Take the French Revolution, which began just a few years after our own Revolution, and was championed by some of the figures involved in our Revolution — like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. They all seemed to think it would be a happy reprisal of what happened here. It was anything but that, ending in a nightmare bloodbath of terror.What went wrong? Just like us, the French decided they didn’t like the idea of monarchy. So they beheaded their king and queen. But the radicals didn’t stop there....Then there are the even worse nightmares of the Bolshevik and Maoist revolutions in Russia and China.
OK, fair as far as it goes. But the American revolution stood on the shoulders of at least two earlier revolutions that had worked: the revolt against King John by the barons who fought him at Runnymede, which produced Magna Carta; and the Scottish Revolution led by William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, which produced a free nation that taught the Pope to accept that men could choose their kings.
Revolution is a risky business, to be sure. Aristotle spends a good part of the Politics explaining how states grow unstable with an eye towards avoiding revolutionary moments. They often end up being destructive.
Not always, though. The one that just occurred in Syria ended a despotic Baathist regime and at least for now seems to have moved in the direction of a better society -- the al Qaeda-linked leader seems to be moderating pretty fast, making deals with the Kurds and the Israelis alike to try to reach a more stable society. The Vietnamese revolution against the French and then us, which we thought would turn them into another Communist hellhole, actually came off all right: the Vietnamese nation is now one of our better friends in the region. The Irish revolt of 1916 produced a nation that is pretty OK, even if they did send condolences on the occasion of Hitler's death. The recent revolt in Northern Ireland's Belfast is healthy, and might help push the whole UK in a better direction eventually.
Sometimes it's the only way to fly. The Declaration sets the terms out clearly: "...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it... Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes... But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security."
Emphasis added, though little needed. Not only a right. Sometimes, a duty.
One trouble I have with these sorts of discussions--especially the negative arguments of the Left, but the Right isn't clean--is that there's very little discussion of what constitutes "worked" regarding government changes.
ReplyDeleteIs it sufficient that the ones who revolted won the fight? Or must the successful fight result in regime change? Or must the fight result in the revolters getting, for the long term, the things they were fighting for?
And revolution vs rebellion. I see the former involving regime change, while the latter merely involves getting an existing regime to radically change its behavior. Maybe in that light, the barons weren't revolting so much as they were rebelling, however salutary the result was for the time--they got the existing regime to change, greatly, its behavior.
Wallace's case is even murkier, it seems to me. He got regime change in the sense that he changed one for another, but it was substantially the same kind of regime, even if maybe better behaved by his lights.
The French succeeded in regime change, but the revolters did not achieve their long-term goals. For me, that's failure.
Our revolution achieved not only a complete regime change, the revolters got their long-term goals--and the revolution substantially altered the society that the new government led--not least by placing government subordinate to the society and thereby long-term altering the underlying societal mindset that led to/resulted from that.
And maybe, especially given the dichotomy between today's Left and Right in our nation, we engage in rebellion over every six-year cycle--which would add to the genius of that Founding generation.
The duty to bring about proper change in governance seems plain, but the means aren't necessarily straightforward. Especially if all my uncertainty is just so much nitpicking.
Eric Hines