In Politics You Never Admit You Were Wrong

For years I've used Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution as a way of understanding politics, that when things go wrong, the activists amp it up and start canceling their opponents: Reign of Terror.

But I can see, back when I started writing about reigns of terror, that I didn't have the key insight that drives political activists to destroy the opposition.

The problem with politics is that you can never admit you were wrong. Or made a mistake. Or shoulder the blame.

Obviously, this is crazy. Human life, every human life, is one mistake after the next. Successful people, happy people, are the kind that realize that "Houston we have a problem" and work like mad to solve the problem.

If fixing mistakes is one of the key skills for a happy and successful life, why don't politicians admit their mistakes?

I think it is because politics is always about fighting an enemy. As in: Nazi Carl Schmitt, that the political is the friend - enemy distinction. As in: Curtis Yarvin, that there is no politics without an enemy. 

Think of it.

• If you've been leading the fight to an enemy for years, can you turn around and say: wow, this enemy is not as bad as we thought?
  
  
• Can you admit that your strategy for fighting the enemy was all wrong, and so now it's back to square one?
  
  
• Can you admit as President Roosevelt in December 1941 that you screwed up the intelligence and the Japanese were able to cruise a force half way across the Pacific to bomb Pearl Harbor?

Obviously not. 

If you admit any of these things, then there is only one thing to do, and that is to resign. So the only way to hang onto your political leadership is never to admit being wrong. And the political system accommodates this. After a couple of presidential terms, the voters typically decide it is Time for a Change. What they are really saying is: you promised Heaven on Earth, you failed to deliver, and so you are outta here.

This approach allows us to understand the present moment.

• If you have spent the last two years pushing mandatory masks and mandatory vaccinations and the science starts to show that you were wrong, then you have a bit of a problem.
  
  
• If you have been pushing entitlement programs for the last century and the entitlement programs are broke, then maybe your brilliant plan was not o brilliant.
  
  
• If you have been enacting welfare programs and the result is that lower-class men don't work much and lower-class women don't marry much, and the young men of these families are violent criminals and only aspire to rapping, then maybe you have a problem.
  
  
• If you passed civil rights laws half a century ago, and you elected the First Black President fifteen years ago, and blacks are still poor and criminal and violent, then maybe you have a problem.

Do you see the point? The last thing that any politicians does is admit he screwed up. The last thing that any ruling class does is admit that its programs and policies were and are a disaster. 

Because once you admit your mistake, there is only one thing to do, and that is to resign.

• Would any politician of your acquaintance admit a mistake and resign?
  
  
• Would our educated ruling class ever admit a mistake and resign?

There is a reason for this, and I use Nicholas Wade and his Before the Dawn to illustrate it. Male chimps defend the troop's territory from other male chimps. But when there are no more male chimps left, then the troop ceases to exist and the females are absorbed into another troop. Same thing with human hunter-gatherer bands.

So, for males, politics -- the pursuit of the enemy -- really is a matter of life and death, or at least status vs. oblivion.

But what do humans do when they are oppressed by rulers that are screwing everything up? There seem to be several alternatives.

1. Exhaustion. That's how most reigns of terror and great purges end.
2. Bouncy castles. Truckers get together and set up inflatable castles in the capital city.
3. Scapegoat. We all come together and select a scapegoat and make them responsible for everything. As in "time for a change" elections.
4. Revolution. The ruling class is ejected and replaced by a new one.

I sure would like it if our problems could be solved by something less than bloody revolution.

But here is a new concept: Any problem that is less than life-or-death shouldn't be the responsibility of politicians and politics. Because almost every human activity is likely to go wrong and require people to get together and fix it. It needs people with a "Houston we have a problem" attitude.

And politics is the one human activity where you can never admit you were wrong and then get together and fix it.

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.

The Folly of the All-powerful Intelligence Community

In his notion of the Fourth Branch of Government, Sundance proposes that ever since 9/11 -- and accelerated under Obama -- the United States has come to be ruled by the Intelligence Community -- FBIs, CIAs, NSAs, -- and their bureaucratic appendages and combinations. It was of course the intelligence community that was front and center in the 5-year Deep State war on Trump.

Of course, this game is an old game, pursued by rulers all over the world and all through history, the lust to keep an eye on dangerous elements in society and keep any opposition subdued and safe: down to a dull roar.

And now we have Nancy Pelosi's secret police, an expanded Capitol Police force, that will have offices in various cities "with the first field offices located in California and Florida."

Of course, we all know that secret police and shadowy intelligence agencies are a monstrosity, as proved by the headline secret police agencies of the 20th century, the Cheka/NKVD/MVD/KGB of Soviet Russia. The Gestapo of Nazi Germany. And I don't even know what the secret police in China is called.

But I think that secret police are stupid. And a secret police or ramped up intelligence agencies are a "tell" that the ruling class isn't really legitimate and really doesn't get it.

But, of course, before the illegitimate regime and its secret police exit stage left, there is always the butcher's bill. And beyond the butcher's bill, the millions of lives for whom the "authoritarian government" has Made Things Worse.

In reading Sundance's piece, we are to understand that the Obama administration wanted more political push for its "fundamental transformation" agenda. So it had no problem siccing its gumshoes on the Tea Party in 2010. But, you may remember, in 2010 the Republicans still gained an extraordinary 64 seats in the House of Representatives. Good work Barack!

So, in the Trump years we had an unprecedented use of the intelligence community to harass candidate Trump and later President Trump. And, you can say, look at the results! They got rid of Trump! Yay! But first, what a bunch of second-raters, 

the new woke FBI of hard noses like James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Kevin Clinesmith, and Jim Baker

as Victor Davis Hanson points out. Yeah, that's what you call a First Team. And then Robert Mueller.

The Mueller bully team collapsed and found no collusion with the Russians, despite a 22-month, nearly $40 million blank check... And Mueller embarrassed himself with befuddled congressional testimony, in which he was either unaware of or lied about Fusion GPS and the Christopher Steele dossier—the seed and fertilizer of the entire Russian “blockbuster” collusion hoax and hence his own investigation. 

Maybe Our Nance's Capitol Police is brighter and smarter and meaner than the Keystone Kops of the Get Trump team. But I doubt it. I think I had my "aha" moment on this watching the 2020 Russian movie Dear Comrades! about a strike in the Soviet Union in 1962. There's a KGB officer in the movie. And it seems to me that his #1 concern is keeping his record clean at the office and not making a false step. He is a mouse and so are all the other local political figures.

Oh, I don't think that the stepped-up intelligence community and Nancy's Specials will be completely useless. I expect they will help extend the life of our current old and tired ruling class for a few years. And they will manage to wreck the lives of numerous ordinary people who dare to challenge the ruling-class narrative and a few elite people that prove to be a nuisance the way that Trump did.

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida! That means you!

My belief, that Government is Force and that is all, has been strengthened by re-reading Crane Brinton's The Anatomy of Revolution, start here. At the end of it all, he asks: did the revolution -- in England, in America, in France, in Russia -- really achieve fundamental change to the country in question? Not so much. After it was all over, England was still England, America was still America, France still France, and Russia still Russia.

If you want proof, read Philosopher Putin's review of Russian and Ukrainian history. You'd almost think the Bolshevik Soviet era was just an embarrassing hiccup in the glorious arc of Russian history.

The point is, Brinton writes, that human society is a lot more complex and a lot more difficult to change than the average intellectual and politician and revolutionary thinks. The wise man thinks of human culture in terms of geology and glaciers. Slow, but relentless.

And the bottom line is that nobody knows what the future holds. Whatever your glorious vision of freedom and liberty and justice and equity may be, the future will probably make mincemeat of it, just as your political gumshoes make mincemeat of a lot of ordinary people that just want to live their ordinary lives without being put in the meat grinder of politics.

Ignoring Supreme Court: It's OK When We Do It

I get why the Biden administration is extending the rent moratorium. Their lefty activist pals are all in a twist on the injustice of making oppressed peoples pay rent.The Noive! What is the point of an ally if he/she/xir can't shove it on the white oppressor landlords on behalf of the oppressed peoples?

But I'd say, with all my years of wisdom and experience, that the sooner you Bidenoids get the economy back to normal, with no stimmy checks, no extended unemployment benefits, no rent moratoriums, no mortgage pauses, no mega-trillion handout bills, the better it will be for you in 2022 and 2024.

Frankly, I am sitting here "literally shaking" my head at what I consider the serial stupidities of the Biden administration. For me it starts with this chart from my ugovernmentspending.com.

To my way of thinking total government spending, federal, state, and local, has been about 35 percent of GDP since 1980.

Let me be clear about this. That means that 35 percent of the national GDP is decided By Force. I think that is wrong; I think it is unjust, and I think that trying to increase it, as the Bidenoids are proposing to do, and at least attempt major tax increases, is going to end in tears, in part in Democeratic circles, and in part among the voters on the receiving end of this injustice. And look at the chart: in the peak of COVID-ology governments in the US were spending 45 percent of GDP. Almost as much as in World War II. 

I think that if Democrats think they are going to boost spending above the 35, 36 percent of GDP they are going to reap the whirlwind. Don't know quite how, but I think that the 35 percent GDP number is not an accident; it represents the correlation of political forces over the last 40 years. There is no broad-based warrant for a surge in spending. Except for Democratic lefty activist groups.

Obviously in this moment our Democratic friends are trying to push through a major increase in spending. That they imagine will be permanent. I suspect that they will live to regret it.

I've been re-reading Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution, and one of his takes is that revolution and counter-revolution exacts a terrible toll on ordinary people, through the disorganization of the economy by the rip-tides of politics.

My judgement about the last 18 months of COVID-ology is that it represents something getting close to a revolutionary disruption. The result will be that the top 25 percent of Americans will do fine; the middle half will do OK, and the bottom 30 percent is having their lives totally disrupted, and many of them are going to be screwed for the rest of their lives in drugs, despair, and homelessness.

And I expect that there will be major political disruptions that nobody will have seen coming.

The whole point of the Era of the Educated Ruling Class is the conceit in the Allies narrative, that "we" are the allies of the working class/oppressed peoples against the rich/white oppressors.

But I say that the educated ruling class has Made Things Worse. It made things worse for the white working class that is now "dying of despair;" it has made things worse for women, that have been disrupted from modesty, from marriage, and from children and neighborhood social works; it has made things worse for blacks, who are leading the nation in murders of and by blacks; it is making things worse for marginal people of all kinds: people with marginal job skills, marginal social skills, marginal common sense.

And now the Biden administration is defying the United States Supreme Court on the rent moratorium.

You don't wanna do that, Bidenoids. You'll regret it.

Peggy Noonan Always Echoes "Respectable" Elite Opinion

Last Saturday, so I understand, Peggy Noonan wrote a piece writing off Donald Trump as "crazy, dishonest, and incompetent" according to Conrad Black.

I have always valued Peggy Noonan as a important meter telling us what "respectable" elite opinion is saying right now.

And yes, I get that right now "respectable" elite opinion wants to put Donald Trump (and the questionable election that you are not allowed to question) out of sight and out of mind. But in fact, as Black writes, Trump's achievements were considerable:

The near elimination of illegal immigration and of unemployment and the sharply rising incomes in low-income ethnic minority areas, reduced taxes, the identification in sober terms of the Chinese challenge, the elimination of oil imports, the extermination of ISIS, shaping up of NATO, the Abraham Accords in the Middle East, and the pressure on Iran and de-escalation of the confrontation with North Korea[.]

Actually, says Black, Never-Trumpers like Noonan got it wrong all along:

they were useful idiots for the Democrats and must now wear their responsibility for the probably dishonest election of the most incompetent administration in American history.  

I think the question is rather whether we are seeing a basic realignment of American politics that puts the ordinary middle class at the center of politics, as various aborted movements suggest, from Nixon's Silent Majority to the Reagan Democrats to the Gingrich Contract with America to the Tea Party to the Trump Car Parades.

Or whether we are seeing a totalitarian educated elite slowing cinching down its domination until nothing moves, as suggested by the Zman. For, he says, good decent people that believe in compromise, the faith in due process, are always at the mercy of the true believers.

As long as people are willing to accept “well we have to respect the election results” as an excuse for not opposing evil, there is no escaping the gathering darkness. It is only when the opponents of radicalism commit to its utter destruction through any means necessary that the tides of war will change. 

Of course that is the lesson of Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution. The radicals won the revolution because they didn't believe in due process. They believed in the truth of their ideology. Of course, eventually almost every revolution returns to normalcy, as with Charles II after Cromwell, Napoleon after the Reign of Terror, and Khrushchev after Stalin.

But then there is the notion of God's Fifth Column, a book by William Gerhardie, discussed by William S. Lind.

His theory was that, just at the point where everyone who was anyone agreed events would go in a certain direction, they instead headed off on a wild, wholly unpredicted tangent.

Back in 1914 nobody thought that the nations of Europe would destroy themselves in a Great War. Right now nobody except crazy conspiracy theorists thinks that the current regime in the US is going anywhere but onward.

Why do we get surprised by history? Lind thinks it is because anyone in the prediction business has to predict a continuation of things as they are. Anything big departure is too crazy to consider in respectable circles.

Which gets back to Stein's Law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."

But the only question is: When? Peggy Noonan will tell us. After it happens.

Because it stands to reason that "most incompetent administration in American history" is not going to end well.

Bidenomics and Trash Pickup

All this week Lady Marjorie has been hassling the Department of Utilities of the City of Seattle.

The garbage truck missed our trash bin on Monday, our usual pickup day. So Lady Marjorie called the hot-line to report a missed pickup. The protocol is that the garbage contractor, Waste Management, picks up the bin on the next day.

But they didn't pick up the garbage on Tuesday. So Lady Marjorie reported the failure to pick up on the missed pickup hotline.

Then funny things started happening. She got an email from Utilities with a photo of a garbage can, saying the garbage had been picked up. But the URL on the photo was dated 2019. And the background was all wrong. Then we were told that the garbage can was in the wrong place; in fact is was 3 feet from the curb, below the required maximum of 4 feet from the curb.

But they didn't pick up the garbage on Wednesday. So Lady Marjorie reported the failure to pick up on the missed pickup hotline. Too late! We were at a friend's in the early evening, and missed the reporting deadline! OMG!

So Lady Marjorie went into overdrive demanding to speak to supervisors and bureaucratic bigshots, who were gradually unearthed from their meetings.

I happened to answer one of the returned calls. Guess what the problem is.

Waste Management can't keep their garbage truck drivers. Ever since the beginning of COVID they have been quitting. The result is, of course, that inexperienced drivers are going out on the routes, and they miss some of the cans.

Golly, President Biden, Chief Insurrection Inquisitor Nancy Pelosi and all the ships at sea. I wonder if that is telling us something? I wonder if it is telling us that the current unemployment bonuses -- and whatever else is going -- means that for a lot of lower-paid workers it's a better proposition to stay home and collect a check rather than go back to work. You think?

Hey, we all know about this, because just about every retail business in the land has a help-wanted sign out front.

Golly, President Biden, Chief Insurrection Inquisitor Nancy Pelosi and all the ships at sea. I wonder if that is telling us something?

I wonder if it is telling us that unless you guys get a clue and stop the unemployment bonuses, and stop the rental moratorium, and stop the mortgage moratorium and let the marketplace right itself, you are going to put the Titanic right on that economic iceberg and all hell will break loose.

Our beloved leaders have been raised by an ideological system that praises them for attending to marginalized peoples and giving them privileges and handouts. Because discrimination, because slavery. 

But, in my view, all of the big government programs of the last century are just lipstick on a pig. When you clean off the lipstick what you are left with is simple loot and plunder.

So if you are a wise and cunning politician you know that everything is a lie including "and" and "the." You know that it's all baloney, lies that people want to hear, necessary lies to get yourself elected.

And you know that you'd better not go to far. That's what the incandescent George Eliot had her numbskull Mr. Brooke say, over and over again, in Middlemarch. And, as they say in The Secret Garden, She Knows.

I get the feeling that the Biden administration has no clue about this. Or maybe they do know but don't know how to shorten the reins and get their partisan horses back on the bit. We horsemen know that you never know about horses. One fine day your horse will bolt. The measure of your horsemanship is to quieten the horse and bring it back on the bit. Else doth err.

Or maybe the Bidenoids know but only care about whipping up the faithful to vote in the next election. Or maybe they do know but with a dementia president know that they can't rally the nation to do the right thing. No doubt wise heads will be writing books about this in the decades ahead.

In his Anatomy of Revolution Crane Brinton says that the course of revolution starts with an old regime that really can't get its act together. Then the moderates take over in the first shot of revolution. Then the extremists take over.

But which extremists? My extremists or your extremists?

The old regimes discussed in Anatomy of Revolutions were all feudal or post-feudal monarchies. But our old regime is an educated-class oligarchy. So whatever happens in the near future, it will not follow the exact scripts of the English, American, French, and Russian Revolutions.

But meanwhile, President Biden, if you can't make sure that your economic policy makes sure that the trash gets picked up, what in the world are you good for?

The Bigger Problem with Defunding the Police

I've been thinking a lot about what happens downstream of "defund the police."

Obviously one downstream effect is that criminals feel emboldened. And police head for the donut shop.

But there are other things to consider, such as my maxim that if you defund the police then you get vigilantes and gangs.

Why?  Because the whole point of police forces is so you don't have vigilantes and gangs and their rather loosey-goosey attitude towards rules of engagement.

When the police head for the donut shop, then vigilantes and gangs take their place.

The vigilantes show up in middle-class areas; the gangs in lower-class areas. And I suppose in upper-class areas you get private security: hired guns, darling.

Of course, all this was mere supposition on my part, an educated guess based on years of study and reading -- and the history of the banker William T. Sherman in San Francisco during the era of the "San Francisco Committee of Vigilance." 

That was until I read about the vigilantes of South Africa arising out the the recent riots and looting that were clearly started by real insurrectionists. It started on a Monday with 

small groups of saboteurs entered the malls... [then] literally tens of thousands of otherwise quite ordinary, peaceful people poured into the malls on foot and by car and completed the looting and firing of the shops. 

Then the vigilantes kicked in.

My community’s Whatsapp groups and local news channels kept pace with the mayhem and at mid-afternoon on Monday the expected call went out for all armed citizens to gather at designated points. Our hastily appointed commander advised us that all roads had been cut off by rioters and efforts to raise support from the police, army and local ruling party civic representatives had failed. The State had gone AWOL.

Within 24 hours, a functioning operational command had been set up, barricades were erected at six access points and stickers issued to emergency workers to speed progress. A communication system operated through a mobile app with military efficiency and infrared drones surveyed the surrounding bushland, their operators trying to separate human forms from bushbuck. Pickets guarded mobile phone towers, water points, electrical substations and schools. All of this had been cobbled together in hours by local neighbourhood watch groups, policing forums, private security and businesses.

Wow: drones! Imagine trying to do this with the bureaucrats at the FBI!

Now, here's another angle, from Crane Brinton and The Anatomy of Revolution, putting together the English, American, French, and Russian revolutions.

What is weird is that in all four revolutions, when it came to the first outbreak of violence, the old regime government was caught flat-footed. Each government totally flubbed its response to the provocation. The authorities responded to the violence, of course,

but in each case with a striking lack of success. Those of the ruling class responsible for such responses in all our societies proved signally unable to make adequate use of force.

In the case of the Fall of the Bastille, numerous soldiers actually joined the rioters.

Hmm. Did I not read somewhere that some of the police at the Capitol on January 6 actually let the rioters into the Capitol?

Hey you liberals, lefties, BLMs, AntiFas, House Speakers, Democrats, Pelosi Republicans, devoted activists and all the ships at sea! A word with you.

Is it not possible that, were a real "armed insurrection" by crazed right-wing racist-sexist-homophobes to materialize in this sacred land of activism the police might do a Bartleby, and say they "would rather not" shoot on the insurrectionists? After you chaps have been dumping on them for the last year and more? And sending the poor schmuck stuck with arresting some crazed drug-addled crook to jail?

And whatabout the armed forces, whose generals are busily saluting to the CRT folks and saying to the Bidenoids, "Yes sir, how high?" Do you not realize that the ordinary rank-and-file soldiers from the hills might not in fact obey their wokist officers when the regime chips are down?

Just sayin'.

My point is that the police and the military are doing the dirty work for you politicians and ruling-class swells -- so you don't have to. All they ask is a little respect, and maybe a nod and a wink when they make a mistake in the heat of battle.

Have you liberals, lefties, Democrats, and all the ships at sea ever thought about the strategic consequence of using the police and the military as punching bags so you can strut and fret upon the stage before your wokie supporters?

Maybe it's time you did, before it's too late.

Anatomy of Revolution: Thermidor and Summary

After a revolution reaches the peak of ideological fever, writes Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution the fever breaks, and things return, relatively, to normal. This retreat from frenzy is called "Thermidor" after the fall of Robespierre, the director of the Reign of Terror, in the revolutionary month of Thermidor.

In the English Revolution, Brinton reckons that Thermidor arrived in April 1653 when Cromwell dissolved the Rump parliament and became Protector. Then,

In 1657 Cromwell became Lord Protector, half a king at least, and with the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 the great English Revolution may be said to have ended.

In France the fall of the "incorruptible" Robespierre was brought about in 1793 by a conspiracy among apparently orthodox Jacobins that were involved in war profiteering and the like. Although the conspirators had not intended to end the Terror, the public reaction communicated to the government that the ordinary people were done with it, and the Terror slowly subsided through the Convention and the Directory, until Bonaparte's coup d'état in November 1799. 

In the Russian Revolution, Thermidor is more complex. The New Economic Policy of 1921 certainly counts as a relaxation in revolutionary frenzy, but Lenin's death in 1924 led to a rivalry between Stalin and Trotsky and a revival of revolutionary tension. But the enforcement of Five Year Plans and the Great Purge in the 1930s count not as revolutionary but as the normal acts of tyrannous rulers.

The striking commonality in the post Thermidorean period is that the establishment of the monarchical rule of a tyrant.-- even Washington was regarded as a tyrant by some -- should be regarded as normal. 

[W]hen "the "silken threads" of habit, tradition, legality are broken, men must be held together by the "iron chains" of dictatorship. 

Thus the frenzy of terror is replaced by the more reliable rule of an uncontested ruler that inherits the revolution.

As time goes on, the pressures of the Terror applied to ordinary men are relaxed: the special tribunals give place to more regular ones, the revolutionary police are absorbed into the regular police... and the block, guillotine or firing squad are reserved for more dramatic criminals.

Ordinary people can get on with their ordinary lives, and slowly the politically proscribed are amnestied, or are allowed to return, and even allowed back into public life. The new governing class tend to be "a very miscellaneous lot," but they slowly get the country some sort of normalcy, "once more working."

However, Thermidor does not mean a return to economic normalcy.

One of the most striking uniformities... notably in France and Russia, but to a certain extent in the England of the 1650's and the America of the Articles of Confederation, there was more widespread economic suffering, especially among the poorest classes, than during the Terror, or during the last years of the old regime.

Another thing: the messianic universalism of the revolution and the Terror gets replaced by ordinary nationalism, not excluding a little ordinary war and conquest.

Thermidor also means the rehabilitation of the old church. In England, France, and Russia the established church was cruelly persecuted by the revolutionaries. But in the reaction, the persecutions were relaxed, and the old religion allowed to resume its place in the national culture.

Thermidor meant a return to pleasure, especially in England and France. That is what "Restoration Comedy" was all about in England.

[I]n the frank return to the pleasure of the senses, to gambling, drinking, dancing, open love-making, to a light and cynical literature, to a frank joy in clothes and other vanities, the two countries present a very close parallel.

Even in Soviet Russia, in the New Economic Policy period, the "Nepmen" were seen as exceptionally vulgar, and prostitution and gambling returned to Moscow. Of course, Russia seems to be an exception -- even in 1964 in the revised edition of Anatomy -- in that it maintained a "continuous pressure" for decades on the individual to conform or else. There are many reasons that can be found to explain this, but Brinton worries about straying into the realm of "prophecy." Still, he suggests,

The ideas, the promises of orthodox Marxism as now embodied in Russia  may well prove in the next few years almost as embarrassing in Russian internal politics as useful in Russian external politics.

Still, despite the inevitable end of revolutionary frenzy, we cannot say that "revolution has changed nothing." Life in all the post-revolution regimes was different. But what did the revolutions change?

Some institutions, some laws, even some humans habits, the clearly changed in very important ways;

 Other institutions, etc., not so much.

In the case of France, it can be said that the revolution ended "the worst abuses, the worst inefficiencies of the old regime, that resulted from a "thousand year struggle between the centripetal forces of the Crown and the centrifugal forces of the feudal nobility." The achievement of government efficiency is the most striking common achievements of the revolutions. And the metric system. It is curious that revolutions all launched in the name of freedom ended up merely promoting the efficiency of government. All the revolutions took property from at least some of the previous upper class, and brought some new men into the ruling class, while throwing out some at least of the old ruling class.

And yet how much did the revolutions change life for the ordinary man? The revolutions had grand plans to change the family, religion, and "personal habits," but after the Thermidor the average man stands "on certain matters about where he stood when the revolution began."

What is loosely called the "Industrial Revolution" had certainly a much greater effect, forcing John [Jones] into a more difficult series of adjustments than did our revolutions.

But the revolutions turned "verbal instruments of revolt" into the new myths and rituals or their societies, a mere recitation of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." 

Finallt Brinton offers the following uniformities in the four revolutions.

First, the revolutions occurred in societies on the upswing, from the discontented who felt restraint from the old order.

Second, there were "bitter class antagonisms" in each of the prerevolutionary societies.

Third, there is the "transfer of allegiance of the intellectuals" over to the revolution.

Fourth, in a rapidly changing society the old-regime "governmental machinery is clearly inefficient... [and] laid an intolerable strain on governmental machinery adapted to simpler, more primitive, conditions."

Fifth, the old ruling class starts to "lose faith in the traditions and habits of their class". It "becomes politically inept."

Thus, Brinton ends with three major conclusions:

First, there seem to be uniformities between the four revolutions; second, that there is a difference between men's deed and words, for in the crisis they may say one thing and do another; third, that it is not easy to change society, and that the vast effort of revolution and terror fails, and that, after the Thermidorean reaction, society is "not greatly altered."

Anatomy of Revolution: Accession of the Extremists and Reign of Terror

Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution now looks at the details of the successful seizure of absolute power by the extremists and its culmination in the Reign of Terror.

The simple reason the extremists succeed is that they acquire control of a parallel, but illegal, government alongside the legal government run by the moderates. It turns out that the moderates are weak, but the extremists are strong.

The extremists are able to bring off their coup d'état because they have steadily managed to oust any and all opposition to them in the organizations they control, such as the New Model Army, the Jacobin clubs, and the various soviets throughout Russia. Typically they learned the techniques needed for this from years of secret organizations, plotting, and underground conspiracy.

And they were few. They were not leaders of a widespread movement, but conspirators in a small minority that advertised themselves as representing the Inevitable Future. And they "were very sure that they were superior to the inert and flabby many." It is also true that, as a revolution proceeds, ordinary people drop out of participation, whether in voting in elections or in keeping their heads above the parapet. Of course, the extremists encourage this non-participation, beating up notables, "starting riots at polling places and electoral assemblies;" making it difficult for the hum-drum to support and cast their votes for hum-drum moderates. The extremists are few, but "they are fanatically devoted to their cause" and put their whole energy into seizing power, "acquiring the technique of any pressure group." This even occurred in the English Revolution when a crowd of apprentices appeared at the House of Commons demanding it vote on the extremists' agenda.

The great leaders of the Terrors are fitted for their task by a genuine vocation, a vocation which in ordinary times would exclude them from political power.

And they learned their trade on the job as their pressure groups transformed into an illegal parallel government, usurping government functions and issuing administrative orders and laws as the opportunities offered.

The extremists are not, then, politically innocent or inexperienced; they have a long experience of oppression, and a briefer, but very intensive, training in actual government before they come to power.

Armed with their basic training in governance, they extremists created governments with a rough-and-ready centralization executed through a central committee, and executed through an extemporized bureaucracy and revolutionary tribunals. Plus a secret police: Cheka, comité de sureté générale, and in England through parish clergy! This centralized administration extended to the economy, whether or not self-consciously socialist. And inefficient. 

Indeed, one of the reasons why the governments of the Terror seem so tyrannical and hard to bear, even retrospectively, is precisely that they were so inefficient.

And yet there was one ray of hope: ordinary criminality seems to be reduced. Possibly because the petty thief on occasion got lynched when the normal authorities became disorganized.

With respect to the Reign of Terror the important thing is to understand its pervasiveness.

During the Terror, politics becomes as real, as pressing, as unavoidable to John Jones or Jacques Dupont or Ivan Ivanovich as food and drink, wife or mistress, his job and the weather. Political indifference, that mainstay of the modern state, becomes impossible for even the most selfish, the most unworldly.

It is all very hard on the outsider, the man who gets on the bandwagon, but then has to put up with endless celebrations of revolution -- processions, festivals of reason. Then there are the renamings, "that tend to confuse and annoy the outsider." In France it extended from renaming the Place Louis XV to the Place de la Révolution, changing the calendar and the names of the months. And you never know when "lightning is going to strike him and his household," to be haled into court as a counterrevolutionary. In France there was a concerted effort to shut up brothels, gaming houses, and eliminate drunkenness. There is a "saturation point in large-sclae, obsessive political propaganda after which such propaganda actually backfires."

For the devoted insider, the experience is close to what we call "religious," in the sense that 

men work very hard and excitedly in common to achieve here or somewhere an ideal, a pattern of life not at the moment universally -- or even largely -- achieved.

But humans cannot be transformed overnight, for human behavior changes "with glacial slowness," and so Brinton writes that

the violence... of the Terror is in some sense an overcompensation for the inability of the extremists to carry their ordinary brothers along with them. The Terror is a desperate overshooting of the mark.

Of course.

Our revolutionists are convinced that they are the elect, destined to carry out the will of God, nature, or science... The opponents... are not just political enemies, not just mistaken men... they are sinners, and must not just be beaten -- they must be wiped out.

And even though these revolutions became progressively secular, from English, to American, to French, to Russian, they all seek a heaven "here, now, on earth...to conquer evil once and for all."

But what explains the Terror? Brinton has seven explanations:

First, the "habit of violence" cultivated in the revolutionary process.

Second, most importantly, "the pressure of a foreign and civil war" that justifies the total mobilization and disciplining of the people.

Third, "the newness of the machinery of this centralized government... that works in fits and starts, and frequently jams badly."

Fourth, the "economic crisis... the shortage of the necessities of life."

Fifth, "class struggles" and the polarization between the extremists and the rest of society.

Sixth, the fact that the leaders have been selected "almost in a Darwinian sense... to push on to extremes, to use their special influence to heighten the already high tension of life in society."

Seventh, the element of religious faith shared by the extremists in each revolution.

And then it all comes tumbling down.

[L]arge numbers of men can stand only so much interference with the routines and rituals of their daily existence... The outsider in the crisis period is pushed to the limit of his endurance by interference with some of his most prized and intimate routines[.]

And so comes the Thermidorean Reaction.

Next: Thermidor. and Summary.

Anatomy of Revolution: The Rule of the Moderates

Having described the different types of revolutionists, Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution now looks at the rule of the moderates, and why it always seems to be doomed to failure.

At the outset of revolution, the moderates seem to be just the right people to take over; even in Russia in February 1917 when moderates, led by Prince Lvov, took power.

The problem is that the moderates are faced with an impossible task: keeping a government going, writing a new constitution, and usually confronted with a foreign war. And they are confronted with the extremists,

who insisted that the moderates were trying to stop the revolution, that they had betrayed it, that they were as bad as the rulers of the old regime -- indeed, much worse, since they were traitors as well as fools and scoundrels.

And the result is that the radicals end up taking power. Even in the American Revolution, it was the radicals that won, in the Declaration of Independence. There is something about the revolutionary process that leaves moderates in the dust.

In the English Revolution the revolutionaries, the Parliamentarians, were divided roughly into three: an Episcopalian group that were almost Royalists: a moderate group, "Presbyterian in religion, puritan in ethics," constitutional monarchists at heart; and extremists, the Independents, extreme Calvinists. They Indpendents made themselves effective through their control of the New Model Army. The Independents were the most ideological, and under Cromwell they won the revolution.

In the American Revolution there were Loyalists that really didn't have a problem with the royal government, the moderate merchants that started the agitation with their opposition to the Stamp Act, and the radicals with their committees of correspondence and committees of safety "exhibited extraordinary technical skill in the practical politics of revolution" and organized the Continental Congress. in 1774.

In the French Revolution the Royalists were dispatched almost immediately, Moderates like Mirabeau, Lafayette, and the Lameths were opposed by radicals Pétion, Robespierre, Danton, and Brissot. But then war broke out with Austria and Prussia, France was invaded and the radicals threw out the monarchy in an attack on the Tuileries Palace in August 1792. When it came to try the King, the moderates were divided, and so the radicals, "better organized, more aggressive, and perhaps more unscrupulous," won absolute power.

In the Russian Revolution the first government was supported mostly by Kadets, the left-wing of pre-revolutionary Russia. But it fell over the question of continuing the war to support the "imperialist" allies. It was followed by a Socialist government, accused by the Bolsheviks of being "compromisist," certainly moderate compared to the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks almost lost when they backed a "rising of workers in Petrograd" in July, but got their mojo back in the October Revolution when they "took over Petrograd with astonishingly little difficulty and almost no bloodshed."

Brinton explains the victory of the radicals according to a theory of "dual sovereignty," that a parallel illegal government was growing alongside the official, legal government, and eventually acquired enough power to stage a coup and take over. This occurred twice in the English Revolution where the legal government of King Charles was overthrown by the Long Parliament, and again, the Parliament was overthrown by the New Model Army. In the American Revolution this is obscured somewhat because men adhering to the illegal government often served in the legal town councils and colonial legislatures. In the French Revolution the radicals slowly increased their control of Jacobin Clubs. In the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks slowly gained control of the various soviets -- literally "councils" -- set up after the 1905 rising that ended up constituting a rival government. The point is that in each revolution the extremists were able to construct a rival illegal government network that, at the critical moment could seize power from the legal government.

The weakness of the moderates derives mostly from the difficulty of suppressing the radicals without seeming to be the enemy of the revolution, a situation that all the radical groups exploited, up until the radicals seized power and declared and enforced an end to politics. In other words, if you want to win a revolution, then opposition politics ends on the day that you take power. If you are a moderate and believe in a fair and free discussion of the issues, this is impossible to bring off.

Next: Accession of the Extremists and Reign of Terror.

Anatomy of Revolution: First Stages and the Types of Revolutionists

Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution now looks at the events surrounding the breakout of revolution, the combination of factors that lead to open defiance and replacement of the old regime.

He begins with Figaro, the barber of Beaumarchais' plays, and his devastating critique of the old regime in Marriage of Figaro. He notes that, "after much vacillation, the censor did not stop Beaumarchais' play."

But in all four revolutions, the old regime, with its vacillations and half-hearted attempts at putting down revolution rather indicate the regime lacked the tyrannous instinct it was reputed to have.

But how did the revolutions begin? With a bang or with a whimper? The revolutionaries preferred the bang theory.

History has tended to mark the battle of Concord as the shot heard round the world, and people marveled at the Fall of the Bastille, but it is not clear just when those revolutions began. But the fall of the Czarist regime following riots in Petrograd in March 1917 seems to be the unquestionable start of revolution. 

The English revolution exhibits more of a rolling start, with King Charles dissolving Parliament in 1629 and disastrously summoning it in 1640 when he was going bankrupt. Pretty soon one thing led to another and in 1642 both Parliament and the King were raising armies.

In America there is a good argument that revolution began with the Stamp Act in 1765 which led to "a series of clashes with increasingly well-organized groups of Americans." Or perhaps it began with the Continental Congress in 1774 or the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775 or the glorious Fourth of July in 1776.

In France there was no Parliament to focus resistance, but there was the Parlement of Paris, a kind of aristocratic supreme court, that led to "a dramatic defiance of royal power and the forced exile of the judges." Then the Assembly of Notables in 1787 led to the summoning of the Estates-General in 1789. But the Third Estate decided not to conduct business unless the Estates-General were called the "National Assembly." And then the King yielded.

Was it all planned by committees of malcontents, or a nation rising spontaneously to smite its oppressors? Brinton opts for a bit of both. The Bolshevik narrative is that it was all carefully planned, the other revolution narratives propose a spontaneous uprising. 

Clearly, the occasion of revolution arose when "the existing government attempted to raise money from people who refused to pay." Also, it is clear that after the first clash between the old regime and the party of opposition, there ensues a "brief period of joy and hope... the... charming honeymoon of that impossible pair, the Real and the Ideal." Yet was the Bastille a spontaneous response to the dismissal of Necker, or the scheming of freemasons, philosophes, and professional agitators? Brinton proposes a gardening metaphor, that

revolutions do grow from seeds sown by men who want change, but that these men do do a lot of skillful gardening, but that the gardeners are not working against nature but rather in soil and in a climate propitious to their work; and that the final fruits represent a collaboration between men and nature.

What is weird is that in all four revolutions, when it came to the first outbreak of violence, the old regime government was caught flat-footed. Each government totally flubbed its response to the provocation. The authorities responded to the violence, of course,

but in each case with a striking lack of success. Those of the ruling class responsible for such responses in all our societies proved signally unable to make adequate use of force.

In the case of the English revolution, King Charles didn't really have an army to put down the rebellious Parliament. In the case of America, the attempts to put down the rebels actually encouraged them. In the case of the Fall of the Bastille, numerous soldiers actually joined the rioters. In the case of the Russian revolution the soldiers joined the rioters as well, and the railway workers refused to allow the Czar to travel by train.

When the first stages of the revolutions were successful, enlightened people all over the world were delighted. But having won the first battle, 

It has now become the government, and is facing a new set of problems. When it actually gets to work on these problems the honeymoon is soon over.

Because there are all kinds of different revolutionists. And, although both supporters and opponents of revolutions tend to imagine revolutionaries as uniquely good or uniquely bad, they are not that different from ordinary people. 

Brinton himself wrote a book about The Jacobins in the French Revolution and found that and found that about two-thirds were middle class, a quarter were working class, and less then 10 percent were peasants. Average age of members was about 40, They represented, the abler, more ambitious, and successful."

In the English revolution the revolutionists were often merchants, great lords, and small landowning gentry, like Cromwell himself. They were not riffraff. In the American revolution, it was the merchants that first organizes opposition to the Crown. There were disreputable street fighters, but also respectable yeoman farmers. In Russia almost everyone from liberal noble to businessman to professional to working man and kulak was eager to see the back of the Czar.

The leaders of the French revolution ranged from nobles like the Duc d'Orleans, lawyers, scientists, journalists. In the American revolution over half the signers of the Declaration of Indpendence had college degrees. Sam Adams, scion of a merchant family, went to Harvard. The leaders of the English revolution pretty well all came from the highest ranks of society. The leaders of the Russian revolution also included nobles and professionals. Lenin was the son of a school inspector, and Stalin, of peasant-artisan stock, went to a seminary for a while.

The revolutionists were not uniquely successful men or desperate failures. They came from all walks of life, and displayed a whole range of talents.

In other words, 

it makes almost as many kinds of men and women to make a revolution as to make a world...They certainly create a number of empty spaces to fill, and give an opportunity to clever young men who may also be unscrupulous... But they do not re-crate mankind, nor so they eve make use of a completely new and hitherto suppressed set of men and women.

The rank and file are ordinary men and women, and not "riffraff, scoundrels, scum of the earth." The ability of the leaders "is certainly very high." The fact that in the crisis periods of revoluion some very nasty stuff happens, is probably the effect of the emergency on men rather than men creating an extraordinary emergency.

Next: The Rule of the Moderates.

Anatomy of Revolution: The Old Regimes

After setting up his "conceptual scheme" that revolution is a "fever" Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution looks at the Old Regimes of the four revolutions under analysis: British, American, French, and Russian.

Disorder and conflict are not uncommon in all societies. Brinton cites Sorokin in his Social and Cultural Dynamics who cites in England "one hundred and sixty-two 'internal disturbances in intragroup relationships' between 656 and 1921." That's one every eight years. In other words there are likely to be too many symptoms of breakdown in any society to please the analyst of revolution.

First of all, what about the economic situation? The main item of contention was government finances. In England they argued about "Ship Money, benevolences, tonnage and poundage"; in colonial America, they didn't want to pay for the Seven Years War; in France the revolution-friendly Estates-General was called because of the government's financial problems; in Russia "the Czarist regime had achieved an all-around collapse in all fields of government activity." And everyone thought their government was incompetent.

Notice it is the government that was in trouble. In all four societies, the people were doing OK economically: Stuart England was definitely more prosperous than Elizabethan England; in America "the early years of the 1770 were distinctly years of prosperity"; "France in 1789  was a very striking example of a rich society with an impoverished government"; even in Russia, aside from the government breakdown, things were looking up.

But plenty of people thought that the government was hindering them: in America the Stamp Act and Navigation Act and the incorporation of the lands west of the Allegheny into Canada; in France tax-reform offended the privileged and the un-privileged, and tariff reductions with England increased unemployment in Normandy.

Of course, the intellectuals were all against the government. But then they usually are. Victorian intellectuals were "united apparently in nothing but a profound dislike for their environment." But no revolution. But in ancien régime France,

One has the impression of immense numbers of intellectuals... all convinced that the world, and especially France, needs making over from the tiniest and more insignificant details to the most general moral and legal principles.

In Russia, being a writer or teacher "meant being against the government." In America, there was no such unity. But the Enlightenment, with Locke and Montesquieu, introduced the "natural and inalienable rights of man." England in the Stuart era was drenched in pamphlets -- in an era before newspapers -- all busy discussing "religion or politics," or both.

What these intellectuals were selling was "another and better world than that of the corrupt and inefficient old regimes." In England they called the ruling class "Normans" after the Norman Conquest; in France they liked to brand the nobility as Franks, descendants of barbarous Germans; in Russia the nobles were all "Varangians, or Tartar or Western": foreigners.

But did the intellectuals cause the revolutions? Brinton is clear: "No ideas, no revolution." But that does not mean that the ideas caused the revolution.

What about class conflict? Such "feelings of dislike" occur in all societies, but are seldom as simple as "bourgeois vs. feudal or bourgeois vs. proletariat." But there is no question that "the ruling class seems in all four of our societies to be divided and inept." In a healthy society the lower orders probably "dream rather of joining them rather than dislodging them." And when members of the ruling class "begin to believe that they hold power unjustly, or that all men are brothers," etc., they are probably not long for this world.

In Russia, the nobility had been "bemoaning the futility of life, the backwardness of Russia," and so on. And when they used force, "they used it sporadically and inefficiently." In France ruling class members "discussing the cause of discontented or repressed classes -- upperdogs voluntarily siding with underdogs." And in Stuart England there were the Cavaliers, "romantic even to themselves."

Except perhaps in America, we find the ruling classes in the old regimes markedly divided, markedly unsuited to fulfill the functions of a ruling class.

 Also, many in the ruling class were in a shaky economic position. They had opted for "finer houses, finer clothes" but still lived off their agricultural rents.

And the middle classes hated the upper class. They "felt morally superior to their aristocracies" and, in France by the end of the 18th century, no longer wanted to join the aristocracy, but abolish it. In England this was partly the effect of the artisan classes being "won over to Puritanism."

The lower classes seemed to hate the upper class more than usual. But "trustworthy materials... are scarce."

Was there any particular resistance to talent rising to the top? There is some indication of the French nobility "tightening its lines." In Russia, the nobility "closed the very highest social honors to plebeian talent." Still, the expanding economies permitted plenty of people to rise.

But not to the top.

[T]he countries were "run" by other, and privileged beings, and from the highest social distinctions the bourgeoisie as a class were hopelessly excluded.

"Where wealth... cannot buy everything.. you have a fairly reliable preliminary sign of revolution." Still, "The actual revolution is always a surprise."

Next: First Stages and Types of Revolutionists.

Anatomy of Revolution: Introduction

The Anatomy of Revolution by Crane Brinton is a comparative study of the four great European revolutions: English, American, French, and Russian. They are not necessarily "typical" but they are four important revolutions about which Brinton proposes to try to observe parallels.

He does not expect to divine the truth of these revolutions; he is a Kantian, and does not expect to find the truth, the thing-in-itself. Nor is the book about the "facts." But he does propose to use a "conceptual scheme" to approach the analysis of the four revolutions, which he will use to frame questions and hypotheses about them, and facts, but not rigidity. And he hopes to steer clear of wishful thinking about "what he would like to prevail" with respect to the four revolutions.

But what conceptual scheme? The notion of a storm, starting with rumblings, building to a thunderous climax, and then subsiding back into sunshine? The notion of equilibrium, of a society getting out of equilibrium and then rocking to and fro before returning to some sort of equilibrium?

Brinton chooses the conceptual scheme of a "fever." In the old regime, 

there will be found signs of the coming disturbance... Then comes a time when the full symptoms disclose themselves, and when we can say that the fever of revolution has begun. This works up... to a crisis, frequently accompanied by delirium, the rule of the most violent revolutionists, the Reign of Terror. After the crisis comes a period of convalescence, and the patient is himself again,

and maybe "strengthened by the experience... perhaps in some respects stronger for it[.]" But, in later chapters, he also uses the notion, as in "disequilibrium" as a sign of regime ill health.

Three of the four revolutions, the British, the French, and the Russian, have a "social or class" basis.

All are begun in hope and moderation, all reach a crisis in a reign of terror, and all end in something like dictatorship -- Cromwell, Bonaparte, Stalin.

The American Revolution is different. It was "predominantly a territorial and nationalistic revolution, animated by patriotic American hatred for the British." But it had a social, class character, and had "some terroristic aspects." It does not fit quite as well into the "fever" conceptual scheme.

There will be no "great discoveries," Brinton warns, and the reader should expect the anatomy of revolutions to yield familiar results. The uniformities in four the revolutions will turn out to be "just what every sensible man already knew about revolutions." 

Next: The Old Regimes.

Direct Censorship, Reign of Terror

So, we've officially entered the Woke Reign of Terror, where you are not allowed to disagree with the regime. Curtis Yarvin:

As a student of history, I know what burden the System has taken on by this step. Such an escalation is a ratchet. Once you enter the mindset of the Eastern bloc and declare the revolution as a permanent axiom, which makes anyone who opposes or even doubts the revolution into a potentially violent criminal, there is no way back.

This "mode of direct censorship... works." But there is a problem. It takes a lot of energy. You gotta have your two minutes hate every day. Of course, you have to amp it up, as the French did, and the Bolsheviks did. The Jacobins guillotined their tens of thousands, the Bolsheviks executed and starved their tens of millions. And then the whole thing dies of exhaustion. I suppose that our Wok-eviks will just deplatform the top conservatives and Qanon guys and get thousands named and shamed and fired. And then one day it will die. Because, as Crane Brinton says in Anatomy of Revolution, people cannot live forever in the fever of revolution. And then comes the Thermidorean Reaction.

Because, you see, any regime that has to break the glass and go for direct censorship has admitted that their revolution has already failed. If things were really copacetic, and heaven on Earth were just around the corner, the regime wouldn't need censorship. The facts would speak for themselves with just a little nudge from regime supporters.

The whole thing also reminds us -- as if we need telling -- that the regime is actually scared of the Trump voters and the Commoners in general. Which means that, deep down, they know instinctively that they have visited monstrous injustice on the ordinary Commoners of America.

For the truth is that the Commoners, like the bourgeoisie, are not that interested in power. They just want to get on with their lives. Only, as Trotsky said, "you may not be interested in power, but power is interested in you." 

Now I would say that this is new. Back in the agricultural age there were more like just two classes: the landlords and the peasants; landlords had the power and peasants sucked up to power. The idea of people just going about their business, trusting trustworthy people, is new and revolutionary and utterly confusing to the people interested in power.

The question for our time is whether the Commoners that are not that interested in power can ever get a ruling class that respects them and lets them get on with their lives.

We know at least that the current ruling class down not respect us, and is damned if it will let us just live our lives in peace.

Why the Good Guys Always Lose: It's Not Their Fault

One of the perennial complaints of guys like me is that our conservative and Republican leaders are wusses, that they always roll over for the Dems.

Like with the current stolen election. Like with cheap foreign labor for Big Tech. Like with climate change. Like with systemic racism. Like with the eternal entitlement programs.

I'm here to say It's Not Their Fault. Let me count the ways.

Ruling Class Argument -- There is a ruling class in America and elsewhere in the world and it's a kinda club. You wanna be a member? Well you better wear the right clothes, express the right opinions, support the right programs, or you can't advance to higher "degrees." Just like in the Masons. Right now the ruling class is the "educated class" that has been to all the right selective colleges. 

So, if you didn't go to the right college and express the wrong opinions you just aren't going to get ahead in the ruling class.

Cathedral Argument -- Curtis Yarvin argues that reality in the western world is defined by a Cathedral, a quasi-religious cultural establishment that defines what you think and feel.

Its inner circle, the Brain and the Voice, includes all professors, journalists, serious artists, published authors, etc. Its outer ring, the Conversation, is the whole upper social class. Its funding division, the Foundation, is the whole upper economic class. Its teaching division, the School, gets to indoctrinate almost everyone for over a decade. And its doctrine, the Dream, defines good and evil for all decent people.

And now, in the aftermath of the 2020 election, Google's YouTube is establishing an Index of proscribed videos. You are not allowed to post videos suggesting that the election was stolen.

Truth is, all societies make it very difficult for visions of good and evil that compete with its Cathedral orthodoxy. Usually such visions are considered heresy.

There Must Be An Enemy Argument -- Since whenever, human communities have had to defend themselves from the Enemy. Now, you may think that, in this day and age, we are past all this, because chimps, for chimps survive by defending their food-growing territory in which the females and young can eat and grow, as argued by Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn. True, because now you can buy food, not grow it. But you think that the defense instinct, that goes all the way back to chimps and beyond, is going to wither away in the two centuries since possession of food-growing land hasn't mattered?

Actually, when the rulers don't have a foreign enemy to rally their people, they invent a domestic one. That's what our rulers' "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" narrative is all about.

The whole point of this argument is to rally the males, because all males are instinctively defenders of the border. It goes with the male Culture of Courage/Insult.

Yes, right now, the enemies of the state are people like you.

All Good People Agree Argument -- If you are a good person everybody likes you; if you are a bad person then everybody hates you. If you are a good person you will go to Heaven; if you are a bad person you will go to Hell. If you are a good person you may be a saint; if you are a bad person you may be a witch.

And if you get on the wrong side of the good people you may find that you have become one of the bad people.

The whole point of this argument is to get all the women conforming to the ruling class narrative, for women must, for good reasons going all the way back to our chimp ancestors, get along as they live with each other every day preparing food and caring for the children. Women have a Culture of Conformity, which is enforced by the women's Culture of Complaint.

Yes, right now all the bad people are people like you.

Failed Revolution Argument -- All religious and cultural and political movements eventually face a "failure of prophecy" moment. Because they are all confidently predicting a glorious future that almost certainly will not show up. The more cunning religious movements prophesy that Heaven and Paradise are the reward for a virtuous life after death. Our modern socialist and culture war religious doctrines prophesy Heaven on Earth.

What do lefty movements do when the promised Heaven on Earth doesn't arrive? They usually amp it up, to keep the sect together. In politics, the ideologists amp it up with a Reign or Terror or a Great Purge, or a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Eventually the amp-up collapses, because, as Crane Brinton says in The Anatomy of Revolution, humans cannot live forever in a state of ideological fervor. Eventually we have to get back to wiving and thriving.

Yes, right now our Wokies are amping it up. Nobody knows when normal programming will resume.

Creative People Gotta Create Argument -- In my reductive Three Peoples theory I suggest that, for Responsibles, God made the Heaven and Earth and the job of humans is to responsibly wive and thrive on the Earth that God created. But I argue that Creatives are called to be gods, to create the world anew.

This means that for Creatives, if they are not creating, doing something new, bending the arc of history towards justice, advocating for traditionally marginalized people, imagining a new and better world, they are nobody.

Yes, right now if you are not creatively advocating for a better world, you are a nobody.

Stupid Ruling Class Argument -- A good ruling class knows that it must refresh its membership with talented people from the lower classes. A good ruling class creates a "political formula" that values all the people in the realm. A good ruling class keeps a weather eye on the passions and the obsessions of the "masses." A good ruling class knows that it is a minority, and that if the people ever got serious they could kick the rulers out in a New York minute.

A stupid ruling class knows that it knows best and it makes sure the plebs keep quiet. A stupid ruling class thinks that only members of the ruling class are smart, and that the lower classes are stupid. A stupid ruling class lives and entertains itself in the Capitol and doesn't get out much. A stupid ruling thinks that the ordinary people are too stupid ever to form a head of rebellion against their wise rule.

Yes, right now we probably have a fairly stupid ruling class.

Why to the Good Guys always lose? I would say that over the last 50 years we have had several political moments where our rulers could have altered their rule to accommodate various populist moments: The Silent Majority in the Nixon years, the Reagan Democrats in the Reagan years, the Ross Perot moment in 1992, the Republican Congress in 1994, the Tea Party in 2010, the Trump election in 2016. But they didn't.

The point is that, of course the Good Guys are going to lose, short of an actual rebellion and civil war, if the ruling class refuses to accommodate to their grievances. The rulers have the upper hand; that's why we call them rulers. And It's Not Their Fault if the rulers outmaneuver the suckers every time, using all the bolded arguments I have listed up above.

And so it goes. Until the day that it doesn't.

The Problem of the Left's Woke Religion

It is a fundamental part of my faith that every human has a religion -- especially the people that insist they don't.

In the writings of Nietzsche he maintains that now that God is Dead we are going through decadence and then nihilism in a process that will end in the Revaluation of All Values.

But surely he is wrong. The decline of Christianity as the faith of the educated class immediately prompted replacement religions, most obviously Marxism and Communism. In fact what is interesting about the Left is how it has picked up the essential content of the Axial Age religions. 

First, there is Original Sin, the idea that there is an essential flaw in human nature that humans must work to repair. Obviously, the new Original Sin is racism. Or, in the words of a journalist supporter of Britain's lefty Jeremy Corbyn:

“We can build a world free of injustice, oppression, exploitation, bigotry, racism and violence”

Yep. There's a lot of Original Sin crashing around these days.

Second, there is Heaven on Earth. The cunning of Christianity is that is does not promise Paradise except after death. But the modern religions promise Heaven on Earth, just like the quote above: "a world free of injustice, oppression," etc.

But I think that the old Sin of inequality and oppression is clearly in the process of being replaced by Climate Change, which also includes both Original Sin and Eternal Redemption.

In Climate Change the Original Sin is the "carbon pollution" of the Earth with the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is peculiarly similar to the original notion of Original Sin with Adam and Eve becoming conscious of their nakedness, their sexuality. For sexuality is central to living things, just as carbon is central to all life on the Earth.

In Climate Change the attainment of Eternal Redemption is obtained, just as under Christianity, by enormous acts of penitence and denial, to retreat from lives of consumption and luxury and instead live a Buddha-life of contemplation under a Bodhi tree.

So nothing has changed.

What Climate Change provides, of course, apart from the penitence of the Commoners, is a magnificent scope for heroic deeds for the activist class. Just as in a world war, the rulers get to direct traffic and conjure forth prodigious efforts and march enormous armies across the world.

OK. So far so good.

Now I think our educated Gentry believe in a false religion. I just don't believe that any true religion can possibly be constructed to encourage a ruling class to admire itself in the mirror for its eternal fight against oppression and climate change. There is a word for that: self-conceit.

But what will it take to explode the conceit and the self-delusion of our ruling class and its educated Gentry supporters?

I have two analyses I use to help me on this. The first is Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution. He says that the frenzy of heretic-hunting peculiar to Inquisitions and Reigns of Terror and Great Purges tends to collapse after a season because humans cannot live at that level of frenzy for too long -- any more than people can live in a perpetual sexual orgasm. At some point the frenzy collapses and normal life resumes.

So, we can say, eventually the present cancel culture will burn itself out. The only question is the size of the butcher's bill.

The other analysis is from When Prophecy Fails, by Festinger et al. This is an examination of a small cult in the US that flourished shortly after World War II with people that believed that they were going to be visited by UFOs on a certain day and carried away to Paradise by the aliens in their UFOs. So what happens when the prophecy fails? Initially, the believers amp up the intensity of their belief. But then, eventually, the members of the cult start to fall away and the cult breaks up.

Yes. And then there is Jim Jones in Jonestown, where the leader gets the whole cult to commit suicide.

The problem that I see is that it is not clear to me that we can ever get past the modern Original Sin of racism. Lefties will be descanting on "injustice, oppression, exploitation, bigotry, racism and violence" till the end of time.

Maybe the answer on this front is for Blacks to start voting Republican. Could it happen? Who knows?

And whatabout Climate Change? What would it take to discredit the prophecy of runaway climate change? Would it take a collapse of electrical generation when it is all wind and solar and a day dawns when there is no wind and precious little sun? Or will it take a sharp drop in global temperature in association with the current solar minimum?

Or will Woke Hegemony collapse in the face of the current surge of "populist nationalism" which, I would judge, is a revolt of the Commoners against their educated Gentry rulers?

Or perhaps, like the Roman emperor Constantine who switched Rome from paganism to Christianity, the day will come when the educated ruling class decides to lead the Commoners rather than oppose them. I wonder what that would look like.

The problem, of course, is encapsulated in Ben Franklin's maxim, that "Experience keeps a dear school but they will learn in no other." Our rulers will not change until they have experienced a very nasty knock on the head. Unfortunately the knock on the head will not be confined to the conceited educated Gentry but will also affect the lives of ordinary Commoners. And, I dare say, women and minorities, the "oppressed peoples," will be hardest hit.

The only question is the size of the butcher's bill.

Angelo Codevilla's "Revolution 2020"

How can one begin to deal with the prophecies of Angelo Codevilla's "Revolution 2020" just out at American Mind?

Where he says that, whether they intended it or not, America's ruling class has declared the Deplorables beyond the pale and therefore ordained a totalitarian future in which nobody will be allowed to dissent from the orthodoxy, or hold an opinion at odds with the orthodoxy, or hold a job if they they are not orthodox.

The point is that Donald Trump represents an inchoate rebellion against the supremacy of the ruling oligarchy:

More and more, America’s ruling class, shaped and serviced by an increasingly uniform pretend-meritocratic educational system, claimed for itself monopoly access to truth and goodness, and made moral as well as technical-intellectual contempt for the rest of Americans into their identity’s chief element. That, along with administrative and material power, made our ruling class the gatekeeper to all manner of goods.

Because, of course, to oppose the oligarchy's "monopoly access to truth and goodness" is the very definition of Satanic evil. And it must be stamped out, in every detail of its satanic systemic racism.

And, of course, once you get the whip in your hand, there is no end to it.

Affirmation of one’s own superiority by punishing inferiors is an addictive pleasure. It requires ever stronger, purer doses of infliction, and is inherently beyond satisfaction.

Codevilla laughs at the pompous notion of the "resistance" to Trump's 2016 election by the ruling class. Yes, of course, the ruling class resisted; it is still resisting.

In fact, the election’s outcome had resulted from the general population’s resistance to the ruling class further solidifying its oligarchy.

And, let us be clear, this resistance of the general population is barely organized or led by anyone. It is inchoate, instinctive, organic.

The warrant for the ruling class oligarchy's power has always been its self-image as certified experts, as truth-telling scientists, its moral concern for "education, to well-being for the poor and disadvantaged, to a healthy natural environment, and to public health." And of course, it moral stand against racial and sexual oppression.

But each and all of these campaigns produced mostly the ostensible objectives’ opposites while increasing the numbers of the oligarchy’s members and their wealth and power[.]

In other words, the oligarchs have wrecked education, demolished the poor, used environmentalism to oppress ordinary people, and used oppression narratives to oppress the deplorables. No wonder the deplorables are rising up.

As with Crane Brinton's notion in An Anatomy of Revolution, the need for totalitarian domination arises from just this failure, of political action failing to achieve its promises -- even producing "the ostensible objetctives' opposites." When your revolution fails to create the Promised Land, that's when you have the choice to admit your failure or double down.

But the ruling class has a problem. The mostly peaceful protesters of the Summer of 2020 have inadvertently made it clear that their real enemy in not Donald Trump but the whole race of deplorable Commoners.

For the ruling class, the electoral problem is that the intersectional coalition’s actions and demands have made far too explicit that crushing Donald Trump is only incidentally its objective—that crushing the spirit of independence in America’s “deplorable” population is its essential objective. 

But, if Trump wins in 2020 and the Republicans maintain their position in Congress, what then?

The greatest benefit that would come from the Left’s defeat in the 2020 election is the possibility that it may become possible to convince the ruling class, if not the intersectionals, that such accommodation is the best deal they can get. But the intersectionals are violent enemies—who must be dealt with as such. Fortunately, there are more spoiled children among them than heroes.

So, the question is whether the oligarchy, the educated Gentry, decides on a truce with the deplorables, to let them go on being deplorable if they don't make too much trouble, or whether the oligarchy truckles to the "intersectional" extremists and goes for broke. Right now, I'd say that the Chucks and the Nancys are finding the AOCs and AntiFas a bit to hot to handle. So there is the temptation to loose them upon the American people as a whole.

And maybe it would work, for a while. But as I say, "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." What prompts people to form a head of rebellion is perceived injustice.

Oh, and there is one other thing, that women expect to be protected. If you don't protect them, dear oligarchs, then they will look for another protector.

And I suspect that our oligarchic rulers have no idea, literally No Idea, of the depth and breadth of the injustice they have loosed upon the land. Rulers seldom do, until the peasants with pitchforks show up at the door. 

Reign of Terror Means the Revolution is Failing

One of the conventional wisdoms on the right these days is that the Conservative Establishment failed us. It failed to fight against the left. And now look where we are, with the left canceling everyone in sight, and Big Business keeping its powder dry by mouthing conventional platitudes about Black Lives Matter.

So argues Julie Kelly at American Greatness.

The argument of the Conservative Establishment, on the other hand, is that Trump's crazy chaos politics radicalized the left. But for Trump, we would all be getting along.

I think that both arguments are wrong. I believe that what we are experiencing is the classic case of a religious movement dealing with the impossible situation, that its faith is not moving mountains.

Do you realize the impossible place our lefty friends are in? The whole arc of leftism is that, with a new politics, we could create a heaven on earth, free of hunger, free of poverty, free of discrimination, free of oppression, free of racism, sexism, homophobia and all the other -phobias in the dictionary.

They said that their labor laws would revolutionize the workplace. Oh yeah, how are the workers doing these days? Dying of despair? How come?

They said that their Civil Rights laws would transform race relations and lift African Americans up from centuries of slavery and Jim Crow oppression and segregation. Oh yeah, how are the blacks doing these days? Still getting killed by police for resisting arrest? How come?

They said that feminism would liberate women from the patriarchy of the ages. Oh yeah? Then how come women reported themselves happier in the 1950s than today?

When the revolution fails to deliver the promised Paradise, the revolutionaries do not just give up and go home. They redouble their efforts. And redouble them again.

Eventually we get the Reign of Terror, Great Purge, Cultural Revolution, Great Awokening.

And then comes Reaction.

That's the model proposed by Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution. And I like it.

But why Reaction? Why don't the wokies keep on keeping on naming and shaming and canceling from now until forever, or until the last Deplorable Statue has been erased from history and the last "far-right" activist has been fired from his job and divorced by his wife?

Because, Crane Brinton writes, humans cannot live forever in the frenzy of white hot religion. Eventually we relapse back to normal life.

The classic Reaction is the end of the French Reign of Terror in July of 1794, the so-called Thermidorean Reaction when Robespierre was removed from office. And it led to the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Of course, Bonaparte then led France through the disaster of the Napoleonic Wars from which France has never really recovered. Some people think that is a good thing.

But I think that, because the United States is a proof of God's existence, that we in America will get through the Reign of Wokeness without the bloodbath of the Reign of Terror.

And that is because the voters of the United States elected Donald Trump in 2016.

Yes, of course Conservatism Inc. is really resentful about Donald Trump. Hey, he's managed to do what they failed to do for 60 years, ever since William F. Buckley Jr. decided to stand athwart history, yelling Stop. Wouldn't you be angry?

Yes, of course the left is fit to be tied by Donald Trump. According to their arc of history, Donald Trump ought to be impossible. Yet here he is. 

And One Million people have signed up for his June 20th rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Although the top Tulsa city health expert wants Trump to cancel the rally, because health.

Do you see why that would be? Why a million people might have signed up for Trump's rally in a stadium that holds 19,000? 

It's because the vast majority of people just want to live their "humdrum lives" -- immortalized by Lina Lamont. They don't want to bend the arc of history towards justice, or stand athwart history, or amaze their college classmates with a brilliant career, or get into activism, or even go to Mars with our tech billionaires. They just want to live and work and get married and have a family and live to enjoy their grandchildren.

And let it be said that this simple agenda has never been easy, down the ages, on account of the Four Horsemen representing pestilence, war, famine, and death.

In a way, it is appropriate that President Trump has been assailed non-stop by a series of harassments from the ruling class, starting with surveillance from the intelligence community, then an effort to take out his advisor LTG Flynn, then the Special Prosecutor investigation, then the impeachment effort, then the hyped-up WuFlu epidemic, and lately the faked-up riots over the death of a black career criminal in police custody.

Really, what president in our history could have stood up to all this abuse the way Trump has done?

Now I believe, following my research into Jungian psychology and his concept of "archetypes," that the proper role for the man who wishes to change history is the role of the Sacrificial Hero, one who probably perishes on the border between Order and Chaos trying to understand and stand for new ideas and knowledge despite the baying of the mob.

Donald Trump is, of course, an improbable candidate for Sacrificial Hero of the Year, since he is a proud and boastful egomaniac, thrice married, and I know not what.

And yet he has stood against the rage of the mob for nigh on four years, standing for Making America Great Again and promising to Drain the Swamp of the Deep State.

Will he succeed or will he go down to ignominious defeat at the hands of the wokey mob and the devious wranglings of the Deep State?

Nobody can tell, but I believe that he has changed history to this extent. He has redefined the Republican Party as the party of the ordinary American Commoner. As opposed to the Democratic Party that is clearly the party of the educated Gentry and its Clients.

In my view the only question is now how the left in its current Great Awokening will go down the tubes. Will it be at the hands of Donald Trump, as the Sixties went down the tubes with the two elections of Richard Nixon, or will it be at the hands of a future Reactionary that seizes the reins of power at the next Thermidorean moment?

You tell me.