Briefly.
Revolution doesn’t have to be violent, it can be political.
If you’ve read dissident liberal/social libertarian blogs over the last decade you may have run into the term squishy totalitarianism. It posits that the current system is so entrenched and its nature so malleable that to destroy it would be like trying to punch a giant jello monster. Crackdowns still happen, but are rarely needed, as the mechanisms of social control are soft. People are atomized, passive, and social movements are politically irrelevant. People keep their head down and try to get by. It’s a lovely dystopian propaganda machine.
I’m not sure if I totally cosign with that idea, but it has some merit. The counter is there are examples of bloodless political revolutions where complex systems of power just fall away suddenly because the agents of the system step aside. But given the system we’re talking about is basically the entire Western hemisphere, that doesn’t seem particularly likely absent some exterior force (e.g. economic disaster).
I think Chris Hedges once said that Nixon was the last liberal president because he was the last one to really be afraid of social movements. And not in a general way, but specifically fearful that huge crowds gathering on the Whitehouse lawn would overpower the police and charge the Bastille, so to speak.
America in particular is such a large country with such strong cultural unification that the idea of revolution seems farcical. People are mostly comfortable. Bread and circuses are well in supply. The ones most abused by the system are the least powerful, and often in other countries. If I was super optimistic I might be hopeful for a political revolution as the old guard wanes, but given the political history of the '60s left I don’t see any reason to be hopeful. Of course, people being cynical of change is another feature of the squishy system.
Thread winner.
The other thing you have to look at is that the real conditions and spark for revolutions are far more serious than what we have now. We don’t have deeply entrenched poverty. We don’t have any large population going to bed hungry, night after night, year after year. We don’t have an obviously closed class system.
What we have is a bunch of shitty conditions, a different mix of shitty conditions from those of prior eras but no more than most of those eras and far fewer than many. We also have a media system that desperately has to fill the airwaves with something, anything that will garner advertising eyeballs… so the fact that there’s 50 people who make more than 500,000 “middle class workers” becomes fightin’ words. (My take on “income inequality”: nothing new. Trim off the 0.1% on each end and the curve and numbers flatten a lot. It’s only when measuring a Walton’s income in terms of a Baltimore fast food worker’s that you get absurd shock numbers.)
We’re on the verge of an era of big changes, from now through about mid-century. We have no control over many of them and will simply have to adapt. The problems we are so so so concerned with of the moment will be repaired… and replaced with others. We are nowhere near revolution of any type.
That’s probably right, but I bet the culture then was so vastly different as to be hard to compare. There was probably a prevailing idea then that life was hard, and we were forming a country from the ground up, and there would be growing pains. Men had to put in hard work for later generations to benefit from, to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps as a country.
Contrast to now, when we’re the richest nation in the history of the world, and yet it doesn’t feel like the average person is able to participate in that in the way that our parents were.
Our reaction to the Great Recession was perverse. Not only did risky behavior by the rich and elite in our society cause massive amounts of real harm, but they were largely protected from the consequences of their action. But not only that - not only did we take this moment to reflect on the dangers of plutocracy and wealth inequality, but we took a giant leap to furthering it. Economic gains and re-growth since the Great Recession have been even more top-heavy than they were in the era leading up to it.
What should’ve been a huge, watershed moment in our history where we started to overcome this issue, but instead somehow we allowed it to let them fuck us even harder. There’s no viable way out of this plutocracy and the situation for the average person grows more dire.
In the land of incredible plenty, we’re working harder and more than we ever did before, being shit upon by our employers in a way that would be unthinkable a generation ago, all just to try to keep pace. The situation is deeply unsatisfying and getting worse. Our political system is completely rampant with corruption and there is no doubt that our lawmakers only represent monied interest, and not their people at all. If we can’t change the system, and things grow more dire, what options are left to us?
The explosion of available media outlets means that opinion pieces need to get more and more extreme to get any attention at all.
No. Many examples of revolutionary disorder involve forces from opposite sides. This is discussed explicitly in the linked article:
[QUOTE=Salon’s interview of Chris Hedges]
What do you think is the most likely way that the people will respond to living in these conditions?
That is the big unknown. When it will come is unknown. What is it that will trigger it is unknown. You could go back and look at past uprisings, some of which I covered — I covered all the revolutions in Eastern Europe; I covered the two Palestinian uprisings; I covered the street demonstrations that eventually brought down Slobodan Milosevic — and it’s usually something banal.
…
You’ve said that we don’t know where the change will come from, and that it could just as easily take a right-wing, reactionary form as a leftist one. Is there anything lefties can do to influence the outcome? Or is it out of anyone’s control?
There’s so many events as societies disintegrate that you can’t predict. They play such a large part in shaping how a society goes that there is a lot of it that is not in your control.
For example, if you compare the breakdown of Yugoslavia with the breakdown of Czechoslovakia — and I covered both of those stories — Yugoslavia was actually the Eastern European country best-equipped to integrate itself into Europe. But Yugoslavia went bad. When the economy broke down and Yugoslavia was hit with horrific hyperinflation, it vomited up these terrifying figures in the same way that Weimar vomited up the Nazi party. Yugoslavia tore itself to pieces.
If things unravel [in the U.S.], our backlash may very well be a rightwing backlash — a very frightening rightwing backlash. We who care about populist movements [on the left] are very weak, because in the name of anti-communism these movements have been destroyed; we are almost trying to rebuild them from scratch. We don’t even have the language to describe the class warfare that is being unleashed upon us by this tiny, rapacious, oligarchic elite. But we on the left are very disorganized, unfocused, and without resources.
[/QUOTE]
Other posters who apparently didn’t read the interview include
I find this message offensive. You associate “leftist idiots” with “killing millions of people” and are happy that the killers will never have power in this country. Start a Pit thread to help fight your ignorance, puddleglum.
Well, it depends on what you mean by “change the system.” If you mean politely try to get businesses and legislators to put people first, and wait for those changes, well… no. Not going to happen.
If you mean change the playing field so that the existing system loses traction and control… you have something within the average person’s grasp and over which the megacorps, billionaires and most of the legislative bodies have almost zero control.
Think of it under the old chestnut, “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” - “What if they set up a predatory and unfair socioeconomic system and nobody played along?” TPTB can only be TPTB if we play the game their way.
So what?
And the idiot who is predicting revolution in the Salon article is a leftist idiot, and he is trying to blame it on the right. Based, apparently, on the idea that the left wing movements he mentions (Occupy, Black Lives Matter) are weak and ineffectual. So there’s gonna be a revolution, and it’s All Their Fault.
I for one am happy that a movement embodied by the rioters in Baltimore or Michael Brown will never have power in this country. Neither will any of the right-wing militias. Or the left-wing ones.
[QUOTE=Amateur Barbarian]
Well, it depends on what you mean by “change the system.” If you mean politely try to get businesses and legislators to put people first, and wait for those changes, well… no. Not going to happen.
If you mean change the playing field so that the existing system loses traction and control… you have something within the average person’s grasp and over which the megacorps, billionaires and most of the legislative bodies have almost zero control.
Think of it under the old chestnut, “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” - “What if they set up a predatory and unfair socioeconomic system and nobody played along?” TPTB can only be TPTB if we play the game their way.
[/QUOTE]
This reminds me of the rhetoric of OWS. Sounds nice - any concrete proposals that will rally the masses?
And if the proposals are “let’s raise taxes, increase spending, make health care affordable, and save the environment”, then explain why the Democratic party isn’t the vanguard of the revolution - they have been peddling that for years, and they got rather badly spanked in the last elections. And why Hillary Clinton is the front-runner for the Democratic nomination and not Bernie Sanders.
Regards,
Shodan
Pisstols at dawn, suh. For even mentioning those self-absorbed pantywaists. 
Yes.
No, see, that’s why most talk-talk is just that - it’s pissing and moaning about the symptoms, and how poor-me and poor-you and poor-him are so crushed by them, and whine moan blubber bleat. It’s playing the game by the rules TPTB have established, and it all makes about as much sense to play as 43-Man Squamish.
Nope. There’s an absurdly simple way to break the back of the current system of control, and it’s utterly, totally and irrevocably in the hands of individuals.
[spoiler][
Stop spending all your income. It’s YOUR consumer-goods feeding frenzy that feeds the whole machine, to the detriment of all but the apex predators.
If welding your wallet shut against the endless conditioning to spend, spend, spend - your present income and all you can be induced to hand over from future earnings - is too difficult, then shut up and quit talking about fixing things. You ARE the problem because you’re choosing to be.][/spoiler]
I’m confused. Should we want “Leftist Idiots” to be in charge of the country? Why? Certainly you aren’t going to claim that there are no Leftists who are idiots, are you? Perhaps you are reading that post in the most unfavorable manner possible-- i.e., that he is saying all Leftists are idiots, instead of a more favorable reading in which he is specifically referring to those Leftist Idiots who think killing millions of people for a cause is OK.
Well, okay, as long as they are water pistols. And can we make it, say, ten-ish? Dawn is so early…
Oh-oh - AB picked the red pill.
Regards,
Shodan
I can see you’re confused. Let’s not play “Septimus thinks John thinks Septimus thinks Puiddleglum thinks Hedges thinks …” Instead let’s try to work with facts.
And let’s do assume that Puddeglum’s was not a post about unicorns or *hypothetical *leftist idiots.
Is Pulitzer-Prize and Honorary Degree-winning Chris Hedges a “leftist idiot” who wants “to feel special by killing millions of people”? No? Then who was Puddleglum talking about? Do you know, John, or are you still confused? (Trivially, even a single such “leftist idiot”, even if – or especially if – in a loony bin, would give the post in question a *syntactic * (or “analytic”) validity, but no synthetic value. It appears this is the entirety of the point you’re making in the quote above; right, John?)
Unfortunately I don’t even think that will work. All that will happen is that the well off will close a bunch of plants and fire a bunch of people, further depressing wages and exacerbating the inequality.
What really needs to change is the mindset of workers who now basically expect that the best they can get is a raw deal. As long as the subset of workers who are willing to be treated like dirt is sufficient to meet the employment needs, there is no reason for employers to treat them any better. But with the total collapse of unions, the first worker to stick his head up and point out that they are getting a raw deal is the first one to get that head cut off.
It’s almost like that was the plan…
I heard Hedges on NPR a few weeks ago and after 10 minutes of his drivel I became disappointed in Tom Ashbrook for giving him any kind of credibility by having Hedges on his show.
Or the Weather Underground and Black Panthers. These were American terrorist groups that set off more than 1000 bombs in the US during the 1970’s to try to foment revolution. It never happened. Bryan Burrough’s book Days of Rage goes into the history of those times. Eventually the WU and BP moved to other ways to protest because democratic means were more effective than violent demonstrations.
And Tracy Chapman.
Well, not a Hitler, Hitler was a leader of a revolutionary ideology, whereas the American right is more conservative in nature. If you want to compare it to a 1930s dictatorship, more Francoism than Hitlerism. Although since we have an unbroken history of democracy, perhaps De Gaullism would be a more likely outcome.
For a nominal service charge, you can reach utopia tonight. With apologies to Zappa, Lennon, Lenin, and McCartney.
Eh. He was responding to another poster who talked about what people were saying 15 years ago and before, so it’s unclear that he was even referring to Hedges. And of course one could always ask him to clarify. But if makes you feel better to be offended, knock yourself out.
I’ve said since the late 80s, that Americans will accept almost any level of bullshit tossed at us by the government so long as we can continue to buy mini-vans, and visit the local shopping mall on the weekend, and watch stupid TV to discuss at the water cooler of our jobs.
Hm, maybe I should start a conspiracy theory saying that reality TV shows are used by the government to control the populace’s mind.