The Historical Irony and Tragedy of American Revolutionism
Protests in Minneapolis, May 29, 2020. PHOTO: Julio Cortez, AP
History is filled with irony. In the middle of the last century, German National Socialists hoped to establish a worldwide Reich ruled by the German master race. What they got instead was Germany left in ruins and half their country given over to the very communists they had sought to defeat.
Communism, for its part, aimed at creating a world-wide proletarian utopia. What it created instead was a series of dystopias which came close to completely destroying their inherited national cultures. Then, in a further irony, the revolutionary class ruling most of the communist regimes, whose mandate had included destroying the capitalist bourgeoisie, themselves became bourgeois, and were finally overthrown, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, by capitalist bourgeois revolutions.
The U.S. today is experiencing similar ironic twists of fate. It is well known that messianic democratic revolutionism was introduced into American political culture at the republic’s birth. The Declaration of Independence, after all, was addressed not just to Americans but to all humankind:
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—-That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government. [emphasis mine – GH]
Thus, the idea that all peoples had the right to overthrow their governments if the people saw them as being unjust -- what became today's ‘color revolutionism’ -- was woven into the fabric of America.
That idea, to be sure, was somewhat mystified by America’s original religiosity, specifically its Christian teleology and eschatology. Correct Christian believers could look forward to their salvation only at the end of time, when Christ and the Heavenly Kingdom would come down to earth. But faith in a Christian end of time (the Heavenly Kingdom) was eventually replaced by the democratic ‘end of history’ – an end indeed that had already arrived, Francis Fukuyama assured us, after communism collapsed.
America’s ‘victory’ in the Cold War and America’s status as the ‘world’s lone superpower’ opened up seemingly unlimited political possibilities for ‘promoting democracy.’ Now America was faced with a decision similar to the one Russian revolutionaries had faced a century earlier. Should the revolution in other countries be allowed to develop ‘spontaneously’ and from within, or should it be pushed forward from without whenever necessary and by force? The answer to the question was perhaps pre-ordained by the overwhelming lure of additional allies and markets. Revolution would come from without, a decision that gave birth to the democratic color revolution industry led by AID, NED, and, as needed, the helping hand of the CIA.
And yet, the founding fathers had not written, say, that if a government violates citizens’ rights, then ‘the Government can be altered or abolished’ by anyone who happens to come along; or that ‘the people and/or foreign governments can alter or abolish bad Government and institute a new Government.’ Nor did they write that the ‘American Government is established to spread Rule by the People across the World, and it may use any and all means necessary to achieve Providence’s intent to establish Democratic Governance everywhere.’ No, the Constitution said what it said: a Tyrannical Government can be overthrown by the people from whom that Government derives its sovereignty and its legitimacy.
The U.S. Revolution From Above
In the 1960s, powerful movements developed in America associated with various liberationist, revolutionary causes. Some were Marxist, others were associated with the black liberation and feminist movements. Over subsequent decades, they mixed and matched among themselves, and found new allies in Hispanic and gay movements, and gradually infiltrated and redefined the goals of the educational system, popular media and, increasingly, much else. Whereas formerly Americans were told that their values were rights and freedoms -- such as those of speech, information, association, and so on, now they were told that these same rights and freedoms must be sacrificed when they come into conflict with the preferences and rights of numerous afflicted and victimized minorities …
This American neo-revolutionism is now turning the tables on America, and the irony of history is at hand. American republicanism has died just thirty years after the more extreme version of its global revolutionary dream was imagined. The arrest of former US President and Republican party front-runner Donald Trump -- who, it must be granted, himself did much to undermine American republicanism -- is just one drop, albeit a very large one, amidst the authoritarian deluge now flooding the former American democratic republic. American exceptionalism is proving ever less exceptional as it winks at the unlimited self-aggrandizement of the in-group and uses censorship and politicized legal institutions to perpetuate party privilege.
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The irony is that [the United States’] demise was greatly hastened by its desperate efforts, after the Cold War’s end, to bring to fruition its own (unrealizable) utopian project — worldwide democratic peace …
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That the United States’ democratic experiment is dying, if not indeed already dead, is hardly open to question. It is obvious. The irony is that its demise was greatly hastened by its desperate efforts, after the Cold War’s end, to bring to fruition its own (unrealizable) utopian project – worldwide democratic peace – a project it tried to hurry along by the use of threats, coercion and violence. US democratic neo-imperial ambitions gave rise to a nascent American police state that merged with a ‘cultural Marxist’ cabal linking law enforcement, intelligence organs and the Democrat Party. This confluence of authoritarian forces amounts to a new American Party-state, something that far exceeds the so-called ‘deep state’ and which is now being built under the present and ongoing revolution from above being waged against the Constitution and the rule of law.
Today, the U.S. is undergoing a state-led ‘revolution from above’, and this is perhaps the greatest irony of all. It was precisely a revolution from above that led to the collapse of the Soviet communist regime and state -- the very event that opened the door to the American hegemony that tempted the increasingly corrupted U.S. elite to maximize power globally rather than balance it.
U.S. Sen. John McCain on Maidan Square, Kiev, Dec. 15, 2013.
American-led color revolutions, political expediency and hypocrisy in the aggressive use of US hegemony and such international principles as state sovereignty; America’s selective use of democratic absolutism as an instrument to increase American power along with the simultaneous decline of American democracy; the rise of American transgenderism … all this and much more have provoked revulsion among many non-Westerners abroad (as well, certainly, as some at home). This in turn has further encouraged a new Sino-Russian alliance that is succeeding in weaning many in the ‘rest’ of the world away from dependence on and support for the West.
Perhaps the greatest irony of all is this: rather than America leading a series of revolutions to install democracy across the world, what we are witnessing instead is an alliance of globalist oligarchs funding an authoritarian revolution from above against the American republic and against republicanism in general across the world. ‘Open society’ baron George Soros is financing color revolutions not in totalitarian countries like China and North Korea but in the US, France, and Israel. Charles Schwab has infiltrated the US, Canadian, and other Western governments in order to bring about an authoritarian managerialist-technocratic global government under the guise of the ‘Great Reset’ and Green New Deal. Locally, in the US, Soros and other such global oligarchs fund the election campaigns of anarchistic public prosecutors who, once in office, prosecute conservatives and constitutionalists on politicized grounds and release or refuse to prosecute hardened criminals or violent activists from Antifa or BLM.
Instead of a stable and more-or-less rational worldwide republican order inspired by the American model, we are witnessing the death of the American republic and the concurrent rise of an international disorder characterized by global oligarch-funded revolutionism and a plethora of authoritarian and totalitarian states of various kinds -- some laced with chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear means and weapons. Meanwhile, even as America is dismantling its own republic, it invokes democracy while using decidedly non-democratic means to ‘spread democracy’ -- to Ukraine and elsewhere.
The Russian philosopher and political thinker Nikolai Berdyaev once wrote that revolution, like war, is “irrational,” and it remains irrational even when revolutionaries make use of rationality in their attempt to remake the entire world in the image of their own ideals.
It bears repeating again: “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.” But it is not the right of foreign governments or globalist oligarchs to do so. Is it too late for Americans to learn this lesson? And even if we did, who among us has the humility and intelligence needed both to implement such a novel policy and to convince the rest of the world that we are sincere?
Gordon M. Hahn received his doctorate from Boston University, has taught at six U.S. universities as well as at St. Petersburg State University in Russia, and has published 6 books and hundreds of articles on Russian politics and international relations.