, but I believe we are essentially in agreement. I knew of course that Marxism didn't start until the mid 1840's, but my point was, as you would probably agree, that the idea of expansion of government as a cohesive political philosophy got a huge boost from the French Revolution.

Interestingly enough, you and I aren't liberal elite journalists, and we knew this. I'm just a commoner, who didn't attend any elite east coast journalism schools. I don't get invited to elite journalist "Inside the Beltway" parties. I'll bet you don't either. Yet WE knew this. Either the author was ignorant of it, or he made it up. Either way, he's contemptible, and shouldn't be writing so authoritatively about things of which he clearly knows nothing. And I mean NOTHING.

On one side you have the champions of expanding the central government. On the other, you have the defenders of private power and either defenders of the central state as it is or those who want state power to be more diffuse. A decent book on the subject is Bertrand de Juvenal’s (a Frenchman himself) “On Power”. We are the latter. We are conservatives.

At the start of the Twentieth Century the term "liberal" meant the same in America as it still does in the rest of the world - essentially, what is called "conservatism" in American Newspeak. Of course we "American Conservatives" are not the ones who oppose development and liberty, so in that sense we are not conservative at all. We actually are liberals.
But in America, "liberalism" was given its American Newspeak - essentially inverted - meaning in the 1920s (source: Safire's New Political Dictionary). The fact that the American socialists have acquired a word to exploit is bad enough; the real disaster is that we do not now have a word which truly descriptive of our own political perspective. We only have the smear words which the socialists have assigned to us. And make no mistake, in America "conservative" is inherently a negative connotation just as surely as marketers love to boldly proclaim that the product which they are flogging is NEW!