Two kinds of revolutions:
- Throwing off an external oppressor
- Often violent, sometimes not
- Forcing regime change in your own country through extra-political or violent means
- Largely violent
- Largely nonviolent
The outcomes tend to be very different.
(Focusing on outcomes where they win -- turns out most revolutions fail militarily)
Those throwing off an outsider tend to work out pretty well!
- US revolution
- Spanish-American independence
- Haitian slave revolt (note unlike many slave revolts, the Haitians were the natives)
- Indian revolution (mostly)
- Greek & Balkan revolutions, generally the revolutions of Nationalism of the 19th century
- Generally the anticolonial revolutions
Those forcing internal change through violence tend to lead to brutal dictatorships
- Russian revolution
- French revolution
- Chinese revolution
- English revolution
- Cuban revolution
- Iranian revolution
- Roman Republic revolutions / civil wars
GENERALLY:
-Kicking people out works out pretty well
-Civil wars don’t: they lead to dictatorships
OK why?
-Kicking people out: you use tribalism to your advantage
Your people are united against an outsider
Once it’s over, the outsiders can generally leave
-Regime change: tribalism works against you
Your people are divided because you’re using violence to create winners and losers
Once it’s over, the defeated folks stick around (see: the Iraq war and the Baath party)
But there’s a second bit:
When you have an internal revolution, you’re using violence not just against the current system, but at the very idea of legitimacy of any given system. You set a precedent: if I don’t like it, I can use violence to change it.
Any regime, or system of government, relies on legitimacy. Building that legitimacy is hard. Lots of people study this. It usually relies on traditions, taught and shared belief systems, propaganda, and enough of a track record that people feel they have some means of getting their needs met through the system some reasonable amount of the time.
So you end up reverting to using raw power, secret police, fear, etc. You don’t have unity or legitimacy so you can only resort to violence.
When that doesn’t work, you end up losing the revolution and either the old regime comes back pretty quickly (English revolution) or you have ongoing violent anarchy where everyone is getting beheaded, including the children of the revolution, until a strongman comes in and restores order and people are generally OK with this (French, Roman Republic revolutions)
See: Machiavelli’s Prince
We must be wary in our own democracies of escalating rhetoric and actions that chip away at the legitimacy of the liberal system. Liberal systems are designed to solve problems through a process: when you eschew that process to get what you need, you erode that legitimacy and bring about its downfall, and what’s going to come next will be ugly.
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