Hanson: Are We in a Revolution?

Today at American Greatness Victor Davis Hanson asks: "Are We in a Revolution and Don't Even Know It?"

Let me answer this: Yes, of course we are. The question is: where are we in the revolutionary cycle?

If you are a devotee of Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution then the question is where are we in the revolutionary cycle? Brinton's stages are:

The Fall of the Old Regime where a regime is discredited and running out of money.

The Rule of the Moderates and Dual Power where moderates are trying to rule but are in conflict with extremists that operate a parallel government.

Reign of Terror and Virtue with extremists purging the world of injustice and sin and vice.

Thermidor with a falling away into normal life, usually featuring a dictator, nationalism, and foreign conquest.

Now Brinton's book featured four revolutions: the English Puritan Revolution, the American, French, and Russian Revolutions.

I'd say we are in something different. But not completely different.

The big difference today, I would say, is that, while Brinton's four revolutions were all about the new middle class -- led by intellectuals -- taking power from a feudal or almost feudal ruling class, we have a different situation.

That's because our ruling class is the middle class led by intellectuals that took power variously in the last three centuries. And if you ask me all the phases identified by Brinton are happening all at once. We have a discredited old regime that looks to be running out of money; we have ostensible moderates like Biden in office but we have a parallel government of activists and "lawfare" operating in parallel and partly with the consent of the ruling class; we have the reign of "woke" terror busily canceling people on social media and purging any backsliders from positions in corporations, education, and media. And we have Donald Trump that our ruling class experiences as a nationalist dictator looking for trouble with China: literally Hitler.

So, our times are different, and the exact framework of revolution will work differently this time.

Now, I would say that it was only in the Bolshevik Revolution that the modern "political formula" was practiced, as invented by Marx. That is, the Bolshevik Revolution was self-consciously an over/under revolution of the educated class allied with the lower class against the middle class, the "bourgeoisie."

Since then all modern ruling classes have operated on this principle. In the US we have an educated class that experiences itself as Allies of Oppressed Peoples fighting against White Oppressors. But I understand its "political formula" as the ruling class using real and imagined victims as cats paws to scratch and mutilate the ordinary middle class: to make the ordinary middle class the "other."

The question is: will the ordinary middle class find the cojones to fight back against the educated ruling class? And can it find a way to do this without a full-scale civil war with the attendant butcher's bill?

Now I say that if you look at US politics over the last half century you see the ordinary middle class being formed into a head of resistance against the educated ruling class again and again. Richard Nixon was elected by a middle class frightened by the Sixties Kids. Reagan was elected by the middle class reacting against the elite incompetence of the Carter "stagflation." The election of Obama was followed immediately by the organic self-organizing Tea Party that the Obama boys harassed with the IRS. And with Trump we had an open populist nationalist running a campaign for the votes of the ordinary middle class.

Obviously this recurring movement of ordinary middle-class Americans could be thrashed and dispersed by our current ruling class, with prejudice, if it got its act together. Or the movement could grow into a nationwide organic movement that would prove to be unstoppable by any ruling class that hesitated to use full Stalinist methods on its opposition.

And if you ask me, anything could happen. On the one hand we have the utter incompetence of the educated ruling class indicated by its failures in foreign policy and economic policy, and its mindless response to the COVID crisis. On the other hand you have the disciplined street thugs of BLM and AntiFa and the whole culture of left-wing activism that controls the conventional wisdom on every issue from race to climate change.

What will happen? Nobody knows. We don't know what happens when the educated ruling class and the ordinary middle class meet in political battle.

In other words, we are making history here. I think that there is a saying that you don't want to be there when history is being made. But I could be wrong.