Revolution: Removing its Halo

Excerpt

Revolution” has a halo about it. We have the example of Bernie Sanders’s call for a political revolution and its wide appeal to the young and aggrieved. When we think of actual revolutions that have occurred and are now happening, the Sander’s revolution is a mild affair, hardly deserving the term. It is an agenda for expanding an already existing welfare state. In his campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump spoke in incendiary terms of wanting to break up and transform an already broken system in order to restore America’s greatness, a call for a reactionary revolution. Whether he will try to make good on his promises as president remains to be seen. He was elected to the presidency by a peaceful imperfect democratic process, not the way revolutions generally are made. (The imperfection in our democratic process is the Electoral College, which trumps one person one vote in the country as a whole.) As Mao put it, “A revolution is not a dinner party…it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.” At the present time, in another part of the world, the Middle East, actual violent revolution has contagiously spread in one country after another. The Arab Spring has turned into a bitter, cold winter, resulting in death and destruction, not freedom from tyranny. We need to remove the halo and understand what is entailed in actual revolution. …