The further I drove into Oroville, the more disappointment I felt.

I had my passport with me, but no one asked me to show it. American flags still hung from stores along Montgomery Street. Homes near the Feather River were flying our state’s banner. City Hall had not been replaced by a new national capitol. And as hard as I looked, I could find no new standing army, or presidential palace, or the Oroville Food and Drug Administration.

It was as if the city council of Oroville, 70 miles north of Sacramento in Butte County, had never made national news in 2021 by declaring itself a “constitutional republic.” And no one in this town home to close to 20,000 residents much wanted to talk about this bold move, even those who once championed the idea.

That’s too bad. Because there is no more productive spirit, and no greater creative force, than the commitment to break away, to declare independence and build something new.

That’s the spirit, that’s the force, we should celebrate on Independence Day—especially in California, which is known for going its own way. But it’s been a long time since Independence Day was about independence.

These days, we try to put on displays of national unity—a fundamental mistake at the heart of our national malaise.

Americans, amidst our divisions, foolishly long for unity, even though unity, and the national compromises it requires, have produced so many awful things in our country. We the people—or more correctly, the wealthy male and European slice of we—came together to adopt a constitution that enshrined slavery and shunned democracy. In the name of unity, we ended Reconstruction and launched Jim Crow. In our moments of greatest national unity, we ceded terrible power to presidents, and pursued endless wars.

The United States only truly advances through division and disunion. We needed a civil war to end slavery. Every expansion of rights required social movements that divided us. The nation’s signature technological achievements were the products of people who went off on their own, in defiance of business convention and existing laws, from Kitty Hawk to Cupertino. Environmental progress, including climate change laws, has come when cities and states, including California, have broken ranks.

So, on this Independence Day, the problem is not our absence of unity, but the weakness of our efforts at disunion.

California, and especially its discontents, have displayed a decided lack of nerve. This country needs a revolution, but we aren’t supplying one. A state famous for producing internal secession movements—there have been more than 200 attempted break-ups since 1850—lately has seen nothing but half-hearted efforts.

In this, Oroville is hardly the only disappointment.

Who, for example, switched all the coffee in San Bernardino County to decaf this year?

Last fall, the people of that county, the largest by area in the United States, voted to direct officials to study greater autonomy “up to and including secession from the State of California.”

That verdict portended a wholesale rethinking of the meaning of county government in California and the U.S. Some of us hoped that San Bernardino, one of the few parts of California seeing population gains, would dream bigger than just statehood, and go all the way, for nationhood. (I would have applied for citizenship.)

But eight months after the vote, there have been few public signs of progress, other than a few more pointed requests for funding San Bernardino priorities in the state budget. There is no public indication of serious work on statehood, and the study that voters demanded has not been published.

In the rural precincts of the North State, the longstanding push for a state of Jefferson, which drew heavy publicity and broad local government support in the early years of this century, seems at low ebb. It’s been eclipsed by the effort by rural counties in Oregon, some of which border California and would have been part of Jefferson, to split off from the Beaver State and become part of an expanded “Greater Idaho.”

Northern California does have some disunity, but it’s not of the constructive kind. In Shasta County, right-wing political figures have taken over, and their desire to destroy institutions and threaten people eclipses any interest in building more democratic government.

Just this May, El Dorado County, which includes Lake Tahoe, saw the launch of a new secession effort, called the Republic of El Dorado, inspired in part by the fact that the county isn’t home to a single elected representative in the state or federal government. But again, the effort doesn’t have a clear agenda. It’s also built on the dubious claim, running contrary to law and the constitution, that the county can leave and make itself a state without any agreement or sign-off from Congress or the state legislature.

There are other local acts of defiance that could evolve into a bigger split and more change, but haven’t yet. Our state is full of sanctuary cities that have developed new ways to protect and serve unauthorized immigrants and their families. Some school boards, notably in Temecula, have limited access to books or taken conservative stands in the culture wars, thus challenging the state. The city of Huntington Beach and the state are suing each other over housing laws, though it seems unlikely that the outcome will boost housing production, much less change the nature of local government in California.

Meanwhile, other, more established ideas for independence in California remain dormant. Bay Area investor Tim Draper, who once circulated ballot measures to split California into multiple states, is devoted to cryptocurrency instead. The city of Los Angeles is in a political crisis and might benefit from the relaunch required by a breakup, but the movement for San Fernando Valley secession, which triggered a citywide vote a generation ago, is all but dead.

That’s too bad. As the historian and journalist Richard Kreitner observed in his 2020 book Break It Up, “secession is the only kind of revolution we Americans have ever known and the only kind we’re ever likely to see,”

So, on this Independence Day, the best way for Californians to celebrate their country is by plotting to break away and build something new.

We’re disunited, and that’s what makes us great.

The post In Praise of a Disunited States of America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Such was the dangerous state of affairs in Great Britain nearly two centuries ago, when that nation veered as close as it ever has come to outright revolution and a French-style overthrow of the government.

Reform-minded politicians knew they had to let some air into the system or the entire country would explode. So, the Parliament—through brinksmanship and arm-twisting, over the strenuous objection of aristocrats—passed the landmark Representation of the People Act of 1832.

The law’s primary purpose was redrawing the gerrymandered districts of Parliament, which still conformed to boundaries determined in the 12th century when the institution was in its infancy. Parliament had been born of arguments over taxes between rural strongmen and King Henry III that the reforms of the Magna Carta hadn’t been able to completely soothe. The balance of power between the crown and the nobles was evened out with a roving council that took its name from the Norman word parler—“to talk.”

King Edward I made this legislature more formal a century later by designating two knights and two citizens from every major population center to confer with him on matters of state. The biggest arguments, of course, concerned taxes and how much should be raised at any given time to support various wars against regional neighbors. The citizens’ group eventually won the right to elect members of its own, which became the beginnings of the House of Commons and the Western tradition of a bicameral legislature.

England changed in the centuries after the Parliament began, but the legislative districts did not. They conformed to the kingdom’s historic counties—Devon, Yorkshire, Cornwall, Essex and the like—without taking drastic population shifts into account. The lines remained static for six centuries even as demographic change rippled through the British Isles. Parliament entered the 19th century in a dangerously unrepresentative state.

The Industrial Revolution made this problem a crisis, as new cities like Manchester and Birmingham blew up with former countryside residents jammed into urban hovels without any representation or protection. The vote was restricted to property owners, defined as those who owned a home with a kitchen hearth. The saying went: If you could boil—or “wallop,” in British parlance—a pot of water in your own house, then you could cast a ballot. (The term “potwalloper” became another word for voter.) This restriction helped keep those on church relief—especially poor Irish Catholics—from voting.

One particularly galling act of an out-of-touch Parliament was the Corn Laws of 1815. This tariff on imported food was meant to protect the incomes of gentlemen farmers—often titled nobles—who sold their harvest to domestic markets at inflated prices. Riots quickly broke out over the rising price of bread; famine-like conditions among the poor accompanied bad harvests.

But Parliament was in the hands of the wealthy, especially a bloc called “The West India interest” who had investments in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean and were dedicated to the preservation of Black slavery. The high tariffs on wheat didn’t bother them, and many of those who owned estates in both hemispheres became even richer.

Though colonies like Jamaica and Barbados officially had no seats in Parliament, their local grandees were able to game their way in because of the ancient legislative maps. They also exploited an 1800 law that created a dual borough system of representation, which allowed for two members of Parliament from every borough, no matter how few people lived there. Abandoned medieval towns with almost no residents still could send two representatives to London. One was a hilltop cathedral that had collapsed in the 13^th century. Another was a ruined port city almost completely underwater.

Big money interests, especially West Indian slaveowners, elected puppet representatives from these hollowed-out areas. A whole class of political consultants called “borough jobbers” arose to steer merchants and earls—or their compliant allies—toward available seats.

This created profound inequality. A bare handful of people from rotten boroughs sent 112 dupes, puppets, and aristocrats to the House of Commons every year. Nobody could ever be sure who paid for a seat; it was the 19th century version of dark money. Abolitionists like William Wilberforce cursed the West Indian interest. As long as it remained intact, slavery would persist.

As a result, the English working classes began to sympathize with enslaved people in the Caribbean—victims of the same heavy hand that was pressing British industrial workers deeper into abject poverty. Radical speakers attracted crowds; at one such gathering at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester, a militia charged into the crowd to break it up, hacking at bystanders with sabers and killing 18 people. The carnage became a major scandal and raised the national temperature. It also called attention to the extreme unhappiness with Parliament among city dwellers.

Then, in the elections of 1830, the reformist Whigs gained a shaky majority, their overwhelming popularity slopping even over the high gunwales of gerrymandered district lines. When the House of Lords blocked three successive bills to add seats to Parliament, more rioters took to the streets and citizens’ committees started to talk of the most un-British of subjects: revolution. The Birmingham Political Union boasted of two million citizens ready “to recover the liberty, the happiness, and the prosperity of the country.”

The government—even the monarchy—seemed on the brink, unless a valve could be found to release the pressure. Historians have given this period the cinematic name “Days of May.” On May 10, 1832, the Whig prime minister Charles Grey, the 2nd Earl Grey, resigned after the failure of the third bill to expand Parliament and was replaced by Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington, a famously tone-deaf politician. He reiterated his support for the status quo, and commoners erupted. Plans for street barricades similar to the Paris Commune were passed around; reform activists readied themselves for combat and office takeovers. The wife of King William IV told her friends that she hoped she would conduct herself like a lady when she was executed.

In a panic, the king reappointed Grey, who muscled a successful bill through both houses that redrew district lines and added Parliament seats. The radicals turned their energies toward petitions and electoral campaigns, demanding pledges of slavery abolition from candidates and formulating slates of those who seemed most likely to beat the borough-jobbers and their shills. In the next set of elections (with results clear by January 8, 1833), the Whigs captured 70 percent of seats and the West Indian interest was permanently hobbled.

That same year, a reformed and reinvigorated Parliament passed the Slave Emancipation Act, setting 800,000 people on a path to freedom. The legislature also approved the Factory Act, which banned the employment of children under the age of nine.

Britain’s path to a more representative government offers lessons to nations with sclerotic legislatures that have lost the confidence of their people. The best solutions in such circumstances are to crack open the locked box of ancient customs and minoritarian rule, to expand representation in the legislative branch, and to reduce the built-in influence of big money interests. Doing so saved British democracy from collapse in the 1830s, and steered its path to an expansion of liberty.

The post How Everyday Britons Forced Their Government to Save Itself appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

By “this stuff,” he meant mutual aid, in which members of a community work together to meet each other’s urgent needs. Normally, the day laborers and domestic workers who are members of his organization, New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE), work together on direct-action campaigns to fight exploitation and advocate for their rights. But the pandemic has pushed them into organizing mutual aid around food.

They are not alone. In recent months, members of progressive direct-action organizations have developed new systems for checking on their neighbors, dropping off food and medicine, providing protective personal equipment to incarcerated family members, and giving cash to those suddenly unemployed to meet immediate rent, food, and medical needs. At the same time, they’re continuing to press for workers’ rights and proper health care during the pandemic, as well as ensure access to federal stimulus money for individuals and small minority-owned businesses.

In so doing, these organizations are harkening back to their roots: people creating social ties by helping each other out, and those ties fueling collective fights for new systems and policies.

Combining mutual aid and direct action might seem like common sense, but in today’s corporatized and professionalized nonprofit world, this model had disappeared almost completely. Community-based nonprofits in the United States today are split into distinct silos, with service provision firmly compartmentalized in one box and direct-action organizing in another.

The roots of this split lie in the increasing professionalization of the sector over half a century, driven by no small amount of sexism, classism and racism.

Throughout American history, mutual aid societies existed wherever poor, disenfranchised people could be found, particularly Black, Indigenous, and immigrant communities. Chinese immigrants of the 19th century formed networks to defend against xenophobic violence and to fund their businesses when banks refused. Native Americans formed urban community centers in the 1950s and 1960s after the government terminated the rights of more than 100 tribes, forcing people off traditional lands across the Great Plains as well as California, Texas, New York, Florida, Oregon, Wisconsin, and Montana. These urban centers provided employment support, housing assistance, and health care, creating both the material and political conditions for self-determination.

During and immediately after slavery, free Black people formed mutual aid societies to provide resources denied them by the white community. The first was the Free African Society of Philadelphia, founded in the 1770s to provide a place to worship and financial resources to members. Similar organizations soon sprung up in Philadelphia, New York, New Orleans and Newport, Rhode Island, providing non-denominational spiritual guidance and resources such as banks, schools, burial societies, newspapers, food, support for widows and orphans, and more. W.E.B. DuBois called these “the first wavering step of a people toward organized social life.”

These organizations were a threat to the racial status quo. Charleston shut down the Free Dark Men of Color in the 1820s for fear of slave insurrections and Maryland made it a felony to join a mutual aid society in 1842. Despite the crackdowns, thousands more societies formed after the Civil War, making enormous gains for Black communities. Decades later, these self-organized groups would become the infrastructure of the Civil Rights Movement and the inspiration for the Black Panthers, who famously served up free breakfasts and health programs alongside their fight against police brutality and exploitation of Black communities.

European immigrant communities of the 19th and 20th centuries, too, relied on cooperative efforts that helped their members learn English, find decent housing, and resist labor abuse. Incorporating a mix of mutual aid, community organizing, and legislative campaigning, the social reformer Jane Addams founded Chicago’s Hull House in 1889, sparking a movement that counted more than 400 “settlement houses” within 20 years. Addams had been inspired by visiting an English settlement house where she saw boundaries of language, class status, and religious affiliation stretching and blurring. In the United States, settlement houses were community arts centers, social service providers, and civic action committees all rolled into one.

Formalizing social work for white people began with the settlement houses. In the late 1890s, Addams’ training of settlement house volunteers became the basis of early social work college programs. Settlement house workers increasingly felt the need for credentials because the medical doctors and lawyers who intervened in the lives of poor families routinely ignored the insights of the volunteers, mostly well-off white women, whom they perceived as amateurs. Early training programs were practical, such as the 1904 partnership between Columbia University and the New York School of Philanthropy. In 1915, medical educator Dr. Abraham Flexner critiqued social work as lacking professionalism of the sort that’s found in medicine, law, and preaching, and labeled social workers as “narrow minded technicians.” Colleges then began to push curricula that would elevate the “theory” of social work rather than the practice.

The settlement houses, meanwhile, continued their social reform projects, including sanitation reform, women’s suffrage, temperance, legislation against child labor, and labor law. Movement leaders such as labor advocate Frances Perkins wrote many of these ideas into the New Deal. In the throes of the Great Depression, the Social Security Act of 1935 created pensions for the elderly, care for the disabled, a state-run medical insurance program for the poor, and unemployment insurance. But the legislation also reflected the prevailing racism of the time, excluding domestic and farm workers in a compromise that ensured that Southern Democrats and the agricultural industry would continue to have access to cheap labor. Left to fend for themselves, those communities, largely comprised of people of color, continued to rely on mutual aid even as they tried to organize for change.

In this April 16, 1969 photograph, Bill Whitfield, member of the Black Panther chapter in Kansas City, serves free breakfast to children before they go to school. Courtesy of William P. Straeter/Associated Press.

At the same time, Black social work traditions grew out of mutual aid organizations, added journalism to the practice, and for decades had a testy relationship with the white social work establishment. Leaders like Mary Church Terrell, Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Jane Patterson founded the Colored Women’s League in 1892 to generate racial uplift through self-help. Thyra J. Edwards, virtually unknown in mainstream social work history, was also a trained journalist. These women made lynching their top priority.

Despite political action among social workers of all races, Saul Alinsky is the white man credited with codifying the social action elements. Starting in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood in the 1930s, Alinsky eventually became the nation’s most famous “community organizer” with his approach of starting with local issues in order to rally people to fight for broader political change. He described this approach in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals: “They organize to get rid of four-legged rats and stop there; we organize to get rid of four-legged rats so we can get on to removing two-legged rats.” Alinsky built the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), one of the largest and most powerful organizing networks of the 20th century, uniting churches, ethnic associations, and neighborhood groups in direct-action campaigns. It was an IAF affiliate in Baltimore, for example, that won the first local Living Wage law in 1994, the precursor to today’s “Fight for $15.”

The Alinsky model came to dominate the way activists were trained and organized. It featured highly professionalized, well-paid organizers who kept any radical politics to themselves in the name of people power. The IAF also had a distinctly male culture. Alinsky expected organizers to work around the clock; women, he thought, were too delicate, even if he didn’t publicly discourage them from the work.

Alinsky’s influential “rules” saw services—mostly organized by and provided by women—only as a means to direct action campaigning. The goal was to deliver “winnable” material improvements as well as change the relations of power between everyday people and the institutions that shaped their lives. Described as “non-ideological,” this model characterized membership-based community organizations for many years. But over time, organizers who were women and people of color have disrupted and changed that norm, arguing that racism, sexism and capitalism would never be challenged under these conditions.

In any case, the split between providing services and advocating for systemic change had long been established in the U.S. When the National Association of Social Workers was formed in 1955, providing services via casework and organizing for systemic change had become distinct streams of social work. By 1960, they had their own tracks at various universities. Funding patterns followed. Philanthropists, too, viewed these functions as separate, driving far more resources to apoliticized service provision than they did to community organizing. When I was learning to organize in the late 1980s, I was consistently told that self-help schemes, lending circles, and cooperative businesses had little to do with “real” organizing.

Today, though, a new generation of activists is erasing that distinction.

The pandemic, in particular, has clarified that organizing cannot be divorced from actually helping people. In March, on a webinar about race and COVID-19, the moderator asked us panelists, “What inspires you?” I applauded all the self-organized mutual aid schemes and noted that prominent organizing networks have jumped in, including the Center for Popular Democracy, People’s Action, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Black Lives Matter, United We Dream, Faith in Action, and Make the Road, among many others. All are responding to the immediate needs of their constituencies—food, masks, money, help navigating government assistance—and diverging from their pre-coronavirus activities. Another panelist countered: “But mutual aid can’t solve this crisis at scale. Only government can do that.” Some activists fear that politicians will try to replace government care with community care, or that mutual aid will absorb all of our energy, leaving nothing for political fights.

But especially in times when the state dramatically fails to deliver what people need, mutual aid is a powerful way, sometimes even the only way, to help people manage daily life while sustaining their spirits in the struggle for systemic change. Organizing requires courage; courage comes from community. Mutual aid fuels the audacity to demand more because it reinforces that we are not alone in our suffering.

Chai Moua, the Civic Engagement Director at Freedom, Inc, a 17-year-old coalition of Black and Southeast Asian groups in Wisconsin, told me that her organization has been ready for this moment. “We have always believed in combining service and organizing to get to a bigger future,” she said. “Our food pantry is actually part of our civic engagement work. We’re not just giving you food but showing systematically ‘this is why our folks don’t have access to healthy food,’ and then changing those systems.”

The United States, and perhaps the world, is at the beginning of a string of fundamental shifts in culture, politics, economy and daily life. The combined disruption of an ongoing deadly pandemic, record unemployment, and multiracial uprisings to defend Black lives will soon make many of our existing models irrelevant. Photos of sophisticated mutual aid operations at recent Black Lives Matter protests powerfully symbolize the future of organizing, protest, and direct action. Everyone is discovering what some of us have always understood: The social ties cultivated by mutual aid are the same ties needed to fuel a historic boycott, a union organizing drive, or a campaign to close down prisons. Our ancestors knew this well, and now we do too.

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To mention the fledgling enterprise in the presence of a white master was a ticket to torture and likely death by hanging, so everyone took precautions to swear new recruits to secrecy. With a few months, more than 60,000 enslaved people had heard about the effort, through well-wired plantation networks.
 
Then, on the night of December 27, 1831, “the business” opened. The first signal fires were lit in the hills above Montego Bay, and soon plantation houses went up in flames across the richest West Indian colony of the British empire. White Jamaica found itself contending with its biggest insurrection ever. It took five weeks for a British military crackdown to restore quiet.

The rebellion’s end would not be a lasting defeat. Much of the British public was already disgusted by slavery—the price of maintaining it seemed to be endless wars overseas—and after the Jamaica rebellion, political pressure built. Within 18 months of the first fire, slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire.

The rebellion, after failing, had succeeded. And not just at advancing freedom. “The Christmas Uprising” in Jamaica was a groundbreaking action and a model; its enslaved leaders anticipated the methods of later revolutionary movements—from the Irish Republican Army to Gandhi’s struggle against the British, from the French underground fight against the Nazis to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. The story of the Jamaican revolution suggests that methods of calculated revolutionary action transcend historical periods.

In other words, the ways of resistance are timeless. 
 
Jamaica’s enslaved population was among the most abused and powerless on the globe in 1831. Most were illiterate. Few had ever seen anything but their owner’s plantation. Their only weapons were machetes and rocks. They constantly lived on the edge of hunger and harsh punishment. Yet even in this isolated atmosphere of extreme deprivation, they developed durable strategies for a politically successful revolution.

One such strategy was nonviolence. The chief conspirator of “the business,” an enslaved Baptist deacon named Samuel Sharpe, had insisted the protest would be a peaceful sit-down strike. The plan was to simply refuse to work on the second rest day after Christmas unless masters agreed to pay striking workers half the daily wages that a free person would get for chopping sugar cane.

This simple tactic of resistance anticipated the philosophy of Mohandas Gandhi by 70 years. What Gandhi would call satyagraha, or “truth power,” forced authorities to confront and defend a central injustice, and perhaps open their own eyes to a moral blind spot. Just as Gandhi knew that British abuses would not last forever under the scrutiny of outside public opinion, Sharpe was also aware of a larger world that might sympathize with his cause.

As a traveling church deacon, he had access to the newspapers brought by cargo ships and had read about the abolitionist sentiment in Britain. His Christian beliefs were of the pacifist kind and he repeatedly told his followers not to harm anyone. Indeed, the extremely low reported death toll among whites in the uprising—just 14, when up to 500 rebels were killed or executed—speaks to the tremendous restraint and forbearance among those who had every reason to want revenge. 
 
The Jamaican revolution also employed a simple idealism—its leaders understood that, if oppressed people were going to risk their lives, they must be given a vision of a higher purpose that could be phrased in simple terms. Samuel Sharpe used the New Testament, visiting slave villages to preach verses considered too provocative by white missionaries, in particular those that emphasized freedom in Christ. Along with scripture, Sharpe (one of the few enslaved people on the island who was literate) let his followers in on a secret: The British people across the ocean were agitating to free the enslaved, and the King of England had signed a general “free paper” that was being kept under wraps by the Jamaican sugar barons.

This last part was embroidered. William IV was an ardent defender of slavery. But the enslaved people in Jamaica still revered his name and believed him to be their friend. Sharpe’s pro-liberty message was both simple and electric. Slavery was against God’s law and the King’s will.

This messianic vision of liberty, accessible to everyone, was not dissimilar to the collectivist ideals touted 40 years later by the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who exulted, “In Moscow from a sea of blood and flame the constellation of the revolution will rise, high and beautiful, and will become the guiding star for the good of all liberated mankind.” Martin Luther King, Jr., an admirer of Gandhi, also advanced a message of Christian love and justice that cut across racial lines, was easy to communicate, and proved difficult to refute. 
 

In Jamaica, Sharpe, while insisting on nonviolent methods, also knew he needed a military wing. At planning meetings in fall 1831, several of Sharpe’s lieutenants agitated for a backup plan in case the strike should fail. Two of those present—Thomas Dove and Robert Gardiner—would become the fiercest fighters against the white volunteer militia once the strike had moved into a less peaceful phase. In January, they even built and staffed an impressive hilltop fortress, designed to repel incursions, called Greenwich Hill, and fought several engagements with British troops. In this, they anticipated another commonplace practice of 20th-century resistance movements: to maintain an armed underground sector operating beneath the political wing. The Palestinian Liberation Organization and Ireland’s Sinn Fein are the most well-known examples of this “arrows and olive branch” approach.

Sharpe also cultivated the enslaved “elite.” The Jamaican colonial government was surprised when it learned that the revolt’s leaders were among the most privileged of the island’s enslaved population: head drivers, head boilers, butlers, and traveling deacons like Sharpe. They were those with seemingly the least incentive to rebel because they enjoyed the most perquisites and avoided the whipping customarily dealt out to field hands. Sharpe himself told his interrogators he had always been treated kindly by his master and never beaten.

Yet the “elites” were also best positioned to recruit followers because they were trusted both by laborers on their watch and by white guardians of the sugar estates. The value of elite support is an enduring lesson of revolution. American colonial resistance to British rule was backed by Boston’s richest men. Vladimir Lenin was no peasant; he grew up in a middle-class household in Ulyanovsk, attended Kazan University and surrounded himself with fellow educated radicals.

Sharpe also used operational tactics—including small cells and safe houses—that would become de rigeur. French Resistance operatives in World War II famously kept themselves in small clusters to avoid mass arrest, and recruited only one or two people at a time, using a case officer who did not know the central command. After the war, communist insurgents used a similar strategy. But enslaved people in 1830s Jamaica had already figured it out.

Samuel Sharpe had been permitted to travel between plantations for the ostensible reason of teaching Bible lessons and leading small worship services. This he did, but he also appointed cell leaders who appointed their own small groups. Sharpe created a ritual called “taking the swear” in which new recruits would promise on the Bible to sit down after Christmas and not work. Sharpe did the first secret swearings, but from then on, his own “case officers” did the work of exponential recruitment. In this way, and within one of the most repressive societies on earth, he built a connected network of strangers that stretched 70 miles in all directions.
 
Sharpe’s development of safe houses was also ahead of its time. Every Jamaican plantation had a section the white ruling class called the Negro Village: a “main street” of individual houses occupied by enslaved people. Field hands typically occupied small huts, but those in senior labor roles tended to have frame houses. In these elite houses, Sharpe preached about the “business.” His top-level recruits used these houses for the most sensitive meetings, stockpiled weapons in them, and even created their own military-style uniforms: blue jackets with red sashes.

This was not unlike the system that Nelson Mandela would use in townships all across South Africa in the formative days of the African National Congress. He would appear at certain homes unexpectedly, a step ahead of the state police. “He put a number of questions to us and then gave us a briefing about what he had been doing outside the country and then discussed the tasks that lay ahead,” recalled one man who met Mandela secretly at a house in Durban in 1962. 
 
Finally, the Jamaican rebels were astonishingly good at the secret sharing of intelligence, and they often knew about troop movements, government decrees, and even international news before their white masters heard about it. They used a sophisticated network of deck hands, house servants, traveling Bible teachers, and cargo ship stevedores to pass along messages.

A planter on the north shore once heard a critical piece of news from Kingston before the mail arrived and surmised there must have been “some unknown mode of conveying intelligence.”

The most critical piece of information of the early uprising, however, could not have been more visible: the first signal fire lit at Kensington Estate on the night of December 27, 1831. Whether Samuel Sharpe approved of it or not, the first blaze was followed almost immediately by a chain of fires lit on neighboring plantations that turned the night sky a dazzling orange and told the entire northwestern side of the island that “the business” was coming to pass at last.

The white ruling class could not help but be intimidated to the point of total confusion.

“The whole surrounding country was completely illuminated, and presented a terrible appearance, even at noon-day,” marveled a white militiaman. “When, however, the shades of night descended, and the buildings on the side of those beautiful mountains, which form the splendid panorama around Montego Bay, were burning, the spectacle was awfully grand.”

News that such a conspiracy could have been so widespread landed with explosive force in Britain. The public became convinced that prolonging the institution of slavery would only lead to further revolts and huge transatlantic military expenses. “The slaves must be sooner or later set at freedom,” editorialized the Morning Advertiser in London, “whether it be or whether it be not for their benefit, and the sooner that proper steps are taken for this purpose, so much the better.”

Within 18 months, William IV gave his reluctant royal assent to the Slave Emancipation Act of 1833. Samuel Sharpe died on the gallows before he saw it come to pass. But the revolutionary methods of “the business” had been victorious against the most powerful government in the world, and more than 800,000 people were set free as a result.

The post The Uprising of 60,000 Jamaicans That Changed the Very Nature of Revolt appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Libya and Syria both descended into civil war. In Libya, the outcome has so far been an unstable political vacuum. In Syria, the death toll may exceed 500,000. Millions have been displaced, in refugee flows that have fueled challenges to liberal democracy in Europe. Now, the Syrian revolution faces outright defeat.

These facts—a success rate of only one in four and all the resulting deaths —present a troubling conundrum. Do we still believe that oppressed people have the right to resist? Or should we question whether a decision to rebel can really be justified?

One method for answering that question is to re-read philosophers on the subject, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, both from the 17th century. In the minds of pro-democracy people, John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689) and its arguments for freedom and the right to resist oppression loom large. Thomas Hobbes, on the other hand, wrote Leviathan (1651), a great defense of absolute monarchy. You might think Hobbes would simply discourage today’s freedom struggles, but the important insights his work offers into the dangers of rebellion aren’t necessarily the ones we might expect.

Hobbes’s arguments were worked out against the backdrop of political conflict in mid-17th-century England. He believed the excitement raised among parliamentarians by the revival of ancient republican ideals of “free government” had led them to tear down the walls that protected them. Aiming for the best they brought about the worst: civil war. What they should have done instead was settle for a middle way: a government that, while not ideal, at least held off the danger of widespread violence within the state. Personal security should have been prized higher than dubious ideals of freedom.

Transposing this argument to modern Syria, we seem then to have clear advice: It would have been better for the Syrians of 2011 to let things be, no matter how oppressive Bashar al-Assad’s regime was. And as for us liberals, if we cheered on the Syrian protesters like good Lockeans in 2011, we ought to have learned our lesson by 2018 and should now be shaking our Hobbesian heads in despair at our earlier naiveté (and theirs).

I think we can learn a lesson from Hobbes, but I’m not convinced that this is it. His political thinking points to a much more nuanced analysis.

The foundation of Hobbes’s theory of sovereign authority is what he calls the “Right of Nature”: All individuals can be expected to employ whatever means best preserve them against lethal threats, and everyone, he thinks, is permitted to do so. For people living in a world without government—the “Natural Condition”—the best means might include robbery, violence, and the preventive killing of anyone who could pose a threat. But in a society enjoying the benefits of a sovereign government with enough power to impose peace between citizens, the same Right of Nature dictates a different strategy. Such a government, whether republican or monarchical, overcomes the problem of mutual distrust between unprotected individuals by enforcing laws and agreements, making it possible for people to enjoy a peaceful, comfortable life. Thus, people should obey the government.

It’s the latter strategy that seems to recommend non-resistance against a regime like Assad’s. But Hobbes entered an important caveat to his theory. If the reason for obeying government is self-preservation, then what if the government itself threatens your life? In these circumstances, he thought, self-preservation may dictate forceful self-defense. Hobbes therefore concluded that individuals retain the right to defend themselves against actions by the state that threaten their lives.

So, in fact, he suggested three strategies for preserving yourself, each suited to a different context and each morally justified by the Right of Nature. The first is preventive attack in the Natural Condition. The second is passive obedience in a sovereign state that protects you. The third is self-defense in a sovereign state that attacks you. How would these three strategies have played out across the population in Syria in 2011?

Let’s assume that before the outbreak of violence in 2011, most citizens would have been best advised to follow the second strategy—to obey a sovereign Syrian state that protects them. Even so, things changed suddenly in February 2011.

The trouble began when security forces arrested 15 teenagers in Daraa, accusing them of graffitiing their school with slogans such as “the people want to topple the regime.” Terrified by rumors that the detained children were being tortured, demonstrators demanded their children back, and protest spread to other parts of Syria. The regime resorted to force and, on March 18, security forces shot (approximately) four people dead, and wounded hundreds in Daraa. By late April, escalating violence brought the city under full-scale military siege.

Hobbes takes the unusual view that even people engaged in wrongdoing (such as unprovoked armed resistance) have a moral right to defend themselves against state violence. If even wrongdoers have this right, then those who are innocent certainly do. And he thought their rights extended to protecting their children, too. Hobbes explicitly argues that it would be both morally and psychologically too demanding for political philosophy to insist that parents acquiesce in their own children’s imprisonment, torture, and possible death.

From a Hobbesian perspective, the danger for a government using force against members of its own population is that it is therefore likely to create an ever-widening category of people who are thereby released from the duty to obey the government. This is true even if —unlike in Syria—state security forces only intend to harm those who (in Hobbes’s view) wrongfully rebel. Any large-scale use of force almost always causes unintended harm to innocent people when they are mistaken for legitimate targets or exposed to risks of collateral damage. This means that, for every person the security forces deliberately threaten, others will also feel threatened.

The moral and political legitimacy of any regime depends on maintaining a wide enough social base that feels under an obligation to follow its commands, but this base can be diminished in two ways. First, spontaneous opposition might occur even if the regime hadn’t initiated any threat against its members’ lives. Second, defensive opposition includes those who haven’t rebelled spontaneously but who find themselves threatened by the regime and needing to defend themselves from it.

The more force a regime like Assad’s uses against its opponents as a whole, the more it expands the population engaged in defensive opposition. And if it keeps intensifying its violence as the opposition grows, then it will progressively eat away at its social base by forcing more and more people to change strategy from obedience to self-defense. If the government persists in doing this, then eventually the ratio between the regime’s social base and its opponents will reach a point where the country has fallen into full-scale civil war.

For Hobbes, civil war constitutes the death of the body politic and the greatest danger to those trying to survive within it. The need to avoid it was the reason why he doubted the idea of deliberately seeking political revolution. But avoidance of civil war is also the aim which ought to motivate governments, on his analysis, in their decisions about how to rule. Hobbes’s theory of rightful self-preservation helps identify errors that a regime like Assad’s should have avoided.

The philosopher’s analysis thus suggests that many people finding themselves in the spiraling cycles of violence that began in 2011 had no credible alternative and were therefore justified in resisting a regime that actively threatened them. We really can’t condemn those people. But what we can condemn is the government because it has failed its chief objective, which was to prevent the outbreak of civil war. Assad’s mismanagement of violence itself helped create and then expand the basis for legitimate defense against the regime and, hence, for wider rebellion and civil war.

So, what would Hobbes do now? After seven years of fighting, Syrian forces have recently retaken Daraa and are close to a complete victory over rebel forces. Now, it might seem tempting to think that Assad has made good on his mistakes and that a Hobbesian analysis would point towards a renewed obligation to obey the regime in Syria. But I think this conclusion is doubtful.

Hobbes argues that political obligation begins in a covenant by which individuals commit to obedience for the sake of protection. It is highly doubtful that a leader who has laid waste to vast swaths of his country, massacred hundreds of thousands of his own people, and secured victory over domestic opponents only with the military assistance of at least two major foreign powers (Iran and Russia) could offer to surviving Syrians a credible partner in a new social contract.

Syrians may not presently have any alternative to turn to. But Assad doesn’t even have the minimal legitimacy of a Hobbesian monarch, let alone anything that would merit the approval of a Lockean. Viewed in the unforgiving light of Hobbes’s political theory, his regime remains the problem; it is unlikely to have become the solution.

The post When Is It Right (or Wrong) to Rebel? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The plaque tells a quick story: Miranda was born in Caracas in 1750, fought with the Spanish troops during the American Revolution, served as a general during the French Revolution, briefly led an independent Venezuela, and died while jailed in a Spanish fortress in 1816.

I can’t blame you if you haven’t heard of Miranda before—though the most nationalistic of my fellow Venezuelans would no doubt be offended. They would boast that Miranda’s name is engraved on the Arc de Triomphe, and that he was allegedly a lover of Catherine the Great.

Unlike many born in Spanish America at the time who either saw themselves as Spaniards born overseas or identified with a specific colonial region, Miranda saw himself as part of a single unified identity, distinct from the European, and bound by language, culture, and geography, ranging from northern Mexico to Tierra del Fuego. It was Miranda’s dream of a united Spanish American nation that inspired the ideals of Simón Bolívar. The flags of Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador were based on Miranda’s design. He died, filled with sadness, without seeing his dreams of independence fulfilled.

His tragedy, two centuries old and so unique, feels strangely resonant and universal to me. Today, as I watch my fellow Venezuelans try to understand themselves, their place in the world, and the meaning of an increasingly-distant place we all once called home, I can’t help but wonder if his life is a warning to those who look back, an inspiration for freedom and cosmopolitan values, or just a meaningless act of Quixotic romanticism.

In Venezuela, Miranda is part of our history, but he is also part of something more emotional—our national mythology—which puts Simón Bolívar at the center and Miranda as his mentor. Bolívar not only occupies a Washington-like role of Father of the Nation, his name and face are a constant, from every main street and square in every town to our highest mountain, our largest state, our main airport, and our currency.

National mythologies, though, are like the statues of great men on high columns. They force you to admire them from below, but they are so far away that you can’t see the small details and imperfections of the real men. They get robbed of any semblance of humanity.

When Hugo Chávez became president in 1999 and started the Bolivarian Revolution by calling himself a “son of Bolívar,” he was hardly being revolutionary. He was following our long-established republican cult, as many have before him, where all of Bolívar’s mistakes are justified, all his contradictions forgotten. Growing up—as I did—in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela meant spending an entire class in middle school learning about Bolívar, seeing portraits and out-of-context quotes of his speeches decorating the walls of public buildings. We even watched his remains get exhumed on live TV for the production of a CGI portrait of the “real Bolívar.” And so Bolívar became nothing but the great man in the column, Zeus in a long, monotonous pantheon of seemingly interchangeable portraits of independence heroes in military regalia.

It was Miranda who stuck out.

There is, for starters, an Arturo Michelena painting titled Miranda en La Carraca. Here, Miranda is portrayed in the cell where he would die. He’s not standing tall, or mounted on horseback. He appears almost humble, far from the luxurious lifestyle and the glittering personalities he was famous for keeping company with. He looks at the viewer with slight reproach. One can’t help but wonder what he is thinking as he sets his eyes on you.

A few years ago, when UNESCO added Miranda’s diary and documents to the Memory of the World Register, they were digitalized and uploaded on a website with lot of fanfare, proclaiming that these papers were available to everyone for the first time. At the time of this writing, that website is broken.

Last year, I found a copy of Miranda’s papers—a collection of 24 volumes printed in Cuba in the early 1950s. They were stacked in a cardboard box filled with cockroaches that I bought from an old book peddler whose house was falling apart.

It’s easy to lose myself in these diaries—even though I can only half-guess what’s written in French—because they reveal an intimate and precise view of a man who I always have regarded as exceptional but never quite human.

Take, for instance, his trips to the United States. His descriptions are filled with life: He lists the names of rivers and the number of miles he travels between towns. He also talks to George Washington’s former slave at Mount Vernon. And then Thomas Jefferson insisted on showing him his two-headed snake.

On his first trip in 1783, when he went from Cuba to South Carolina to New Jersey, you sense him marveling at the institutions of a strange, nascent nation. He compares a barbecue, where townspeople enjoy beer and pork and talk about politics, to Plato’s Symposium.

Yet he’s candid in his criticism. He finds Americans to be overly religious and regrets that theater was banned in most of the country at the time. Despite his admiration, he complains about the cult of personality surrounding George Washington. He derides the way the people of Philadelphia greet Washington, saying that Christ entering Jerusalem looks small by comparison.

During the French Revolution, Miranda was brought to trial and almost sent to the guillotine by Robespierre. In the process, he became a far savvier and more pragmatic politician.

On his second trip to the United States in 1804 he went from New York to Washington, D.C. to meet with Jefferson and his cabinet with one thing in mind: to get assurance that the United States would not intervene in favor of Spain if the Spanish colonies rebelled against the Crown.

Although his meetings with Jefferson were brief—and Miranda didn’t think the author of the Declaration of Independence had the right qualities to be president—he got a positive response.

He then made several observations that, in retrospect, show his keen geopolitical insight. First, he realized that the United States would expand westward and eventually add Mexican territories to the union. Secondly, he realized that the United States was the only nation in the Americas capable of building a canal on the Panamanian isthmus—something Spain had tried to do, but failed. And he hoped that a united Spanish America would be able negotiate a good deal with the United States for that canal.

Eventually, this trip would lead him to buy a ship in New York City. With the help of a mostly American crew, he tried to invade Venezuela in 1806. Ten Americans were captured and executed for piracy. There’s a small monument in my hometown dedicated to these Americans, though hardly anyone knows who it commemorates.

In a 1815 letter, John Adams describes Miranda’s charm and intelligence, but also his single-mindedness and his power to rope others into his impossible dream:

“His constant topic was the independence of South America, her immense wealth, inexhaustible resources, innumerable population, impatience under the Spanish yoke, and disposition to throw off the dominion of Spain. It is most certain that he filled the heads of many of the young officers with brilliant visions of wealth, free trade, republican government, etc., etc., etc., in South America.”

In 1811, Miranda returned to help Venezuela become one of the first Spanish colonies to declare its independence, setting up a federal republic modeled on the United States. It fell apart because of factional squabbles, economic problems, and a devastating earthquake that left the most important cities in ruins. Miranda, then leader of the haphazard government, was arrested by the other patriots and given to the Spanish Crown to guarantee their safe passage into exile.

Looking again at Miranda en La Carraca, I know he always will be entangled in myth, but I can’t help but wonder what Francisco de Miranda is thinking. Today, his life feels more relevant than ever.

As Venezuelans leave their country in droves, and try to make sense of their new identity as a diaspora, it’s tempting to see Miranda as a role model. Despite living less than half of his life in South America and, at different times, adopting names such as Merond, Martin, or Meroff to hide from his persecutors or to pass unnoticed in a foreign land but he was driven by his dream of seeing those he regarded as his own people be freed from Spanish rule.

Both he and Bolívar met tragic ends. But while Bolívar’s fate—dying of pneumonia on his way to exile, after being expelled by the nations he had liberated—was tangled with South American independence, and carries almost the gravitas and inevitability of religious martyrdom, Miranda’s fate is Byronic.

One could imagine him living out the rest of his days in his townhouse in London with his wife Sarah and his children, but instead he chose to follow his impossible dream. In that way, Miranda en La Carraca feels like a warning from a romantic, an adventurer, the father of a nation that never was, a doomed soul telling you to save yourself and never look back, because there’s nothing to salvage.

But then I go back to his diaries, to his stories of escaping from the Spanish Inquisition and his quotations of John Milton, and comprehend that a lost cause is no less great, no less inspiring than one that succeeds. For many Venezuelans, our homeland is a lost cause; but for me, whether that’s true or not, it’s no reason to give up.

The post Why Simón Bolívar Isn’t the Only Revolutionary Icon Venezuelans Should Look Up To appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

There are never any easy answers in this ancient country, long plagued by poverty, war, misrule, and earthquakes. But what I’ve seen since April here convinces me that it is impossible to know when a giant change will come, even when you are right in the middle of it.

It was during the first week of April that Armenia’s opposition party, which had never had a real shot at power, began a civil disobedience campaign. It launched this effort with a cross-country march, led by opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan. Starting with fewer than 10 people, the march grew to 300,000 as it covered more than 500 kilometers of the country from north to south. The marchers didn’t demand a specific political outcome but rather espoused the ideals of love, tolerance, and dignity.

These ideas fired the imagination, and soon people were in the streets all over the country, offering similar messages. These demonstrators were mostly young and educated, and within a few weeks, it was a national movement headed by Pashinyan, who is a member of parliament from the YELQ (Way Out) opposition party. On many days—whenever I could spare the time from my job as a software developer at a small IT company—I was among them. I once even walked 11 miles to join a protest.

By the end of April, this movement had forced the resignation of the president of 10 years, Serzh Sargsyan, who only days earlier had sought to extend his rule by taking over the newly empowered office of prime minister. By the second week of May, Pashinyan was being sworn in as interim prime minister, with the support of the previous ruling party.

To say that this moment feels different than any we have known before is an understatement. In only a few weeks, Armenia has embarked on what is not just a transition of power but also a wholesale rearrangement of the country and a break with its history. Indeed, this is a revolution of the idea of Armenia itself. And for the first time, Armenians feel that our destiny may be in our hands.

Armenia, for so much of its history, has been a target of conquerors, its people ruled by outside tyrants and empires. In the last century alone, Armenians have faced historical hardships: the Genocide of 1915 at the hands of the Turks; the loss of sovereignty to the Bolsheviks in 1920; the conversion of Armenia into a republic of the Soviet Union. In 1990, we celebrated our regained independence only briefly, as that event was soon followed by economic troubles and by conflict with Azerbaijan over independence for the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Since independence, the Armenian government has been corrupt and incompetent, as successively less educated and more criminal people ended up in government positions, from which they could enrich themselves. Election irregularities became regular. This class seemed to believe that Armenians would stoically suffer as they previously had. Many regular Armenians believed this, too.

But the younger generation of Armenians—people in their twenties, including me—surprised them. In fact, we surprised ourselves. In retrospect, we didn’t know each other. If you complained while working in a job like a teacher or university researcher, you risked losing your job. The economy’s pyramid structure discouraged dialogue. So many of us didn’t know just how disenchanted our generational cohorts had become—until the protests began, and the frustration became visible to all of us.

Ours is an especially large generation: People age 20 to 30 represent 570,000 out of the country’s total official population of about 3 million—the product of a baby boom after the war with Azerbaijan. While we weren’t entirely free, our youth after 1990 was relatively open. We used the internet; we traveled; we sought education and worked outside the country. Many of us—including me, whose job involves work with companies in the United States, Canada, and Sweden—took advantage of this, and learned firsthand that opportunity in Armenia didn’t have to be so limited. We saw that the country was growing far too slowly, and that its political system was not keeping up with Europe.

And while our schools could use improvement, our generation of Armenians did benefit from the country’s determination, after independence, to preserve its culture and teach more of its own history. We were well aware of the 1915 genocide. We studied legendary Armenians who made internationally recognized contributions to science, culture, arts, and literature, including Tigranes the Great, the poet-theologian Narekatsi, the medieval theologian David Anhaght, the mathematician and astronomer Anania Shirakatsi, the composers Komitas and Aram Khachaturyan, the painter Ivan Ayvazovski, and the diving champion David Hambardzumyan. Knowing our history has made younger Armenians less willing to compromise with bad leadership.

Still, it took a significant amount of organization to turn these feelings into a revolution. The opposition organized carefully, with a disciplined message. We were handed paper with the points we should make. Our goal was to be relentlessly positive and open, while insisting that a better future was possible. The people blocked traffic and access to government ministries, with lines of people, and even put their bodies beneath police cars to prevent protestors from being arrested and taken away. We were told to avoid violence and resist provocation and we conducted ourselves in a way that was both professional and beautiful. This approach was irresistible, and Armenians of all ages and backgrounds joined in.

Mothers were in the streets with infants. Well-known actors performed for the crowd. Kids organized in the public parks so they could protest while still holding their lessons and doing homework; teachers joined them. The protests included street classes on history, design, art, painting, math, music and computer programming.

The most striking characteristic of the protests was the kindness that poured into the streets and squares, as people smiled and greeted strangers.

In this conservative place it was striking to see girls hugging policemen, many of whom had been trained as exclusively punitive personnel, according to the old Soviet standards and mentality.

One potential confrontation I witnessed was defused by protestors chanting, “The policeman is one of us.” The police and protestors talked frequently. On one street, where the authorities had erected a wall to keep demonstrators away from the prime minister’s office, some police officers abandoned their posts and joined us.

During the days of protests, with as many as 350,000 people gathering in public areas (parks, squares, or streets and avenues), there was not one report of a storefront, a public bench, or a single bush being destroyed.

There were three turning points in this drama. The first came one evening in late April when the former president officially resigned. He previously had used a referendum to install himself in a newly powerful prime minister’s post. His resignation brought what seemed like the entire population out to celebrate in the capital, Yerevan. But not only there. I live seven kilometers from Yerevan, but my job and all my business contacts are in Yerevan, so I was on the scene, too. The former prime minister didn’t appear live, but simply issued a statement. As the word spread, we celebrated. I remember feeling grateful that he had done the right thing, instead of sending out the police to go and stop people.

The protests and celebrations also took place in all provincial towns and villages. But as soon as the celebrations were over, professional unions, social networks, and other organizations raised the issue of the need to clean the central squares after the gathering. The next morning people going to work were astonished to find the squares had been cleaned—mostly by young people during the early morning hours.

The second turning point was the puzzled reactions of authorities, including the police, who sought to crack down on the protests but were unequipped to deal with people confronting them unarmed with smiles, laughter, dancing, and singing. Because the police could not spot an actual enemy in the crowds, they were unable to provoke a reaction that would justify a crackdown—their usual response.

A third turning point came with the last gasp of the ruling party. In an extraordinary session of the National Assembly, the ruling party backed the discredited government and refused to agree to install Pashinyan, the opposition and movement leader, as prime minister. This desperate attempt to maintain power was the end of the ruling party—it doubled and tripled the number of people in the streets.

Soon after, the ruling party reversed itself and surrendered, declaring that it would not propose its own candidate, and would instead embrace the candidate proposed by the parties in the opposition coalition.

By that time, the movement had adopted a new slogan, which translates roughly as “Take Your Own Step.” It was a way of saying that today’s Armenians, after having been told their country was too weak to make its own rules, would now take charge of our own destiny.

The opposition says it will be peaceful, that it will champion public participation, and restart dialogue with its neighbors and international organizations. The new government says it will be democratic, with the citizens of the movement acting as the overseer of government and democratic processes.

Holding onto this revolution will not be easy. The new prime minister inherits a devastated economy, corruption, poverty and emigration, monopolistic political and economic systems, and heavy foreign debt. Developing the country will require hard work not just by the prime minister, but by all of us. The good news: Armenia is now a place of unprecedented inspiration and hope. We are, quite suddenly, a country with new possibilities and high expectations.

The post How Young Armenians Forced Their President to Resign appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

I don’t say this to act as a “myth-buster”; rather, to put that moment in a more accurate context so that we might understand it better. In the years just before 1776, Americans did not consider themselves “American” in any substantive way. They regarded themselves as Britons living in America. The difference is crucial for understanding both the events that would usher in American independence and the ways we remember it.

While researching my latest book, I sought to recover this lost world on the eve of 1776. One way to recreate it was through the eyes of two brothers who played formative parts in shaping that era.

George Townshend, a high-ranking soldier and politician, and Charles Townshend, a key member of Britain’s Board of Trade, took on important roles in the British empire in the years just before the Revolution. George, a year older than his sibling, worked to create an empire of imperial might. Charles imagined an empire of commerce. In the process, the two brothers helped create an Atlantic world of migration and commerce that made American colonists the most proudly British people and autonomous in the world. Later, both would initiate reform of that Atlantic world. George would attempt to tie Ireland more closely to Britain. Charles would do exactly the same thing for the American colonies.

In the wake of the Seven Years’ War, a global conflict spanning five continents, the brothers came to believe that they were living during one of history’s critical moments. The British victory over the hated French, they thought, made this a time when institutions could be shaped to sustain British liberty and bind the empire together.

Charles Townshend, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, tried to come up with a vision of empire that could manage, and profit, from this moment. In 1767, he introduced duties on select goods to fund an American administration that could serve as the basis for a centralized empire.

Portrait of George Townshend. Art courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

It did not seem at the time to be a high-risk tax policy. Americans, after all, considered George III to be, in an expression of the period, “the best of all kings.” They reveled in their lives, liberty, and property, rights that were guaranteed to them as British subjects.

But in crafting his idea of empire, Townshend set off a backlash—not because the British subjects in America were somehow different, but because they were so similar in outlook.

Charles Townshend’s policies placed the British Americans in a bind, one that would lead to 1776. When Bostonians and others up and down America’s Atlantic coast contested Charles’ duties, they did not think they were declaring independence. Far from it. They pushed back in hopes of holding onto a loosely federated understanding of empire that would allow them to retain their traditional liberties while continuing to profit from the Atlantic trade.

In doing so, they embraced the same rationale that the Townshends employed to design empire: that only a people devoted to liberty could negotiate a world-changing moment of time. By contesting the empire Charles was championing, they would create revolution.

Empire and revolution, then, were made of the same British materials.

The leaders of this British American revolution did not reckon, at least at first, with the implications of their resistance. By contesting the measures of Charles Townshend in America (and also of his brother George to keep Ireland within the British empire), the British Americans occasioned a battle over who would rule in each society.

Both Ireland and America were deeply politicized by the Townshend Moment. In Ireland, Roman Catholics found a political voice. The same was true for poorer people in America, and even for some enslaved persons. Most troublingly, for elites in each place, was that the backlash against the Townshends had driven members of the lower social orders to violence that seemed to be increasing.

The violence was a political challenge to rulers not only in Britain, but in America. And so the British-American elites—the merchants, planters, and lawyers who were pressing for their British rights against Townshend—had to fight two conflicts: one in Parliament, and another against the people they ruled over in America.

This created a series of what I call “provincial dilemmas.” In Ireland, Protestants carefully addressed their dilemma by pushing for as much autonomy within the British system as they dared, without further infuriating Catholics who made up more than 70 percent of the population. The Irish would not make a claim for real national independence, however much they resisted what Parliament was doing.

British-American elites had more confidence. They figured that the only way they could contain the political challenges from below was to make a bid for independence. To enjoy autonomy, their liberties, and the promise of Atlantic commerce—and to remain masters of their own societies—meant that they would have to become “American.”

That transformation took a long time, and it didn’t happen in 1776. For years afterward, Americans did not quite know what it meant to be “American.” It took the actual fighting of the war against Britain for them to see each other as compatriots and to become, in some sense, a people.

The date of July 4, and the Declaration it commemorated, did not mean much until the decades following independence, when it would be resurrected as a birthday of a nation, in order to address political tensions and the uncertainties that a period of revolutionary uncertainty had unleashed.

In time, all Americans could look to the country’s Founders as the reasonably minded midwives to a new republic dedicated not to the memory of violence but to a set of ideals. These ideals—“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—would then become the sum total of who we are as Americans.

But, placed in the proper context, our nation’s tangled tale actually began with British statesmen like the Townshends and with a group of colonists who proudly considered themselves to be the most proper British people in the world.

The post How the Townshend Brothers Accidentally Sparked the American Revolution appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

He was in love with his close friend’s wife. He was called an ingrate by his commander. He was accused of being a war criminal, a murderer, an incompetent leader, and an international embarrassment.

What is truly remarkable about the 20-something Washington, however, is not that he struggled and stumbled and made some terrible mistakes. It is how profoundly he learned from them. Washington’s arc of transformation from self-centered youth to selfless leader offers an example to us all.

Washington’s father, Gus, a Virginia tobacco planter and slaveholder of middling status, died when George was 11. Gus left the bulk of his plantation lands to George’s older half-brothers, thus leaving the young Washington without a way to make a living. After his mother emphatically rejected his request to go to sea at age 14, he took up surveying. This was fortunate. Under the mentorship of the aristocratic Fairfax family, the teenage Washington was soon surveying Virginia’s frontier, making good money, and buying his own land there.

Ambitious and eager to climb in the Virginia aristocracy, Washington took a part-time officer’s post in the Virginia colonial military and volunteered to cross the wintry Appalachian Mountains into the Ohio Valley wilderness when he was 21. His mission was to carry a message from Virginia’s British governor to the commandant of a French fort deep in the forest. It said, in essence: Stay out! These lands belong to King George! This launched the young Washington on a series of harrowing adventures in the Ohio wilderness that nearly killed him. At one point he tumbled off a makeshift log raft into a half-frozen river. The real trouble began, however, after Washington delivered the French commandant’s reply to the Virginia governor. The commandant politely but firmly declined to leave.

The indignant Virginia governor dispatched Washington back into the wilds at the head of a small military party, but warned him to be cautious and avoid being the aggressor. Washington did the opposite. He ambushed a small French party while they were breakfasting at dawn. Then one of Washington’s Indian allies tomahawked open the skull of the French officer in charge. It turned out the party Washington attacked was a French diplomatic detail—or so its members claimed—trying to deliver a message to the British.

Instead of retreating and reconsidering at this point, or engaging diplomatically, Washington, eager and cocksure, pushed ahead. He bragged that he enjoyed hearing bullets whistle and that he would drive the French back to Montreal. He built a flimsy stockade named Fort Necessity and made a stand against the French and their Indian allies.

It was a disaster—his troops were slaughtered, with about 100, or one-third of them, killed or wounded. Washington was forced to surrender, but it was too late. With his mistakes in 1754, he had personally ignited the French and Indian War, which would spread to Europe and, known there as the Seven Years’ War, last until 1763.

Surprisingly, this did not end his military career. Remarkably brave in battle, he was eventually named commander of Virginia’s provincial troops in that war when he was 23. Washington was responsible for protecting Virginia’s frontier settler families from Indian and French raiding parties. Initially, he seemed largely focused on himself—his “honor,” his reputation—and driven by pride. He tried to strike up a personal correspondence with Sally Fairfax, with whom he was infatuated, the charming wife of his good friend George William Fairfax. He began to see himself as an actor on a grand stage, and Sally as a willing audience. Thin-skinned, he quit or threatened to quit at least seven times as a Virginia officer—over too little pay, jealousy toward higher-ranking officers, newspaper criticism.

Civilian friends warned him if he quit then, in the middle of the war, that he truly would sully his reputation. He deeply coveted a British Royal Army officer’s commission—a prestigious “King’s” commission instead of a colonial one—but, to his lasting bitterness, Royal Army commanders rebuffed his many requests. His emotional neediness was pitiful at times. Pouting when he didn’t receive letters from friends back home, he complained to his commander that there must be something wrong with the military mail system. In fact, his friends had not written him.

Amid the trauma of war, however, his emotional focus began to widen. He showed an evolving sense of empathy toward others, first toward the colonial troops under his command as they died, undersupplied, in mud-and-blood-filled trenches, then toward the Virginia frontier settlers he was charged with defending. Families were kidnapped and scalped and butchered in Indian raids. Settlers came begging him to save them.

He often felt powerless to protect these people. Yet Washington was dogged and fearless and calm in the face of danger. He began to listen closely to his officers, carefully weighing their advice and moderating his impetuousness. Surviving numerous close calls in battle that left bullet holes through his clothing, he felt miraculously spared. He came to believe that “Providence” had a greater role for him.

After British forces finally dislodged the French, Washington emerged from the Ohio wilderness in late 1758 at age 26. He had recently written an impassioned letter to Sally Fairfax, who did not return the sentiment. Within a few weeks of his emergence he married the wealthy widow Martha Custis, settling down to the life of a prosperous planter and family man. Besides financial security, Martha probably offered him the intimate emotional reassurance that he had lacked during those years thrashing through the Ohio wilderness, trying to make a name. (We’ll never know for sure because she burned their correspondence.)

Almost two decades later, in the spring of 1775, Washington attended the Continental Congress in Philadelphia as a delegate for Virginia. Still tall and powerfully built at age 43, he wore a resplendent blue-and-buff uniform of his own design. He projected an aura of modesty, dignity, and strength. By then he had learned how to carry himself in the world, how to engender loyalty and trust, how to seize opportunity yet also care for others. In other words, he had learned how to lead.

The Continental Congress needed a commander for its new army to march against British troops in Boston. Washington possessed far more military experience than anyone in the room due to his role—checkered though it may have been—in the French and Indian War. John Adams rose to speak favorably of him. Washington was nominated. Delegates voted. It was unanimous. George Washington would be the first commander in chief of the Continental Army of the United Colonies. In so many ways, it was a destiny of his own making.

The post How Vain, Stubborn, Thin-Skinned George Washington Grew Up appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This question often has been answered by referencing Mexico. Political scientists often link Mexico City’s devastating 8.0 magnitude earthquake on September 19, 1985, to the end of the PRI’s seven-decades-long rule of the country 15 years later. Their argument is not that the party was responsible for the loss of some 10,000 lives, but rather that the disaster exposed the incompetence and corruption of a regime that until then seemed to control everything. While the government of President Miguel de la Madrid looked hopeless, if not helpless, ordinary citizens took the lead in rescuing survivors and helping the injured. It was this unexpected bottom-up movement of people that presaged the eventual demise of the then-ruling PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional).

Today, the question of earthquakes and politics is again alive, with two new terremotos, including a 7.1-magnitude quake on the 32nd anniversary of the 1985 disaster, devastating Mexico as the PRI again clings to power. The response of ordinary citizens has been reminiscent of the 1985 quake: Tens of hundreds of young people in hard hats spontaneously joined the rescue operation, digging into rubble with bare hands and forming long lines to carry away pieces of concrete and mortar from collapsed buildings.

Despite the parallels, however, predictions of a political earthquake are overblown. Mexico’s quakes may shake the earth, but their political power has long been overestimated. The story of Mexico City quakes, past and present, reminds us that such events make slow impacts, and only damage political orders that were already weak and cracked. And for all the civic action that a tragedy may produce, the impact is temporary.

As a longtime resident and observer of Mexico, I have waited in vain for decades for an autonomous civil society to emerge there. The 1985 earthquake certainly didn’t produce it—nor was the quake the main catalyst for the end of the PRI’s rule.

The unraveling of Mexico’s one-party system really began with the economic crisis of 1982, which shook the country far more than any movement of the earth. The collapse of the peso was followed by high inflation, a deep recession, and a widespread sense of despair. There had been a lesser crisis and currency devaluation in 1976, but it was soon hidden by important off-shore oil discoveries and massive foreign borrowing. After 1982, there were no such band-aids. It was this moment that broke the unwritten contract between the PRI and Mexico’s middle classes.

This contract was simple. A broad political class, which controlled the peasantry, labor unions, and civil servants through the PRI, had brought the country three decades of steady economic growth nicknamed the Mexican “miracle.” In exchange, the growing urban middle classes spent more time vacationing in Acapulco than engaging in politics. Occasionally dissident groups appeared, even armed guerrillas in the mid-1970s, but they were either crushed or co-opted by the system.

The lack of economic growth was far more unsettling. Without it, the ruling political elite was unmasked as self-serving and corrupt and the middle classes began demanding a voice in the country’s affairs.

The demands grew in 1988 when the PRI resorted to fraud to insure the victory of its presidential candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, over his left-leaning opponent, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. Ignoring pressure for greater political freedom, Salinas instead chose economic reform, which included privatization of major state-owned companies and utilities and, later, negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada.

Darker days followed. When an armed group known as the Zapatistas took up arms in the southern state of Chiapas on January 1, 1994, the rebellion won popular sympathy simply for daring to defy the regime. Three months later, Salinas’s hand-picked successor, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was murdered. Weeks after his PRI replacement, Ernesto Zedillo, took office, a new economic crisis erupted and, with it, fresh middle-class anger at the regime.

With his back to the wall, Zedillo sought to release political pressure by permitting genuinely free elections, with the result that in mid-term elections in 1997 the PRI for the first time ever lost control of the Chamber of Deputies. Then in 2000, to the fury of PRI party dinosaurs, Zedillo refused to step in to block the victory of the conservative National Action Party’s presidential candidate, Vicente Fox Quesada. The impossible had happened: the PRI had been ousted peacefully. The earthquake was merely one small part of a generation-long transformation.

Fox occupied the National Palace in Mexico City’s Zócalo, but he did not inherit the near-absolute power enjoyed by PRI presidents since the 1930s. His party did not control Congress and, as the traditional vertical structure of government fell apart, state governors exercised greater independence and labor unions slipped from central control. The coherence of PRI rule, however perverted it may have seemed to many Mexicans, vanished. As new centers of power emerged, powerful drug cartels which controlled the traffic of cocaine from Colombia to the United States posed a growing threat to the nation’s security.

In the 2006 presidential election, Fox’s party candidate, Felipe Calderón, was the narrow victor, but his leftist opponent, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, claimed fraud and his supporters blocked Mexico City’s streets for months. To assert his power, Calderón declared war on the drug cartels, with disastrous consequences. The estimates of the number of people killed or disappeared during his six-year term range between 60,000 and 100,000, most of them as a result of territorial wars between rival cartels. These gangs also set out to terrorize the population, bombing nightclubs, hanging bodies from highway bridges, and even leaving the heads of victims outside some schools.

The perception of a breakdown in law and order was one explanation for the PRI’s return to power in 2012: The PRI may have been corrupt, the saying went, but it knew how to govern. It also benefitted from the undisguised support of Mexico’s dominant television group, Televisa. Even then, its presidential candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, was hardly given a national mandate. Because Mexico has only one round of presidential elections (unlike, say, Brazil), Peña Nieto won with just 38.2 percent of the vote, with López Obrador again in second place and Calderón’s own party candidate trailing in third.

At first, Peña Nieto’s boast that he was leading a “new PRI” seemed to carry some weight, above all when he dared to break the exploration monopoly of the country’s oil giant, Pemex, and to challenge the near-monopoly of the telecommunications billionaire Carlos Slim. But while a different approach to the drug war resulted in the capture of several leading capos, including the infamous Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the number of cartels has multiplied. Further, the old ogre of corruption returned: Peña Nieto’s wife bought a mansion with the help of a prominent businessman, and several PRI governors were caught enriching themselves. For many Mexicans, there was nothing new about this PRI.

Then Donald Trump appeared, with his insults toward Mexicans and his threat to build a wall along the common border. Peña Nieto tried appeasement, inviting Trump for hombre talks in Mexico City, only to find Trump resuming his flailing of Mexico immediately upon his return home. Given blossoming anti-American sentiments, Peña Nieto had no choice but to refuse to pay for any border wall, but he did persuade Trump to engage in talks to renew NAFTA rather than denounce the treaty.

On the eve of this September’s earthquakes, polls showed Peña Nieto’s approval rating at well below 20 percent, lower than any Mexican leader on record.

Will the seismic tremors push Mexico into another political earthquake? There’s reason for skepticism. This Mexico City earthquake, and the earlier major quake in southern Mexico, were less devastating than the 1985 quake, with the number of dead in the low hundreds, not the thousands. While some 40 buildings collapsed in the capital, including the wing of a packed primary school, the city as a whole remained intact, and Mexican authorities were better prepared than in 1985.

Once life returns to normal for all but the earthquakes’ victims, the issue consuming most Mexicans will be next July’s presidential elections. The political earth may again move because the current front-runner is the perennial leftist candidate López Obrador, known throughout Mexico by his initials of AMLO. Because his promises of sweeping economic and social reforms have alarmed the private sector and middle classes, the other three main parties are determined to stop him. But can parties of left, center and right agree on a “unity” candidate? If they fail, as seems likely, López Obrador could win with an even smaller percentage of votes than Peña Nieto won in 2012.

If the actual earthquakes and their aftermath reinforce public disenchantment with the political establishment, AMLO, with his cultivated image of the political outsider, could benefit. But even if by next July the disaster has been largely forgotten, and even if most Mexicans oppose him, enough voters may still opt for the unknown variable of a populist with a radical new message to elect him. And at that point, a new cycle of Mexican political instability will unavoidably begin.

The post Mexico’s ’85 Earthquake Didn’t Start a Revolution appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.