Coming Attractions: Violent Revolution

What happens to people’s minds when they’re left hanging just a little too far past the moment when they’re ready for transformative change?

We’ve already lined up all the preconditions that have historically set the stage for full-fledged violent revolution.

Deeply conservative nations very reliably create the conditions that eventually make violent overthrow necessary. And our own Republicans, it turns out, have done a hell of a job.

Seven Criteria:

1. Soaring, then Crashing: middle-class America is being hollowed out by health-care, bankruptcies, higher college costs, and a tax load far heavier than that of the richest 2 percent.
2. They call it class war: the stage for revolution was set when the upper classes broke faith with society’s other groups, and began to openly prey on them in ways that threatened their very future.
3. Deserted Intellectuals: Revolutions require leaders — and those always come from the professional and intellectual classes. In most times and places, these groups (which also include military officers) usually enjoy comfortable ties to the upper classes, and access to a certain level of power. Revolutions catalyze when these deserted intellectuals make common cause with the lower classes.
4. Incompetent Government: Conservatives invariably govern badly because they don’t really believe that government should exist at all — except as a way to funnel the peoples’ tax money into the pockets of party insiders. This conflicted (if not outright hostile) attitude toward government can’t possibly lead to any outcome other than bad management, bad policy, and eventually such horrendously bad social and economic outcomes that people are forced into the streets to hold their leaders to account.
   1. Liberal democracy avoids this by building in a fail-safe: if the bastards ignore us, we can always vote them out. But if we’ve learned anything over the last eight years, it’s that our votes don’t always count — especially not when conservatives are doing the counting.
5. Gutless Wonders in the Ruling Class: Revolution becomes necessary when the ruling classes fail in their duty to lead. Most of the major modern political revolutions occurred at moments when the world was changing rapidly — and the country’s leaders dealt with it by dropping back into denial and clinging defiantly to the old, profitable, and familiar status quo. When the leaders failed to step forward boldly to lead their people through the looming and necessary transformations, the people rebelled.
6. Fiscal Irresponsibility: As we’ve seen, revolutions follow in the wake of national economic reversals. Almost always, these reversals occur when inept and corrupt governments mismanage the national economy to the point of indebtedness, bankruptcy, and currency collapse. There’s a growing consensus on both the left and right that America is now heading into the biggest financial contraction since the Great Depression.
7. Inept and Inconsistent Use of Force: The final criterion for revolution is this: The government no longer exercises force in a way that people find fair or consistent.
   1. This kind of capricious, irrational ineptitude in deploying government force leads to public contempt for the power of the state, and leads the governed to withdraw their consent. And, eventually, it also raises people’s determination to stand together to oppose state power. That growing solidarity and fearlessness — along with the resigned knowledge that equal-opportunity goons will brutalize loyalists and rebels alike, so you might as well be a dead lion rather than a live lamb — is the final factor that catalyzes ordinary citizens into ready and willing revolutionaries.

Over the past 350 years, almost every major revolution in a modern industrialized country has been preceded by this pattern of seven preconditions.

Hillary Clinton is failing because this is a revolutionary moment — and she, regrettably, has the misfortune to be too closely identified with the mounting failures of the past that we’re now seeking to move beyond. On the other hand, Ron Paul’s otherwise inexplicable success has been built on his pointed and very specific critique of the kinds of government leadership failures I’ve described.

And Barack Obama is walking away with the moment because he talks of “hope” — which is clearly the very first thing any would-be revolutionary needs. And then he talks of “change,” which many of his followers are clearly hearing as a soft word for “revolution.”

Source: AlterNet