How do you get a revolution? What does it take for a critical mass of individuals to overcome their societal conditioning and engage in armed revolt? Revolutions don’t happen in stable, ideologically homogenous nations. They’re only possible when the constructs of social and civil order are rapidly broken down, causing both literal and ideological displacement for large swaths of the population. Historically, a handful of elements need to be in place at the same time. Populations will – generally – ignore one or two of these elements, but when all five come together, the likelihood of armed revolt inside a nation is nearly historically certain.
What are those five elements?
1. Economic tension and degradation of living conditions among the populace
2. Alienation between elites and the proletariat
3. Widespread anger at injustice, real or perceived
4. A compelling narrative of resistance
5. International support, particularly from other nations willing to bankroll or otherwise materially support the revolutionaries
Look at the above conditions and apply them to America today:
Rampant inflation is creating economic tension, leaving huge swaths of the U.S. population in a precarious financial position. The cost of essential goods – housing, food, and energy – are skyrocketing. If you’re rich, work for the government, or in academia – and hence part of the elite class of cultural and financial leaders – you’re basically immune to these forces. Few others are. Meanwhile, our cities are becoming less safe. People who are forced for economic reasons to use public transit are subjected to a daily gauntlet of deranged and dangerous criminals the government refuses to either prosecute or treat. Our cities are crumbling. Crime is up, policing is down. There is no good news. The 1990s rebirth of U.S. urban centers is being undone at a frightful pace. We’ve absolutely checked the first box.
What about the second condition, alienation between elites and everyone else? Oh my, yes. Covid outed the utter contempt for everyday Americans in the hearts of our elite as nothing else could have. The elites stayed home, sniping at people who just wanted to live their lives, even calling them grandma killers, while the elite themselves cowered in their palaces demanding that masked plebes service all their needs. Send your kids to school? Sure, their kids could still go attend class in person in their elite-only private schools while demanding the peasants keep their dirty, disease-spreading offspring at home. And shame on you for taking that opportunity to notice that the education the elites have been foisting on your kids was (and remains) damaging garbage.
Widespread anger at injustice, both real or perceived? The entire country is up in arms at each other, but if we could look past our differences, we wouldn’t be directing our anger, left and right, at each other: we’d be storming the palace gates together and lining up our societal elites in front of a guillotine instead. The system has rigged by insiders. Look at how many of our political rulers are the children, or grandchildren, of political rulers. If a monarchy is defined by genetically inherited leadership, we’re a good portion of the way there. Fifty years ago, everyday Americans could work a job and earn enough of a living from that job to buy a house, raise a family, and look forward to a decent retirement? Today, that same couple ends up working three or four jobs and side hustles, is stuck renting, and can’t afford a decent vacation, much less look forward to a comfortable retirement. We’ll be working forever just to eat, and we know it. Then there’s the “justice system” itself, which – as the Biden family has shown – is absolutely no such thing. Politicized justice is never just. So, yeah, we’ve checked that box, too.
A compelling narrative of resistance? Well, there are two, and – if either side is being honest – both are actually fairly compelling, at least if you accept the basis of either one. The narrative on the left is racial discrimination. The narrative on the right is intellectual discrimination. Whether either is real – both sides dismiss the other, though neither should – isn’t relevant, only the emotional connection each is engendering, and the actions that can (likely will) flow from them. When you’re a Democrat being told, day after day, hour after hour, that you are battling racial hatred – literally fighting Nazis – by supporting a specific ideology the boundaries of that fight are going to get blurry real quick. After all, what action isn’t justified under those circumstances? Meanwhile, on the right, the narrative is fighting the destruction of the American way of life, and the deeply embedded ideological corruption of the forces in power. Again, not many boundaries when you’re fighting for the most basic values you hold dear when the fight is against people who are explicitly trying to destroy them.
And that gets to international support, the only box the U.S. population hasn’t checked, and one that may – frankly – be somewhat outdated, or perhaps even irrelevant in a country with ample war material already at hand.
All this is to say that the U.S. is most certainly closer to a revolution now than it has been at any time since the Civil War, which was really a second American Revolution. And the scary thing is that the fervor for conflict, both on the right and the left, is almost certainly greater today than it was before either the War of Independence or the Civil War. Revolution doesn’t require a majority of the population, or anything like it. Historically, just 3.5% of a population can engender revolutionary change. If the revolution becomes a prolonged physical conflict, the number has to go much higher to sustain the fervor of the revolution in the face of the atrocities of armed conflict and the impact on civilian populations, but the base is still just 3.5%.
That’s an awfully low bar in our current environment.
We know, for example, that a large number of elites (multiple Fortune 500 CEOS, tech leaders, and government law enforcement agencies) united ahead of the 2020 Presidential election and agreed to work together to oust Donald Trump from office, not because Trump’s policies were hurting them, but because they believed that if Trump won re-election that Democrat firebrands would burn down our cities, including their stores and offices, and they chose to put their thumbs on the scale to ensure that didn’t happen. But, of course, doing so created more alienation between those corporate leaders and a large swath of the populace. Republicans were – Democrat lies about the events of January 6th, 2021 aside – willing then to let it go with little more than a single day of belligerence and individually riotous behavior. What about next time? What if Trump supporters (as is almost certain to happen) once again watch elites band together to hand the Presidency to the obviously corrupt and mentally deteriorating Joe Biden once again?
If that happens the likelihood that it ends in rebellion is, at this point, far more probable than not. And that’s not an outcome anyone should be rooting for, least of all the elites creating the conditions for it. Those elites might now truly believe – as they have been all too eager to signal over the last few years – that the world is ready to accept their vision of technocratic rule. But they’re wrong. They’re not standing in front of the fictional “radiant future” of technical totalitarianism they dream of, they’re standing in front of a gibbet.
Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Sam Stone only and not his co-host Chuck Warren or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.