OK, so where do Washington and Jefferson, for example, fit into that paradigm?
Whereas you aren’t automatically assuming anything about those who hold revolutionary politics. :rolleyes:
Exactly, and yet he still came to the conclusion that capitalism should be overthrown by force. So how does that fit in with your previous assertion that revolutionaries act in complete ignorance of written history?
So you’re saying that Washington was the most violent?
Don’t forget Jefferson. Dude was a homicidal maniac. Or John Adams, with the Sedition Act and all.
A wealthy and organized bourgoisie who is upset that the top levels of the status quo are closed to them. Just like the first time.
Who in the heck would close it off? They’re already up there.
I had lunch with an old professor of mine yesterday and this came up. I said it would happen when the average man wants meat and he has to go shoot it, and when he wants vegetables he has to grow them. Probably sometime between 100 years from now and never, barring unforeseen circumstances like a disease or a meteor that decimates the population.
The American Revolution wasn’t a revolution; it was a rebellion or secession. It wasn’t trying to overthrow the British government, just to break away from it. Same thing with our so-called Civil War, except in that case it didn’t work.
Still, plenty of innocents died during the American Revolution; that happens in any war. But the wholesale, intentional slaughter that has accompanied so many revolutions, such as the French, the Russian, and the Iranian, did not happen here precisely because it was a rebellion rather than a revolution; there was no former government power structure to put down. The Crown loyalists either got out or laid low. There just wasn’t the kind of rage that accompanies a revolution, and America won its independence by making it too expensive for Britain to find it worth continuing - you typically don’t get that outcome with a revolution.
So the simple answer is, Washington and Jefferson don’t fit within that paradigm, nor should they need to.
Please note the use of the word “usually”, and try to take into account
Czechoslovakia “came apart peacefully” in 1993. Though perhaps that is not the kind of thing you’re talking about.
England’s Glorious Revolution was bloodless – but the winners had to fight later to keep it.
Also, history teems with examples of nation-states that have been conquered or destroyed from the outside. Revolution is not inevitable. Aside from all the examples in Eurasia, look at the Native American nations. They were all pretty much destroyed from the outside, by disease, conquest, and assimilation. It wasn’t peaceful, but it wasn’t a revolution either.
The US may eventually fall to revolution. It may be conquered. Or it may just ultimately be rendered irrelevant, if we ever reach a point where the world is in effect a single nation. The only certainty is that eventually, it will not exist anymore. But eventually could mean centuries or millenia from now. It could also mean next week, but I wouldn’t put any money on it.
Exactly. Over the past 70 years or so, the American upper-middle and upper classes have gradually negotiated a merger into a single, culturally homogeneous white overclass while nobody (including themselves!) was watching. From The Next American Nation, by Michael Lind:
N.B.: Barack Hussein Obama has won himself the highest office in the American institutional elite. That does not, in and of itself, threaten the existence nor the power of the white overclass. A real revolution would.
Nor is there any significant threat American society will break up along regional lines, like the Balkans. From the same book:
And Obama’s election portends no serious threat to that, either. It is a revolutionary development – but only in the sense FDR’s election in 1932 was revolutionary.
http://carnival-of-anarchy.blogspot.com/2008/01/smedley-butler-and-business-plot.html
In1933 there was a plot to take over the government by the business leaders. How serious a plot, can be debated .
In 1967 there were riots in the streets. I was in a Detroit suburb and cops and national guard troops with rifles forcibly closed everything down. That was fueled by the ignoring of the blacks problems.
Our economy is on a huge downslope. At what point does it get serious enough to act as an organizing agent. All we have to do is toss more and more middleclass people in the street to find out.
Irving Kristol, in his essay, “The American Revolution as a Successful Revolution,” once expressed disagreement with that, pointing out that while Washington was engaging the Redcoats, there was simultaneously a real and partially successful (and, in Kristol’s views at that time, highly desirable) grassroots class struggle and social revolution going on within the colonial population.
He may have changed his views since then.
The American Revolution was a rebellion a secession and a revolution. The reason it was a revolution is because it changed the way people govern themselves in a profound way.
That’s right. So there won’t be one. All governmental systems are always aristocracies because some people are smarter than others. Illiterate peasants don’t make successful revolutionaries in the modern era.
The guys who started out on top in the colonies ended up on top in the United States. Almost all of the “founders” were elites to begin with, educationally if not financially. I’ve often wondered how much our rebellion was initially motivated by picque on the part of elite colonials who visited England and were treated as provincial bumpkins.
Wrt your earlier post, I don’t think there’s an overclass so much as a poor and uneducated underclass, what I call the hereditary poor. If your parents are both poor and uneducated, and particularly if you also live in a neighborhood where these conditions prevail, the chances of your being anything but poor and uneducated yourself are very small. That said, there’s also certainly a group of people who, by their social contacts, virtually ensure the success of their children; the Bush sons are certainly strong examples of this. But the wealth of one generation can largely buy into that class for the next; money buys access and favor regardless of ancestry, race, religion, or geography, because in our society, wealth is a signifier of worth - if so and so is rich, s/he must be worth talking to, even if they’re tacky (i.e. don’t share the upper class tastes and accent as outlined by Lind). Their children will usually acquire those upper class tastes and accent, but probably won’t change their religion or name and certainly won’t change their ancestry. This is a change from the first half of the twentieth century (when it was not uncommon to change name and/or religion for success-driven reasons), but then, so is the inclusion of European Jews and the children of turn of the century immigrants.
But revolution is unlikely to come from the hereditary poor, although rioting can, and any revolution would recruit its cannon fodder from this group. Since upward mobility is quite possible for anyone who gets an education or makes serious money, revolt is unlikely until and unless people who have the potential for wealth or status start feeling that their options are closed off. As others have mentioned, this is most likely if we see a major economic depression. The hereditary poor, though they tend to feel their options are closed off, seem to have coped not by revolution, but by creating a cannabalistic shadow society in which money and, more importantly, status can be acquired by various illegal activities, such as drug sales and gang-warfare. The election of Barack Obama may bring some of the next generation back into the mainstream, as they realize that the biracial son of a single mother on welfare can nonetheless make it to the top. But I don’t think this makes revolution more likely; if anything, it makes it less likely. The better people view their chances for success within a society, the less likely it is that they will revolt against that society. Again, the American Revolution doesn’t qualify, as it was a breakaway, rather than a true revolution.
The American Revolution certainly was revolutionary in that respect, but it was not a revolution. No one was overthrown, nor was there an attempt to overthrow anyone.
The idea that the best and the brightest are in charge is an illusion. The government is run by a group of people who set up ways to exclude the unwashed masses. Ivy League schools admit the carefully selected along with the legacies who get to run the government. They populate the upper echelons of our government . Do you really believe other colleges are graduating lesser students?
If you were around back in the black power days ,you would have seen some very bright organizers who learned about life on the streets and in jail. There are some very bright people who live a life of limited opportunity ,who can rally the people if the circumstances demand it.
People don’t need to be overthrown in order for a revolution to occur. Systems can be overthrown and it’s still just as revolutionary. The American Revolution overthrew a system in which, for example, the head of state was hereditary and not democratically elected and in which there was a state-supported religion. For the times, those measures were drastically revolutionary and the overthrow of that system constituted a revolution.
I took a fairly careful look at the excerpt you quoted from Lind, BG, and I have to say he’s got no grasp of what constitutes class in this country. Class isn’t a set of lifestyle choices and job opportunities. Where does he think those old planters in Virginia who go hunting with the hounds got their family money in the first place? Here’s a hint: that source of income dried up rather quickly between 1863 and 1865. Simply put, class is indeed economic function - based on whether your income is drawn from your own ability to perform work or from others’.
If you’re using revolution in the same sense as “The Technology Revolution,” then this may be true (although I can make a pretty good case for the fact that England was by then mostly parliamentary, and freedom of religion was already pretty much in place in the colonies - John Locke had written almost a hundred years earlier, and the ideas weren’t new). But in the military sense, a revolution is a war intended to overthrow and replace the current government, whether or not it is successful.
Oh, both exist – as do several classes between them.