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For the moment let’s assume that things need to change in the US, and probably the entire world. That we have serious and urgent problems which need fixing. For most people I imagine this assumption isn’t particularly controversial, though before we proceed with it, it’s probably worth at least mentioning the idea that this assumption could be wrong, that perhaps the problems we experience are neither serious nor particularly urgent. To at least entertain the notion that things are actually awesome and all of the current turmoil is self-generated drama. That, as Steven Pinker says in the opening to his book Enlightenment Now, a “bleak assessment of the state of the world is wrong. And not just a little wrong—wrong wrong, flat-earth wrong, couldn’t-be-more-wrong.”
Of course as anyone who has dealt with self-generated drama knows, it can cause quite a few problems without necessarily being based on anything concrete. Which is to say even if we factor Pinker’s assertion into our calculations I still think it’s pretty safe to assume that things need to change. From here we can imagine two ways that this might happen. We could work within the existing system, and make gradual changes to the framework that already exists. Or we can ditch the old system and replace it with a completely new and presumably better system.
In my last post I examined a proposal that fell into the latter category, one that proposed a completely new system of racial justice, and found that it suffered from a distressing lack of pragmatism. In this post I want to examine the general idea of completely replacing a system rather than gradually modifying the current system. And right off the bat I want to make the bold claim that a complete replacement never works, or if it does it takes so much longer than anyone ever thought it would when things began that the effect is the same.
To be clear when I’m talking about a complete replacement I mean nothing less than a revolution. Something which clearly separates one form of government and ideology from another. In the interest of full disclosure I draw most of my knowledge about revolutions from the excellent podcast of the same name by Mike Duncan, and out of the modern revolutions he covers I think three are worth discussing here: the American, French and Russian.
To begin with you may already be thinking, “But the American Revolution worked! I thought you said revolutions never worked?” I actually didn’t say that, I said a complete replacement never works. And, while it’s impossible to completely replace your system of government without a revolution, it is possible to have a revolution without completely replacing your system of government. To illustrate what I mean it’s instructive to contrast the American and French Revolutions. Why was one successful, while the other was largely unsuccessful? (Unless you consider Napoleon some sort of win condition…) This disparity would make sense if the unsuccessful revolution had occurred first. You could imagine that the second time someone attempted an “enlightened” revolution that the revolutionaries would have learned from all the mistakes of the first, and as such it would be more likely to be successful, but in fact it’s the reverse. Another factor that might have played a role in things was the fact that the Americans were rebelling against an external power, while the French were largely rebelling against themselves. Certainly this disparity has to be taken into account, but I wouldn’t put too much weight on it. The Revolutionary War was more loyalists vs. patriots than it was colonists vs. England, and it was much closer to a civil war than an indigenous rebellion. So why did the one fail while the other succeeded?
I’ve been interested in this question for a long time, how is it that these two revolutions, so close in time and goals, had such different outcomes? Just recently I read something which seemed to answer it. It was a passage in the book, A Secular Age by Charles Taylor. It’s a massive, incredibly dense tome which clocks in at 874 pages. And I’m going to attempt to do some justice to it in the July book review round-up, but for now I just want to focus on one little part of it: a section comparing the American and French Revolutions:
The [American] revolutionary forces were mobilized largely on the basis of the old backward-looking legitimacy idea. [The revolution] will later be seen as the exercise of a power inherent in a sovereign people. The proof of its existence and legitimacy lies in the new polity it created. But popular sovereignty would have been incapable of doing this job if it had entered the scene too soon. The predecessor idea, invoking the traditional rights of a people defined by its ancient constitution, had to do the original heavy lifting…
…this projection backwards of the action of a sovereign people wouldn’t have been possible without the continuity in institutions and practices which allowed for the reinterpretation of past actions as the fruit of the new principles. The essence of this continuity resided in the virtually universal acceptance among the colonists of elected assemblies as legitimate forms of power. Popular sovereignty could be embraced because it had a clear and uncontested institutional meaning. This was the basis of the new order.
In other words the American Revolution worked because of the things it modified rather than the things it dispensed with. The various legislative bodies present in the colonies and in the mother country formed the foundation for the new system they ended up with. Without that foundation already in place they would have found it impossible to build something new. On the other hand:
Quite different was the case in the French Revolution, with fateful effects. The impossibility remarked by all historians of “bringing the Revolution to an end” came partly from this, that any particular expression of popular sovereignty could be challenged by some other, with substantial support. Part of the terrifying instability of the first years of the Revolution stemmed from this negative fact, that the shift from the legitimacy of dynastic rule to that of the nation had no agreed meaning in a broadly based social imaginary.
[Edmund] Burke’s advice to the revolutionaries was to stick to their traditional constitution and amend it piecemeal. But this was already beyond their powers. It was not just that the representative institutions of this constitution, the Estates General, had been in abeyance for 175 years. They were also profoundly out of sync with the aspiration to equal citizenship…That is why virtually the first demand of the Third Estate in 1789 was to abolish the separate chambers, and bring all the delegates together in a single National Assembly.
Even more gravely, outside of [the] educated elites, there was very little sense of what a representative constitution might mean.
In both revolutions they had the idea of popular sovereignty, the difference was that for the American Revolution popular sovereignty had a “clear and uncontested institutional meaning” whereas in the French Revolution, there was “very little sense of what a representative constitution might mean.” And consequently any “particular expression of popular sovereignty” could be supplanted by any other “expression of popular sovereignty”. The American Revolution had a logical endpoint, the French Revolution didn’t. That was why one was a success and one wasn’t and it’s also the key difference between making changes within a system and trying to implement an entirely new system, as long as you keep the old system you also keep an endpoint, but once you abandon it, you also abandon any obvious markers for declaring the thing finished.
I leave it for the reader to judge whether the current political unrest represents an example of something where the radical changes being demanded will nevertheless ultimately use the current system as a foundation, i.e. is there in fact an obvious stopping point. Or whether it falls into the category of revolutions which entirely reject the old system. Or whether it should be considered to be a revolution at all. What I’m more interested in at the moment is the historical perspective. Which takes us to the other revolution I said I was going to cover, the Russian Revolution.
There is an argument to be made that this was both a successful revolution and a revolution that thoroughly and comprehensively rejected the previous system. For myself, I would certainly agree with the last half of the argument, Russian communism was clearly something entirely new, it’s the first half that I take issue with. Yes, if your sole criteria is whether a new ideology took power, and held onto that power, it was a success, but when you consider the millions and millions of people who died in the course of making that happen, it’s not a success I think that anyone should want to emulate. And in any consideration of the Russian revolution that would be the lesson I’d want people to come away with. But if you assure me that you have absorbed that lesson, I think the lessons that came from how that revolution ended are valuable as well.
To pull all three revolutions together, and restate things: in order for the revolution to end there has to be a point where most people admit that it has ended. For the American Revolution that end point was independence and a revised system of elected assemblies. For the French Revolution they had the supposed end point of achieving popular sovereignty, but no one could agree on precisely how they would know when that was achieved. The end point of the Russian Revolution was more complicated, there was the overt and widely proclaimed goal of total economic leveling, but this was combined with the more covert endpoint of a select group of people seizing power. In making these comparisons I’m hand waving numerous very complex situations, but distilled out, I think the Russian Revolution provides two additional examples of how things might end, 1) the ideology motivating the revolution could provide a clearly defined endpoint. Or 2) the revolution could be led by people powerful enough to call a halt to things when they’re satisfied. Out of these two it is unclear if either is sufficient to end things by itself, but if one of them is, it would have to be having strong leaders.
As I said, I’m not ready to declare what sort of revolution is taking place right now, or if it even is a revolution. But if it is, then it would appear to be in danger of falling prey to the phenomenon I’ve been talking about, the lack of any obvious endpoint. The clearest way this manifests is in the lack of leaders, something which has been brought up a lot in this space particularly in the comments, but which seems to pass mostly unremarked upon everywhere else. Or at least I haven’t seen any really serious grappling with what this might mean in the mainstream press. Which is surprising because it represents a huge difference between past protests and now. And even if I’m over-reaching when I argue that this lack of leaders is going to make it harder to bring things to a close, I can’t see anyone arguing that it doesn’t significantly alter the dynamic.
The effect of ideology is more nebulous, but as I argued in previous posts, the protesters seem to have a whole constellation of demands, none of which are particularly pragmatic, or even well-defined. But from a high level view, and at the risk of being too simplistic, it feels like if the French Revolution was motivated by popular sovereignty that the current protests are motivated by the idea of justice. And if anything it seems even tricker to decide when justice has been achieved than it was to establish when popular sovereignty had been. As Taylor pointed out, “any particular expression of popular sovereignty could be challenged by some other, with substantial support.” Couldn’t we adapt that, and with equal accuracy say, “any particular demand for justice could be superseded by some other, with substantial support”?
You might assert that simplifying things down to the idea of justice goes too far, that they are not demanding some form of unreachable platonic justice, for all people and for all times, that their ideology is more complicated, but if anything doesn’t that make it even worse? If the French couldn’t agree on the meaning of popular sovereignty, and the Russian revolution only stopped after millions of deaths, and the imposition of a dictatorship, what makes you think, should this actually be a true revolution, that having lots of competing ideas about what needs to be accomplished will make declaring an end to things easier?
Lest you think I’m overstating the complexity of things here is just a half dozen points from the website blacklivesmatter.com:
- We make space for transgender brothers and sisters to participate and lead.
- We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege.
- We build a space that affirms Black women and is free from sexism, misogyny, and environments in which men are centered.
- We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement.
- When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking.
- We embody and practice justice, liberation, and peace.
I’m not necessarily saying that any of the above is bad (though I think some points bring a lot of negative second order effects) nor am I necessarily claiming blacklivesmatter.com speaks for all of the protestors (though that takes us back to the lack of leadership) I’m saying that these points are nebulous (what has to occur for us to be sure that cisgender priviledge is dismantled?) and also numerous.
As I mention, I’m not sure how this is going to play out over the next few weeks and months (or years). What I am saying is that if the protests are expected to continue until every item on the list is checked off, then the expected duration starts to approach infinity. Of course, no one is patient enough for an infinitely long process, which is why people want to speed things up. And that’s how we switch from gradually remaking the existing system into violently imposing an entirely new system.
In the end, the caution I’m urging here is closely related to the caution I’ve been urging in all of my recent posts:
- Don’t panic so much over the first mistake, that you make a second bigger mistake. While I’m not saying the excesses of the French Revolution were worse than the abuses of the Ancien Régime. It should have been possible to do something about those abuses without The Terror.
- If you are going to try something radical, try it on a small scale rather than at the level of the entire nation. In 1900 it was reasonable to argue that Communism would be a better system of government than market capitalism, but rather than start with a modest experiment, they imposed it at the point of a gun in two of the biggest nations in the world, Russia and China, and it led to millions of deaths.
- Things are more complicated than you think. At the time of the French Revolution, (particularly in light of the American Revolution) it may have seemed straightforward to implement something completely new, but there are always all manner of complexities and systems you’re almost entirely unaware of.
- There are lots of different ways of viewing the world, and getting everyone on the same page is more difficult than you think. If you’re creating chaos in an attempt to disrupt the current system, how do you turn that chaos off? For the French it was essentially Napoleon. For the Russians it was Lenin or possibly Stalin. For the Americans it was elected assemblies. Who or what turns off the current chaos?
- And of course the last post where I directly address the lack of pragmatism in the ideology of Critical Race Theory.
To all of that I would like to repeat my caution from the beginning of the post, trying to completely replace the system never works. So if we want to succeed, if we want to address the problems of police brutality and income inequality and the rest, we need to build on what we have. I know that this is not what people want to hear, but before you dismiss it, take a minute to consider the differences between the American and French Revolutions, and in particular the horrors of the Russian Revolution. I know it seems impossible to go from what’s happening now, to either the French or Russian Revolutions, but had you asked the French in May of 1789 or the Russians in January of 1917 I’m sure that what actually happened would have seemed impossible to them as well…
This is actually my 200th post. I thought about doing something meta, or special, but in the end I decided not to. However, if you wanted to give me a gift, becoming a patreon would be at the top of my list…
Thanks for an interesting read. There’s a lot I want to address, but I’ll start with my biggest problem:
…..it’s impossible to completely replace your system of government without a revolution.
I think you’re starting from a flawed premise here. Consider the case of Feudalism to Capitalism. There was no revolution, only a redistribution of wealth and thus a redistribution of power. Of course now Capitalism has led to its own power hierarchies, and we can’t financially out-compete capitalism in the way that mercantilism did with feudalism, which is why Marx believed that the expanding inequality would eventually lead to a post-capitalist society via revolution. I think the revolution is inevitable, but the outcome is far more unpredictable.
Okay, technically you’re correct, I should have added the word “quickly” to that sentence. Yes you can gradually replace your system of government over hundreds of years until it is essentially entirely new, as is the case with feudalism and capitalism, (and that’s actually my point). But this process took a very long time, also there were many revolutions in that time. Feudal lords were frequently putting down rebellions and offering concessions as part of that (most of the expansion of English rights came through such methods). There was also the Glorious Revolution, and I would say that the 30 Years war was very significant to the transition as well, and that it had many of the qualities of associated with rebellions.
I’m not so sure the US revolution was so smooth. Afterwards we had several near succession criseses. We had to ditch the Articles of Confederacy. We had another war with England, where the White House was burned and the northeast nearly sided with England. We also had the Alien and Sedition Acts & then we had massive westward expansion. That is seen as benign, except for Native Americans, but then you mentioned Napoleon. Wasn’t he essentially doing the same thing we were except he got pushed back eventually? Then, of course, we had the Civil War, which was a big deal. There was also some religious group that formed in NY and moved out west who had some beefs with the US gov’t…but whose keeping track of that?
I do think a leaderless revolution is an interesting concept to contemplate but then maybe what we are seeing is a generational shift. I’ve been thinking about this since I’ve been listening to Bret Weinstein talk about ‘horizontal revolutions’ where every institution is being ‘infected’ with woke culture at the exact same time. What strikes me about this is that such a thing is impossible. No ideology yields 100% uniform support. Unless, of course, it’s not an ideology. The 60’s, for example, had no leader. You can find leaders in it. You can find people to pin the blame on leading up to it (Hugh Hefner or Kinsley were people conservatives loved to pin the blame on), but there was no leader. No one that declared “ok we’re moving from moppy hair now to long hair”.
But maybe this should then be looked at from a different point of view. Perhaps it isn’t a revolution against the old guard, perhaps the old guard is attempting a revolution against the young. From this point of view Trump is essentially an attempt to become a vampire. Of course that sounds silly, but there are a few points to it:
1. His crew kind of looks like vampires. Rudy G and Alan D. esp.
2. They seem committed to keeping the job but won’t actually do the job. Vampire’s do tend to live in old castles and have lots of stuff around them but they never actually produce anything. They just refuse to die and get out of the way for everyone else. Granted they will host fancy dinner parties where they will be very sophisticated and witty.
3. While they don’t quite literally feed off the bodies of the young (Alan D., though, was named as one of the people who had sex with underage girls at Epstein’s ‘pedo island’) they do seem to literally feed off of triggering the young. Insisting on law and order, for example, while exempting themselves from it quite explicitly. Kids in cages at the border too….
Granted you may think this is satire but if you look at it from the reverse point of view, it does kind of fit many pieces together. No one agrees on the exact terms of the revolution? Well yea, the village just wants the vampire gone. Cancel culture? It is interesting many of the ‘cancel victims’ strike me as people who suck all the oxygen out of a field by dominating it by weight of their names but are almost certainly not going to make any future contributions of value beyond rehashing their old work (J.K Rowling and Steven Pinker , I mean be honest, if I told you another 800 page Pinker book is being printed right now do you think for a second it will have one idea that hasn’t been mulled over in the last 3 800 page books of his?).
Food for thought.
Okay, but doesn’t the point about the difficulties faced by the Americans even after the revolution support my claim? Which is essentially that revolutions never work? And thus to the extent that what we’re currently seeing is a revolution it won’t work either?
As far as leaders in the late 60’s early 70’s what about MLK, or the Weathermen, or the recently deceased John Lewis? And are you sure you’re not biased? Comparing your ability to come up with the names of the leaders of 60 years ago to your ability to come up with the names of leaders today is not a fair comparison.
I did chuckle at your vampire comparison, though I agree that it’s not entirely satire. I think the Boomers in general have been very vampiric…
There were leader in the 60’s, but not leaders of the 60’s. You had all types of leaders, for example, Barry Goldwater (who Hillary Clinton campaigned for), William F. Buckley, the Hells Angels, Anton Levay etc. etc. But none of them ran the whole thing.
I hate to say I don’t think it’s satire at all. The problem here is you’re seeing the revolution as what’s happening in two blocks in Portland. I think you’re missing it, it’s coming from the top and yea it’s not going to work at all. It’s almost going to end up a farce of a revolution because, well, you can’t be a vampire.
I know we like to take a kind of shorthand with French history in the US, but I don’t think the history supports the idea that Napoleon was doing anything like the US Westward expansion. Yes, he conquered continental Europe, but he didn’t actually start the wars launched against him. The British and other monarchs kept forming coalitions against the ‘illegitimate’ anti-monarchical French, but were never able to get them to capitulate and reinstate the royals (until the end). Sure, Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, but after the Fifth European coalition against him I can cut him some slack over a single preemptive war. Especially since the Russians had joined a few of the previous coalitions not that long before. They didn’t seem to mind breaking their oaths of peace every time.
Also, Napoleon worked a huge amount of statecraft to reverse the excesses of Robespierre et. al. Granted, he did that with a dictator’s pen, but if it’s not possible to advance the argument that he’s the kind of force that makes a revolution NOT smooth. He’s just the kind of force that makes a revolution no longer a revolution. The order of operations ran the other direction, where the revolution was a mess until a strong leader came along to right the ship. From getting rid of the ten day work week to establishing the custom of alternating odd and even house numbering (something we still use today), Napoleon’s reforms were vast and generally beneficial to the revolution-weary French public.
This leads to the biggest problem with strong leaders, though, which is that they can become strong enough that a revolution takes the nation backward instead of forward. Let’s say the progression of power runs from Strongman -> Monarch/Dictator -> Aristocracy -> Functional Oligarchy -> Republic, with the goal that power eventually lands in the hands of the People. I think observational evidence suggests the American Revolution was somewhere between Aristocracy and Functional Oligarchy. We’ve been driving toward a Republic, but we keep falling back to letting the rich people make the rules. It’s just really hard to make sure the People actually get the power, and that it’s not wrested away by stronger forces.
Look at the various socialist revolutions. Each one tried to make the move to a republic, and each one fell ‘backward’ to dictatorship. I’ve been asking socialists and Marxists for years what they think the difference is between their current iteration and all previous attempts at instituting a form of government that routinely devolves into brutal dictatorship. The answer is always a form of the No True Scotsman fallacy. Except if you read the literature of those old revolutionaries, it’s hard to argue that the leaders of most these movements didn’t truly believe in the cause, and that the People weren’t trying to make it work. It’s true that those attempts didn’t END in socialism/communism, but they were certainly STARTED by people who truly believed in those causes – same as those who want to start a new revolution today. It’s just that no matter where they started, their leaders naturally took them back to dictatorship, and that we can expect the same result every time a revolution starts with a strong leader like this.
So maybe ‘leaderless revolution’ is the answer to the problem of leaders seizing power? Certainly the American Revolution had a strong leader in George Washington, but he also wanted to live the dream of going down in history as a Cincinnatus; remanding power to go back to his farm. He was uniquely able to set a major precedent that persisted in the system to prevent outright dictatorship. Of course, plenty of leaders plan to become a Cincinnatus some day, but they never get around to it before they die. (Even Washington was an old man before he got around to it.)
The larger questions, then, are how do you run a revolution without a leader in a way that can also PREVENT a strong leader from taking over and forcing the revolution backward, just like all the others? And can you run a leaderless revolution with the kind of direction a strong leader lends the movement, or does it always end up in the terror of mob rule, requiring a strong leader to come in and fix it?
You allude to this, but the argument could be made that the difference between the American and French Revolutions comes down to Washington. That if he hadn’t been so committed to stepping down or otherwise so principled (in some respects, I know he owned slaves) that our revolution would have gone the same as all the rest.
One of my favorite stories is about how the military was all set to rise up and start a new revolution (or arguably continue it). Rather than try and relate what happened I’ll just quote from wikipedia:
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The March 15 meeting was held in the “New Building” or “Temple”, a 40 by 70-foot (12 by 21 m) building at the camp. After Gates opened the meeting, Washington entered the building to everyone’s surprise. He asked to speak to the officers, and the stunned Gates relinquished the floor. Washington could tell by the faces of his officers, who had not been paid for quite some time, that they were quite angry and did not show the respect or deference as they had toward Washington in the past.
Washington then gave a short but impassioned speech, now known as the Newburgh Address, counseling patience. His message was that they should oppose anyone “who wickedly attempts to open the floodgates of civil discord and deluge our rising empire in blood.” He then produced a letter from a member of Congress to read to the officers. He gazed upon it and fumbled with it without speaking. He then took a pair of reading glasses from his pocket, which were new; few of the men had seen him wear them. He then said:
“Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.”
This caused the men to realize that Washington had sacrificed a great deal for the Revolution, just as much as any of them. These, of course, were his fellow officers, most having worked closely with him for several years. Many of those present were moved to tears, and with this act, the conspiracy collapsed as he read the letter.
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If that meeting had gone differently the story of America would have also been different.
But like you I’m very curious how a leaderless revolution will play out. I can see how it might perhaps avoid the excesses of dictatorship, but for me it seems more similar to the opening days of the French Revolution, which evolved into Robespierre and The Terror. And I’m perfectly aware that drawing parallels like this across vast distances of time and space is fraught with potential errors, but what model should I use to understand what’s currently happening?
I think the French Revolution is the right analogy, not so much because it’s unique as because it’s just a really good example of mob rule. My biggest concern with a leaderless revolution is that mob rule is probably the only force with a worse track record than strong dictators.
There were other incidents that nearly ended the American Experiment early on. For example, the Genet Affair, where a French foreign ambassador was organizing Americans to fight on behalf of the French and Spanish against the British. When Washington refused to rescind his neutrality order, Genet started organizing a revolution to overthrow the US so it would become part of Revolutionary France. He almost succeeded, too, if not for the fortuitous outbreak of (I think it was yellow fever?) the day he was planning to activate his rebellion. Washington knew of the plot in advance, but couldn’t get Congress to authorize the organization of an army to break up the whole thing. He watched helplessly, thinking all was lost, until the day the epidemic broke out and saved the Union. Genet was recalled to France, but ironically asked for political asylum in the US.
Later, when the Whisky Rebellion saw farmers in Western PA rising up against the government for legislating away their livelihoods, Washington wasn’t about to wait for congressional approval. He organized – and led – an army against the rebels without waiting for Congress to bless the emergency action. He’d learned from the Genet Affair that if he waited for Congress to declare war he’d lose the Union. So he took what many viewed as extra-constitutional power for the executive branch out of pragmatic necessity.
Lots of stuff happened those first few years. Some precedent-setting actions, some acts of God. Each a potential crisis that could have led to the end of the idea of popular sovereignty early on.
Washington was a huge force for making the Union work, to be sure. But again you can look to other figures in history who had a knack for government, but it inevitably led to dictatorship. Napoleon has already been discussed, but he always saw himself as a dictator. Even when leaders tried to pass the baton on to republican control a dictator would succeed the reformer.
Case in point, Sulla in the Roman period. He made a lot of major statecraft reforms, including some that were intended to make it impossible for another dictator to take power like he had and undo everything he’d done. Sulla knew dictatorial powers were ruinous, so he made as many changes as he could to set things right and then tried to burn the bridges behind him so others couldn’t take dictatorial power. But the biggest thing he did was set a precedent for ’emergency measures’ as an excuse to let a dictator rise to power. Which is exactly what subsequent dictators did.
I read Ron Chernow’s biography of Washington and I don’t recall that the Genet affair was that close to the wire, but perhaps I need to re-read that section, or is there another book you would recommend?
Yeah, it doesn’t get much historical play. I think I first read about it in Unger’s “Mr. President”, which was specifically about Washington’s time as president.