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| Congressional Tea Party Caucus members enroute to yesterday's meeting |
While I find these fears and assumptions about the nation’s core commitments to be comically off target (as I’m sure teapartiers would find my own bill of particulars against the current regime), I do understand the spirit and desires of a revolutionary impulse. I really do. And I am ever sympathetic to those who feel an upwelling of revolutionary spirit when they see the rather obvious signs that their nation is failing to even remotely approximate any version of its creed (more about which in some other diatribe). And such a spirit is, for me anyway, far more befitting a democratic polity than apathy or, worse, that smug post-modern sneer of amused indifference I seen on so many faces these days.
But the tea party’s mouth-breather stupidity is manifest in its thoroughly incompetent, comic book understanding of the revolutionary spirit.
The most important of the multitude of realities lost on the teaparty bumpkinati right is this: no one elects a revolution.
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| Meeting of the House Tea Party Caucus last Wednesday |
They speak of revolution and have trademarked their ‘movement’ with the brand of the Revolution of 1776, and yet they are as befuddled on the means and modes of revolution as they are on economics, American history, basic earth science, constitutional framework of American government, and virtually everything else they cluck and caw about. So here’s a little Revolution 101 for the grassroots members (hapless stooges) of the tea party.
If you look back into the near or distant past, you can easily discern two models for the would-be revolutionary. Gandhi and King were genuine revolutionaries. So too were and Thomas Paine and Gracchus Babeuf.[1] I admire all four and understand them all to be patriots. These two pairs of revolutionaries illustrate two distinct models of revolutionary spirit—the distinction having less to do with means (violence versus non-violence) than it does with aspirations for making change.
Revolution as transformation. King and Gandhi saw revolution as a transformational healing process. In this model, revolution proceeds by using direct action to fearlessly and relentlessly call to undeniable awareness the conditions of intolerable injustice and thus bury the regime’s will to suppress resistance under the weight of witness, opprobrium from its friends, and shame from within its own conscience. Thus, the regime (or the government that illegitimately sustains unjust or intolerable conditions) and those on whose behalf it wields power will ultimately withdraw from the use of force to sustain the status quo configurations of power and will more or less allow transformation to take place. Society, then, is healed by replacing illegitimate rule with legitimate government and a more just social order.
Revolution as overthrow. Babeuf and Paine (along with rest of the gang of 1776), on the other hand, saw revolution as a purgative process of overthrow. In this more familiar model, the resources of the regime are seen to be too powerful, or too its ideology too deeply ingrained within the minds of those whose tacit support maintain it, or simply too inherently evil to justify anything less than immediate extermination, or all three. Thus any idea of transformation is seen as delusional, self-defeating capitulation. If the regime is too strong for direct overthrow (as in a coup), the revolution must proceed by fearlessly and relentlessly pushing the regime to continuously worsen conditions and inflict ever greater injustices on the people. As the regime becomes increasingly poisonous to the system, the forces of anarchic rage and chaos will be released and purge the regime from the social body in reaction. Only after the expulsive overthrow of the old regime can the new, just order be established.[2]
Now, the issue here isn’t which mode or model of revolution is better; each has its own claim to efficacy. Nor is the issue about which model is appropriate to today’s state of affairs; typically it is only through historical perspective and the flow of post-revolutionary events that judgments can be made about the legitimacy of a revolution’s approach, otherwise on what basis other than dumb parochialism could we find the founder’s violent revolution just and the Bolshevik revolution a sham?
No, the point here is simpler. Revolutions don’t happen through Congress.
Pay attention, Cletus: Radical legislation is the accomplishment of a revolution not its means.
Neither King nor Gandhi, neither Paine nor Babeuf sought office within the institutions of the government they sought to raise a revolution against. Real revolutions—violent or non-violent, transformational or purgative—are staged by outsiders to the system (else they are coups--another matter entirely).
This is especially true when the agent of status quo injustice is not truly a regime but is rather an election-based government which simply fails to serve as a legitimate tool of the people’s interest. Depending on how dire the circumstances, genuine revolutionaries may call upon the government to take actions that would transform it from a mere mask worn by a tacit and unrecognized regime to a legitimate agent of the people, or they may take a more disruptive path, but they do not get themselves elected to office. When not simply an act of drooling incompetence, such an approach is an affront to history: Hitler and the German National-Socialists are history’s best example of elected revolution.
Any process involving electing revolutionaries to govern is inherently corrupt because it starts from a fundamental deceit: people expect their elected officials to provide competent government; no legitimate citizen goes to the poles and pulls the lever for someone committed to making matters worse—to making the nation ungovernable; nor does any intelligent voter vote for a representative thinking that this will place someone inside the legislature who will, through pure unprofaned witness, transform the status quo: such representatives (and there are a few) are either immediately ‘compromised’ (from the point of view of the deluded voters for transformational pure witness) as they seek to actually pass legislation, or they remain wholly symbolic representatives of a point of view which has no legislative impact.
Thus, the elected revolutionary must start by fooling his or her own constituents, which, of course, can lead nowhere good—either ineffectiveness or thuggery in the halls of government. In the case of the House teaparty gang we have both. They didn’t know what the debt ceiling actually was, they don’t have any idea how to get anything accomplished, their only capacity is to stop anything from being legislated, and in the end they won’t even be able to succeed in using their gangland hostage-taking efforts to achieve their narrow purpose to obstruct the raising of the debt ceiling.
But they will harm the nation. They will force the government to continuously worsen conditions and will probably succeed in pushing the government to inflict ever greater injustices on the people in the form of continued largesse for the wealthy amid draconian cuts for everyone else. That indeed is one model of revolution (see “Revolution as Overthrow” above), so good practice for a revolutionary; not so much for an elected member of the United States Congress (again, unless they intend a coup; maybe someone should ask them...).
So, to make things as simple as possible for the befuddled rightwing, Grover Norquist is a revolutionary: he works from outside the system of government and you will never see him run for office. The buffoons who sign Norquist’s pledge as they seek and hold elective office are not revolutionaries, they are tools. They are either delusional incompetents or cynical hacks or craven lapdogs, for example:
Rep. Joe Walsh of Illinois and Sen. Rand Paul: delusional incompetents
Rep. John Mica of Florida and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell: cynical hacks
Senators Orrin Hatch and John McCain: craven lapdogs
Oh, and then there’s…
Speaker John Boehner: cynically delusional craven incompetent hack-lapdog
[1] Babeuf was a revolutionary agitator and the editor of The Tribune of the People during the early French Revolution; after the fall of Robespierre’s dictatorship, when the Revolutionary Republic was under the more conservative (and corrupt) rule of the French Directory, Bebeuf fell afoul of the Directory for his role in the so-called “conspiracy of equals” which denounced the decline of the Revolution and called for the establishment of a true egalitarian society as outlined in the 1796 Manifesto of the Equals to which he was a party. Babuef was executed by the Directory in 1797.
[2] Often, as in the case of the South African revolution, the two models play a complementary role. Our own civil rights movement shows signs of this mode of revolutionary process: King and SNCC on the one hand, Malcolm and the Panthers on the other; one offering a peaceful way out for the regime, the other standing ready to unleash the wolves if more peaceful means proved ineffective.
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