In Revolutions, The Worst Often Rise To The Top
The Robespierres in the House of Representatives are driving American politics in a predictably horrible direction.
If you think of classic conservative thinkers, the name that often comes first to mind is Edmund Burke. Among Burke’s works, his Reflections On The Revolution In France is the clearest statement of why he believed that conserving and reforming the existing “constitution” (in the British sense of the word, encompassing more than formal laws and institutions) was usually better than overthrowing it. Burke directed much of his animus against the leaders of the French Revolution, whom he considered to be, to state it politely, not up to the job. Here’s one of his many pungent criticisms of them:
To make a government requires no great prudence. Settle the seat of power, teach obedience, and the work is done. To give freedom is still more easy. It is not necessary to guide; it only requires to let go the rein. But to form a free government, that is, to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind. This I do not find in those who take the lead in the National Assembly. Perhaps they are not so miserably deficient as they appear. I rather believe it. It would put them below the common level of human understanding. But when the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators,—the instruments, not the guides of the people. If any of them should happen to propose a scheme of liberty soberly limited, and defined with proper qualifications, he will be immediately outbid by his competitors, who will produce something more splendidly popular. Suspicions will be raised of his fidelity to his cause. Moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards, and compromise as the prudence of traitors,—until, in hopes of preserving the credit which may enable him to temper and moderate on some occasions, the popular leader is obliged to become active in propagating doctrines and establishing powers that will afterwards defeat any sober purpose at which he ultimately might have aimed.
In revolutions like the one in France, Burke argued, the worst rise to the top. And by “worst,” Burke did not mean just comically incompetent. The execution of the king and queen was, to Burke, the logical conclusion of a political philosophy for which no norm or institution was sacred:
On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors, and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations, or can spare to them from his own private interests. In the groves of their academy, at the end of every visto, you see nothing but the gallows.
While the Freedom Caucus may never erect a guillotine on the floor of the House of Representatives, it is very likely that, after the embarrassing and (from the standpoint of doing the business of Congress) unproductive fight over Kevin McCarthy’s election to Speaker, the House of Representatives is likely to get more dysfunctional, and just plain more awful, in the months to come. That’s because, in the fashion of Burke, we can see, once the bomb-throwers get disproportionate power, where things are headed. While you might disagree with Burke’s analysis of the French Revolution, it is true that revolutions often follow predictable paths towards more extreme, more militant, and more destructive destinations.
You can quibble over the definition of “revolution,” and scholars of the subject often do. For example, was the Napoleonic Empire a revolutionary outcome, in any real sense, or just the return of monarchy dressed in different clothing? It’s unremarkable to say, however, that anyone deserving of the title of “revolutionary” is not interested in merely reforming the body politic, but chopping down, root and branch, all the institutions, norms, customs, understandings, and laws that offend them. Reform is not enough. Patience with incremental change is not enough. Revolution now is the only acceptable course of action. (Though interestingly, revolutionaries often say that they are returning society to some previous, better state, before the corruption of the status quo.)
Not all revolutionaries need to be true believers. In fact, there are always opportunists who see revolution as a path to self-aggrandizement. You don’t need to look into the souls of the Daniel Ortegas, Ayman al-Zawahiris, or Robert Mugabes of the revolutionary world to see the possible, probable, or inevitable outcomes of what they unleash.
By this standard, the MAGA faction in Congress has revolutionary ambitions. The status quo must go. Existing rules and norms of how the legislature operates are useful only if they distract and paralyze the people who still believe in them. And if the rules of the game are not worth even respecting, so too are the other players of the game, including both those branded as enemies, and those insufficiently zealous in the war with those enemies.
All of which is a way of describing the way in which many revolutions evolve predictably to the point where the MAGAnistas are now. Over time, the most militant, unscrupulous, outrageous, and zealous revolutionaries shoulder aside everyone else. McCarthy is just another Kerensky or Banisadr, someone useful until the revolutionary seizure of power. Other, more moderate factions, which in this case means everyone from traditional Republicans to even many cultural conservatives, are just as temporarily useful, but on the list to be abandoned. Coalitions with these factions traditionally collapse after the revolution starts, as happened in Russia, France, Iran, and other countries where the most militant eventually emerged on top. The Jacobins are always ready to sacrifice the Dantonists, Girondists, and everyone else at the first opportunity. Eventually, they often turn on each other, especially when there are clashing interests among the opportunists and the zealots, or the zealots battle over the correct orthodoxy or revolutionary programme.
This is the trajectory (or, to use a fancier word, “etiology”) if many revolutions. Following this logic, the begrudging willingness to elect McCarthy speaker was just a slight detour for the bomb-throwers in the Freedom Caucus. The Congressional Jacobins will continue to try to consolidate power, in the form of tribunals investigating the “weaponization of law enforcement,” over-representation on the powerful Rules Committee, the eventual debt ceiling vote, and other acts legislative terrorism, in the words of one “conservative” (whatever that word means now) Republican legislator. The fact that there isn’t much of a post-revolutionary program — what do you actually hope to build on the rubble of the old order? — is less important than ending an ancien regime that cannot be tolerated.
In the short term, there does not seem to be an impregnable wall that might stop the militants from driving the House in this direction. While not all revolutions follow this path (the American War of Independence turned out pretty darn well, for example), once a revolution lets the Jacobins increasingly steer the vehicle of governance, history doesn’t have a happy conclusion. Eventually, people may grow tired enough of the incompetent, nasty, performative, and destructive acts of the Robespierres to overthrow them. The endgame might happen quickly and decisively, as it happened in the case of the actual Robespierre, or it might take a very long time, as it did in the USSR, and might be starting to happen today in Iran. But there will be a lot of damage done first. Or, as Burke put it with 18th century-style eloquence,
[B]efore its final settlement, it may be obliged to pass, as one of our poets says, “through great varieties of untried being,” and in all its transmigrations to be purified by fire and blood.
One of these days I should get around to reading Burke. Read some about him. I recall reading that in his government role he was fairly liberal by the standards of the times. So was he really the prototype conservative, or more just anti-revolutionary?
J. K. Galbraith had a line about revolutions not being all that powerful, the successful ones amounting to kicking in a rotted door. If so, I hope only the Republican Party turns out to be rotted, not the country.
Although I understand the desire (and delightful irony) of using Burke against modern-day conservatism, that doesn’t change the fact that Burke’s ideas are just absolutely terrible.*
For instance (all quotes are from his Reflections on the Revolution in France):
This is just an outright attack on the concept of elected representatives and representative government.
According to Burke, the only people – besides the king – suitable to represent the people are land-owning aristocrats:
Clearly, Burke doesn’t believe in moral progress or more representative government than what the Brits had in 1790:
He hates the concept of individual rights:
Burke is often placed on a pedestal for opposing extremism. But what they don’t tell you is that his alternative is a combination of monarchy, aristocracy, and an established Church.
In such conditions, a revolution may turn out wrong (we all know that the French eventually cocked it up big time), but you can’t fault people for wanting one.
* Judged by modern-day standards.
I feel like I should again recommend Mike Duncan’s apendices to his Revolutions podcast. He discusses a few general lessons from the revolutions he covered, giving examples from those where these apply and to the degree they apply. I really need to find some hours to listen to them again.
Napoleon, BTW, is a rather unique case for his times. I’m not sure whether he was part of the nobility, but he certainly wasn’t royalty. Yet he wound up as emperor. He’d never have accomplished that without the various revolutionary developments. And to be fair, if had not been a brilliant military leader.
Two things about successful revolutions:
1) they create vacancies at or near the top. This leads naturally to a scramble for power.
2) A successful revolution demonstrates how to remove and replace a regime. This usually gives others ideas if they don’t like the new regime.
Combine the two with a point Duncan made: various groups with divergent objectives tend to band together in a common front, as they all share the objective of ousting the ancien regime. After a successful revolution, these factions tend to drift apart, then they tend to fight between themselves for dominance.
These fights may be political, but with armed people loose, unstable governments, etc. they tend to become violent. In the French revolution this led to the terror, using mostly state power to suppress other factions. In the Russian revolution this led to civil war.
McCarthy may well feel he won against them and for good reason. Beat them down in about a week. He’s a snake himself so the concessions are only as meaningful as the majority of his party say they are.
They may think they have him by the short ones, but whether or not that is the case is an open question. I have heard for years now about the majority of Republican in office privately saying they hate Trumpism but were afraid to say so. If they can’t smell blood in the water now they not only lack spines, they lack noses as well. The MAGAts have stupidly made an enemy of their own Speaker, and it’s a fair bet he’s still angry about that. Even FOX is getting tired of them. It doesn’t get much better than that.
I note that the 72-hour rule either has exceptions, or is being ignored. Yesterday they passed at least one bill less than 24 hours after it had been introduced. Today they passed at least one bill less than 48 hours after it had been introduced.
Somehow I have the feeling that this is McCarthy’s answer to most of the bills he had to promise to allow a vote on, that are DOA in the Senate. Jam ’em through in the first week and then forget about ’em.
@drj: “ * Judged by modern-day standards”
I don’t think it’s fair to judge people from the past by those standards. Jefferson was probably a commie pinko in his days but a white supremacist mysoginist by today’s standards.
@dazedandconfused:
“ Even FOX is getting tired of them.”
I hope you’re right that we may have reached a turning point but I doubt it. When these Republicans start saying what they really believe in public let me know. What do the primary voters in their district want? That’s the only election that matters for most of them.
@Scott O:
I am not judging people, I am judging their ideas in relation to their modern-day applicability.
As to the difference between Burke’s and Jefferson’s ideas, those of Jefferson were, on the whole, pretty cool. Jefferson just applied them to a very narrow category of people. But we don’t have to.
Burke’s ideas (with the exception of a few nuggets here and there) amounted to “The peasants should tug their forelocks harder.” There is not much you can do with that.
It seems to me that a successful revolution requires that the victors are, more or less, of the same mind in the construction of the government in its aftermath. The OP sites the American Revolution and the reason it succeeded was that the founders immediately set about to create a framework for moving forward that they would be accountable to. I think the American philosopher Jeff Spicoli said it best
Not only did they do that but they reworked the rules a few years later when it was obvious that the Articles of Confederation weren’t up to the task of firing a more perfect union. When you think about it that is the work of people who are something other than attention-seeking whores. That is the secret sauce. Trouble any set of rules can be subverted by bad-faith actors. And most revolutionaries automatically assume that the “reward” for winning the revolution is to be the new boss.
Or to quote the poet …
Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.
I seriously doubt that McCarthy (or more than a handful of Representatives) has read Crane Brinton’s classic work The Anatomy of Revolution, which shows the pattern of “revolutions that eat their own” has occurred repeatedly in the past.
There’s the other possibility which was shown in the Meiji Restoration: a “restoration”, where the promise was to go back to Ye Olde Times Before Everything Went Wrong, and then, once in power, a total 180 degrees and throwing Japan open to the world and assimilating as much from the outside as possible. (In fact, IIRC there was an attempted coup d’etat from a group of the original supporters when they discovered what was going on, which went over like a damp squib, since everyone else by that time had agreed that trying to close Japan off to the world again was unrealistic.)
@drj:
I certainly don’t agree with everything that Burke says, but I think it’s worth considering his point that an elected officials have to do more than just parrot the opinions of their constituencies (in his words, being a “flatterer”). When people on this blog have pilloried Republican legislators for covering up for Trump, I don’t think that we were saying that standing against authoritarianism, fascism, and corruption should depend on the mix of Republican and Democrat voters in their districts. All politicians have to balance being a representative versus being a delegate. Doing one or the other exclusively would be wrong, and there’s no clear formula for how to balance the two.
@SC_Birdflyte: Glad to hear someone else has read that book!
@Kingdaddy:
To reiterate (perhaps I was insufficiently explicit), this is pretty far from what Burke was saying.
Burke was instead arguing that people such as “tailors and carpenters” have no capacity (and can have no capacity) for being more than simple delegates and flatterers of the mob.
Relatedly, Burke’s argument isn’t so much that extremism begets extremism (although he did say that), but rather that extremism is necessarily unavoidable as soon as you allow the common rabble to be in charge.
Even more fundamentally, Burke did not oppose revolutions as such. See e.g.:
Rather, Burke only opposed revolutions in which the wrong kind of people were in charge. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was led by “moderate” aristocrats (moderate because they were aristocrats), and therefore OK. The French Revolution was led by “radical” carpenters and country lawyers (radical because they were carpenters and country lawyers), and therefore not OK.
In short, a proper reading of Burke does not support your argument, and can, in fact, easily be used to argue the opposite, i.e., that the GOP is “moderate” because of its reliance on traditional power structures and that the Democrats are “radical” because they let in the women, the queers, etc.
I don’t think Burke was saying what you think he was saying…
KingDaddy: While not all revolutions follow this path (the American War of Independence turned out pretty darn well, for example)
In France, the monarchy had subsumed all power to itself. With revolution, every institution was seen as corrupted by its association with the monarchy. Everything had to be overthrown.
In America, the homegrown institutions of republican government existed before, during, and after the Revolution. The existing government was decapitated, but the rest of the social institutions were trusted and kept.
KingDaddy: “conservative” (whatever that word means now)
While the term used is “conservative,” they aren’t conservative, but reactionary. They are threatened by modernity and want to tear it all down in order to return to a mythological and heroic past.