The Uses of Revolutionary Violence

Essay October 7, 2020  

 

When compared to the countries it most resembles, America has always been a violent place. Born in a violent revolution, America also differs from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in its toleration of revolutionary violence as a legitimate method of effecting political change. 

The great theorist of revolutionary violence was Georges Sorel (1847-1922), and those who seek to understand modern American politics might wish to read his Reflections on Violence. In it, Sorel described how French trade unions had used the threat of violence to wrest the changes they desired. So too, the looting and riots in today’s America are best seen as the political expression of a revolt against what is seen as an illegitimate state.

Before revolutionary violence succeeds in its political goals, I suggest that four things are required. First, violence must be routinized, like the filth and the detritus on their streets that San Franciscans must now accept as a fact of life. Second, the violence must be seen to serve the revolutionary goal of resisting an illegitimate state. Third, a fainéant state must show itself to be unwilling to suppress the violence. Lastly, an ostensibly revolutionary party allied to the rioters must be able credibly to promise that, if given its way, it can cabin in the violence and prevent things from descending to mere anarchy.

The murder rates in cities such as Chicago, and the inability of the local authorities to solve crimes, would be wholly unacceptable, full stop, in our sister democracies. Here, however, we are asked to tolerate and even excuse such crimes as a consequence of “root causes” for which the state and not the murderer is responsible. Empirically this is nonsense, and morally it is repugnant, but this describes how many Americans, perhaps half of us, think. If society is to blame, what some call “senseless murders” in Chicago are really political acts.

Violence becomes revolutionary when the state is seen as illegitimate, and Gordon Wood and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. have reminded us that this is why mobs played so important a role in the American Revolution. Similarly, the present American government is less than legitimate if all of American history should be seen through the prism of slavery and Jim Crow, as the 1619 Project holds. In addition, many think Trump was not legitimately elected since his opponent took a greater share of the popular vote. By contrast, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals received fewer votes than the Tories in the 2015 Canadian election, and no one joined a “resistance.”...........To Read More.....