‘Revolutions’ tend to kick off way before the society as a whole is really ready for them. Usually as pre-emptive takeover attempts by the newly educated middle class ‘intelligentsia’, (or chattering class as we would call them, or ‘twitteratti’ as I have recently heard the political ‘pundits’ ruthlessly described).
Unsurprisingly these newly graduated minor functionaries, petty civil servants, and junior lawyers, want more say in the power structure of the state than the traditional ruling class has previously allowed them. Unsurprisingly – I suppose – they want it immediately… Or as Billy Connelly said in a skit, “We want it now, we want it yesterday, we want to control half of that, most of that, f….ing ALL of that, and stay awake, because tomorrow the demands will change!”
The problem with the proto middle classes jumping the gun and trying to impose their idealized version of democracy before the working class (read average voter) is even half way down the trail to a similar level of literacy and political interest and philosophical conceptualization: is that the resulting mad theories are far too complex for the voters, and NO imagined safe-guard can stand up to the combined ignorance and misunderstanding of the newly enfranchised. The result is, absolutely inevitably, a dictatorship.
Either one of the theoretical loony models is seized by a corrupt power seeker ‘for the good of the people’, and away we go to a Mussolini, or a Stalin, or a Franco, or a Gaddafi, or a Castro, or a… well the list would go to a couple of hundred in the last century. Or worse, it is seized by the much more restricted number of ‘genuine believer’ nutters: like the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, who (like Hitler, Petain and Mao) honestly believed that the only way to give the people the government they deserved was “to rule myself!”
Nigel Davies, “The ‘Arab Spring’, 1848, and the 30 Years War/s…”, rethinking history, 2015-09-19.
July 22, 2017
QotD: Middle-class “revolutionaries”
Comments Off on QotD: Middle-class “revolutionaries”
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
