I am not sure I agree about any of this, JVL. At least, not with your analogies, because I view them in an entirely different light. Let me try to explain.
When revolutions fail, the revolutionaries usually face severe consequences... But only if those revolutionaries are from the bottom trying to go for those at the top. In these cases, …
I am not sure I agree about any of this, JVL. At least, not with your analogies, because I view them in an entirely different light. Let me try to explain.
When revolutions fail, the revolutionaries usually face severe consequences... But only if those revolutionaries are from the bottom trying to go for those at the top. In these cases, what you're looking at is something akin to the Iranian revolution, or the Boxer Rebellion, or in America the whiskey rebellion. But when it comes to revolutions in general, there's usually not a huge penalty for the revolution until it turns into a military coup.
For example, the founders of America would have been tried and hanged as traitors, but only at the point where they declared independence. Consider how much rebellion had been going on before that moment happened; there was a lot of tea party-ing and tar and feathering going on, and no one lost their heads. In the French Revolution, the people revolting were not the peasants in the countryside but the rich men of the third estate; men who owned businesses and yet could not break into the upper crust of landed nobility and clergy. Had they kept on without the violence, it is unlikely most of them would have lost their heads, because there was no real way for the state to punish them.
Consider the Russian Revolution as well. How many times had Lenin attempted to engineer the collapse of the state, only for it to result in him being exiled to Germany and Siberia, not executed? In Haiti, the revolution was of rich black men against rich white men, and after they gained independence the first thing they did was pass laws ensuring that the former slaves now couldn't change jobs, lest the economy collapse.
Because you see, 'revolutions' are always due to the bored, affluent class. The ones with money and education and time to think about things like government theory. Poor people do not have any of those things; they're too busy trying to make ends meet. That is why when they rise up, we do not call it a revolution, we call it a revolt, even if they are revolutionary.
Even Hitler's putsch resulted not in his execution, but his imprisonment, and he still made it back to power after the fact. As a man who had once hoped to attend art school, he was hardly a peasant.
In my view, most revolutions occur because there are a lot of people who desire power, who possess means, who are not themselves in power. These people, who believe they deserve power, then agitate, and they possess the time and means to spread ideas and concepts to the people who will actually be fighting and dying for them. But these ideas do not start in the hands of the poor and work up; they start in the hands of the affluent and move down.
In other words, a middle class is required for prosperity, but it is ALWAYS the middle class who becomes revolutionary. The men of the American Revolution were middle class by the standards of the day; not rich nobles with titles, not poor workers and farmers. The men who made up the third estate in France, the men who served in the politboros of Russia; these were middle class men. The rich are never revolutionary, because they have too much to lose. The poor don't have time or education to be able to act on their desires, and when they do it becomes revolt, not revolution.
The middle class is also the class that spreads the most radical ideas. The moral puritanism that spread in England during the industrial revolution was not started in the houses of the elite, but the factories of the middle class who sought a way to control their workers. The beliefs of the French Revolution were fermented in the Salons, not the noble estates of the rich.
Revolution then, is about a class of people with money, but not power, who desire power, and see a chance to wield the poor against the rich in order to become the new rich themselves.
Furthermore, Trumpism has MANY ideas. It's ideas are simply reactionary in nature. White men should rule, there are only 'real' Americans and 'fake Americans,' religion should be observed in the name of the state, the purpose of government is to harm your enemies. It's all there, and they will articulate these ideas to you if you listen. That's not 'no ideas' it's simply that they are old ideas, and that's the nature of every reactionary movement.
The conservatives in Iran, for example, said basically all the same things as Trumpist do, they just substituted the Koran for the Bible. What Trump and his ilk want is something akin to a christian Saudi Arabia or Iran, a nation where religion and power is used by the wealthy against their enemies for the explicit purpose of enriching themselves. That's a very powerful idea.
Furthermore, I do not believe that defeat at the ballot box means that people suddenly abandon their ideas. When Kennedy, LBJ, and Carter were elected, the GOP didn't think 'guess we need to abandon our anti-communism stance and our jingoism.' They put up men like Nixon and Reagan. They put up men like Barry Goldwater. It's a fiction to think that movements change because of electoral defeats; most of the time, they double down and wait for their enemies to collapse under the weight of their responsibilities. It's only when the old guard die off that new ideas are infused into the political mainstream; younger people who see the people who came before as out of touch. But they themselves don't radically shift their views based on what the opinion polls say.
This will be written over the course of hours as I have downtime between patients, so please bear with me (but do criticize normally).
I have a different view of what constitutes American classes. I'm in the lower class, always one paycheck away from destitution. I also have a personal computer that fits in my pocket and has yadda yadda Library of Alexandria inside it. Having a phone plan is on the order of a utility nowadays -- ask anyone who's filled out a job application in the past few years.
What you describe as the middle class of yesteryear and yore isn't the middle class anymore, and I doubt they would fit any definition of middle class that we spent time working through and agreeing upon. Owning land with a house on it might fall into the definition. Owning land that your business sits on is a cut above. Two incomes each bringing home six figures is a cut above. But, this is getting into the weeds a little without a reason to yet.
The crux of my stance on this is that Trumpism has some roots in the upper middle class, the same one that put Mitt Romney up as their man to take down Obama. But, its roots are deep in the lower class of America.
Those roots have been exposed for decades in the common folk for anyone with eyes to see it and ears to hear it. There are many routes to Trumpism, because it does definitely espouse some ideas. Those ideas almost all circle back to social politics, to an us vs. them mentality, and that is what makes it so pernicious. It's what gives Trumpism such a wide spread.
Properly countering those ideas requires individualized messaging, which requires getting to know them, which requires some elemental trust. Now, repeat that for 74,223,974 more people. I'm exhausted, and I'm not even working like Sarah Longwell is.
You are absolutely right that winning the election isn't enough. It's necessary, but not sufficient. Us vs. them is as old as we are. Wealth is a vehicle and boredom an engine, but the driver is a mentality. It is alive in my generation, the one before me, and in those just coming into their voting rights. You cannot weed out human nature.
Trumpism is a revolution of recidivism. It's a revolution predicated upon social capital. It's a revolution in social media, showing how the democratization of communication and dissemination of information has lowered thresholds for people to take action and, e.g, plot to kidnap a state governor or kick off an actual revolt vis-a-vis January 6th.
A final point of contention: I doubt that Trump wants a Christofascist state. He would be terrified if one came to pass without him at the top. Ask him to name five books in the Bible and he'll list Genesis three times. All he wants is to be the center of the universe and to stay outside of a jail cell. Hell, he might even plead guilty to every charge if he was allowed to stay under house arrest for the remainder of his days so long as he had a tweet deck. He'd be able to do just as much damage from Elb-a-lago and strut as a prima donna without much legal exposure.
"In my view, most revolutions occur because there are a lot of people who desire power, who possess means, who are not themselves in power. These people, who believe they deserve power, then agitate, and they possess the time and means to spread ideas and concepts to the people who will actually be fighting and dying for them. But these ideas do not start in the hands of the poor and work up; they start in the hands of the affluent and move down."
100%. The modern domestic equivalents are the Steve Bannons of the world. And the more affluent and well-off a society gets, the more people "with money and education and time to think about things like government theory" there will be. Greater prosperity brings greater risk to political stability in turn. That's why this isn't strictly an American thing and we're seeing it happen in Europe too.
Excellent points. Re "It's only when the old guard die off that new ideas are infused into the political mainstream; younger people who see the people who came before as out of touch" is the basis for the book "THE FOURTH TURNING IS HERE
WHAT THE SEASONS OF HISTORY TELL US ABOUT HOW AND WHEN THIS CRISIS WILL END" by Neil Howe. We are in what he calls the Fourth Turning, AKA a crisis period that began with the '08 Crash. The four cycles parallel the seasons. We are in Winter. Systems are breaking down. This is obvious. What isn't is that something new emerges from the ashes which is what happens in the Spring. Here is a Kirkus review of the book: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/neil-howe/the-fourth-turning-is-here/
No, no one was hung, drawn, and quartered, but in the year before Lexington and Concord and the year following there was a not small chance some people would have been transported to London for a trial on treason.
I think this is more akin to what we dealt with with sectionalism leading up to the Civil War which was not a revolution really, even though fights about power can all look like that. Of course, our issues are not limited to sections today, but divided along lines that are found everywhere.
This is wonderfully worded and written. I disagree on some points and I will try to revisit later when I have more time. But, I wanted to say this is very well built writing.
No one of status or means who advocated for those things to happen lost their heads. The men who advocated for violence and spread ideas, men like Patrick Henry and Paul Revere, did not face any consequences for them inspiring the violence that led to people dying.
People who were not themselves of the middle class.
They WERE risking their lives, but if they had not "hung together" as Franklin urged, or if the Brits didn't just give up at Yorktown, they surely were gonna "hang separately".
Yeah, this is an important point. How much of this is happenstance. I.e. that the Hilters of the world weren't killed (in some way or another) and instead given multiple shots at the ring.
Hitler may be an outlier case, but it's not like he wasn't a target for someone from 1914 onwards, starting with the British and French soldiers on the other side of No Man's Land and continuing past the Munich Police before and after the putsch. While he had an apparatus of protection around him to ward them off, there were plenty of people with motive.
Gotta disagree, somewhat. The women of Paris who marched on Versailles were poor and wanted more bread. The folks who took the Bastille were a mix, but mostly regular folks who were hurting, though there was influence from others.
Hitler was a poor, virtually penniless scamp before he joined the army.
Lenin, along with Trotsky, was firmly established as a Bolshevik leader and was in and out of Russia while he awaited his moment to strike. He was a hero of the proletariat.
They were. But they did not get their ideas from other poor people. They acted on ideas that were spread to them by the rich members of the third estate. Without the Tennis Court Oath, they are merely revolting, not causing a revolution.
Hitler was poor, but he was not a poor laborer. He was distinctly middle class in his own society, which is why he could think about things like art school as opposed to working on a farm or in a factory.
You're right about Lenin and Trotsky, but my point was that neither of them were struck down by the Czar. They were exiled, not executed. A better example might have been the internal revolution of Stalin rising over Trotsky. But then, internal revolution is different from external revolution.
One of the most enlightening things in my life was back in college where I took a class on the industrialization of Britain. Specifically, it was enlightening how different groups spread different ideas. For example, the Luddites were working class and their idea of society and 'revolution' was against the concept of factory labor, specifically on the idea of not themselves owning their tools and the machines they worked with. They also were against the fact that factory work had traditionally been women's work, and was now putting them, working men, out of business. This forced them into the factories, where they didn't want to work with women.
This was taken by the middle class that was emerging and spun into the moralism of the day; the kind of thing you see in Charles Dickens was not created or spread by the rich, it was spread by the middle class. Ideas like 'if you're poor it's because you're immoral and don't work hard' was not spread by rich people, it was by the middle class who wished to justify their wealth. They couldn't claim long, distinguished family histories, so they claimed moral superiority instead.
And so you had a very strange thing going on: the factory owners co-opted the sexism and racism of the lower classes (women don't belong in men's work, foreigners take British jobs) and infused it with moral Puritanism, and what you were left with was a way of thinking that basically wanted to replace one rigged system with a new one.
'Rich people are rich because they were born to it' was replaced with 'if you just work hard enough you can be rich' even though the middle class became it's own entrenched nobility. But this is entirely the same as Trumpism. People of means who lack access to power using the angry masses to propel themselves towards power so that they can become the new entrenched nobility.
The reason why you don't see revolutions before the modern age across the world is because for a revolution to happen, you need a middle class. Without a middle class, it becomes revolt or a military coup. One dynasty coming and one dynasty going in China is not a revolution. There's no middle class there to cause a shift in who is in power, so what changes is just who is in charge.
Arguably, you could say that in America, it's not the inner cities that are hotbeds of revolution, but the suburbs. Soccer moms meeting are the American Salons of Paris. Do you think the men of the American revolution walked to their meetings? No! They took carriages like men of status did.
The most dangerous force in modern society is a bored middle class.
Once again your response is outstanding. You left out the use of Victorian child labor, which seems to be coming to Arkansas. Marx and Engels saw this clearly although their understanding of where it would lead was wrong and they didn’t understand that the proletariat class just wanted to be like the middle class. I think the forces that worked against revolution then may be weaker now. Then as now politics was exhausting. Thinking about this is tiring on another day I might have more energy to comment, but I am also overwhelmed by people’s lack of awareness. The whole MAGA idea is based on a world that never really existed and I think a real revolution requires the idea of going forward. Radicalized reactionaries are the worst and I think they will fail, but the harm they may do is terrifying.
"People of means who lack access to power using the angry masses to propel themselves towards power so that they can become the new entrenched nobility." Brilliant. This is EXACTLY what's going on.
Trump is not nobility. Donny from Queens wanted to be, but he was never accepted. That goofy, 50s-hot-rodder hair, too garish and gaudy with his wealth, and not very smart. No grad degree and he barely got through U Penn as a transfer student only because, reportedly, his father donated to the University. Then he was humiliated by a Black president in front of the Manhattan and Georgetown journalism and entertainment nobility he so desperately wanted to be accepted by at the 2011 White House Correspondents' Dinner. Here's the clip:
Note how everyone's laughing but him (Al Franken says he never laughs.)
Anne Applebaum, author of "The Twilight of Democracy," says all the recent authoritarians, like Steve Bannon and Laura Ingraham are well educated, but were never accepted by the elites. They are now "political entrepreneurs", making money stoking the middle-class whites' resentment of elites.
"...even though the middle class became its own entrenched nobility". But didn't much of the offspring of the working class population become middle class overtime? I'm just not sure you can characterize the mid-19th-century British bourgeois and petit-bourgeois class as some sort of "entrenched nobility" if access to its ranks was open to lower classes (as demonstrated by subsequent socioeconomic developments in Britain and across the industrialized world).
What I'm getting at is that the easiest way to become wealthy is to inherit it. The men who built businesses in the beginning of the industrial revolution left their fortunes to their children, and their children's children.
This also happened in America. The men who were at the cusp of industry in the first half of the 20th century eventually made it impossible for people outside of those industries to break in the same way. Such is the nature of business.
I am not sure I agree about any of this, JVL. At least, not with your analogies, because I view them in an entirely different light. Let me try to explain.
When revolutions fail, the revolutionaries usually face severe consequences... But only if those revolutionaries are from the bottom trying to go for those at the top. In these cases, what you're looking at is something akin to the Iranian revolution, or the Boxer Rebellion, or in America the whiskey rebellion. But when it comes to revolutions in general, there's usually not a huge penalty for the revolution until it turns into a military coup.
For example, the founders of America would have been tried and hanged as traitors, but only at the point where they declared independence. Consider how much rebellion had been going on before that moment happened; there was a lot of tea party-ing and tar and feathering going on, and no one lost their heads. In the French Revolution, the people revolting were not the peasants in the countryside but the rich men of the third estate; men who owned businesses and yet could not break into the upper crust of landed nobility and clergy. Had they kept on without the violence, it is unlikely most of them would have lost their heads, because there was no real way for the state to punish them.
Consider the Russian Revolution as well. How many times had Lenin attempted to engineer the collapse of the state, only for it to result in him being exiled to Germany and Siberia, not executed? In Haiti, the revolution was of rich black men against rich white men, and after they gained independence the first thing they did was pass laws ensuring that the former slaves now couldn't change jobs, lest the economy collapse.
Because you see, 'revolutions' are always due to the bored, affluent class. The ones with money and education and time to think about things like government theory. Poor people do not have any of those things; they're too busy trying to make ends meet. That is why when they rise up, we do not call it a revolution, we call it a revolt, even if they are revolutionary.
Even Hitler's putsch resulted not in his execution, but his imprisonment, and he still made it back to power after the fact. As a man who had once hoped to attend art school, he was hardly a peasant.
In my view, most revolutions occur because there are a lot of people who desire power, who possess means, who are not themselves in power. These people, who believe they deserve power, then agitate, and they possess the time and means to spread ideas and concepts to the people who will actually be fighting and dying for them. But these ideas do not start in the hands of the poor and work up; they start in the hands of the affluent and move down.
In other words, a middle class is required for prosperity, but it is ALWAYS the middle class who becomes revolutionary. The men of the American Revolution were middle class by the standards of the day; not rich nobles with titles, not poor workers and farmers. The men who made up the third estate in France, the men who served in the politboros of Russia; these were middle class men. The rich are never revolutionary, because they have too much to lose. The poor don't have time or education to be able to act on their desires, and when they do it becomes revolt, not revolution.
The middle class is also the class that spreads the most radical ideas. The moral puritanism that spread in England during the industrial revolution was not started in the houses of the elite, but the factories of the middle class who sought a way to control their workers. The beliefs of the French Revolution were fermented in the Salons, not the noble estates of the rich.
Revolution then, is about a class of people with money, but not power, who desire power, and see a chance to wield the poor against the rich in order to become the new rich themselves.
Furthermore, Trumpism has MANY ideas. It's ideas are simply reactionary in nature. White men should rule, there are only 'real' Americans and 'fake Americans,' religion should be observed in the name of the state, the purpose of government is to harm your enemies. It's all there, and they will articulate these ideas to you if you listen. That's not 'no ideas' it's simply that they are old ideas, and that's the nature of every reactionary movement.
The conservatives in Iran, for example, said basically all the same things as Trumpist do, they just substituted the Koran for the Bible. What Trump and his ilk want is something akin to a christian Saudi Arabia or Iran, a nation where religion and power is used by the wealthy against their enemies for the explicit purpose of enriching themselves. That's a very powerful idea.
Furthermore, I do not believe that defeat at the ballot box means that people suddenly abandon their ideas. When Kennedy, LBJ, and Carter were elected, the GOP didn't think 'guess we need to abandon our anti-communism stance and our jingoism.' They put up men like Nixon and Reagan. They put up men like Barry Goldwater. It's a fiction to think that movements change because of electoral defeats; most of the time, they double down and wait for their enemies to collapse under the weight of their responsibilities. It's only when the old guard die off that new ideas are infused into the political mainstream; younger people who see the people who came before as out of touch. But they themselves don't radically shift their views based on what the opinion polls say.
You gave me a different way to think about revolution. Very interesting.
Some may call this elite overproduction as formulated by Peter Turchin, which he believes can predict massive societal change.
This will be written over the course of hours as I have downtime between patients, so please bear with me (but do criticize normally).
I have a different view of what constitutes American classes. I'm in the lower class, always one paycheck away from destitution. I also have a personal computer that fits in my pocket and has yadda yadda Library of Alexandria inside it. Having a phone plan is on the order of a utility nowadays -- ask anyone who's filled out a job application in the past few years.
What you describe as the middle class of yesteryear and yore isn't the middle class anymore, and I doubt they would fit any definition of middle class that we spent time working through and agreeing upon. Owning land with a house on it might fall into the definition. Owning land that your business sits on is a cut above. Two incomes each bringing home six figures is a cut above. But, this is getting into the weeds a little without a reason to yet.
The crux of my stance on this is that Trumpism has some roots in the upper middle class, the same one that put Mitt Romney up as their man to take down Obama. But, its roots are deep in the lower class of America.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jrnRU3ocIH4
Those roots have been exposed for decades in the common folk for anyone with eyes to see it and ears to hear it. There are many routes to Trumpism, because it does definitely espouse some ideas. Those ideas almost all circle back to social politics, to an us vs. them mentality, and that is what makes it so pernicious. It's what gives Trumpism such a wide spread.
Properly countering those ideas requires individualized messaging, which requires getting to know them, which requires some elemental trust. Now, repeat that for 74,223,974 more people. I'm exhausted, and I'm not even working like Sarah Longwell is.
You are absolutely right that winning the election isn't enough. It's necessary, but not sufficient. Us vs. them is as old as we are. Wealth is a vehicle and boredom an engine, but the driver is a mentality. It is alive in my generation, the one before me, and in those just coming into their voting rights. You cannot weed out human nature.
Trumpism is a revolution of recidivism. It's a revolution predicated upon social capital. It's a revolution in social media, showing how the democratization of communication and dissemination of information has lowered thresholds for people to take action and, e.g, plot to kidnap a state governor or kick off an actual revolt vis-a-vis January 6th.
A final point of contention: I doubt that Trump wants a Christofascist state. He would be terrified if one came to pass without him at the top. Ask him to name five books in the Bible and he'll list Genesis three times. All he wants is to be the center of the universe and to stay outside of a jail cell. Hell, he might even plead guilty to every charge if he was allowed to stay under house arrest for the remainder of his days so long as he had a tweet deck. He'd be able to do just as much damage from Elb-a-lago and strut as a prima donna without much legal exposure.
"In my view, most revolutions occur because there are a lot of people who desire power, who possess means, who are not themselves in power. These people, who believe they deserve power, then agitate, and they possess the time and means to spread ideas and concepts to the people who will actually be fighting and dying for them. But these ideas do not start in the hands of the poor and work up; they start in the hands of the affluent and move down."
100%. The modern domestic equivalents are the Steve Bannons of the world. And the more affluent and well-off a society gets, the more people "with money and education and time to think about things like government theory" there will be. Greater prosperity brings greater risk to political stability in turn. That's why this isn't strictly an American thing and we're seeing it happen in Europe too.
Excellent points. Re "It's only when the old guard die off that new ideas are infused into the political mainstream; younger people who see the people who came before as out of touch" is the basis for the book "THE FOURTH TURNING IS HERE
WHAT THE SEASONS OF HISTORY TELL US ABOUT HOW AND WHEN THIS CRISIS WILL END" by Neil Howe. We are in what he calls the Fourth Turning, AKA a crisis period that began with the '08 Crash. The four cycles parallel the seasons. We are in Winter. Systems are breaking down. This is obvious. What isn't is that something new emerges from the ashes which is what happens in the Spring. Here is a Kirkus review of the book: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/neil-howe/the-fourth-turning-is-here/
No, no one was hung, drawn, and quartered, but in the year before Lexington and Concord and the year following there was a not small chance some people would have been transported to London for a trial on treason.
I think this is more akin to what we dealt with with sectionalism leading up to the Civil War which was not a revolution really, even though fights about power can all look like that. Of course, our issues are not limited to sections today, but divided along lines that are found everywhere.
Must break out my copy of Crane Brinton's book.
This is wonderfully worded and written. I disagree on some points and I will try to revisit later when I have more time. But, I wanted to say this is very well built writing.
Agree. Triad commenters are the best!!! I love reading such writing.
Best comment section on Substack. It's not even close.
No argument here!
No one lost their heads?
Please tell that to the five who died at the Boston Massacre.
Or the seven at Lexington & Concord.
Or those who lost everything when the British navy bombarded Falmouth MA and Norfolk VA and burned both.
No one of status or means who advocated for those things to happen lost their heads. The men who advocated for violence and spread ideas, men like Patrick Henry and Paul Revere, did not face any consequences for them inspiring the violence that led to people dying.
People who were not themselves of the middle class.
As I note elsewhere, while they didn't die that's not evidence they weren't risking their lives.
They WERE risking their lives, but if they had not "hung together" as Franklin urged, or if the Brits didn't just give up at Yorktown, they surely were gonna "hang separately".
Yeah, this is an important point. How much of this is happenstance. I.e. that the Hilters of the world weren't killed (in some way or another) and instead given multiple shots at the ring.
Hitler may be an outlier case, but it's not like he wasn't a target for someone from 1914 onwards, starting with the British and French soldiers on the other side of No Man's Land and continuing past the Munich Police before and after the putsch. While he had an apparatus of protection around him to ward them off, there were plenty of people with motive.
Totally.
Barring obvious hurdles, I tend to view these things as quirks of history. We only rarely hear about the ones that didn't get thru the gauntlet.
Gotta disagree, somewhat. The women of Paris who marched on Versailles were poor and wanted more bread. The folks who took the Bastille were a mix, but mostly regular folks who were hurting, though there was influence from others.
Hitler was a poor, virtually penniless scamp before he joined the army.
Lenin, along with Trotsky, was firmly established as a Bolshevik leader and was in and out of Russia while he awaited his moment to strike. He was a hero of the proletariat.
They were. But they did not get their ideas from other poor people. They acted on ideas that were spread to them by the rich members of the third estate. Without the Tennis Court Oath, they are merely revolting, not causing a revolution.
Hitler was poor, but he was not a poor laborer. He was distinctly middle class in his own society, which is why he could think about things like art school as opposed to working on a farm or in a factory.
You're right about Lenin and Trotsky, but my point was that neither of them were struck down by the Czar. They were exiled, not executed. A better example might have been the internal revolution of Stalin rising over Trotsky. But then, internal revolution is different from external revolution.
A++ comment.
Thank you!
One of the most enlightening things in my life was back in college where I took a class on the industrialization of Britain. Specifically, it was enlightening how different groups spread different ideas. For example, the Luddites were working class and their idea of society and 'revolution' was against the concept of factory labor, specifically on the idea of not themselves owning their tools and the machines they worked with. They also were against the fact that factory work had traditionally been women's work, and was now putting them, working men, out of business. This forced them into the factories, where they didn't want to work with women.
This was taken by the middle class that was emerging and spun into the moralism of the day; the kind of thing you see in Charles Dickens was not created or spread by the rich, it was spread by the middle class. Ideas like 'if you're poor it's because you're immoral and don't work hard' was not spread by rich people, it was by the middle class who wished to justify their wealth. They couldn't claim long, distinguished family histories, so they claimed moral superiority instead.
And so you had a very strange thing going on: the factory owners co-opted the sexism and racism of the lower classes (women don't belong in men's work, foreigners take British jobs) and infused it with moral Puritanism, and what you were left with was a way of thinking that basically wanted to replace one rigged system with a new one.
'Rich people are rich because they were born to it' was replaced with 'if you just work hard enough you can be rich' even though the middle class became it's own entrenched nobility. But this is entirely the same as Trumpism. People of means who lack access to power using the angry masses to propel themselves towards power so that they can become the new entrenched nobility.
The reason why you don't see revolutions before the modern age across the world is because for a revolution to happen, you need a middle class. Without a middle class, it becomes revolt or a military coup. One dynasty coming and one dynasty going in China is not a revolution. There's no middle class there to cause a shift in who is in power, so what changes is just who is in charge.
Arguably, you could say that in America, it's not the inner cities that are hotbeds of revolution, but the suburbs. Soccer moms meeting are the American Salons of Paris. Do you think the men of the American revolution walked to their meetings? No! They took carriages like men of status did.
The most dangerous force in modern society is a bored middle class.
Once again your response is outstanding. You left out the use of Victorian child labor, which seems to be coming to Arkansas. Marx and Engels saw this clearly although their understanding of where it would lead was wrong and they didn’t understand that the proletariat class just wanted to be like the middle class. I think the forces that worked against revolution then may be weaker now. Then as now politics was exhausting. Thinking about this is tiring on another day I might have more energy to comment, but I am also overwhelmed by people’s lack of awareness. The whole MAGA idea is based on a world that never really existed and I think a real revolution requires the idea of going forward. Radicalized reactionaries are the worst and I think they will fail, but the harm they may do is terrifying.
"People of means who lack access to power using the angry masses to propel themselves towards power so that they can become the new entrenched nobility." Brilliant. This is EXACTLY what's going on.
Trump is not nobility. Donny from Queens wanted to be, but he was never accepted. That goofy, 50s-hot-rodder hair, too garish and gaudy with his wealth, and not very smart. No grad degree and he barely got through U Penn as a transfer student only because, reportedly, his father donated to the University. Then he was humiliated by a Black president in front of the Manhattan and Georgetown journalism and entertainment nobility he so desperately wanted to be accepted by at the 2011 White House Correspondents' Dinner. Here's the clip:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/cnnmoney/2017/04/28/obama-roast-trump-correspondents-dinner.cnn.
Note how everyone's laughing but him (Al Franken says he never laughs.)
Anne Applebaum, author of "The Twilight of Democracy," says all the recent authoritarians, like Steve Bannon and Laura Ingraham are well educated, but were never accepted by the elites. They are now "political entrepreneurs", making money stoking the middle-class whites' resentment of elites.
"...even though the middle class became its own entrenched nobility". But didn't much of the offspring of the working class population become middle class overtime? I'm just not sure you can characterize the mid-19th-century British bourgeois and petit-bourgeois class as some sort of "entrenched nobility" if access to its ranks was open to lower classes (as demonstrated by subsequent socioeconomic developments in Britain and across the industrialized world).
What I'm getting at is that the easiest way to become wealthy is to inherit it. The men who built businesses in the beginning of the industrial revolution left their fortunes to their children, and their children's children.
This also happened in America. The men who were at the cusp of industry in the first half of the 20th century eventually made it impossible for people outside of those industries to break in the same way. Such is the nature of business.