>And yet the extremely wealthy do face an abiding risk from festering inequity: The have-nots might finally lose patience and turn upon the haves. “That’s the real danger,” Mr. Cohan said. “This little thing called the French Revolution.”
Yeah... I keep hearing this threat from people who really ought to know better. Inequality is a major talking point from the left, but it reflects complete ignorance of how the world works.
The French Revolution is memorable precisely because it's so incredibly unusual. Look at Mexico, India, China... almost anywhere in the world aside from Europe and North America. There is virtually no society on the planet that doesn't concentrate wealth and power among the elite one percent, gated off from the lower classes. I'm not even speaking historically -- show me a modern country on any other continent that even remotely approaches a middle class.
Also, re-distributing wealth doesn't necessarily solve the cultural problems that create inequality. Egypt massively subsidized food... and Egyptians promptly had massive numbers of children that overwhelmed even the ridiculously cheap food prices. Just this week, Afghanis threw acid in the faces of schoolgirls trying to get an education. The Saudis cling to power through massive welfare programs to pacify their increasingly fundamentalist populace. Even here in the US, cultures that discourage education and responsibility aren't suddenly going to churn out engineers and doctors if billionaires give away their wealth.
The US will just continue down the well-trodden path that the rest of the world has already blazed, where tiny pockets of wealthy elites try to shelter themselves from the increasingly lawless masses. A revolution requires organization and discipline, which is absurd to expect even before you consider the unbeatable modern surveillance of all communications and movements in developed countries. The only threat that masses pose is lawless violence, much like what we saw in the Arab Spring -- but that's not really a problem when you can concentrate the rabble outside of elite pockets. Particularly when the rabble lack a unifying religious fervor, like what you see in the coalescing identity of fundamentalist Islam across MENA and Europe.
So please stop making vague threats about the French Revolution, people. The Second Amendment is not going to help rednecks water the tree of liberty. The people are not going to surge against their capitalist oppressors as a tide of justice or whatever. At worst, less developed countries will turn into Libya... but the more likely result is India, where elites gate off the masses and let them cultivate self-destructive cultures.
Do you have something more concrete than sweeping assertions and the claim that people you disagree with are ignorant? Because at least two of your examples are totally wrong.
Mexico's revolution was in large part about wealth and land reform [1]; Zapata's famous battle cry was "tierra y libertad", land and freedom. Many of the reforms persists, albeit in weakened form, even today. China's revolution is known as the Chinese Communist Revolution [2] for a reason. The spike in conspicuous inequality is so new in China that the newly rich quite literally need instruction on how to display their wealth [3].
I do think a revolution is unlikely to happen in the US any time soon, but that's because we've got some tradition of taking care of people well enough that they're mostly not desperate enough to start a shooting war with the cops. E.g., during the 2008 crash, we spent zillions of dollars propping up the economy until things got better. We also have enough issues with race that we may see a race war before a class war. But it's a mistake to think it can't happen here. If we're ever dumb enough to pursue an austerity program like the one being inflicted upon Greece, where the interests of a small number of bankers are being hugely privileged over the great bulk of a nation, I would not be shocked at all to see something like Occupy Wall Street crossed with the Cliven Bundy crew.
Put mildly, you are mistaken about Mexico. From ECLAC [1]:
>It should not be surprising that today more than half of its population is poor (CONEVAL, 2014), a proportion similar to the one prevailing three decades ago. Thus, more than 55 millions of Mexicans live in conditions of poverty.
>In these years, What happened to inequality? Well for anyone that visits Mexico, the words of Alexander Von Humbold (1811), more than two hundred years ago, still ring true:
>“Mexico is the country of inequality. Nowhere does there exist such a fearful difference in the distribution of fortune, civilization, cultivation of the soil, and population. …The capital and several other cities have scientific establishments, which will bear a comparison with those of Europe. The architecture of the public and private edifices, the elegance of the furniture, the equipages, the luxury and dress of the women, the tone of society, all announce a refinement to which the nakedness, ignorance, and vulgarity of the lower people form the most striking contrast.”
>As the writer Augusto Monterroso wrote in 2002 (p.60): “the unique, truly hyper-real characteristic of Mexico is its social inequality; the misery that marks the everyday life of the immense majority of Mexicans.”
>The figures corroborate this image. As Table 1 shows there is an almost 27-fold difference between the average incomes of the top and the bottom deciles. This difference is in stark contrast with the average ratio of 10 to 1 in the OECD (OECD 2014). More worrying, the top 1% of Mexico’s distribution has an average annual income 47 times that of the poorest 10% (del Castillo Negrete Rovira 2012). It is very likely that, were there numbers for smaller slices at the top, the ratios would be astronomical.
Likewise, I admire your optimism that Chinese inequality will be solved just as soon as the newly rich realize that they're Communists. I hope the future will prove you right.
Neither a race war nor a class war will happen in the US. Seriously? Even ignoring your optimistic assumptions of organized minorities (speaking as one, there are shockingly few war pacts among us), how exactly would such a revolution be organized, funded, armed, or fed? How would they conduct communications?
More to the point, what possible ideology would unite these revolutionaries? The Arab Spring had fundamentalist Islam as a unifying identity, but the US is nowhere near as sympathetic to fundamentalism... and even if it were, Christianity has proven far less conducive to the sort of grassroots-organized violence you see in MENA or South Asia. At worst (best?), you'll see the sort of anarchic lawlessness you see today in Detroit or Flint.
I'm not being sarcastic when I say I admire your idea of revolution. Many in the Arab Spring shared the same ideals, and were in for a rude awakening when their revolutions were instead dominated by religious fundamentalism and racial/cultural feuds. But the US lacks the strong cultural/religious ideologies necessary to organize armies and instigate revolutions -- which is a damn good thing, but it also limits possible plebeian uprising. Which is also a very good thing.
You seem to be saying that the revolution didn't work out as hoped. Which isn't surprising; many things don't. But that doesn't mean the revolution didn't happen, or that it wasn't motivated by inequality.
> Likewise, I admire your optimism that Chinese inequality will be solved just as soon as the newly rich realize that they're Communists. I hope the future will prove you right.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that China has already had one revolution where inequality was a driving force. That the inequality is returning is again no proof that a revolution couldn't happen.
> Neither a race war nor a class war will happen in the US.
Further, unrest usually starts with the people getting the shortest end of the stick, and in the US that has a strong racial component. That sort of unrest quickly sets off white people; during Ferguson, for example, you had heavily armed white people coming to Ferguson to "help" and plenty more offering.
I agree they are unlikely to happen in the next couple of decades, though.
> the US lacks the strong cultural/religious ideologies necessary to organize armies and instigate revolutions
Keep telling yourself that. We've already had two organized revolutions in the US: the War of Independence and the Civil War. The latter of which was a war driven by race and economics.
Further, there are plenty of ideologies available on the fringe. See, e.g., Niewart's long look at the US protofacist right.
Certainly the rate of increase has slowed -- which is an accomplishment, relative some other countries' quadrupling of population since 1950. But Egypt has still gone from a desert country of 28m in 1960 that relies on the extortion of diminishing water supplies from Ethiopia to... a desert country of 82m in 2012. The Arab Spring was directly related to the higher price of heavily subsidized bread in North Africa due to a minor spike in corn prices that year.
Even if the birth rate fell flat today (and as you noted, the opposite is happening), can you honestly predict any future for Egypt other than Malthusian failure? The Aswan dam was specifically built in a rare fit of foresight of this exact future... and relies heavily on Ethiopian/Sudanese submission to Egyptian riparian rights. I think it's fair to say that Egypt is extremely overwhelmed by its population growth.
Is that really necessary? You could replace that with any other class/race/cultural group and you would be banned in seconds. It needs to stop, and surely HN is a progressive enough place to help begin that process.
I'm not sure that "redneck" qualifies as a racial slur, nor that we should never have words that describe different cultural groups.
But fair enough. What term would you prefer we use for generally uneducated, reactionary populations that infamously believe their personal arsenals will be used to overthrow a tyrannous federal government and establish socially conservative concepts of personal liberty?
This belief in revolution certainly isn't limited to conservative reactionaries (and I mocked leftists in the next sentence), but I'm not sure it's that productive to start a tangent of personal offense rather than address the questionable idea of armed revolution.
What term would you prefer we use for generally uneducated, reactionary populations that infamously believe their personal arsenals will be used to overthrow a tyrannous federal government and establish socially conservative concepts of personal liberty?
Yeah... I keep hearing this threat from people who really ought to know better. Inequality is a major talking point from the left, but it reflects complete ignorance of how the world works.
The French Revolution is memorable precisely because it's so incredibly unusual. Look at Mexico, India, China... almost anywhere in the world aside from Europe and North America. There is virtually no society on the planet that doesn't concentrate wealth and power among the elite one percent, gated off from the lower classes. I'm not even speaking historically -- show me a modern country on any other continent that even remotely approaches a middle class.
Also, re-distributing wealth doesn't necessarily solve the cultural problems that create inequality. Egypt massively subsidized food... and Egyptians promptly had massive numbers of children that overwhelmed even the ridiculously cheap food prices. Just this week, Afghanis threw acid in the faces of schoolgirls trying to get an education. The Saudis cling to power through massive welfare programs to pacify their increasingly fundamentalist populace. Even here in the US, cultures that discourage education and responsibility aren't suddenly going to churn out engineers and doctors if billionaires give away their wealth.
The US will just continue down the well-trodden path that the rest of the world has already blazed, where tiny pockets of wealthy elites try to shelter themselves from the increasingly lawless masses. A revolution requires organization and discipline, which is absurd to expect even before you consider the unbeatable modern surveillance of all communications and movements in developed countries. The only threat that masses pose is lawless violence, much like what we saw in the Arab Spring -- but that's not really a problem when you can concentrate the rabble outside of elite pockets. Particularly when the rabble lack a unifying religious fervor, like what you see in the coalescing identity of fundamentalist Islam across MENA and Europe.
So please stop making vague threats about the French Revolution, people. The Second Amendment is not going to help rednecks water the tree of liberty. The people are not going to surge against their capitalist oppressors as a tide of justice or whatever. At worst, less developed countries will turn into Libya... but the more likely result is India, where elites gate off the masses and let them cultivate self-destructive cultures.