Appendix 9- The Second Wave

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Appendix 9, The Second Wave

As we've discussed over the last two appendices, when the first great revolutionary wave recedes, Inherent divisions among the revolutionaries emerge.

Those who find themselves in charge of the post-revolutionary government struggle to maintain cohesion.

The disequilibrium of the later stages of the Ancien regime finds its counterpart in the disequilibrium of the early stages of the revolutionary regime.

Things are still extremely fraught, and nothing at all is settled.

The revolutionaries, turned responsible agents of government, must improvise on the fly a new set of political arrangements that will hopefully allow equilibrium to return to the society they've seized control of.

And this is no easy task, because all the chaos balls bouncing around the later stages of the Ancien regime are still bouncing around in the early stages of the revolutionary regime.

Plus, there are almost certainly shooting wars breaking out on multiple fronts.

Achieving stability is an incredibly difficult task, and occasionally, it's impossible.

Now we know that divisions among the revolutionaries can open up on many fronts, religious, geographic, economic, and social class.

But one of the most dependable splits is along temperamental and ideological lines.

This is a split between moderates and radicals.

Radicals cheered on the first revolutionary wave and now want it to advance further in bigger and bolder directions.

Moderates cheered on the first revolutionary wave and now want to consolidate a few minimal gains before risking anything more.

If indeed they even want to risk anything more, chances are they are satisfied with the minimum gains and don't want the revolution to advance further at all.

It usually happens that as the early stage revolutionary regime coalesces, moderates wind up in key positions of authority.

If that government tries to put the brakes on the revolution, they will inevitably be criticized by more strident radical voices.

If the conflict between radicals and moderates escalates, then the stage will be set for a second revolutionary wave, a more radical wave that sometimes succeeds and washes out the moderates, and other times breaks against the stormwall and is forced to fall back.

Before we go on today, though, let's get our terminology down because words like radical and moderate can take on all sorts of meanings in people's minds.

The definition of these words shifts constantly depending on time period, geographic location, and political context.

So let's be clear about what we're talking about.

Let's start with radicals and radicalism.

I often find people misunderstanding one another about who or what should be called radical because we equivocate on the meaning of the word.

Broadly speaking, we need to disentangle two types of radicalism, radicalism of means and radicalism of ends.

Radicalism of means is a willingness to engage in any strategy or tactic that will achieve political objectives, whatever those objectives happen to be.

A radical in this case is somebody who will ignore both the spirit and the letter of any custom, law, rule, or norm in the pursuit of their objectives.

The ends justify the means.

Radicalism of means is thus measured by a willingness to do things beyond the bounds of what we might consider normal ethical behavior.

It involves a flexible imagination, single-minded clarity of purpose, and very few compunctions about doing things that other people might consider bad or wrong.

If a radical of means is losing a chess match, they might win that match by bashing their opponent over the head with a chair.

This is the tactical approach of a radical of means.

This kind of radicalism can be deployed towards any objective.

So conservatives, liberals, moderates, all of them have radical wings.

So a radical conservative is absolutely a thing, even if the words themselves appear to be contradictory.

A radical conservative is someone willing to go to any lengths and use any tactic in defense of the status quo.

Now the other type of radicalism is radicalism of ends.

When we talk about ends here, we are talking about how much society will change from the present status quo.

A conservative is somebody who wants things to change not at all or change very, very slowly.

A moderate is willing to tolerate some change but not go too far or too fast.

A radical, meanwhile, wants the complete reordering of society after an apocalyptic year zero.

This total reordering of society is often premised on the destruction of old social and political institutions.

The goal of such radicals is not remodeling the house, but tearing it down and building something new from the foundation up.

Radicalism of ends is not limited to left-wing or progressive political actors.

A religious fanatic might have the radical end of a theocracy.

A nationalist might have the radical end of an ethnically pure society.

The point being that the radical end involves a great departure from the present status quo and a greater willingness to toss out institutions of that status quo that are seen as irredeemably corrupt.

Now on the other side of our looming confrontation we have moderates.

In contrast to the radical, the moderate is going to limit the scope of their imagination whether we're talking about means or ends.

Moderation of means entails having some kind of mental list of things one won't do, that if one can only remain in power if one does X, and X is too radical a step to contemplate, whether it's assassination, blackmail, or hostage taking, then the moderate will not do it.

They will acknowledge defeat and quit the field.

Moderation of ends, meanwhile, entails a cautious imagination about what is possible.

Change and reform must happen, but it should not go too far or happen too fast.

We must proceed one step at a time.

They consider calls by radicals to cut the cord and sprint away from the chains of the past as a reckless risk that will provoke a backlash threatening to undo even moderate revolutionary gains, let alone the great dreams of the radicals.

For the moderate, prudence and patience are the watchwords after so much chaos and violence.

With these parse definitions in mind, we can now see that there can exist moderate radicals and radical moderates, which, like the radical conservatives, seems like a contradiction in terms.

A moderate radical, though, is somebody who dreams of great social transformation but has limits on what they are willing to do to achieve that grand objective.

A radical moderate, meanwhile, is willing to engage in any activity or behavior necessary to ensure the revolution is not handed over to radicals, or anybody who wants to turn the world upside down.

When I think about the French Revolution of 1848 and the ministers of the provisional government who deliberately sabotage the national workshops in order to discredit them and halt further advances on the social front, those seem like radical moderates to me.

So if we go back and survey the people who come to power after the first revolutionary wave, we typically find ourselves among moderates of ends.

This is explainable in part because of where they come from.

The first batch of post-revolutionary leaders is typically drawn from the ranks of the old ruling class as we broadly defined it.

Educated elites with the money, connections, and standing to have a place in society under the Ancien regime, even if they were not actually holding the levers of power.

These leaders then typically come from that breakaway faction of the ruling class we talked about in our early appendices.

people who had become so resistant or frustrated with the now former sovereign that they launched a revolution to overthrow them.

Before the dust even settles, these are the kinds of people then stepping into positions of post-revolutionary authority because they are the ones closest to the halls of power.

To be in such a cohort means one is materially comfortable and probably at least a little bit respectable, even if they had been considered gadflies or nuisances at ancien regime cocktail parties.

Everywhere we look in the first wave of post-revolutionary government, we find such prominent figures who had names and reputations made before the revolution, not by the revolution.

For reasons not hard to understand then, this set of leaders naturally tends to be more limited in their revolutionary goals.

They are quite moderate.

Certainly, they want to avoid the kind of root and branch destruction contemplated by the radicals.

Why?

Well, because the old ways weren't all bad for them.

So the goal is to reform some broken parts of the system without turning the world upside down, or, worse yet, losing credit with the banks.

So moderation of ends prevails inside the committees, assemblies, and ministries now claiming sovereign authority over the realm.

Though, it is worth pointing out that even if all these folks are considered moderates because they are moderate of ends, this first batch of quote-unquote moderate leaders have just passed through a period where they were quite radical on the question of means.

They have, after all, just come from performing the mental gymnastics necessary to justify a revolutionary power grab.

Even an arch moderate reformer like Francisco Madero was briefly a radical, and doesn't get much more radical than launching an armed revolt against the government.

Complicating the situation for our first batch of moderate revolutionary leaders, from the Earl of Essex to Prince Lvov, is that upon taking up their post-revolutionary authority their time and attention is now split.

The issue here is that the revolutionary government must serve two masters, the revolution and leviathan.

The former demands liberty, the latter demands order.

Now that they oversee the administration of society, this group must see to it that society is well administered.

Many of the functions of the former regime need to be maintained in full.

Municipal infrastructure, social programs, tax collection, the administration of justice and regulatory agencies, seeing that the entire military apparatus is still functional.

The first generation of revolutionary leaders are now tasked with ensuring all that stays functional.

This is an especially difficult task given that if the state was functional, there probably would not have been a revolution.

So we are invariably talking about a society whose political and economic systems are frustratingly out of sorts.

Just trying to keep the lights on will consume an enormous amount of time and energy and take up most of the emotional and psychological bandwidth of our initial revolutionary leaders.

But consumed as they are with trying to keep the lights on, with maintaining order, with serving Leviathan, they also must deliver on the promises made by the revolution.

These are usually pretty simple promises, liberty, equality, bread, land, freedom.

But while it was easy to shout slogans like these to the masses while the Ancien regime was recognized as the great obstacle to all of that, to anything and everything that one might desire, it turns out to be far more difficult to deliver after the obstacle has been removed.

As it turns out, it was never just about one of our great idiots standing in the way of all that is good and pure.

There are lots of competing interests out there that must be considered when formulating policy, lots of competing revolutionary interests.

There is tension, after all, in the workers' cry for cheap bread and the peasants' demand for better prices for their grain.

Peasant demands for redistribution of land will incur protests from major landowners who may have themselves been a part of the revolutionary coalition seeking liberty and might even consider breaking up their estates if they are adequately compensated.

But adequate compensation means making demands of the peasants that might infringe on their conception of revolutionary liberty.

Governing means making decisions.

Making decisions means making enemies.

And if one's decision-making tends to routinely give short shrift to the maximum revolutionary program, if it is consistently limited, cautious, and moderate, then the radicals are going to be among the enemies made.

So what are some examples of this, of the moderate program of the first cohort of revolutionary leaders?

Well, we can look at the English Civil War and see that parliamentary leaders coalesced around a few great lords, whose object in fighting the Civil War initially was simply to gain a bit of leverage over the king, maybe force him to take them on as ministers.

But that was it.

In the French Revolution, the moderates of the National Assembly eventually produced the moderate constitution of 1791, which no one was happy with, but which especially incensed radical voices who wanted to move in a far more Republican, egalitarian, and democratic direction.

In the Revolution of 1830, the Orleanists went into a room, locked the door, and revised the charter of government in the mildest way possible, to avoid demands from young radicals in the streets, to declare a republic.

When Francisco Madero got himself declared president of Mexico, His first order of business was reconciling with old Porphyrians and backing away from the demands made by the people who put him into power.

In Russia, the first provisional government was composed almost entirely of conservative liberals whose only real objective was restoring some competence to the state apparatus and nothing more.

In fact, they were terrified of anything more than that.

And this takes us back to our old friend, frustration.

Radicals who came out into the street, manned the barricades, joined citizen militias, expected their service and sacrifice to mean something.

And instead they opened the newspaper each day to discover that the people that they have fought to elevate into power might not be interested in delivering on the promises of the revolution.

And so frustration sets in.

And just as they had vented their frustrations with the Ancien regime, the radicals now begin to vent their frustration with the first cohort of moderate leaders.

Now, radical frustration with the moderates is driven by a mix of true belief and self-interest.

True belief is not something to be casually dismissed.

Sometimes we find radical leaders like Danton or Lenin or whoever described merely in terms of Machiavellian calculation and self-interest.

But radicals are often radicals for very simple reasons.

It's because they believe in the radical program.

They believe that the revolution will be a deed half-done if it does not deliver on its full promise.

So in the days, weeks, and months after the revolution, they are shocked and outraged and appalled by the scattered crumbs brushed down onto the floor by the moderates who claim sovereignty over the realm.

Their frustration and anger and disappointment is then further exacerbated by fear, most especially fear of counter-revolution.

And so while moderates may argue that the radicals will go too far and that will open the door for a backlash and counter-revolution, the radicals argue the opposite, that the very moderation of the moderates is what invites counter-revolution.

Radicals are outraged and appalled at the lack of vigorous measures against enemies of the revolution.

People who should be in prison or in exile are wandering around free.

But while we should not ignore the fact that radicals are not just saying things that they genuinely believe that their larger program could, should, and must be enacted, let's also not kid ourselves about the nature of ambition and self-interest.

Most of our radical leaders come from a lower social tier than the first cohort of leaders who stepped into positions of authority after the revolution.

Had our radical leaders been richer or more important or more influential, they would probably already be in the halls of government right now.

Radicals thus tend to come from the second tier of the educated and comfortable set of society, a lot of young lawyers, and journalists and military officers.

They are passionate strivers who, whether they are fully conscious of it or not, are pursuing their own personal life ambitions as they push, press, and criticize the inadequacy of the moderates.

So, it is true belief, yes, but it's also an obvious path to personal power.

So, the growing chorus of radicals who are opposed to the moderates fall into the classification set of radical radicals.

Those who are unfettered by traditional norms of behavior, but who are also pursuing total social, political, and economic transformation.

They demand that more radical means be deployed by the revolutionary government to advance the revolution and defend the revolution.

They demand sterner, tougher, and more uncompromising revolutionary government.

They want to use pressure and intimidation and violence to achieve their goals.

And they want to use these radical means in pursuit of radical ends.

Mass redistribution of land, the nationalization of industry, democratic equality, whatever counts as the radical position in the time and place and context we're talking about.

Radicals want to fight against foot draggers and layabouts and corrupt sellouts down at City Hall.

They want no more excuses, no more delays.

They want the government to deliver on the simple promises of the revolution.

And as each new policy, law, or decree falls short of the radical expectations, frustration mounts and factional battle lines become well drawn.

As the weeks, months, and sometimes even years pass, the tension and conflict between the moderate government of the first wave and the radical tendencies of the coming second wave ebb and flow, build and recede, until some great moment of truth arrives, which triggers the radical attempt to stage a second revolution.

As radical challenges to the moderates mount, the moderates often find themselves caught in a dilemma.

The first cohort of moderates often come to power having denounced the coercive tyranny of the former regime, and they promise to respect everyone's political liberties.

It's one of the great reasons they went into revolution in the first place.

They thus have difficulty cracking down on opponents, even as their opponents get openly belligerent.

Moderates are bound by their principles to allow their enemies to operate out in the open and thus allow the second revolutionary wave to build.

So even after the Bolsheviks got caught up in an armed insurrection in July 1917, the response from the provisional government was incredibly mild.

Lenin and a few other leaders skipped town, but mostly the Bolsheviks just got left alone.

Freedom of speech and thought and the press meant that the Jacobin Club and the Coruilly Club could agitate right out in the open, and moderates in the National Assembly and then subsequent Legislative Assembly were helpless to do anything about it.

When Lafayette attempted to arrest Marat for inflammatory speech, public public sentiment mostly sided with Marat and Lafayette was forced to back down.

But even if it's not about principle or public opinion, moderates have another incentive to not come down too hard on the radicals.

There's an understanding that the radicals are the most committed soldiers in the war against reactionaries and counter-revolution.

Radicals are naturally going to be the most dedicated and most committed defenders of the revolution.

Moderates can't afford to alienate them too much for fear of losing their shock troops, the people we need to hold the line against counter-revolution, because we can't do it ourselves.

So as tension builds and builds, there is then another big thing thrown into the mix, and that is that this is often happening in the context of a wartime emergency.

As we noted in our last appendices, revolutions bring out all sorts of different wars, both foreign and domestic.

And if the war has any sort of ideological dimension, where the very survival of the revolution appears to be at stake, radical demands are going to come with an existential bite.

Toleration of counter-revolutionary activity must be met with severe consequences.

The enemy is at the gate.

For the revolution to survive, the enemy must be destroyed.

And when we look back over our revolutions, we often find that just as with the first wave, military debacles often accompany the second wave.

We're talking here of things like the failures of the French armies in the spring of 1792, Kerensky's failed offensive in the summer of 1917.

These failures discredit the moderates and get people's heads turning towards radical critics who promised to win the war and save the revolution, or, in the case of the Bolsheviks, end the war and save the revolution.

Now, an interesting distinction between the first wave and the second wave of the revolution is that the second wave uprising is often planned in advance and launched according to a prearranged timetable.

As we've seen, one of the great hallmarks of the first wave of the revolution is that it breaks out spontaneously.

It's random.

It catches everyone by surprise.

Both revolutionaries and defenders of the Ancien regime scramble to respond to an event that nobody foresaw.

But the second wave typically comes after a degree of planning.

Arrangements are made, orders are given, a date is circled on the calendar.

The second wave does not happen as a spontaneous reaction to some trigger, but because somebody decided that this is the moment we strike.

So what are some examples of this?

Well, obviously the French Revolution looms large.

The French Revolution was defined by conflicts between quote-unquote moderates and quote-unquote radicals, whatever those terms happened to mean at any given time, as they did change meaning depending on whether we're talking about 1789, 1790, 1791, 1792, 1793, or 1794.

But obviously the great radical second wave was the insurrection of August 10th, 1792, an event which often goes by the name name the Second Revolution.

Total, and frankly justified, loss of faith in the king combined with the looming threat of Austria and Prussia led Denton and other Paris radicals to plan, organize, and stage a revolutionary insurrection.

They gathered forces, they circled the date, and then they rang the toxin at the appointed hour.

This was also true in Russia in October 1917.

The October Revolution was a planned and orchestrated assault on Kerensky's government, unlike unlike the First Revolution, which followed the spontaneous activities of the women in Petrograd, who, it should be remembered, the Bolsheviks had told to stand down.

Now these two incredibly famous moments in revolutionary history also get us into the dynamic of the people who initially made the revolution eventually get thrown overboard by the revolution.

And we'll get much more into the revolution eating its children next week.

But the overthrow of the moderates by radicals indicates that there is presently a lot of activity in the kitchen.

Now August 1792 and October 1917 are the most famous radical second waves to hit a revolution.

And because the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution are the two greatest and most influential revolutions in world history, we might think to ourselves that radicals rising up and overtaking moderates is just a thing that happens in the normal course of a revolution.

But as often as not, this radical second wave manifests itself, but is then defeated by the moderates.

That's what happened in all the subsequent French revolutions we talked about.

After the Revolution of 1830, moderates took control of the French government to the increasing frustration and anger of young neo-Jacobin radicals in Paris.

These radicals subsequently staged the June Rebellion of 1832, which was an attempt to revive the revolution and push France towards an egalitarian republic.

This uprising was defeated by forces loyal to the moderates in a matter of days.

Now we often often treat 1830 and 1832 as two separate historical events, but really 1832 is best understood as the failed second wave of 1830.

Similarly, the June Days Uprising of 1848 was launched against the moderates of the February Revolution, but instead of succeeding, it was beaten back down by those moderates.

This is also a way to view the relationship between the moderates of the Third French Republic and the radicals of the Paris Commune.

The Commune, like its radical predecessors, was crushed by the moderates.

And we also saw this throughout Central Europe in 1848 as, for example, moderate German liberals rallied to put down the forces of the heckers and stroves of the world.

There are also times when such a second wave either does not materialize at all, or to the extent that the revolution is radicalized, it doesn't necessarily follow from the concerted action of any radical group.

The American Revolution had radicals and moderates, but it's not like John Adams ever staged an armed coup to win the debate over independence.

The Haitian Revolution radicalized as emancipation went from unthinkable to fact of life, but this just occurred inside a five-sided messy conflict rather than a binary struggle between moderates in power and radicals out of power trying to overthrow them.

In South America, Simone Bolívar traveled a path from seeking merely Republican independence for Gran Colombia to seeking to overturn the racial caste system and emancipate the slaves, but this did not involve a direct insurrectionary dynamic like August 1792 or October 1917.

So as we talked about last week with the fact that there's always a restorationist wing of any revolutionary civil war, there's also going to be a radical faction inside of the revolution.

That faction is always going to be present.

They are always going to want to push further, and they would love to toss the moderate sellouts out on their butts.

But they're not always going to have the forces or resources or luck necessary to carry that out.

So the radical challenge will thus always manifest, but it can be beaten back.

But other times, they very much do have the forces and resources and luck necessary to carry it out.

And so next week, we will move on to the subsequent attempt to consolidate and settle the revolution once and for all.

This typically involves crackdowns, purges, imprisonment, exile, and executions for those on the wrong side of the revolutionary government, whether it takes the form of a dramatic reign of terror carried out by victorious radicals, or more mundane repression by the state, because the moderates won their conflict with the radicals and now would very much like to restore order, such top-down violence by the government on the people, or at least some targeted group of the people, inevitably follows.

As we discussed in the first appendices, ultimately, the legitimacy of any government rests on its monopoly on violent force.

and eventually the revolutionary government is going to have to prove that it has a monopoly on violent force.

force.

And it is this late-stage process in any revolutionary event that often takes that revolutionary event to one of the most common results of any revolution, and that is authoritarian dictatorship.

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