Does the revolution have to involve shooting? Might not a general strike get it done?
Yes, quite possibly. As was mentioned before, violence is probably counter-productive to lots of revolutionary goals anyways (although Syria seems to have chosen a violent route).
Does that somehow preclude any possibility of fighting it again? I can imagine some Germans in the interwar period saying something like “We already fought that war” and yet, WWII still happened.
I don’t understand why you think the “why” is so important, but I’ve given a half dozen “what-if” scenarios. Pick your favorite / funniest conspiracy theory and that could be the reason. “Why” isn’t the point, nor do I think it’s particularly relevant.
I don’t know why you’re so opposed to this post. It seems directly on point: the question was, What’s the bare minimum it would it take to overthrow the US Government?, and that is, in fact, what would be required: the support of a significant portion of the US military.
I don’t think you’d have to get all that support before you start, though. If you had an administration/government that was a lot less popular than, say, Obama’s (less popular with conservative/military types, at least, so that you had a Tea-Party-On-Steroids situation), I can imagine a relatively small group getting off to a good start and thereby convincing a larger group to go along with it. That’s what the leaders of the July 20th plot were counting on, for instance, and I don’t think it was inevitable that they were going to fail.
You also wouldn’t want to explicitly portray your actions as a revolution. If you tell all the troops under your command “ok, you’re all rebels now,” you’ll lose most of them. But if you maintain a plausible excuse (“quelling the recent disturbances”), I think you’d stand a good chance of maintaining the loyalty of your troops.
Yes it would, because it gives us a historical context from which to base current situations, and judge an appropriate course of action before we go guns ablazing into things. Unless, of course you have a definitive scenario that drives the vast majority of the population into open revolt.
You are flat wrong. “Why” drives everything, and you refuse to accept this. “Why” sets the initial ends, which drives the means to those (or later) ends.
Tripler
Half a dozen ‘what-ifs’ don’t carry enough weight to sustain your momentum.
My daughter is a democrat and her husband is a republican. There are lots of families like us and I just don’t see us taking up arms against each other.
And we unite when we are attacked. I think 911 showed that.
I just don’t see it happening. Thankfully.
People outside the U.S. have difficulty seeing the differences between Dems and GOP – even with the Tea Party in the mix. They are like two sides of the same coin, and they share power in the U.S. very amicably – including using various devices to keep other parties ot the the system. If there ever were a revolution in the U.S. – and that is highly improbable for the foreseeable future – it will come from outside the Dem/GOP alliance. It would be something like the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street, but keeping well clear of the currently governing parties.
I really think most of you are misreading this. The emphasis on ‘why’ is as pointless as asking ‘why Star Destroyer vs Enterprise’? You guys appear to be fighting the hypothetical for personal or political reasons.
Instead, rather - and this is me as a poster, not a moderator - enjoy it and use it as a thought experiment.
Try this, for each of you, come up with these things:
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A reason you would have been made CinC of the Glorious Revolution. It could be an overthrow of entrenched Wall Street interests or it could be the seizure of guns or it could be that Bloomberg is now POTUS and has decided no one can drink Appletinis anymore as they’re unhealthy. The WHY doesn’t matter except in how it impacts YOUR scenario.
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How you would develop your base of support. How to get the message out without getting stomped.
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The impact of that support and how it would grow to revolution. Armed revolution? General strikes? Passive resistance? What?
Most likely answer to any of these is, “The NSA notices you and you get swatted like the bug you are.” But that doesn’t make the speculation less interesting.
Hell, when I was a pissed off kid in school - going back to junior high - I used to think ‘Man, there’s schools everywhere. If I could just persuade the school kids across the country to rebel we’d have this place all Logan’s Run in no time.’
Don’t fight it, enjoy it. Develop it. I guarantee you there’s something in government that you dislike. Make that what you rebel against. But for a lot of you fighting this, I see you more as disagreeing with HurricaneDitka rather than the thread. That’s bringing past history and arguments into a new thread. And that’s a shame.
Isn’t this true of the how people outside almost any democracy might regard the two strongest parties there? How much difference do people outside India perceive between the Congress party and BJP?
Also, the statement of yours I quote sounds like what someone on the left might be likely to think, especially in light of Wikileaks and Snowden. That doesn’t quite equate to “people outside the U.S.” I can’t see the average newspaper-reading Canadian or British Tory, or even the average Blairite, having difficulty seeing a difference between the two major US parties.
Why not? That leaves 300 million+ who are unaffiliated with the revolution, and oppose it. The money and the firepower is on the establishment’s side. Government operations would change, sure, but they wouldn’t end.
You might want to read up on Colombia in the early 80s through early 90s, when Pablo Escobar’s billion-dollar drug cartel was murdering hundreds of policemen, bribing thousands more, assassinated a presidential candidate, had the Supreme Court raided and judges killed, took down an airliner, and set off numerous car bombs, and declared “total and absolute war” on the Colombian government. The cartel had an entire region of the country that was loyal to it, and enjoyed the support of communist guerrillas. The government was unpopular, especially amongst the lower classes.
The cartel still lost. The government didn’t fall.
On the contrary, I’m fighting the hypothetical because of its lack of political reasons. The OP asked for potential solutions to a very finite political activity. A revolution, as chaotic as it could be, does have necessary steps to go through, as determined by the goals of the powers behind its momentum. Asking for a little definition would help narrow down some of the arguments on how to get things done. I can solve problems, but I can’t invent a problem and find its solution objectively.
Of course I’m disagreeing with him. He continues to rely on hypotheticals as alternatives or “what-ifs” which aren’t really logically forwarding a discussion. I don’t know the guy, haven’t had any other correspondence with him, and have no argument with him outside of this thread. It ain’t personal, his proposal is just floating around in circles. Who’s bringing past history in?
Tripler
The original question needs further definition.
With this attitude, you can forget getting anywhere as a revolutionary. The government is not going to get overthrown except if people think their lives under the old regime are so circumscribed as to be worthless unless the existing order is overturned. In other words, you must love death as much as your opponents love life.
I suspect that the current US economic level is too high for people – even you – to be willing to give it all up for the sake of the revolution. Maybe your first task is to figure out how to decrease our GDP by, oh, say, 75 percent.
Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had some of the right ideas in terms of what it takes to overthrow the US government. They just, fortunately, lacked needed tools. I think that a couple dozen suitcase nuclear bombs, used alternately for purposes of mass death and as threats, would have worked.
It may be objected that the revolutionary regime would have been the near opposite of what bin Laden wanted. But it’s normal that revolutions don’t work out anywhere near the way those who started them envisioned.
Violent overthrow of the federal government is a non starter in the US.
The most fundamental thing our federal government does is redistribute wealth. This redistribution is imperfect, but there’s a lot of total wealth, so even the poor are not actually poor…
We’ve now become addicted to distributing the wealth of future generations by borrowing from them. As a consequence of this largesse, nearly everyone in this country–rich and poor–gets back from the feds more than they pay in.
What’s to kill for in that system? The broad masses don’t give a crap about ideology if they generally feel like they are getting more than they paid in, in any system. And anyway, generally our ideology is live and let live.
I don’t think the federal government will last more than about 25 more years–you can’t borrow forever–so it will collapse on its own. But the dissolution will be relatively peaceful. Chaotic, but peaceful. At some point fiscally sound states will begin to withdraw because its so fiscally unsound to participate in the federal system. And no one will feel like shooting their neighbor over it.
For the hypothetical, is it sufficient to take over 50% of the population OR 50% of the territory, or must the takeover cover 50% of the population AND 50% of the territory? The reason I raise this question is that the US has a lot of wide-open areas that have very low density. Say our hypothetical revolutionaries take over all of Wyoming and Montana, all of Alaska except the Juneau metro area, and major swaths of rural Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. Would that be sufficient? That could add up to 50% of the land area but wouldn’t be anywhere near half the population.
I agree with the OP and Jonathan Chance above. This is an interesting hypothetical that makes one think about people and technology and try to imagine a scenario and guess how it might play out. The point isn’t to start a violent revolution or determine whether such revolution is likely. I agree that it is not.
If you’re having trouble separating the hypothetical with real politics, imagine you are writing a novel set in 2015 after certain events of your choosing have transpired. Maybe there’s been a terrible famine in California and Smith and Wesson have introduced a cheap handheld disintegration ray gun that is sweeping the gun-nut market. Maybe a native-born cult has gained large numbers of followers in East Coast cities and is causing violent family and neighborhood conflict that is spilling over into politics. Maybe Iran is offering a ten million dollar bounty and a lifetime supply of whirled peas for each bona-fide American LEO or soldier corpse delivered to their embassy.
The right-wing version:
Paul Ryan decides to run for President in 2016 and due to continuing problems with Obamacare and reduced turnout from Democratic demographics due to Obama proposing “entitlement reform” wins the election. The Republicans have in addition gained a majority in the Senate and retained one in the House thanks to the 2014 and 2016 midterms. President Ryan then proceeds to voucherize Medicare, block-grant Medicaid, privatize Social Security, massively cut non-military discretionary spending, and slash taxes (eliminating several categories such as the estate tax ). This causes the United States to slide into another recession along with increasing the national debt and deficit and causing mass unemployment.
Thanks to voter registration laws, the Republicans retain majorities in the 2018 midterms and prepare themselves for 2020. By 2020, they have passed further electoral “reform” which allocates electoral votes on the basis of Congressional Districts further increasing GOP majorities and their control of state legislatures enables them to gerrymander House seats further. As a result in the 2020 Presidential Election, Ryan easily defeats Elizabeth Warren in the electoral college despite narrowly losing the popular vote. This causes serious unrest with the country at nearly 20% unemployment which is bloodily suppressed.
Various politicians and union leaders decide that only a revolution can end this cycle. They focus their efforts at persuading police unions and the military both of which will be necessary in seizing power and which are traditionally conservative-leaning. Due to an increasingly minority dominated armed forces (for example a form of immigration reform passed allowing those who served in the military to become US citizens), this is not as difficult as before. On May Day in 2022, the Revolution begins, with the proclamation of a general strike after another round of spending cuts are announced. This swiftly shuts down the public services in most major metropolitan areas and is quickly followed by the police seizing major media centres along with public utilities. Meanwhile the enlisted military and junior officers turn on their commanders and take them into custody while aiding the police in their seizure of control. Within hours, thousands of Republican politicians, activists, media personalities, and businessmen are taken into custody. The Second American Republic (or Third arguably depending on one’s view of the Articles of Confederation) is proclaimed at Burlington, Vermont by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren
The Washington DC area itself is seized by troops and most of President Ryan’s Cabinet are also arrested. However President Ryan himself along with loyalist elements of the military proclaims himself the legitimate President at Colorado Springs. A brief stalemate prevails, but the Great Mutiny spreads even into loyalist areas and forces President Ryan to surrender.
The art of distancing oneself from a horrifying hypothetical is not something to be taken lightly. Because if you do, you end up looking, well, horrifying.
Yes. Because what you’re describing is not a once-every-few-years terrorist attack, it is a state of war. It’s the difference between how the police react to a single crazed gunman trying to break into the white house and the events in, say, “White House Down”. Tens of thousands of severe terror attacks? That’s an act of war, and while we have not had war on American soil in a long time, do you really think even for a moment that the government would hesitate to call in the standard wartime procedures (martial law, ramped-up domestic spying, mobilization of reserves, heightened security, all of which would seriously hamper such attempts)? Or that the country would not stand behind them given the nature and severity of the actions taken? No, if anything, this would GALVANIZE the existing government. We saw this in 2001, where Bush’s approval ratings shot up to unprecedented heights after 9/11. And then there’s the logistics. You think the government doesn’t notice when people procure a shitload of explosives? Here, you’re talking about tens of thousands of people? No fucking way the government wouldn’t notice that!
You don’t need to do that - it has been proposed that you could place something like 100 normal bombs in crucial places on the national power grid and shut down all power to the country in a single shot. Combine that with convincing the military to go along with you in a martial law situation, control of at least Fox news and what sounds like a reasonable ‘recovery program’ and you could pull it off. Bonus points for leaving faked evidence of some terrorist plot to get the population all pulling together like what happened right after 9/11 and it would be a done deal - it would probably be difficult to keep people from demanding we bomb Afghanistan back into the stone age again [if it were somehow linked to a specific Afghan terrorist group. Pick the group of your choice - Myanmar if you really like.]
Honestly, if you had the military all lined up, planting the bombs would be pretty simple, deciding which group to fake evidence on would be fairly easy, and the population of the US is easy to sway with actual terrorist activity [or perceived activity] because we simply do not have the same history of being invaded and having terrorist activity striking our homeland the same way that Spain has with its Basques, or Italy with its various factions. We really have an odd history of being a pretty unified bunch. The right group probably could have managed it immediately post 9/11.
Expanding on the scenario I previously suggested,
The key is flipping the military. In order to have a successful revolution without the military, you would need to have an insurgency larger than the military itself, violating the OP’s principal of a minimum number of people. But converting the military into an anti-goverment group won’t be easy as they’re entire reason for being is to protect the US governments interests.
In order for a small insurgency to succeed it would need to be a seed that converts the majority of the rest of the population and the military along with it to the cause of over throwing the government. This is only going to happen if they are seen as the victims rather than the aggressors. A small insurgency blowing stuff up, isn’t going to do it. As others have said when faced with real adversity Americans by and large unite and become even more patriotic. Those against the government will need to be seen as martyrs for the cause, while the government is viewed as the bad guys.
Even if we get everyone agreeing that the government should be overthrown, you will need to eliminate the easy ways of doing so. If the people feel that they can just vote the bums out non-violently then they will jump at the chance. Thus we need to make it clear that the US government has changed so completely that this is no longer an option.
So in order for the plan to succeed it will require that the government become totally despotic and then over-react to a suicidal degree. A smart despotic government would probably be able to keep things at a low simmer until they could cement control of the military to the point that it couldn’t be flipped.
So in answer to the OPs question the number required would be on the order of a few hundred, provided that those few hundred included the president, most of both houses of congress, and the supreme court. And they will succeed by making their presence so intolerable that revolution naturally follows.
The trouble is, the type of government that would be vile and oppressive enough to cause the general public to want to revolt would naturally be the type of government that would install strong measures designed to quell any such revolt.