Where Are All The Revolutionaries?

Where are all the gods?

Since Donald Trump was reelected, he has been busy waging illegal genocidal wars against Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, and various other peoples throughout the world. He has committed war crimes and human rights atrocities alike, whether it’s double-tapping sinking civilian ships or a girl’s elementary school, or executing anti-ICE protestors like Renee Good and Alex Pretti. He has violated the constitution, appropriating funds without Congressional approval. By all metrics therefore, Donald Trump is an illegitimate, criminal President that should be immediately impeached and removed; yet he isn’t, for the Republican Party still supports him, and so, President he remains. Lacking a legal means of removing an illegal President, the next obvious step would be to use illegal means yet that too is an anathema. As the boisterous buffoon Natalie Wynn noted:

The above observation demands analysis. Where are the revolutionaries, either the liberal constitutionalists or marxian typologists, who would’ve built and mounted barricades over far less offensive measures in the past? After all, it was Adolphe Thiers, the liberal revolutionary who brutally gunned down the leftist Paris Commune in 1871 who in 1830 said about the King’s government:

“The legal regime is over; that of force has begun; in the situation in which we are placed, obedience has ceased to be an obligation.” - Adolphe Thiers, 1830

This was not just a hot take, something Tweeted out on the toilet in between posts about discussions about racism on The Pitt and the latest condemnations of Hasan Piker. This was an actual call to revolutionary violence, heeded by the public who then took up arms and overthrew the Kingdom of France in 1830.

The equivalent of a modern Thiers would be the liberal princeps, Ezra Klein. Can anyone imagine Klein posting something equivalent, calling people to literal arms? Even if he did, can anyone imagine anyone actually heeding the call? Both are farcical fantasies. Using violence to achieve political objectives is so far out of the norm of American politics that even a President flagrantly violating the laws and constitution does not change the anti political violence nature of Americans.

Meanwhile, on both the left and the right, revolutionary violence operates on a lone wolf ‘one-and-done’ principle, and has for some time. It is simply not possible to organize a violent conspiracy with more than two people. Two people may indeed get together and conspire some violent act, but more than two almost always leads to arrest and preemption by the police. We can see this reflected in past terrorist attacks. During the 2000s and 2010s in Europe, there’s data to suggest that lone wolves have a 61% chance to launch terrorist attacks, versus 18% for 2 or more conspirators.

Crucially though too is that these attacks are ‘one and done’, meaning that once an attack has been executed, the perpetrator is always eliminated, either by forced exile, death, or imprisonment. The persons who committed the Charlie Kirk and Brian Thompson incidents were ‘one-and-done’; they will never be able to act in that kinetic fashion ever again. That in turn makes their revolutionary potential nil; a revolutionary is someone who may die in the struggle, but otherwise can be trained and counted on to do work as part of a large organizational goal. Thanks in large part to the strength of the American police state, neither of those goals are tangibly possible; you cannot train revolutionaries (for they will be arrested after their first act) or count them to be part of a larger organization (for they will be arrested and/or closely monitored by the police as soon as they enter, rendering their actions vulnerable to espionage, sabotage, and preemption).

The US Federal Government, and her European allies, have altogether hundreds of years of fighting and breaking up revolutionary groups using combined police enforcement efforts. They are all extremely well-informed, highly competent, well-paid, and highly motivated. To wit, the last time a leftist group made any serious revolutionary moves was in the 1980s, when leftist bombings were commonplace. The right, treated with comparative kid gloves, launched violent attacks as recent as last year, yet with extremely little to show for it.

Where then, are all the revolutionaries? We killed them all. Or, if we didn’t, we arrested them, marginalized them, and in other words made the things that made revolutionary victory possible, impossible.

And what makes revolutionary victory possible? First, let us define the main four revolutionary tactics.

1. Maoist/Castroist guerilla resistance

   1. This is the classic image of a green camo-wearing mountain band of cigar-chomping, hard-living men and women who wage a Star Wars-like rebellion against an evil empire. It’s people lugging rusty AK-47s in the deep wilds, ambushing police and military units, staying mobile, and slowly destabilizing the state from the inside out. Eventually, the state will be so weakened by these engagements that the guerilla force will be able to march into the capital, relatively unopposed.

2. Thiersian barricade mounting

   1. Going back to Thiers, this was most recently seen in the Gen Z Protests and in the Arab Spring; a bunch of people taking to the streets and effectively shutting down the national economy with a general strike. The state, crippled by elite disagreement and general weakness, opts for capitulation to these forces rather than continued resistance.

3. Soviet dual power

   1. Pretty much seen only in 1917, this entails the state allowing the army to choose which national government to swear fealty to, to either the Soviets or national legislature. If a power like the Bolsheviks is thereafter able to take over the Soviets through elections, and if a large enough component of the army holds loyalty not to the legislature but the Soviets and thereby the Bolsheviks, then the Bolsheviks can use the army to overthrow the national government, assuming the national government does not move first.

4. August or Self-Coups

   1. This type of revolutionary action stems from elite disagreement. An elite part of the government, sensing political weakness of other parts of government, moves against that part of the government and dismisses them. This may happen in conjunction with a mass popular protest, but rather than the protests driving the coup, it is the coup plotters driving the protests. This is the ‘revolution by letter’, as was seen successfully throughout multiple military dictatorships throughout the 20th century, and unsuccessfully in the 1991 USSR August Coup. Mass involvement, to the extent it exists, is co-opted and utilized for revolutionary purposes before being discarded.

Of these, which is most likely to happen in America? Or, for those that cannot happen in America, why is that?

First, we must dismiss options 1 and 3, the guerilla war and the dual power scenarios. Guerilla war is impossible for all the aforementioned reasons; the strength of the American police and military state is such that if it were to happen, the United States would effectively have to have already collapsed into a Syrian-style civil war. And for the third scenario, dual power, that too is impossible considering that no government in their right mind would suffer something like the soviets to ever exist, and that the only reason that the Russian government allowed it in 1917 was because of the German invasion of Russian territory; an existential, ruinous bloody war of massive epochal upheaval.

Next, we can dismiss the ghost of Thiers. If Ezra Klein and his cohorts were to demand an immediate rising, there might be a few million who march out into the streets. But then what? Napoleon III taught all modern city architects: build your cities with wide enough avenues to ride a unit of hussars (or, in modern contexts, tanks) through, and cut down any would-be revolutionaries. And, you don’t even need to use tanks. Simple CS gas, riot shields, and a few thousand well-trained, well-paid cops can dent a force 100 times its size, no matter how well-intentioned the group of protestors are. Even if a group of protestors could break through all the kettling, all the walls of riot shields, all the CS gas, all they’ll end up doing is occupying a building or two before being surrounded and arrested. That’s exactly what happened on January 6 (both the American and Brazilian versions!).

So that only leaves August or Self-Coups. This remains the only type of revolutionary action that is still possible in America in spite of everything. For one, it doesn’t take a lot to do. To explain, let’s assume that Vice President JD Vance wanted to attempt a successful version of the August Coup, using the 25th Amendment as the Constitutional justification.

Vance would first need the backing of armed men, a combination of either soldiers, police forces, or the Secret Service, to act. This doesn’t have to be a large group; around 100 would be necessary to interdict and detain the President at a secure location. Once Trump has been detained and moved to a secured facility, Vance would then submit a Section 3 letter to Congress, effectively making him Acting President.

With Trump detained, ‘a written declaration to the contrary’ will not be forthcoming. Here of course is where the August Coup failed, as Gorbachev was able to send a written declaration to the contrary to Yeltsin, ending the coup prematurely. With that in mind, Vance will ensure that Trump is incommunicado until his either Section 1 resignation or impeachment (a Porfirian exile or Allende execution would be other options, though fraught with their own obvious risks of a Trumpist return either from exile or in revenge, from his children).

This is not to advocate for Vance to do this, to be clear. This is just an observation that the only type of revolutionary action possible in America, at the present and foreseeable future, is this, an elite self-coup by other members of the elite. Guerilla forces do not exist, the masses cannot otherwise take power, and soviets are a historical oddity, not a repeatable pattern to exploit.

There are of course implications for political movements in this analysis. For those on the Left or the Right, it means that to commit to politics, one must commit to electoralism. One can tilt at terrorist windmills, but other than serving as Quixotish parables, there is no logical reason why one would do so. It doesn’t matter if you are in the DSA or some other group; if you are in politics as a leftist, you are either imminently involved in electoralism, or you are imminently about to be arrested.

It means that those who do have revolutionary ambitions must play the long, internal game, and build internal elite consensus first before acting. Considering how capitalist-aligned our state is, and therefore how capitalist our elites are, this internal revolution, shown in a Vancian style self-coup, will only ever happen to solidify and strengthen the capitalist state, not to seek its overturn.

So, if a revolution is to happen in America, it will only ever be an elite-run, internal elite self-coup, which will end up strengthening the capitalist state and the forces that underpin it. Otherwise, your best bet is to work within the system, and seek to reform its excesses from within.

Maybe this will change in the years and decades to come. Maybe it won’t. For now though, the pattern is clear. The revolutionaries are long gone. All that remains are the elite: their games, their struggles, their triumphs, and our suffering. Our only choice: to join with the elite, or to alleviate whatever suffering we can, by whatever power we can scrounge up.

It will never be enough.