Wednesday, December 16, 2020

The Road to Revolution

 From First Things:

Modern democracy succumbed to revolution by degrees. Revolutionaries who had violently challenged the system received absolution from a lenient and confused regime. They then resumed their challenge through coalition-building and electoral politics. Corrupt elections provided cover for a broad prerevolutionary offensive. The left believed that any response from the right would be weak and abortive and would serve only to provide legal justification for a full takeover executed in the name of “antifascism” and “defending democracy.”

Throughout, the revolution maintained the shell of a republican government under a figurehead Azaña to camouflage the process—a camouflage that persists in the writing of many historians to this day—in the vain hope of gaining support from the democratic governments in Paris and London. In fact, centrifugal revolutionary activism, disruptive and violent in the extreme, fatally weakened the entire revolutionary cause. Perhaps the left’s gravest mistake was to transform the conflict into a war of religion. If the revolution had not set itself against the Church, it would likely have prevailed. But its partisans could not help themselves.

Revolution is not an event but a process, and a complex one. Radicals who fail to overthrow a constitutional system by force may find it useful to exploit that same system. Though their intention is to destroy the regime, they can purport to defend it when its institutions serve their short-term interests. They will invoke free speech as a cover for left-wing violence, even as they deny it to peaceful demonstrators on the right. They will honor votes unless they endanger progressive dominance, in which case the victorious right will be labelled “­undemocratic.” In these circumstances, far from being a guarantee against revolutionary takeover, democratic ­procedures provide cover for its advance. (Read more.)


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