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Could America Have a French-Style Revolution?
by Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds:
As with the French Revolution, that will be the trigger for a wholesale replacement of our failed institutions.
Since it’s Bastille Day, a national holiday in France celebrating the French Revolution, let’s ask a question few even think (or dare) to ask: could America have a French-style Revolution? Not in some distant era, but within the next five years?
By French-style Revolution I don’t mean the extravagant use of the guillotine, I mean the complete political overthrow of the ruling elites. This overthrow need not be violent; it could be an entirely peaceful electoral rejection of the two-party political elites and the Federal Reserve / banking / financialization elites which together form the neoliberal-neofeudal ruling elites.
The BAU Crowd (business as usual) considers the possibility of such an overthrow of parasitic, predatory elites as remote as a landing by Martians. I suspect they’re purposefully blind to the reality that America’s elites and institutions are structurally incapable of accepting meaningful reforms that would address the extremes of dysfunction, exploitation, predation and wealth / power / income inequality that characterize America today.
America’s elites and institutions have only one systemic response to crisis: do more of what’s failed spectacularly.
This inability to acknowledge the reality of their own self-serving incompetence and the deeply dysfunctional nature of virtually every level of America’s economic, social and political orders leaves an overthrow of the entire ruling elite as the only option left other than resignation to Bread and Circuses funded by the Fed, a policy of desperation that will inevitably debauch the U.S. dollar and impoverish everyone who counted on Bread and Circuses to fix what’s broken.
Counting on Fed-funded Bread and Circuses to fix what’s broken is the perfection of magical thinking, a state of denial expressed by the phrase routinely (but apparently falsely) attributed to Marie Antoinette, when she learned that the peasants had no bread: Then let them eat brioche (roughly translated into “cake” in English).
Ignoring the horror of the delusional BAU Crowd, let’s explore the set-up for a French-style Revolution in America.
Setting aside the horrors of the guillotine, the French Revolution was many things unfolding at once:
— The failure of the Monarchy’s money system, as inflation soared to the point commoners could no longer afford bread. (The price of bread peaked the week that the Bastille was stormed by mobs.)
— The overthrow of the state-religion nexus in favor of Enlightenment rationalism.
— The romantic ascent of liberty as the rallying cry against an oppressive feudal hierarchy.
— The fragmentation of the social and political orders into warring factions.
— The failure of the Monarchy’s institutions to recognize and understand the potentially fatal challenges and institute reforms that addressed the problems.
— The failure of the French economy, which was plagued by poor roads and communication lines, limited trade due to regional fragmentation and low levels of productive investment.
