There are two dominant models of progressive social change.
- Revolutionary — Top Down
- Democratic — Bottom Up
Revolutionary change. Of course “top-down” has a bad taste to it, so the revolutionaries always claim their approach is bottom-up, and they get away with that because there is a little bit of truth to it. But here’s how it works.
It starts with a charismatic leader or sometimes with a small vanguard party that is taken over by a charismatic leader. Then this happens:
- A charismatic leader creates a mass movement.
- The leader & movement create a revolution.
- violent or democratic
- The revolution installs the leader.
- The leader creates social change.
The leader ends up leading the mass movement and being the political leader. The fiction is that “the people” decide, but in reality, they just support the leader.
The most famous examples of this are called, Communism (Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Nazism (Hitler), Fascism (Mussolini), Chavismo (Hugo Chavez), Peronism (Juan Peron), and Maoism (Chairman Mao, of course). There are many less-famous examples.
The revolutionary approach usually fizzles and leads to a backlash. But when it succeeds it leads to a single leader with most of the power and a single party whose role it is to support leader. Generally, the social changes produced are more totalitarian than progressive.
Democratic change. The U.S. is a good example. We have gone 232 years without devolving into a one-party system with a supreme leader. The result has been reasonably steady progressive social change. And the cumulative effect has been enormous. Just to list the most obvious changes:
- White men without property gained the right to vote ~1820s.
- Slavery was ended under Lincoln.
- Laissez-faire capitalism was ended starting with Teddy Roosevelt.
- Women gained the right to vote under Woodrow Wilson.
- A federal safety net was started under Franklin Roosevelt.
- Legal racial discrimination (Jim Crow) was ended by King and LBJ.
- The safety net expanded under LBJ and again under Obama.
- Gays and lesbians have gained acceptance and rights.
There have been setbacks in some areas, but none of these major changes have every been reversed to any significant extent.
Every one of these changes has been a long, slow process, usually taking decades. The only partial exception is that slavery was ended in about four years, but only with nearly a century of anti-slavery movements leading up to it, and with 750,000 deaths.
Of course, I am not suggesting its a good thing it took so long. It would have been better to put all this in the constitution and finish that job in 1788. Unfortunately, good things seem to take a lot of time and hard work to produce. It takes a century to build a great city. But we can destroy on in under 30 seconds.
Comparing the two approaches. The advocates of revolution like to say “it takes a movement.” And most often it does. But looking back we see that it usually also takes a politician who is not a movement leader. Think of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and LBJ. They all played an essential role, and none were movement leaders.
Often the movement has no one leader of great prominence. But even in the case of Martin Luther King Jr., he could not play LBJ’s role and neither could LBJ play his role. We needed both.
And keeping the two roles separate lets each do a better job playing their own role. It also prevents one person from aspiring to being a dictator.
And where are we now? Most often the revolutionary approach is carried out by either a right-wing or a left-wing populist movement. These are populist times globally and the U.S. is no exception. Without a doubt, Trump is a charismatic populist leader and is attempting to carry out a populist revolution.
That could end our 232-year democratic experiment.
Ripped Apart
