Revolutionology (REBELLIONS & SOCIAL CHANGE) with Jack Goldstone

Oh hi, it's that lady standing in the rain.

Allie Ward, here is ologies, here's revolutions.

Revolutionology, it is indeed a word.

The word revolution itself dates back hundreds of years coming from the orbit of the planets around the sun, so revolutions and wheels that spin and things coming back around again.

So let's talk about it with someone who is recognized globally as one of the leading experts in revolutions and social change.

He did his undergrad, his master's and PhD at Harvard University.

He has authored or edited over 20 books, including Revolutions, A Very Short Introduction, which has a revised second edition that we'll link in the show notes.

He's published 300 papers, including recent bangers like Classical Liberalism versus Populism and Authoritarianism, The Struggle for Modern Democracy.

And when it comes to asking someone more intelligent than you can fathom how governments rise and fall, he is the most solid choice.

And if you are like Allison, you better not get any politics in my science program.

I do think that you should leave.

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It'll get historical.

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Okay, let's hear the whys of revolutions, the hows of revolutions, what revolts have been the gold standard, how that's changed over time, social media and social change, how protests are squashed before they really start, storming the Bastille, facing off tanks, the creep of regime change, the forces behind the scenes, what happens when you install the wrong new leader, the rhetoric that moves revolutions along, violent revolutions, non-violent ones, which one is more effective, fascism, anti-fascism, anti-anti-fascism, folk songs, college kids, and so much more with scholar, author, professor, social change expert, and actual real life revolutionologist Dr.

Jack Goldstone.

Yeah, I'm Jack Goldstone.

He, him.

You are one of the most highly lauded experts on revolutions.

You've been doing this for decades, right?

That's right.

If people have a question about revolutions, they say, hit up Goldstone.

He's got some answers.

How did you end up the revolutions guy?

Like anything else, it's a combination of persistence and stubbornness.

I got interested in revolutions because I wanted to know why governments often do stupid things.

I figured the most stupid thing a government could do would mess things up so badly that it would get overthrown by its own people.

So I started looking into this question of how do states fall into revolution?

And it's a difficult question, and I've had to learn about revolutions in a lot of different places and over a lot of history.

So it was a big project, And yeah, it took decades to establish a sense of knowledge about it.

Did you always have kind of a bent toward justice or history when you were growing up?

Well, I certainly had a bent toward history.

You know, if people ask me, when did I start studying revolutions?

I'd say in an undergraduate college paper, I was reading about ancient Greece and the

ideas they had about transitions from democracy to tyranny.

And I saw, saw, hey, this goes way back.

Of course, revolution keeps changing as people learn.

But it's been an endlessly fascinating topic for me.

And I've heard you say that revolutions are kind of under the same genus, but there's a lot of different species of them.

Yeah, that's right.

I think the world once got hung up on the idea of the French Revolution as the model revolution, and it's really not a revolution unless you have people hanging from lampposts and such.

But we now have to recognize that that's not the only way these things happen.

There have been nonviolent revolutions throughout history, and lately, the nonviolent approach has become much more widespread.

And I think it's a good thing.

When you're studying revolutions, do you approach it like a patchwork quilt, going back in time and types of revolutions and violent, nonviolent, communist revolution, industrial revolution?

Are you jumping around to study these?

Or

revolutionology is it sort of like a linear path to see how they evolve?

Well, you have to go back and forth.

So sometimes you'll have a question that leads you back in time.

What did the French and Russian revolutions have in common?

Those are big peasant revolutions.

Sometimes you leap forward and you say, hey, you know, revolutions lately in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Philippines, those were non-violent.

And how were they different?

But then if you want to ask something like, how did people develop a sense of injustice?

What is it that really kind of pissed them off and made them willing to turn against their own government?

Then you start hopscotching around and looking at the different ideologies, the different themes.

You say, how did someone like a Napoleon come out as the result of a revolution that fought against kings, ended up crowning an emperor, right?

Just a quick definition here.

I was like, what is the difference between a king and an emperor?

And it's just one rules a kingdom and one rules an empire.

And you can have many kingdoms within an empire.

I just had never thought about it before.

And then, you know, in the modern world, we want to look at revolutions where democracies slid into authoritarian regimes because that's a type of revolution, too.

I mean, people turn against their own government.

They want a strong man to replace the institutions.

And so we have had in history authoritarian, fascist revolutions, whatever you want to call them.

But these are cases where people dismantled democracy, not in a kind of a military coup, but by mobilizing the population on their side.

Just a quick note here.

Sometimes it looks as though the people dismantle a democracy.

And they may, though, have a little help from foreign nations.

And perhaps you're thinking, how scary, another nation wanting to install an authoritarian leader, but oops, it is us sometimes.

Surprise.

So for more on this, you can see history or you can hop into the 2019 paper, The Strategic Logic of Covert Regime Change, U.S.-backed regime change campaigns during the Cold War, in the journal Security Studies, which explains that, quote, Washington's proclivity for covert regime change was not limited to either political party.

And author Lindsay O'Rourke continues that the United States promoted authoritarian leaders in nearly 70% of its covert interventions and half of its overt regime changes during the Cold War.

So below the surface, the populace of a country may not be the only force leading change, for good or for bad.

History, it's just gossip that matters.

You know, you always think about a revolution as a good thing.

Maybe that's because there's so many products that are touted as revolutionary, or you think about a chapter that really got us ahead.

But it is chilling to think of how many revolutions have been not for the good.

Does that come up a lot when you're studying or lecturing on this?

Yes, it certainly does because we have a kind of a myth of revolution as a heroic, noble cause to overthrow a

terrible, oppressive government and liberate the people.

That may not be the case.

And that's a myth that revolutionaries themselves have cultivated.

It's a Hollywood theme, you know, whether it's the uprisings of gladiators or the uprisings of slaves or historical documentaries about revolutions that need heroes and villains.

So, yes, we tend to think that a revolution is a good thing, and some of them have been.

Certainly, we have democracy today because of revolutions against kings and emperors.

But almost all revolutions have a dark side, if you will.

That is, if it requires a lot of violence and a lot of creating harsh, oppressive, brutal governments to create a revolution and to hold it in place, that leads to tragedies.

That leads to tens of millions of people being killed.

And too many revolutions have leaned in that direction, leading to civil war, leading to authoritarian governments.

Well, that was going to be my next question.

What is the difference between a revolution, an uprising, a civil war?

Can you take me through a little bit of the anatomy of a revolution so we can spot it

when it happens?

Sure.

And the thing about revolutions is, you know, they're processes.

They're not just an event.

A revolution can unfold over years, sometimes even decades.

That is, revolutions can trigger civil wars.

Revolutions may start with uprisings, spill into civil war.

Sometime during the revolution, there may be a military coup.

So it is hard to tell these different things apart.

What I tell my students and what I would tell your listeners is if you have a sustained mass mobilization, that is someone kind of raising and organizing and pushing the people to change the government and they make a major attempt to overthrow the government in order to change the way institutions are run.

We figured we'd switch it up a bit.

Then that's a revolutionary episode.

It may lead to a successful revolution.

It may not.

But the two key things are mass mobilization for the purpose of radically changing the way government is organized and operates.

And when it comes to mass mobilization, is that a certain number, certain certain percentage of the population on board for it?

Or is it majority rules there?

Well, if you're a revolutionary organizer, the more people on your side, the better.

I think that's true.

But there's no minimum.

The effort of

maybe,

you know, 20,000 students in Tiananmen Square to demand democratic accountability from China's communist government, that was a revolutionary episode.

There were signs that it was spreading to other cities in China, and the Communist Party brought in the military and crushed it before it could threaten to overturn the government.

And if you're not familiar with the Tiananmen Square event in the summer of 1989, broad strokes are that a liberal communist leader died that spring, and gatherings of people mourning him turned into peaceful protests urging reform because there were huge income disparities and inflation was high.

And these protests continued for months.

They consisted of a lot of student protesters as well.

And then there were counter-demonstrators who were funded by the government, who called the peaceful protesters traitorous bandits.

But anyway, these protests continued, and as they gathered in Beijing City Square, the military was brought in.

And on June 4th, 1989, the military opened fire on the demonstrators, killing hundreds, possibly thousands of them.

Why the vague numbers?

The Chinese government never released the actual death toll.

And there aren't annual memorials in mainland China as the incident has been scrubbed from the internet there, hasn't made it into textbooks.

So people who communicate about this Tanaman Square incident in 1989, when they talk about it online, they use code words like 8 squared, because 8 squared is 64, June 4th, kind of like how the grape and the corncob emojis mean real different things in some parts of the internet.

But you may have seen the image of a man in a white shirt holding a bag of groceries.

He's standing in an empty street.

He's in front of a row of tanks blocking them just by standing there.

And that image has inspired protesters across decades and continents to stand up against authority.

So yes, Tannin Square in 1989, protesters met with military force and killed.

But that was a revolutionary moment.

Even, I would say, here in our own capital, if the crowd on January 6th of 2021 had managed to somehow overturn the result of the election, either by keeping Congress too frightened to authorize the Electoral College results, or if they'd actually pressured Congress into changing the results, that would have been a mass mobilization that brought about a major change in how our government operates, even though it was only a few thousand people.

So I don't think there's any minimum.

What matters is how weak the government is.

If the weak government is going to crumble from having a few thousand people storming a government building or protesting in the streets, that's happened in history and it can happen again.

Does what precede that a weakening of the government, of the legislative and the judicial system, for example?

Like if you weaken those pillars, then is it easier to get a couple thousand jabronis in there and topple things?

Well, now you're asking me to talk about how revolutions unfold in a little bit of detail.

So be patient with me.

I love it.

I think the general principle is a government that has the support of administrative and business elites and particularly is able to keep the support of the military because the military believes the government is worth fighting for and worth defending.

In that situation, it's almost impossible to overthrow a government no matter how many people you have in the streets.

In the Arab Spring, the island nation of Bahrain had almost a third of the population protesting.

Just a side note, this is the Bahraini uprising, which happened on Valentine's Day, 2011, at the start of the movement known as the Arab Spring.

And over 180 protesters in this Bahraini uprising, in particular, were killed by security forces and military troops.

But the government, with help from Saudi Arabia, crushed that attempted rebellion.

And in Hong Kong, at times, they had a quarter to a third of the population engaged in protests against control from the mainland.

but the mainland was able to impose its will anyway, because no matter how many people turned out in Hong Kong, they didn't have much leverage over the government in Beijing.

So you can have a large turnout that's not effective if the government has leadership and military support that it can use to kind of weather the storm and put down the protests.

But then the reverse is true.

You can have a government that has already been widely seen to have failed the people.

It may be seen as kind of terribly corrupt and only interested in enriching itself.

It may be seen as incompetent, having failed to deal with some economic or military threat.

It may be seen as kind of betraying nationalist beliefs.

If you have a religious country and the government tries to go secular, this happened with the brief communist takeover in Afghanistan, which is a very religious state.

That revolutionary regime fell very quickly because people were won over to the Islamic opposition and the communist government couldn't hold on.

So if you have a government that loses support, then even a fairly small demonstration can kind of build.

You know, people see that, hey, this government really is weak.

It doesn't have the support to really thoroughly repress a protest.

And then more people may join in and say, hey, I'm going to get with the ball too.

I mean, I hate this government.

I'm going to get out there.

And if the government's weak, maybe this is our time to push it over.

That's kind of how things looked in Berlin in 1989, when the government didn't shoot back as people started converging on the Berlin Wall.

You know, government said, well, we're not supposed to shoot our own people.

So let's see what happens.

And what happened is when people felt, hey, you know, there's nobody stopping us, they started going over the wall, taking it apart.

You'll see revolutions.

Sometimes the police or the troops will come into the street and they'll shoot a few protesters.

That makes the crowd mad.

And then if the government says, well, that's what they deserve.

They were enemies of the state.

We're going to come out with even stronger force.

And the army is willing to do that, then the revolution stops.

On the other hand, If the government has a crisis of authority or a crisis of confidence and said, oh, we really didn't want to shoot civilians, and the army starts to say, we didn't want to be in this position of shooting our own people, then revolutionary momentum can start to build.

And over the next hours, days, weeks, the revolution can grow to the point where the government has to

throw its arms down and run away.

Is that why when protests break out, say, a heavy military force gets sent?

to meet those protesters in, say, in some countries?

Well, here's the thing.

Yes, in some countries, if you have a ruthless government and a ruthless dictator, they'll send out overwhelming force to crush protests.

They'll arrest people, throw them in jail.

They'll knock on doors at night to try and grab the ringleaders.

Oh, no, it's still happening.

So in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., many other places, organizers of protests have been targeted in raids at their homes, seizing paperwork, personal items, electronics.

And our lead editor, Mercedes Maitland, is in touch with a friend of the show, Aya, who is Palestinian.

But Mercedes told me Aya grew up in Lebanon and Canada after her grandmother fled Palestine during the NACBA.

And Aya told her about protesters and organizers who face arrests, fines for using megaphones, while other protests, like in support of the Ukraine, are never targeted for noise.

Mercedes told me that if you're arrested in a pro-Palestine protest in Ottawa, the bail conditions, she says, are mind-blowing-blowing and she genuinely doesn't understand how they're legal.

Things like you have to remain at your current home address, you have to refrain from attending, organizing, or supporting, including on social media, any protests related to the Middle East conflict, and you have a prohibition on wearing any masks in public.

And if you violate those conditions, you could get up to two years of imprisonment.

And in the UK this month, nearly 900 people protesting the military assault on Gaza were arrested a few weeks ago.

And news of these clashes or threats of arrest do work to intimidate people to sit it out.

They'll take control of the TV waves and put out a message, don't you dare come out because the military's keeping order.

So, you know, communist China, Islamic Republic in Iran, they've done whatever it takes to stay in power.

But sometimes if you call out the military, they say,

no, thank you.

We'd rather not defend you.

So, for example, in Tunisia.

So in December 2010, a fruit vendor was repeatedly harassed by police, couldn't afford to bribe them, and he ended up self-immolating in front of a government building, igniting what would be known as the dignity revolution, which led into the Arab Spring Movement.

Initially, there were small uprisings in the countryside, but when they started to spread to the cities,

the dictator-in-chief, Ben Ali, called out his police.

But the police were kind of overwhelmed by the tens of thousands of people who were protesting in the capital of Tunis.

And so then he called on the military.

And the the military said, this is really not our problem.

We're here to defend the country against external threats.

And frankly, you and your family have been so corrupt and are so old and are so unpopular that we don't want to take on the mission of defending you.

You're on your own.

And so the military stayed in their barracks and Ben Ali had to run away because there was no one to defend him.

And the notion of a government falling, what I picture is a bunch of leaders, like you said, running away like scattering like roaches.

Do you need there to be already a seed of power in a revolutionary figure to sort of take over?

How does that transfer of power happen?

Do you need to rewrite all the laws?

Do you have to get rid of a ton of books?

What happens after that?

Well, again, we're going into the processes, and I have to say it's different in different countries.

There's not one single model that all revolutions follow.

As a scientist, it would be really nice if you say, you know, oxygen is oxygen, whether it's on a star a million miles away or whether we're breathing it in today.

You know, it's two atoms of oxygen bounded together in an O2 molecule, and that's how the universe works.

But revolutions are created by the interaction of human beings.

And just like you and I don't even know for sure where our conversation is going to go 20 minutes from now,

people are constantly creating options for themselves in the course of a revolution so revolutionaries you know sometimes they're surprised it depends on how many people run away how many people are left behind i've told you that in order for a revolution to succeed it's pretty much necessary for a large portion of the old regime administrative and military elite to defect or stand aside.

Now, if there's a charismatic revolutionary leader who has been mobilizing the people and can turn them against the remnants of the old regime and just kind of scare everybody to leave, just like the French Revolution went from initially nobles and commoners meeting and voting to throw out feudalism.

All right, so feudalism being a medieval style of governing where landowners gave land to people in exchange for military service and loyalty.

And in July 1789, the French had had it right right about up to fucking here with economic disparities and hunger and some changing cultural norms after the Enlightenment.

People are like, I'm so mad.

A bunch of them stormed the Bastille, which is a fortress castle prison.

They took a bunch of cannons and guns and gunpowder and some grain for bread because they were hungry.

And then they just busted open the floodgates for a lot of change in France and the world.

And then it kind of went further.

There were peasant uprisings and riots in the cities, and they ended up guillotining the king and the queen and going after the nobles.

And then all the nobles fled.

And then it was essentially wide open for a popular rising charismatic military leader, Napoleon, to come in and say, this is a mess.

And I'm going to create order.

I'm going to put in a new set of laws.

I'm going to recruit a new military.

I'm going to recruit a new government.

And we're going to create a grand new France.

And he did a pretty good job until he got a little cocky and decided to invade Russia.

But he really kind of made a clean slate.

The French Revolution changed the calendar, creating new names for the months.

They changed the administration.

They kind of moved the courts and local government from old cities that had been associated with the monarchy to new commercial cities that were better aligned with the revolution.

But that's an extreme case, and that's kind of why the French Revolution is a model.

If we look at what happened in Ukraine in 2014, the revolution of dignity or the Medan Revolution, you had, you know, hundreds of thousands of people meeting in the central square in the capital of Kyiv,

and there were shots fired on both sides.

The protesters stayed strong.

And the military started to literally defect and disperse.

And the ruler of Ukraine ran to Moscow where his friends were and left everything behind.

And so the initial outcome for the first year after the Medan Revolution was a sort of democratic regime, but with very wealthy, corrupt oligarchs as the leaders.

Now, that didn't last.

Vlodymir Zelensky, who was a popular, he was trained as a lawyer, but became a television comedian.

Just a reminder, Vladimir Zelensky was on a Ukrainian TV show called Servant of the People, in which he played the president of Ukraine.

The log line, according to IMDb, is: after a Ukrainian high school teacher's tirade against government corruption goes viral on social media, he finds himself elected the country's new president.

The Democratic Party in Ukraine changed the name of their party to Servant of the People before he was even elected in office.

Zelensky ended up running, and now he is the president of Ukraine Ukraine in the party, the servant of the people.

Really, the weirdest life story.

So weird and so difficult.

But how are the ratings?

Ukrainians give him an astounding 72% approval rating.

He offered himself as an anti-corruption, clean democracy candidate, and he won.

Now, unfortunately, The last thing that Vladimir Putin wanted to see in neighboring Ukraine was a popular anti-corruption, clean, democratic leader, because that was a reproach to everything that Putin standed for, right?

So, shortly thereafter, he invaded, he grabbed Crimea and encouraged a rebellion in the east.

And that was his initial response to the revolution.

But after Zelensky was elected, I think Putin said, this is intolerable.

I've got to change that government.

I cannot have a popular comedian who's doing away with corruption as the mirror that I have to see every day when I look across the border.

I think that's why in 2022, Putin said, I'm just going to send my army to Kyiv.

I don't care what anybody says.

I'm going to get rid of this guy.

But he turned out to be tougher than expected, right?

He didn't run away.

He marshaled the people of Ukraine and now they're locked in a life and death struggle.

So if you said, you know, in 2014,

when popular crowds chased the leader out of Kiev and proclaimed a revolution of dignity, did they think they were going to end up in a decade-long war that would be disastrous and brutal?

You know, they didn't see that far ahead.

All they were trying to do is make their government accountable.

And that's often the tragedy of revolutions.

People do what seems the right thing today,

but they get enmeshed in some type of bigger international context or things happen that they didn't foresee.

And that's why revolutions are generally thought of as not simple, quick events that are here today over tomorrow.

Revolutions are things that people have to fight for and defend.

I mean, that was true of the American Revolution.

It's true of the Ukraine Revolution.

That's how the Iranian government sees its own action.

They're defending the Islamic revolution against Western infidels.

So us against the world is also kind of part of what happens in revolution.

You know, I was thinking, I was under the misinformed assumption that to have a revolution, things have to get really dire economically, or there has to be a famine to sort of spark this.

But obviously, that's not the case.

But when it comes to modern revolutions, how bad do things typically have to get?

And are we seeing things like boycotts and kind of economic revolution where you just are refusing to buy certain things?

Are those measures of revolution that are maybe a little less bloody?

Well, here's the thing.

I'm glad you raised this, Allie, because it's probably the most common misunderstanding about revolutions that there's kind of a temperature gauge.

And when the temperature gets too hot and people can't take it anymore because they're too poor, they suffer too much, they're too oppressed, they rise up to overthrow the government.

That's simply not how this works.

You have to understand the government as kind of a machine.

And the machine has a lot of parts to it.

There's the ruler, there's the administrative elite, there's the military officers, there's the rank and file in the military, there are business leaders who have wealth, they're religious leaders who have influence, they're ordinary people living in the cities, and then there's kind of a culturally different group of people usually that are living in the countryside.

That's true even, you know, America today, we've got a red rural area and blue metro areas, right?

For sure.

So there are lots of different groups.

So when you say, how bad does it have to get?

You have to say for whom, right?

And it turns out that as long as the elites are doing well, things can get pretty horrible for ordinary people.

They may even protest with some local revolts and uprisings.

You know, Iran has had either rural or urban uprisings, you know, every few years for the last couple of decades.

But even if things get bad for ordinary people, that doesn't lead to a revolution.

On the other hand, if you say, well, how bad do things have to get for the elites?

And that's a little more complicated question because elites are already well off, right?

They're not going to be reduced to starvation.

They protect themselves.

But what they care about is their status, their position, and that of their children.

And so if some group of the elites feel that they're being squeezed out, that there's kind of a factional fight and they're losing out, or if they feel the government is corrupt or the leader is kind of saving things for his own family and not paying attention to anybody else, or if they feel the leader is somehow squandering national resources, making systematically decisions that are going to hurt them in the long run, that may be enough to get them to rise up.

So elites and oligarchs turning against each other.

In a little bit, we're going to go into way more depth on what an elite actually is.

If you're confused by the term, there's a reason that you're confused.

Honestly, politics, it's a 24-hour football game in which the fate of the world hangs every day.

It's all the backstabbing and drama of the real housewives, but with so much higher stakes.

More boring clothes, way higher stakes.

I mean, in the French Revolution, it was a lot of the nobles who felt that the tax system was ruining them and ruining France.

They went over to join the revolutionary forces.

It's the common thing that for a revolution to get going, it's not total suffering in the population as a whole.

It's whether specific groups that have leverage become disenchanted or angered with the government to the point where they might be willing to go out and stir up the people and stir up the crowds and say this government.

I mean, to bring it home,

look at the attacks that the Republican officials, including our president, have been making on the Democratic Party.

And I don't want the best for them.

I'm sorry.

I am sorry.

And that's the kind of thing where you see, you know,

for a long time in this country, we had kind of little policy debates where people would argue over a few percent of taxes or spending or, you know, do we do this?

Do we do that?

Now they're arguing,

should the opposition party be treated like Americans or the enemy?

Yeah.

And it's when you get kind of people who have been successful, like Donald Trump, saying,

this country's in carnage and it's got to be rescued and the Democrats have run this country into the ground.

That's revolutionary rhetoric.

That's someone who is in an elite position, who's nonetheless so angry or upset with the direction that his country has taken that he's trying to stir up people to support radical change.

And so I think that this is kind of a revolutionary moment in American history.

It's just that in the old days, revolutions came with bayonets.

Now they often come with elected leaders taking more authority and changing institutions and the way they operate with popular support.

Like I say, not all revolutions require people to be hung on lampposts.

Sometimes they just have to be investigated, kicked out of office, lose their jobs, have the the department that they were working for dismantled, have the federal government take precedence over state and local.

This is what happened in the French Revolution, as I said, the central government remodeled the state and local governments and so on.

So for someone like me who's kind of been studying revolutions and seen how they play out over decades and decades,

First time in my, well, I can't say the first time in my life, because I was in Egypt during the Arab Spring as a researcher, but certainly first time in my own country that I start to say, hey, this actually looks like the kind of action and change and institutional struggle that you see in revolutions.

Well, it's interesting because I think that a lot of people right now are saying, it seems like we're due for a revolution, but not this kind.

Where does counter-revolution come in?

Is it like a poker hand where you can see your revolution and raise you?

a return to democracy?

Well, counter-revolution is always an important part of what can happen when a revolution begins.

So I told you I was in Egypt and in the early phase of the Egyptian revolution, everybody was cheering that the old dictator, Hosni Mubarak, who wanted to put his son in power and have his family stay forever, he was forced out.

Everybody was in the streets cheering that he was gone.

And then they had to decide, okay, who's going to run Egypt now?

And there were only two organized groups that were really prepared to step in with popular support.

One was the military, which had huge networks of economic operations throughout the country.

And the other was the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been organizing underground and had kind of big social welfare networks that they'd created in the villages.

So they had an election.

And the Brotherhood and the military both got about a quarter of the vote.

The Brotherhood came out ahead.

And once in power, this is the first democratically elected government in the history of Egypt.

The Muslim Brotherhood started operating like they were a religious, God-inspired government that could do whatever they want.

And that was seen with distress by so many people that they called for the army to come back and take power and kick the Brotherhood out.

So you had a very popular counter-revolution there because of the way the first revolutionary party governed.

So there's a successful counterrevolution.

So a revolution, and then one party gets installed, they suck, the populace is like, yeah, no, they bench them, and then they call out another player from the dugout.

They're like, you're in.

Now, what happens in a country like America if you have a government that starts to act like a revolutionary government, says, you know, the laws are not that important.

We can, you know, deal with them.

What's important is to set things right the way we see them.

We're going to stop crime.

We're going to shield our industries by putting up high tariffs.

Well, okay, if these things are unpopular, what do you do?

You could say, just like Egypt, oh, well, people should call on the military to overthrow this unpopular government.

But I don't think that will happen.

In Egypt, there was a decades-old tradition of the military being involved in power and putting military officers in charge.

America is the opposite.

We have 250 years of the military being outside of politics, and generals only become president after they've retired, joined political parties, and been elected.

So I don't think we're going to see a counterrevolution like that.

If we see a counter-revolution,

basically two options.

Well, let's hear them.

If the ballot box remains available, then we could see

some democratic-led effort to mobilize the people

new elections in 2026 and 2028, in which they use the power of the presidency that Trump has pioneered to start pushing things through that are different.

They may make Puerto Rico and D.C.

states.

They may put term limits on service in the Supreme Court.

So you'd have kind of, you know, really dramatic radical action.

in the opposite direction, as it were, if the Democrats can take power by elections.

Now, if it's the case, and these are two big ifs, because you can't predict the future.

So I'm just projecting since you ask.

You know, let's say Trump continues with his revolution.

He basically puts all of his people in every branch of government.

He, you know, pressures the universities to fold.

We get to the feeling where we're not living under the rule of law.

We're living under the rule of the president.

I tell my students, For most of my lifetime, presidents always complained about how weak they were because they had the courts, they had Congress, they had state and local governments, all of which pushed back and limited what presidents could do.

Well, that's changing now, right?

Yeah.

You know, so if people don't like that, if the

Republicans who lead government now are able to change the rules for voting, if they're able to prevail in the redistricting, if they can just kind of tilt the playing field enough to make it almost almost impossible for the Democrats to win national victories, then the only options really are for people to, you know, go into the streets and try and overthrow the government by force.

That's not likely to be effective, given how strong the American military is and how loyal it seems to be to the government.

This year, for the president's 79th birthday and the 250th year of our army, he orchestrated a military parade birthday party in Washington the same week that the National Guard was installed in LA to curb ICE protests.

Maybe we'll see some states actually talk about succession.

They say, we don't want to live under an arbitrary government in Washington.

We want to control our own destiny.

And then we're back to that issue.

So I hope it doesn't go that far.

But the fact that we're even talking about it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And frankly, I was at a meeting of experts on revolution.

We had a workshop last week in the Netherlands.

And everybody was kind of talking about, is the United States going through a kind of peaceful, non-violent, but authoritarian revolution?

And if so, what kind of things could turn it back?

So a lot of people around the world have a sense that this is an unusual moment.

This is not politics as usual, right?

Although, as an Angelino, I would very much like to point out that it's not quite nonviolent as we see masked ICE agents without warrants taking people off the streets, sometimes U.S.

citizens profiled for the language they speak or their skin color.

At least 14 people have died in ICE custody so far this year.

Right now, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has nearly 59,000 people in detention.

70%

have no criminal conviction, and many of those convicted committed only minor offenses like traffic violations.

Now, ICE.gov says that one of the agency's highest priorities is detained alien health care, but a new detention center built in Florida Everglades is known as Alligator Alcatraz.

And according to an August ABC News article titled, It's Like You're Dead Alive, families, advocates allege inhumane conditions at Alligator Alcatraz.

Detainees report being locked in a chain-linked cage inside a large white tent, which frequently floods when it rains.

Mosquitoes and other insects swarm around.

Temperatures fluctuate from sweltering Florida heat to bone-shaking cold from industrial air conditioners, and access to medical attention is limited.

And detainees also say that they are unaware of why they are detained, where they might might be sent, and how long they would be stuck in this controversial Florida facility.

And a news report this week from the Miami Herald said that of the 1,800 people held at the swampland alligator alcatraz, about two-thirds of them have gone missing from the ICE database, and their families are unable to locate them.

And the Department of Homeland Security in the White House seems to kind of delight in this notion of bloodthirsty alligators.

And there's a right-wing influencer and friend of Trump, Laura Loomer, who tweeted, the good news is alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now.

And 65 million is not the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States.

That's just 14 million.

65 million is the Latino or Hispanic population in this country.

So that's a pretty 1940s Germany thing to say.

Now, Dr.

Michael Parenti's 1997 book, Black Shirts and Reds, Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism, explains that pitting populations, especially the working class, against each other is the keystone of a power grab.

And he writes: in Nazi Germany, racism and anti-Semitism serve to misdirect legitimate grievances toward convenient scapegoats.

And anti-Semitic propaganda was cleverly tailored to appeal to different audiences.

The Nazis might have been crazy, he writes, but they were not stupid.

What distinguishes fascism from ordinary right-wing patriarchal autocracies is the way it attempts to cultivate a revolutionary aura.

Fascism offers a beguiling mix, he writes, of a revolutionary-sounding mass appeals and reactionary class politics.

And as Dr.

Goldstone says, historians and academics who study revolutions agree and sense that this is an unusual moment, that this is not politics as usual in the U.S.

Yeah.

Did they have anyone?

Do you guys spit ball any ideas there?

I presented a paper.

in which I said

what makes revolutions work, the motor of revolutions is emotion.

It's not facts.

People don't revolt because unemployment is up or down 5% or 10%.

People are being manipulated on the basis of pride and fear, very strong, widespread emotions.

People want to be proud of their country.

They want to be proud and feel it's the greatest, but they're also easily

driven to fear by the specter of, you know, fear of immigrants, fear of foreign competition hurting American companies and jobs, fear of woke elites controlling their culture.

They don't want any of that, I understand.

I have to say, one of the reasons we entered a revolutionary moment, I talked about the government losing legitimacy.

If you look at polls on institutions that Americans trust, Trust in government has collapsed among all people.

And when trust in government collapses, people no longer think the institutions of government are working in their interests, then they're open to supporting an alternative.

And that's how you get kind of revolutionary enthusiasm.

So you can kind of only counter that with a strong emotional appeal.

And we talked about what emotions have been used against dictators that have worked.

And the answers that came up were anger about injustice, inequality, and corruption.

Injustice, inequality, and corruption.

So if you could really kind of make a sweeping case that this government is really unfair, that it's helping the rich, it's hurting average people, we're going to, you know, basically lower taxes for the rich, bigger debts for everybody else.

Maybe that could get people emotionally engaged against this drift to authoritarianism.

But right now, it's popular.

Most people who react emotionally are kind of cheering.

Yeah, protect us from all these criminal immigrants, protect us from crime.

Yeah.

So what happened, this tragedy in Minnesota that happened today, I mean, I hope your listeners have heard about this horrible shooting at a church.

So this interview was recorded on August 27th, 2025.

And that morning, 18 school kids and three elderly people were wounded in a mass shooting at a Catholic school.

Two little kids died.

It was the 339th mass shooting in the U.S.

of 2025.

As of this recording, we're up to 373 mass shootings in the U.S.

this year, but there have already been two today.

So

ticker keeps going up.

You know, on the one hand, it's kind of like, hey, you know, liberals have been saying for years, if we don't get guns off the streets, if we don't put tight controls on how many guns people can get their hands on, we're going to see these tragedies over and over.

And this gunman, apparently, had a rifle, a shotgun, and a handgun.

He fired them all.

This sort of thing shouldn't happen.

But I'm afraid we're going to get a reaction that says, man, we need martial martial law in our cities in order to protect us from this kind of thing.

And if we get martial law, will elections ever occur again?

Historically, once a country declares martial law, elections are one of the first things to get postponed or changed.

So we'll see how this goes.

During the war, you can't have elections.

So let me just say, three and a half years from now.

So you mean if...

we happen to be in a war with somebody,

no more elections called.

But it's something to be concerned about.

You know, you mentioned elites, and one thing that has obviously driven some of us bonkers is just this notion of elites being on the other side of the government.

When in this case, we happen to have someone who's a lot of billionaires running the government, but elites are posed as the people who are in universities who actually sometimes don't get paid that much.

You know, that's one of the biggest hardships I hear from all the scientists I interview.

When it comes to manipulating language where the elites are saying that they're not the elites, is this something that's very new in the modern age with the internet and the way that information is now siloed and algorithms feed you what you want to hear?

About the elites.

I mentioned that society is complicated, has a lot of moving parts.

So I have a book coming out next year.

It's called 10 Billion, How Population is Changing the World, because I look at people, who composes different parts of government and society and how has that changed.

And in America, we really have two distinct elites.

We have what I call the plutocratic elite.

These are the billionaires, people who have made fortunes on Wall Street or in business.

And then we have the credentialed elite, people who got into positions of influence or power because they have a credential and are in a cultural institution.

So this is, you know, broadcast journalists, big-time columnists, university faculties and deans, lawyers, prominent urban officials and other government officials.

All of these people tend to be salaried, well above average worker level, but they don't tend to be rich, like you say, except that broadcast journalists for networks, they make millions.

But, you know, most of us in the credentialed elite, I count myself part of that, we have relatively well-paid, cushy jobs, but we have big voices, right?

I'm on a podcast.

You know, good for me, I'm not the biggest or the best.

But all of us in this credentialed elite

have really done badly by the average American.

And I'm the first to blame credentialed elite for losing popular support, because we claimed that we were building this credentialed elite to give a meritocratic leadership to America.

And yet this meritocratic leadership has failed.

We didn't avert the great housing collapse and the great recession in 2008, 2009.

We didn't prevent the dot-com stock bubble from collapsing.

So this credentialed elite in which Americans put a lot of faith, you know, you guys are supposed to be smart.

You're the experts.

You're supposed to kind of run these institutions so that our lives can be stable and pleasant.

We don't have to worry about it.

And they failed.

And so they have really lost support.

And the plutocratic elite has kind of stepped in and taken advantage and said, yeah, you know, all those cultural elites, they wanted to regulate regulate business.

They wanted to raise taxes on the rich.

Don't listen to them.

They screwed things up.

Just let us run things.

And that's what happened, right?

So that's that.

Now, in terms of facts, well, you know, if you're a plutocratic elite and you want to lower your taxes and you want to get rid of regulation, there are inconvenient facts, right?

It's kind of inconvenient and unpleasant for Americans to hear that CEOs already make 500 times what the average worker makes.

You know, it's inconvenient to hear that billionaires pay a lower tax rate than most workers who make 50,000 a year.

Billionaires pay lower taxes than millionaires under Trump, and millionaires pay a lower tax rate than average workers because of all kinds of capital gains, benefits, and so on.

So the unfairness is there, but the facts are being clouded by this disinformation sphere that we all struggle with nowadays.

Because the credentialed elites have lost all trust and legitimacy, there's no one to referee what's true, true, what's not, what's a factor, what's not.

If you're an expert now, you're distrusted.

If you're a media star, get people riled up and it feels good.

That's truth for me, man.

Sounds good.

I believe it.

So all of that, it makes things difficult.

So things have become, I think, really unfair to the non-college, educated,

good, hard-working American.

And they're reacting, you know, like you or I would for things that are unfair.

So to me, it makes sense what's happening.

I don't like it, but I can absolutely see how and why we're in a revolutionary moment here in the USA.

So patron Maisie Fincham sent in an audio question.

Hello, my name is Maisie from Oxfordshire, England.

Do you think that class consciousness is on the rise or will false consciousness always be too strong of a force?

Thank you.

There you go.

And for some quick definitions, class consciousness and false consciousness are concepts put forth by Karl Marx.

And class consciousness is when you can see and feel what class you're in, what socioeconomic strata you occupy and you act and vote and believe things according to your own best interest.

False consciousness is when you think you're in a different class and you end up supporting systems that don't actually benefit you.

And in a capitalist and aspirational society, it's easy to think, well, I want to be here, so I will believe I am and I will act accordingly.

Meanwhile, your healthcare is getting stripped and your union might be getting busted and minimum wage isn't going up.

And you might be like, wait a second, this guy in the private jet may actually not care about blue-collar workers or students or families trying to make ends meet.

Either way, more questions from y'all in a moment, but first let's toss some cash at a worthy cause selected by the ologist.

And this week, Dr.

Goldstone directed it to the City of Hope, one of the largest and most advanced cancer research and treatment organizations in the United States.

And that donation was made in the name of his dear mother-in-law, Rita, who recently passed.

You can find out more about City of Hope in the links in the show notes.

And this week, we're making an additional donation donation to the Hand of Salvation Initiative, which is a mutual aid fund for displaced Gazans.

organized by our own lead editor and producer Mercedes Maitland on behalf of her friends Tasneem and Nidal, who are now displaced again and are helping their neighbors in the camps to access necessities of life, which have become incredibly scarce, expensive, and dangerous to obtain.

So donations will be used for that to supply water trucks, to make and distribute meals, money, and supplies, and get diapers and baby formula for children starving due to ongoing strikes on Palestine and the blockade of aid trucks to the region.

For more on the history of humanitarian rights, you can see our episode, Genesidology, with Dr.

Dirk Moses.

We'll link to that GoFundMe in the show notes as well.

And if you've been looking for a way to help out directly, this is it.

Also, don't tip GoFundMe.

They already take a percentage of the funds.

Just a heads up, you don't have to tip them.

Okay, those donations were made possible by sponsors of the show.

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Okay, your questions, patrons.

Several people, Rosa, Curtis Dogg, Jess Seam Swimming, wanted to know essentially how

suppressing dissent about whether or not in this modern age, if it's easier to suppress dissent so that essentially a population can't gather and uprise together.

And I think a little bit about, you know, when Elon Musk bought Twitter, it was a very powerful way to kind of scatter community.

I think that's where a lot of people would go for information and organizing.

With the internet, is it easier to scatter people and to squash dissent?

I don't think that's fair to say.

What I do think it is, is that the internet is a kind of

weak substitute for face-to-face networks and organizations.

So that people used to organize for revolutions through neighborhoods, through local clubs, through professional associations.

People were willing to take risks for other people that they knew or that they knew shared the same interests.

If you connect to other people on the internet, It's not quite the same.

It's not as easy to get the emotional attachment to make sacrifices on behalf of a kind of, you know, faceless but very loud crowd of people whose posts that you read.

And so what we've seen is building a revolutionary coalition is harder because people are more dispersed into lots of different little internet or cable TV, you know, little silos where they cluster with people like themselves.

So social media had a huge role in the Arab Spring.

And for more on that, you can see the Wikipedia page, Social Media's Role in the Arab Spring, which was so reliant on the spread of information and organizing through digital platforms that Arab Spring is also called the Facebook Revolution.

Remember, this was nearly 15 years ago, before it was a site for your grandma to repost AI videos or your uncle to publish conspiracy theories about Tylenol.

But according to Vincent Bevin's 2023 book, If We Burn, the Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, Twitter, in fact, was started in part by an engineer in the late 1990s as a way to send mass text messages to others involved in protests and let them know where the cops were.

Now, of course, Elon Musk owns it and it's called X and it's got a lot of weird bots and a lot of Nazis on it.

But remember, at the 2025 inauguration, when the leaders of Meta, Facebook, Instagram, and X were all like pretty much in the front row, leaders of Apple and Google were there, OpenAI, Rupert Murdoch.

Also, as announced today, hours before this episode goes up, the guy who owns the giant data company Oracle, who was for a brief period of time earlier this month the richest man in the world, is about to buy TikTok.

So we'll see how that goes.

And in order for a revolution to work, you need a coalition that bridges different groups of people.

Now, sometimes, you know, the internet can bring a few thousand or even tens of thousands of people together to protest or riot.

But if the government is strong, that's usually easily put down.

So if you want to build the kind of movement that Martin Luther King built during the civil rights movement, you know, that takes years of organizing and building local lieutenants and building local affiliates and all of that.

That's kind of what parties, the major political parties used to do that.

Unions, unions were very powerful nationwide organizations to bring groups of people face to face and deal with the hardships of strikes and contribute to supporting each other.

With the internet, we have lots of people shouting, lots of people cheering, but not kind of broad, diverse coalitions of people that join a cause.

In a sense, you know, Trump has been successful building a coalition.

He has working class people.

He has evangelical Christians.

He has the wealthy.

He has farmers.

So there are a lot of different groups that have kind of come together under the MAGA banner.

And internet has not made it easier to build a kind of similarly broad counter coalition.

In fact, I think it's made it more challenging.

Yeah.

Well, a lot of you, and I'm going to read your names because power to the people, but patrons, Aaron Farley, Tony Vessels, Ryan Marlowe, Janny Rown, Sam Zavar, Jacob Shepard, Meredith Levine, Etta Goom, Regina Mutt, Rachel and Rachel Guthrie, Marta Berenz, Little C Side, Dylan V, Suleika Pevic, Redheaded Scientist Rowan Tree, Fiona, and Fiona Rogie, Emmett Wald, Roman Pigeon, Sidney Van Sleet, and Second Act Science Teacher, and also Greg in D.C.

had a question in Greg's voice.

Hey, Allie, Greg Hiddelman here, calling from Washington, D.C.

Question: Why are some revolutions violent and other revolutions peaceful?

It's a good question.

I know, right?

Historically, the trend has been for peaceful revolutions to become more prevalent in recent years.

Now, most revolutions in the past were violent because

in monarchies, we had, you know, basically monarchies and empires and a few military dictatorships.

The military was kind of personally loyal to the elites, and

the opposition really had to put a lot of people together.

They had to seize weapons.

They had to kind of build their own counter armies.

And so the English Revolution, French Revolution, Russian Revolution, even though they started with protests in the street, they ended up having to create revolutionary armies to defend themselves against the kind of holdovers from the old elites who were trying to take the country back and overturn the revolution.

Now, in modern times, populations tend to be older.

That is, you know, in the old days, you had lots of young people and they were cannon fodder.

They were ideologically easy to get excited.

Nowadays, in countries like Europe, U.S., even in Russia and China, the average age is about 35.

So, you know, these are people who have jobs and a mortgage.

It's not like the average age is 25 as it was in the time of the French Revolution, where it's mostly kids.

So older people are willing to protest.

They're willing to go into the streets, but they're usually usually not willing to join a military revolutionary guerrilla force, right?

So the model of let's organize for protest.

Now, I will also say that you have to point to the success of Gandhi in India and Martin Luther King in America as showing the way forward.

And we've had recent research that has shown nonviolent mass protest has as good a chance of success, especially against one of these

weak governments that have lost support from their own elites.

Nonviolent protest is just as able to push those out as anyone else.

That was just the ringer on his phone going off.

Don't freak out.

And for more on this topic, you can see the 2011 book, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erika Chenoweth and Maria J.

Steffen, which did find in analysis of over 160 variables in resistance, nonviolent means outweighed violent ones in terms of efficacy.

So that's great.

But that data cut off in 2006 when we were still T9 texting and had a lot of deep side banks, and a lot has changed.

And Dr.

Chenoweth, in a 2020 paper titled The Future of Nonviolent Resistance, conceded that more recent data show nonviolent resistance used to be effective about 50% of the time and it's dropped to around 33%.

Violent resistance, also less effective than it used to be.

So what changed?

It might be our phones.

In the 2023 book, If We Burn, The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, detailing mass protests in Tunisia and Egypt and the U.S.

Occupy movement and Brazil and Turkey and Ukraine and South Korea and Chile, author Vincent Bevins writes that with strategies and locations and intentions easily trackable, protests lack the surprise impact that they used to have.

And organizing offline old school is an often overlooked strength.

And as Bevin writes, one must be very aware of what a protest is doing and how it will lead to a positive outcome.

One must not confuse tactics and strategy.

A particular type of contention may get you through one phase of a struggle, but not the next.

If the goal is to put pressure on existing elites, then strikes and boycotts often work much better than people walking back and forth across a city.

And we have definitely seen boycotts and economic pressures work.

Now, you can't go about things leaderless and willy-nilly.

Bevins writes that if the existing elites can actually be removed, a revolutionary situation, then some group must be prepared to take their place and do a better job.

So it is not enough to just like topple a statue, you got to put something else there.

And in some political circles, people, sometimes the wrong people, will jockey for that power.

Now, in other circles, there's something called a horizontalism, which leads to kind of no one wanting power over anyone else on their own side, which kind of weakens the cause.

So like no one wants to choose where to eat for dinner, but also nothing sounds good, but you're hungry.

Like someone's got to take the reins there.

Also, in case you're wondering, Dr.

Erika Chenoweth, the professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School, is not a family relation of Kristen Chenoweth.

I checked.

But Dr.

Chenoweth, according to their TED Talk in 2013, shows that no government can withstand a challenge of 3.5% of its population without either accommodating the movement or the government disintegrates.

But things again have changed in the last 10 years and Chennawith published a paper finding that, yes, since the initial publication, there have been movements that have failed despite meeting or exceeding that threshold and that it's a tendency and not a rule.

So for patrons Era Victor, Nikki G, Kate E., and Ella Sugarman who asked 3.5% questions, we will link their most recent paper on our website at alleywar.com slash ology slash revolutionology.

Point is, if you're passionate or mad or scared, get involved if you can.

Or boycott stuff.

And so as people have learned that lesson and people have realized that older populations are willing to go in the streets but not take up arms, the model of nonviolent protest and belief in its efficacy has spread.

But I will say, the most recent data shows that dictators are aware of this and they've become more effective in suppressing nonviolent protest early.

How are they doing that?

They're basically being very alert.

And instead of treating large nonviolent protest as, oh, that's not a problem.

It's just people out in the street expressing themselves.

They're not a threat to us.

They say any effort to mobilize people against the government is a threat.

They round up the ringleaders, knocking on their doors at night.

put them in prison.

They commandeer the media and warn people, don't go out on the street, you'll be at risk.

They threaten people's families if they have to, but they've dictators have learned that nonviolent protests have a propensity to grow and are a threat to them.

And so they've reacted more severely, as long as they have the loyalty of the military to do that.

And that's what we see.

We're kind of seeing that right now.

Yeah?

Not to be too on the nose.

I live in LA and when

National Guard was deployed here, I had driven through downtown LA that day, and there was not a lot of upset there.

So all of us living in L.A.

were obviously appalled, but it's now happened where there's protests, there's usually National Guard.

That's not common, right?

No,

it's against kind of all the traditions in America.

And, you know,

it is true that there was...

among all the thousands of anti-war and civil rights and student protests in the 1960s, there was one case where the National Guard was sent to a college campus and opened fire, and that was Kent State in Ohio.

May 4th, 1970.

Anti-Vietnam War and draft protests had been going on for this point years, and Nixon made an announcement of the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia.

Students and community members had been gathering for protests on the Kent State campus in northeast Ohio.

The National Guard were called in to disperse the protests, and after escalations and the exchange of tear gas canisters, the military opened fire into the gathering, killing four students and injuring another nine, some as their backs were turned fleeing the scene.

And the response to this use of military force against people rose political tensions that some scholars say led to the uncovering of the Watergate scandal and ultimately Nixon's downfall.

Patrons Manish Agarwal and Jonathan Stansell asked about the timeline of revolutions and insurrections, with Manish asking, is it fair to say that we often don't see the society-wide results of revolutionary actions until a few years after after they've happened.

Thinking, for example, they say, of the Stonewall riots and all the lesser-known LGBTQ insurrections that came before.

And as Dr.

Goldstone is telling us, a revolution is often not an isolated event, but something that flips a switch on a much larger, longer mechanism culturally.

Also, weirdly, and looking into this aside, I just learned that Chrissy Hind, the lead singer of the punk new wave band, The Pretenders, was there at Kent State during the shooting, as was a Devo band member, Jerry Kasale.

And as they say, bad times make good art.

You can ask Neil Young, who wrote Ohio after the Kent State massacre.

And that's kind of remembered as a horrible tragedy and unfortunate use of military power against unarmed protesters.

And, you know, as recently as Trump's first term, the commander of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, said that Trump was concerned about peaceful protests, the Black Lives Matter protest near the White House.

And he asked about calling out the troops.

And Milley said, we don't do that.

We don't use the troops in America.

The troops are not here to fight against our own people.

And, you know, Trump wasn't happy with that.

And so now he wants to call the troops out.

I mean, I live in Washington, D.C., so I also see National Guard around.

But what's interesting is

they're here for show,

which is to say they're here for 30 days, maybe 60 days.

They don't know the neighborhoods.

They don't know the town.

They haven't been trained in crime control.

They don't know how to, you know, if a crime is committed, how do they track down the perpetrator and how do they execute a civilian arrest?

They don't know how to do these things.

But anyway, it's very frightening that, yes, troops are being sent to LA.

They're being talked about for Chicago.

They're all over DC.

And so if you want to have big peaceful protests, it's definitely scarier now than it was even just a couple of years ago.

Well, in Rachel's words.

Hi, so I am just so, so, so tired.

I know that a revolution is needed.

I know our system is broken.

I know it was designed

broken.

What can we do?

Well, I love the question because it's wonderful for people to say, what can we do if we're concerned?

Now, I have a lot of friends who write op-eds.

I don't think that's all that effective anymore, to be honest with you.

But what I would urge people to do is reach out through organizations that they belong to, whether it's a neighborhood club or a church or congregation or a parents' club in your school.

Just talk to people and listen.

Ask them, you know, I'm concerned about some of the things I'm seeing.

Are you concerned too?

And maybe you can build a group of people in an organization that share concerns and are willing to schedule a march and maybe reach out to other organizations in the town.

We had a pretty successful march on No Kings Day.

A lot of communities in America turned out.

There is another No Kings Day on October 18th, and nokings.org has a video of a recent live stream about organizing.

But, you know, again, the lesson for Martin Luther King, who worked largely through churches to build his network in the beginning, is it takes a sustained campaign.

You know, one day with a million people in the streets, that's a holiday.

That's not a campaign.

What you need is to have people in the streets every weekend for months on end.

That's how the Medan revolution against a corrupt leader prevailed in the Ukraine.

The central square of Kiev was filled with people every day for months on end, despite rain, despite snow.

That's how they showed their resolve to stand against the government.

We're not seeing it here, but maybe it can start with a few people building on the organizations that they belong to, work with their neighbors, and we'll see.

That's the best advice I can give.

Just let those feelings out.

It's bad times.

Make some good art.

Paige McLaughlin wanted to know, are there any particular revolution songs this allergist likes?

And this was echoed by Andy Pepper, Sarah Manns, Emmett Wald, Anastasia Press, Brooke Bartholomew, Bronwyn Trim McDonald, John Buckner, and Marla T.

Emma OE asked, could you talk a little bit about the role that art plays in historical revolutions?

And I will say, in popping around the internet for this, I came across a 1943 photo of folk singer Woody Guthrie with his acoustic guitar bearing this little sticker that said, this machine kills fascists, which was a slogan cribbed from World War II era machinists making munitions.

Now, what is fascism?

Exactly.

What exactly is it?

How do you define that?

Guthrie explained it as a form of of economic exploitation similar to slavery, led by a group of dictators set out to rob the world.

Kind of like a mafia boss.

Other definitions of fascism highlight exalting nation and often race, a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.

So fascism was something that the U.S.

was bent on defeating in World War II.

But literally yesterday, September 22nd, the president put out another executive order.

It's over 200 since his inauguration in January.

And this one written in first person says, I hereby designate Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.

All relevant executive departments and agencies shall utilize all applicable authorities to investigate, disrupt, and dismantle any and all illegal operations conducted by Antifa, including investigating and prosecuting actions against those who fund such operations.

So Antifa, standing for anti-fascist, they don't have a central leader or a list of members or an organizational structure.

And experts admit that it's really more of an ideology that opposes far-right or racist or anti-LGBTQ and fascist groups.

And there's a recent BBC article titled, What is Antifa and Why is President Trump Targeting It?

And it notes that Antifa is sometimes used as a catch-all term by conservative politicians and commentators to include other liberal or left-wing groups that they politically object to.

And this BBC article quotes Dr.

Brad Evans, who's a political science professor in England, writing that Antifa's lack of an organizational structure and membership offers a remarkable opportunity to apply it to anybody who may be assumed to belong to an organization that's ill-defined.

So this means that anyone suspected of belonging to Antifa would need to disprove their association.

And Dr.

Evan notes the dangers of overreach are all too apparent.

And that article also says that the Department of Justice removed a study into political violence in America, which had concluded that far-right extremism outpaced all other types of violent extremism.

And when asked why they removed it, they just said no comment.

So if this seems a little sketchy, seems a little sketch, you can tune up your acoustic guitars.

Kiddos.

On that note, Maya Catherine wrote on Patreon, hi, theater kid here.

What is your professional opinion on the musical les miserables?

Any revolution songs you love?

Do you belt out any les mes in the car?

Do you love and or anything, any art that you find particularly inspiring?

You know, it's funny.

When I was in college and was looking at this, I actually

asked one professor to do a, could he design a course for me on art and revolution?

Because I was impressed that, you know, revolutions are great, soul-stirring events and they have produced a lot of great art.

If you go to the Louvre, you see these beautiful paintings about the French Revolution or the Greek independence revolution and, you know, great figures of liberty raising martyrs and people.

There are a lot of kind of hero stories here.

There's a movie called Snow Piercer.

I don't know if you know that.

It's about

in the apocalyptic future.

The world is no longer livable, and the remaining survivors are on this massive train that some industrialist built and it's a metaphor for society.

The rich people are in a luxury car in the front of the train and most of the people are in poor crummy cars in the back end of the train.

The people in the front get the good food.

The people in the back get processed waste to eat.

And, you know, there's a rebellion against this kind of injustice where the people from the back of the train storm the front of the train.

You know, a slightly different story is the Hunger Games, you know, which is again a metaphor for society.

The rich live well, the poor suffer, and there's a hero that kind of stands up for the people and threatens the privileged elite.

As I say, it's a heroic theme, but unfortunately, it misrepresents how revolutions actually occur, because the government has to be not just mean and corrupt, but also weakened and losing legitimacy.

And you can't just have a single hero firing a bow and arrow.

They need to build kind of grassroots coalition and support and mount a campaign before that kind of boom instant moment where the opportunity suddenly arises and then the depth of anger against the government is revealed.

So I like the art.

I like the movies, but that's not reality.

So look to history more than Netflix or look to documentaries.

Netflix is great.

Look, if you want to distract yourself from all the unpleasant things going on in the world, yeah.

But if you actually want to change it, look to history.

Yeah.

Last questions I always ask, the hardest part about your work, the most vexing.

It could be anything from something petty to something giant.

But yeah, what's the hardest part about being a revolutionologist, which, by the way, is a real word.

I did look that up.

It does exist to my thrill, yeah.

Okay, so I have a new label.

I've never used that for myself.

Go for it.

I'll take it.

I'll take it.

Sure.

I mean, maybe I'd rather be a gemologist, but I'll do what I can.

So kind of the most vexing thing about my work

is

dealing with the

abolition of

fact versus opinion.

I've been a scholar for decades.

I've invested enormous energy trying to discern things that are true from things that are false.

To me, that distinction is very hard won because the world is full of ideas and opinions, and smart people have them all the time.

But to try and figure out what questions can you ask for which you can get pretty firm, defensible answers gleaned from history, from narratives, from data, you have to work hard for that.

Scientists all over the world, whatever their field, whether it's physics, chemistry, biology, revolutionology.

You know, we're not in it for the money, as you say.

We're in it because we're excited about finding true narratives, being able to tell true stories, being able to say, you know, I've struggled to the top of this mountain, but now that I'm here, I see where the facts are and I see where the misunderstandings and misapprehensions lay scattered around me.

And as a society and maybe as a world, we're losing.

the value of truth.

It just no longer matters to people for the most part because the lies now are told with such conviction and with such

compelling emotional stories behind them.

Again, just to pluck a current example from this week, Donald Trump happened to say, as he often does, blustering, since I put the National Guard in Washington, we've had no murders for a week.

Never happened before, never had such a peaceful time in this city.

And it's because of what we did and people are complaining.

Well, according to a news story from the Washington Post in March,

or in April rather, there was 16 days in late March and early April when there were no murders in Washington, D.C.

You know, these things, murders are statistical, and sometimes we'll have a string of seven days without a murder, sometimes a string of 10 or 15 days.

It's happened several times in the last five years that you have a string like that.

kind of occurs at random.

It wasn't the first time.

But Speaker Johnson came and echoed the lie and said, this was a great accomplishment of our president.

We had seven days in Washington without a murder.

No one's ever seen that.

And at the cabinet meeting the other day, one of the cabinet secretaries said, you know, you should get a Nobel Prize for creating peace in Washington, D.C.

We have this unprecedented accomplishment of a week with no murders.

You know, well, it's not unprecedented.

It's not a big deal.

But if everybody repeats the lie and every time it's told with more and more enthusiasm, you start to say, you know, is there really any point anymore in trying to fight for the facts and winnow the truth?

And that's the most vexing thing for me is people are so easily swayed and people who should know better repeat the lies and they repeat them with enthusiasm.

And so this atmosphere of, you know, lie after lie and people piling on the lies, people who should know better, you know, not just people who are misinformed but well-meaning, but really people who should know better who are telling lies to get ahead, telling lies to enhance their position and damage that of their opponents.

We used to be ashamed to tell lies for those purposes.

And that shame is gone and the lies are spreading.

And myself is kind of a poor toiler in the fields of truth and understanding.

You know, you start to feel the world closing in.

So if you want to know what's most vexing for me, there it is.

That's a biggie.

That's a biggie for sure.

That's a biggie.

It's tough too because I think if you are wanting to fact check or speak out against it, it suddenly becomes like, oh, you're just partisan.

You're the enemy.

We won't listen to you.

So it's difficult even to speak out against it without being instantly written off as just a hater or, or I guess, as our president would say, a hater and a loser.

He likes to tweet.

Yeah.

Whatever my politics, I'm professionally committed to finding and telling the truth.

That's the most important thing for me.

But as you say, people who do that now get it from all sides.

Yeah.

What about the thing that you love the most or that's kept you going for so long or even going now through a time when I think a lot of listeners ask, like, is the revolution in the room with us?

And it appears as though that's kind of a yes.

But

what keeps you going?

What do you love?

Well, I was getting pretty

depressed.

But last fall, when I wrote this book I have coming out next year year that I mentioned, the 10 billion, how population will change the world,

I got excited in the act of writing because I was telling stories, stories of people, stories of people who are over 100 who are breaking athletic records, immigrants who have come and built great businesses,

students in Mississippi who broke all the records for fourth grade achievement because they adopted a different way of teaching and learning.

So

the little successes, the good stories, the places where people are actually living better lives and making other people's lives better, when I get to encounter those in the course of my research and have a chance to tell people about those, that's really the only thing keeping me going.

Human beings are basically wonderful.

We can be.

I mean, I'll say this.

It's fashionable now to paint, you know, Democrats and progressives as horrible woke people and mega conservatives as bigots or whatever i don't believe any of that i've traveled back and forth across this country i've traveled around the world most people just want to live in peace have a family have a job that gives them some security and something to look forward to and they're not naturally inclined to hate other people.

That has to be fanned and brought out.

And it only comes when they feel that they've been let down or betrayed.

So I'm kind of distressed at that, but I do still have a lot of faith in people.

I love the stories of people who are succeeding, building a business, building a community center, reaching out.

We're all good people at heart, I like to think.

And if things break the right way, we'll all get better and move forward as a society.

Now is not a good time.

probably a lot of bad stuff to go through and that we have to deal with.

Revolutions are tiring.

You know, revolutionary times, and we talked about this as scholars, revolutionary times are intense.

They're tiring.

People naturally tend to kind of withdraw.

And so those are all challenges.

But if we keep in mind that other people are basically good, they kind of want the same things that we do, we can talk to them, have good conversations, then I think there's always hope.

Well, that's nice to hear from someone who studies people.

Got to get those protests up.

Don't put away your protest signs yet if you don't like what's going on.

Yes, exactly keep them in the trunk keep your protest

yeah yeah and be and don't throw them away after a protest keep them for every weekend yeah yeah

thank you so much for doing this what an honor no it's been a pleasure thank you very much allie

so ask smart people sometimes not smart questions because an ego should not stop you from learning and ask yourself have they got you fighting a culture war to keep you from starting a class war interesting

thank you so much to Dr.

Jack Goldstone for taking the time to talk to me about this.

If you enjoyed this chat, you can check out the re-release of his book, Revolutions, a Very Short Introduction, second revised edition, which we have linked in the show notes, alongside the two charities we gave to the City of Hope and the GoFundMe for the Hand of Salvation initiative to bring mutual aid to Gazans.

Also linked at alleyward.com/slash ologies slash revolutionology is a PDF from the ACLU explaining your rights as a protester in the U.S.

So go grab that.

We are at Ologies on Instagram and Blue Sky.

I'm at Allie Ward with 1L on both.

Smallogies are shorter, kid-friendly episodes linked in the show notes.

Ologies Merch is at ologiesmerch.com.

And thank you, patrons at patreon.com slash ologies, for supporting the show from the beginning and for your great questions.

Erin Talbert admins our Ologies podcast Facebook group.

Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts.

Kelly Ardwyer does the website.

Noelle Dilworth is our dear scheduling producer.

Susan Hale is our managing director.

overlord we love.

Jake Chafee is our fair and kind editor.

And lead editor and also additional producer and researcher for this episode is the powerfully informed Mercedes Maitland, who contributed so much info and book excerpts and wisdom.

So, so appreciate you and happy birthday.

Nick Thorburn made the music.

And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I tell you a secret.

And this week, it's that if you're not getting a lot done lately, you're not alone.

You're living through

some pretty dazzling history, folks, with some crazy shit, including robots that can talk like your mom if you ask them to, and social media feeds full of dead people.

If you felt normal, I would be concerned for you.

Shit is weird.

It's been weird for a lot of people all over the world for many, many years, but it's getting weirder.

Anyway, I hope this episode serves as a reminder to keep speaking up.

Just keep calling out bullshit.

Keep defending each other.

Keep trying to understand each other and try to see the people underneath.

the fear and the ways that billionaires profit from that fear and hate and engagement.

Try to go outside, take an extra two minutes with a coffee, sit on the porch or a bench.

At lunch, close your eyes and listen to the birds or the streetcars for a few minutes.

Give yourself 15 minutes at the end of the day if you can to doodle or draw or

breathe.

Your nervous system just needs to catch up.

Okay, and let's meet offline, everyone, shall we?

Also, second secret is that the singer Elliot Smith used to live in a Silver Lake apartment that was modeled after the seven dwarves cottages.

And I read that he used to have a spiral staircase going up to the attic where he put a sink and a bathtub in the attic.

And the landlord was like, that's cool.

I love it.

But it was technically illegal.

And they had an inspector coming and they had to take down the staircase and plug up the ceiling.

And

like two or three times a week.

for the past five years since I read that, I think about that apartment all the time.

I drive by it all the time.

And sometimes I'll just be doing something else during the day and I'll think,

I just wonder how dusty and quiet it is up there.

But for some reason, just knowing it exists, or at least hoping it exists, I don't know.

It's kind of comforting and lonely.

Anyway, okay, bye bye.

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