The Issue is the Revolution

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

“There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” mobs of college students chant at terror rallies.

What is there to ‘revolt’ against in New York City, Los Angeles or Chicago? The Hamas rallies like the BLM, environmentalist and other radical rallies take place in cities run by mayors and city councils who support their efforts and sometimes even show up to their events.

Even before New York City and other municipalities paid out millions in voluntary settlements to the BLM rioters who had assaulted police officers, the dirty secret of the radical mobs was that the authorities were on their side. And will continue to be on their side no matter what they do.

The revolution is also the thing that it’s revolting against.

Democrats secured control of the country’s major cities only to be faced with the timeless leftist challenge of making the intensification of their rule look like revolution rather than totalitarianism. The USSR and Cuba directed the ‘revolution’ outward by invading, conquering and intervening in other countries. Democrat cities nationalized their politics, building entire campaigns around Trump, abortion and (to their eventual regret) declaring themselves to be sanctuary cities.

As long as Republicans existed anywhere, urban Democrats could not sleep soundly at night.

Democrat control of cities and states didn’t end bipartisan politics, just turned it into a somewhat real and somewhat fake grudge match between the party’s really crazy and less crazy wings. Craziness was a variable like ‘X’ that was defined not by the common sense brakes of intellectual diversity, but by how far the really crazy wing could push the less crazy wing.

In 2010, open borders, freeing all the criminals, men pretending to be women and support for Hamas were fringe positions of the really crazy wing. By 2024, they’re Democrat positions.

The difference between the really crazy wing and the merely crazy wing is not that they have fundamentally different beliefs, but different tactics and comfort zones. It didn’t take long for the next generation to come home for winter breaks and win over the Democrat moms and dads to police defunding, drag queen story hour and the mass murder of Jews. But first the cultural establishment had to make these horrifying things seem respectable and normal.

Had to fit banning cars and Hamas on a lawn sign right under “in this house, love is love”.

What will the really crazy wing of the party normalize next? Check the academic calendar for the next year, social media for the year after and then the protest calendar for the next five years.

The ‘revolution’ is just about the radicals running the streets getting the feckless ex-liberals running the actual show to adopt some horrendous policy derived from the ravings of a 19th century philosopher and then given a glow up by activist academics and public intellectuals.

Classic town hall politics, limited constitutional government, and checks and balances in a bipartisan system would have prevented American cities from turning into the Paris Commune, but urban politics had made a rapid transition from Tammany Hall political machines to corporate consultants to Marxist struggle sessions with little democracy to be found in any of it.

Cities aren’t run by voters but by ‘stakeholders’. Lifelong community activists and their community groups, municipal unions and their members, and a few political clubs harvest ballots, turn out votes and then end up running cities. That 1% actually runs our lives.

A new generation of young radical activists with dot com money backing and social media savvy like AOC found it easy enough to harness the power of hipster grad students living in $3K a month walkups to disrupt the system and carve out their own extremist slice of the pie.

The new red guard, like the old, however had to find something to do besides stealing money.

The lofty promises of universal health care require more money than is available even if the wings of the old crazy party and the new really crazy party stopped stealing all the money. Defunding the police by moving money from law enforcement to their leftist activist social allies is easier. And a good pogrom against Jewish stores and synagogues is a great distraction.

The revolution isn’t about killing Jews (or not just about killing Jews) but wiping out entire classes of people, reactionaries, shopkeepers and whoever else ended up in the killing fields of Siberia, Guangxi and Choeung Ek for the power and profit of a rising new political elite.

The less crazy party thinks it will never have to come to that, but as with its views on men showering with girls or exposing schoolchildren to violent pornography, this is subject to change.

Life as an urban/suburban bourgeoise with regular stops at Starbucks, Crate and Barrel, and Whole Foods before charging the Tesla in the driveway is pretty comfortable, but being a pol commissar with a dacha in the Outer Banks and the power to gulag your enemies might just be better. All of that will require not just one revolution but a cycle of intermittent revolutions.

The causes matter less than the trajectory. One day it’s the police, the next day it’s car owners and then it’s the Jews. (Say what you will, but the Jews are always a popular one.) The issue, as a certain Marxist once said, is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution.

Causes provide narratives. Berkeley professors and Wall Street personal assistants who have no idea where the river or the sea may be are chanting for the destruction of Israel because it’s a nice change of pace. Like all of us, leftists like to feel that they’re growing as people by embracing new murderous causes. Freeing all the criminals didn’t work so well, but freeing all the terrorists to kill Jewish people thousands of miles away feels both heroic and safe.

But the exoticism of chanting for an “intifada” boils down to a call for revolution here and now.

Students for Justice in Palestine tweeted that the ultimate purpose of the anti-Israel BDS movement is “eradicate America as we know it.” Eradicating America as we know it might seem a bit off-putting to the suburban soy dads and wine moms who make up the middle class base of the party, but they’ll come around just like they did on turning Tim into Tammy and Tammy into Tim. What else are they going to do anyway: become Republicans and have people sneer at them in Whole Foods and risk their kids refusing to come home for the holidays?

The revolution is about eradicating America as we know it. A lot of it’s gone already, but there’s still plenty of work of destruction to be done until we’re all on the right side of history. Or dead.

Revolution is all about being on the right side of history. And the revolution consists of old liberals who are terrified of being on the wrong side of it, stammering their way through pronouns and handling popular critical race theory texts like they were the sacred scriptures of a religion they don’t believe in, and young radicals certain that they are on the right side of it.

But ‘revolution’ is also just dictatorship misspelled. As George Orwell wrote in 1984, “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” The dictatorship in urban and sub Democrat areas is already here.

The stream of monthly revolutions make the deepening totalitarianism, the higher confiscatory taxes, the daily government scrutiny of everything from trash content to social media posts (in cities where violent muggings earn thugs no more than a free therapy session) and the ideology tests for employment, seem like liberation. But that’s what the Russians called it too.

Each revolution makes us more enslaved and less free. We are not free to walk the streets, not free to think for ourselves and not free to even work for a living. We are however free to protest.

But only as long as it’s for the revolution of the political machine taking away all our freedoms.

The issue isn’t drug dealers shot while assaulting police officers. It’s not Israel. It’s not oil or illegals. Those are just the levers which make the dictatorships running our lives more extreme. They are also how those dictatorships pretend that there’s a vibrant system of political dissent.

The issue is not the issue. The issue is that the fake revolutions are a tyranny. The issue is that we have become the slaves of a system that keeps promising to liberate us from our freedoms.

The issue is that we cannot go on living this way.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.