How do protests like the TP and OWS differ from effective political action?

Larry Kummer, Editor

15 years ago

Summary: Change is slow and difficult. Reform efforts, no matter how deeply rooted, usually have many false starts. Success requires learning each failure. Doing better each time. Only a people who intensely love liberty have a chance at getting it. Here we discuss the causes of these grim truths, as we start on the road to reforming America.

“We swear and pledge ourselves to fulfill with zeal and fidelity the duties which devolve upon us.”
— Opening of the Tennis Court Oath signed by members of Third Estate on 20 June 1789, starting the French Revolution

Contents

Peasant protests only vent frustration
Peasant revolts complain about the symptoms
We need an alternative vision for America
The Tea Party
The difficulty of change
For more information

(1) Peasant protests only vent frustration

Injustice and inequality have been the common lot of peasants since the development of settled agricultural societies. This generates tension. Peasant protests.

Effective collective action requires competent leaders — and competent followers (people willing to support their leaders). This combination is rare among peasants. Even stratified societies allow some degree of upward mobility for aggressive, intelligent peasants. This removes potential leaders from the peasants.

This is why a regime totters when unrest spreads to the Middle Class (however small), as they provide a leadership cadre for the peasants.

(2) Peasant revolts complain about the symptoms

Disorders which affect societies are like syphilis, manifesting a wide range of symptoms affecting many parts of society. Treating the symptoms leaves the underlying illness untreated. A wider vision is necessary understanding the causes of the problems.

Brad DeLong (Prof Economics, Berkeley) explains one common form of this. The peasants are oppressed by the excessive, often criminal violence of the Cossacks. They complain to the Czar, not realizing that the Cossacks work for the Czar. They do his bidding. The Czar is the problem, not the Cossacks. When they realize this truth, then the window opens for radical change.

(3) We need an alternative vision for America

Leaders can only take their followers down a visible path. Elites foreclose the possibility of fundamental revolt by using religion and education to fetter the minds of their suspects — so that they believe there are no alternatives to the present social order. The King is God’s anointed, so that rebellion on Earth means rebellion against God’s will. Or that history has ended with the triumph of the Marxist revolution — capitalist republics. As Francis Fukuyama wrote in The End of History?“, The National Interest, Summer 1989:

The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism. In the past decade, there have been unmistakable changes in the intellectual climate of the world’s two largest communist countries, and the beginnings of significant reform movements in both. But this phenomenon extends beyond high politics and it can be seen also in the ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture in such diverse contexts as the peasants’ markets and color television sets now omnipresent throughout China, the cooperative restaurants and clothing stores opened in the past year in Moscow, the Beethoven piped into Japanese department stores, and the rock music enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon, and Tehran.

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

(4) The Tea Party

The Tea Party movement illustrates all these things. They did the right things — poorly as usually in the sloppy real world (the downside of open source — grassroots, bottoms-up — organizations). But they lacked a deep understanding of the problem, a clear vision of an alternative, and competent leaders. Or perhaps their leaders were competent, but in the pay of our ruling elites. The result was they quickly became co-opted. They started proclaiming their independence from the two political parties, protesting the bank bailouts. In the end they acted as Republican shock troops, supporting shifting taxes from the rich to the middle class and de-regulation of banks (which leads inevitably to more bailouts).

The Obama-as-Messiah believers have traveled a similar path.

(5) The difficulty of change

Change is slow and difficult, no matter what snake-oil salesmen tell us. Nature (or Nature’s God) does not care how much we need reform (it does not heed the cries of slaves whipped in the fields). It does not care how much we deserve reform. These sad facts shock and disturb many Americans (see the outraged comments on this thread).

Reform efforts, no matter how deeply rooted, usually have many false starts. Success requires learning each failure. Doing better each time. Only a people who intensely love liberty have a chance at getting it.

Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Dr. Franklin “What have we got, a republic or a monarchy” “A republic, if you can keep it” replied the Doctor.

— entry of 18 September 1787 in the Papers of Dr. James McHenry on the Federal Convention of 1787 (McHenry, 1753-1816, signer of the Constitution, third Secretary of War, namesake of Fort McHenry)

(6) For more information

About political protests and reform: