A revolution that worked
Posted on Saturday, July 4, 2009
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/263432/
The American Revolution was the most important human event of the past several centuries, one without which the broader global democratic revolution of recent decades likely never would have happened.
The revolution that we properly celebrate today got it right because it was based on the principles of the Scottish Enlightenment, meaning the idea of freedom through limited government. The United States Constitution was not dedicated to turning human beings into angels but simply to creating a system of checks and balances that constrained governmental power and allowed the defects of human nature to work to the advantage of individual liberty.
The most important question in politics is always "Compared to what?" and compared to the consequences of other revolutions the American experience has been a bountiful blessing for humanity. In contrast to the American experience, most revolutions have turned into bloodbaths throughout history because of misguided attempts to perfect society and human beings, a task that invariably requires massive and corrupting coercion.
The French Revolution began nicely, at least in theory, with the overthrow of an absolutist monarchy and the credo of fraternity, equality and liberty. But the radicalism of French philosophy led to the embrace of an extreme egalitarianism that quickly produced the Reign of Terror, Robespierre and the Emperor Napoleon. The result was two decades of European-wide war followed by the restoration of monarchy.
The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 took the Jacobin radicalism and hyperegalitarianism of the French several steps further by attempting to create a classless utopia in a backwater of Europe. Within only a few weeks after Lenin and Trotsky seized power in what amounted less to a revolution than a midnight coup, the Soviet police state was up and effectively running
Utopianism requires coercion when faced, as it inevitably is, by a recalcitrant human nature, and Josef Stalin would turn the machinery of the Soviet terror apparatus toward his own thuggish advantage, in the process killing somewhere in the vicinity of 20 million, including almost all of the original Bolshevik leaders.
Vladimir Lenin not only beget Stalinism and the world's first example of what would become known as totalitarianism, he also forged a hybrid political doctrine, Marxism-Leninism, based on a "dictatorship of the proletariat" that led to tyranny and mass bloodshed wherever it was established, from Cuba and Bulgaria to Vietnam and North Korea.
The Chinese Revolution wasn't really a revolution at all, at least in the precise sense of things. Rather, Mao Zedong and his Chinese Communist Party proclaimed the People's Republic of China in October 1949 only after triumphing in a 20-yearlong civil war against Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalist forces.
Inspired by the bizarre belief that Marxism-Leninism could be established in a Third World country by entirely bypassing the capitalist stage of development, Mao's "Great Leap Forward" (1958-62) was arguably the worst government-inflicted tragedy in human history, producing an estimated 50 million deaths. It would take the fizzling out of his even more radical Cultural Revolution, which claimed at least several million more lives and inspired the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, for China to be able to begin to repair the damage that Mao wrought.
The Chinese Communist Party still rules the country, but it is a communist state in name only, and the extent to which it has moved toward prosperity has corresponded precisely to the extent to which it has repudiated Maoism.
The last in this unhappy series of revolutionary calamities occurred, of course, in Iran in 1979 as the maniacal Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Islam's version of Lenin, created the Islamic Republic of Iran by deposing an archaic monarchy. Intended to restore an imaginary and unrealizable Islamic past, the Iranian Revolution marked, instead, the beginning of Islamo-fascism as a movement, a level of oppression that vastly exceeded that which existed under the shah, and three decades of enthusiastic sponsorship of terrorist organizations around the world.
Revolutions that produce "dictatorships of the proletariat," emperors and "supreme leaders" are, by definition, unsuccessful at producing the rule of law and democracy. What has been happening in the streets of Tehran since the mullahs' latest round of rigged elections may not mark the end of their rule, but it suggests that, whichever way things go, the regime's days are numbered. Like the Chinese Communist Party 20 years after Tiananmen Square, the mullahs will survive, if they survive at all, only by progressively jettisoning the theocratic doctrine upon which their power and fake legitimacy are based.
Compared to such calamities, Americans have been profoundly blessed. Indeed, one could go as far as to argue that world politics for the past 200+ years has essentially involved a struggle between the wise ideas emanating from 1776 and various radical doctrines dangerously predicated upon the idea of the perfectibility of man. Seldom has the idea that the perfect is the enemy of the good been more effectively illustrated.
The ultimate lesson in all this: Beware those who wish to expand the power of the state to implement utopian ideological agendas.
So let us celebrate our good fortune. The American Revolution didn't create the perfect society. But by not trying to, it created a quite good one; if measured in terms of freedom and prosperity, by far the best in history.
Thank God for those racist, sexist, long-dead white males called the Founders.
· ------·------Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of
Illinois.
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