Last week the world marked the centennial of the Bolshevik takeover in Russia. The word “celebrate” is hardly appropriate in this rather tragic context. Now, after 100 of solitude, Russia’s revolutionary path is being followed by the United States. As in the case of the Bolshevik coup, there will be nothing to celebrate either.
Indeed, the United States is clearly in the midst of a revolution – a violent destruction of the old system and its replacement by a new one. The revolution is not yet clearly understood – because it is still in its early stages – but the groundwork is being laid before our eyes, just as the foundations for the Bolshevik takeover in Russia had been built well before the Nov. 7, 1917 actual date.
Last week’s series of electoral defeats in New Jersey, Virginia and elsewhere were surely a setback for trumpism, but in retrospect they may be seen as a Pyrrhic victory. In the end, this may simply mean that trumpist revolutionaries will become more determined, more radical and more violent.
In 1989, to mark the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, historian Simon Schama published a book, Citizens. He argued convincingly that conventional wisdom about the Ancien Régime was wrong. The French system was not an ossified monarchy that stifled the aspirations of the nascent bourgeois classes but, on the contrary, rather dynamic society that was reforming and modernizing at a pace that was quite rapid for its time.
But not rapid enough for many of the children of artisans who had risen to great wealth and prominence in the second half of the 18th century. They clamored for more reforms, greater meritocracy and less privilege for the aristocracy and the clergy.
At the same time, according to Schama, their discontent was shared by those who were, on the contrary, unhappy with the rapid pace of reforms and pined away for more traditional, patriarchal, slow-paced medieval society. The two groups formed an alliance against the old order, overthrowing it in a series of street protests, but contradictions within the revolutionary ranks tore it apart when it came to building a new system on the ruins of the old. The early reformers who started the revolutionary process were eventually guillotined by the radicals who grabbed power, but in the end Napoleon created a kind of synthesis, imposing many features of the old system on the new French reality.
Schama’s findings are relevant to analyzing the Russian revolution as well. As in France, discontent with the Russian Empire and Czarist autocracy was most visible among those who benefited from a more open, Westernized system that emerged in the late 19th century with the development of Russian capitalism.
But there was also a seething discontent among the masses of traditionalist Russian peasants who loathed all that modernization. They joined in the destruction of the monarchy but they certainly had no interest in building a new system along the lines proposed either by the Westernized liberal democrats or the early Bolsheviks.
In the end Stalin, like Napoleon, combined Leninism with Russia’s imperial past into some kind of mongrel cocktail, making his Soviet Union colonialist, expansionist and oppressive. He rejected all the social and artistic novelties introduced by the early revolutionaries and even brought back such medieval features as serfdom.
Clearly Prof. Schama formulated an important insight about revolutions. They seem to occur in response to reforms and not in a stifling, stagnant or oppressive climate, and they are made by an alliance of reformers who believe that society is not changing fast enough and retrogrades who are hurt by the changes and want the status quo restored.
Donald Trump’s revolution is thus an alliance of the rich – a class that emerged since 1980, benefitting from an era of easy money, deregulation, low taxation and technological progress – and the white lower middle class and blue collar workers who were hurt by the accompanying trends of deindustrialization, automation, job flight, immigration and hollowing out of the welfare state.
The two groups have divergent interests. The rich are paying a very small proportion of their incomes in taxes – but they use few of the services their taxes pay for. Their education, health care, pensions and police are private and they prefer to fund culture, science and medical research as voluntary charity and not through the IRS. They demand even lower taxes and a minimalist state; they also feel, like the Koch Brothers, that they are entitled to own politicians and control the national political agenda.
In retrospect historians will be able to draw clearer lines, but what we, the contemporaries see is a lot of fog and confusion. For instance, it is not obvious to us today that the hi-tech industry should be on the side of Trump’s revolution. However, it is: not only was Robert Mercer and his Cambridge Analytica, along with Julian Assange’s Wikileaks, instrumental in getting Trump to the White House, but we’re now finding out that Google, Twitter and Facebook all played a major role in this project as well.
The resentful white voters meanwhile “want their country back.” This means not only that they want to curb the influx of immigrants but put an end to the overall cultural openness and protection for the rights of minorities who have become far too numerous for their taste in today’s highly complex society. They want their blue collar jobs back, along with certainty and insularity. They also want the welfare state and a variety of freebies from the state – but they want all of that for themselves, and not for various foreign and nonwhite “freeloaders.”
Their vision of America is in many way inimical to what the rich envision as the bright American future. But at this point, they have a common enemy: the liberal America of Barack Obama and the Clintons. Forming an alliance, these two groups have undermined the existing American system – perhaps irreparably at this point. But going forward things are not going to go smoothly between those two groups.
On past form, things will probably develop as follows: Since these are the early days, the revolution is still peaceful and relatively benign. It still hopes to attain power by legal, bloodless means – through the ballot box. However, revolutionaries are always a minority, while the majority it typically inert and conservative. Trump’s base doesn’t reach much beyond one third of the American electorate. In a democracy it presents a problem. Trump may be impeached and, if not, dealt massive setbacks in the next two elections, in 2018 and 2020.
Revolutionaries feel much better in opposition than in power when their power is hemmed in by checks and balances. It’s no surprise that Steve Bannon, the Lenin of Trump’s revolution, wants to wage war on his fellow Republicans. He understands that only being on the sidelines can stoke trumpist resentments and radicalize the movement to the point of open rebellion.
After taking power they’ll first do away with the remaining liberal democrats and then turn their attention to the rich who funded their revolution and the intellectuals who provided its ideological underpinnings. It may be a nasty thing to say, but I can’t help looking forward to the moment when radical right-wing publicist Ann Coulter is defeated by lower middle class real Americans she so much admires.
