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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.
Appendix 11: Meet the new Boss
The working premise of these appendices is that we can take a bunch of unique historical events that are mostly defined by their own time, place, and context, and tease out some similarities; to observe how these revolutions progress through certain common steps; to catch the places where history seems to be rhyming.
But as we moved into appendices 9 and 10 to discuss a specific stage of conflict between moderates and radicals, we have been drifting a bit from universal application. Not all revolutions become defined by a conflict between moderates and radicals: the American Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Spanish American revolutions, don’t really express themselves in these terms. Sure, we could take the model and go looking for things in those revolutions that fit the mold, but they’re not gonna fit that well or that convincingly. So as we wrap up these appendices, we should always keep in mind that if we find uncomfortable tension between an abstract model of history and the particular details of a historical event, or if factual relations need to be ever so carefully stretched or framed to fit a template, my advice is to let go of the template. Always, always err on the side of letting the historical facts speak for themselves in their own way and on their own terms.
That said, we do return in this appendix to something that does seem to happen at the end of all revolutions — well, nearly all revolutions, not all of them. Never all of them. But most of them. It’s actually one of the most common observations about the universality of certain revolutionary events: that they seem to invariably reach a stage where political power and authority coalesces around the magnetic personality of a single charismatic leader. That what started as a vast, multi-faceted, multi-faced, multi-party, multi-interest, all-encompassing revolutionary mass movement aimed at the overthrow of the ancien regime has splintered, via the entropy of victory, will ultimately give way to a powerful leader commanding unique authority, who will use their power to settle all accounts, tie up old threads, and often conveniently give name and face to the transition from revolutionary to post-revolutionary era.
And whatever the specific causes, twists and turns, and courses of whichever revolution we are talking about, it is undeniable and practically axiomatic that a revolutionary period involves an enormous amount of chaos, uncertainty, and insecurity for the population of whatever society we’re talking about. This honestly doesn’t need much of a further explanation, because… it’s a revolution. It’s gonna be chaotic. The old political order has literally been thrown out and people are scrambling to erect something new in its place. In the interim, there’s gonna be a lot of confusion. During that process, different political groups will set up rival claims to power, and one group will say, we are the new power, pay attention to us, not those other guys over there. And those other guys over there are saying, no, we’re the new power. Pay attention to us. Lines of authority get very scrambled. Nobody knows who’s in charge or how long they’ll last. And in the revolutions we’ve been talking about, this is often accompanied by a great deal of combative violence. There could be riots or street fighting, there are often full-blown wars. For the average person living through a revolution, stress and confusion are likely the dominant emotions.
Now, along with this prevailing political chaos, revolutions also cause enormous amounts of economic dislocation. Supply lines are disrupted, trade lines are cut, goods become scarce, money becomes inflated, maybe even worthless. There’s no stability or predictability. You can’t really count on anything. You go to the same bakery you’ve always gone to and there’s no bread to be had. You go to sell your grain at the market and nobody has anything to pay you. Workers and laborers are conscripted into armies, and there’s not enough hands for field or factory. Output plummets, transportation networks are destroyed or impassable. With old economic relations torn asunder amidst war and revolution, just trying to put food on the table becomes a dicey proposition. The struggle for survival often becomes a daily, even hourly challenge with no certainty whatsoever that tomorrow will bring anything different.
Revolutions also come with a breakdown of law and order. Now, the old system of law and order may have been worth overthrowing, just as the old modes of economic and political relations may have been worth overthrowing, but it means that in the aftermath of a revolution, the legal system is going to be a bit of a dysfunctional mess, and it’s very easy for unsavory characters to get away with things. Nearly every revolution we’ve covered has been accompanied by a spike in criminal behavior — and I’m here just talking about regular old crimes, theft, fraud, extortion, kidnapping, assault, rape, and murder. The rise in banditry and what we would call today gang activity rises amidst economic uncertainty and the breakdown of old systems of legal justice.
All of this chaos naturally produces a kind of general exhaustion in the population. A revolution is above all an exhausting proposition, not just for those participating in it, but for those who are essentially on the sidelines. Stress and uncertainty wear us down. We become very tired, tired physically, tired psychologically, tired emotionally. The longer it goes on, the more the exhaustion prevails, and like a kind of low grade torture, invites us to sign on to anything the torturer puts in front of us to just make the torture stop. And in a revolutionary setting, that torture becomes defined by ongoing and never settled factional civil wars, that can provoke from a normal person, the sense that, uh, my god, I’m sick to death of all of you people, just settle things so we can get on with our lives.
So the number of people who are stressed and exhausted and absolutely over it in society rises as the revolution progresses. Remember, we started with the masses all pouring out into the streets in this first revolutionary wave, to overthrow an ancien regime that had itself become so exhaustingly and frustratingly and provocatively irritating that it just had to go. But as conflicts open up within the revolutionary coalition, and individuals and groups and parties get tossed aside, the people who supported those individuals or groups or parties drop out of politics. They quit, they leave, they run, they hide. And those who are winning the revolution very much prefer it this way. They’re happy to purge and discourage and prohibit people who disagree with them from participating in politics because, look, they’re trying to organize a new legitimacy, and dissenting voices will mess all that up. So as the stakes rise, the willingness to tolerate dissent inside the revolutionary regime shrinks, and people wind up unable to muster the energy to fight on. What they want is some semblance of order, and revolution often takes them to the point where they are willing to accept order in whatever form it takes, whether they actually like it or not.
The point I’m trying to make here is that human beings have a tendency to prefer living with something resembling security, regularity, safety. This is one of those primordial instincts that goes with the territory of being a mammal in nature. We prefer to go back to the same place for food, and find that there’s food there. We prefer it when we can go to the same place we found water last time, and find that there’s water there again. We prefer to be able to go to sleep at night and not be attacked by predators or rival groups while we sleep. And to be honest, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s stressful to live in chaos and people would prefer to live with less stress and fear if they can get away with it. The fact is most normal people endure the revolution as passive and helpless spectators. Most people are not obsessed with politics. Most people don’t even care about politics, or if they do get interested, they get quickly fed up. And day by day, the promise of order and regularity becomes very alluring.
And so if a single leader out there starts to make a name for themselves, and that name begins to promise order and stability and an end to the chaos, a lot of people are willing to listen. And even those who are still idealistic true believers and don’t necessarily believe that the order promised will be worth the price, well, they look around and despair that the people probably don’t have any fight left in them. So even if a leader rises up without much cheering, they may rise with something a leader likes just as much, and that’s exhausted resignation.
But let’s be clear, it’s not like the leaders we’re gonna talk about here rolled in and said, oh, aren’t you sick of all the chaos and disorder, hand all power to me, I’ll make everything better. No, it usually happens far more subtly and organically than that, but the implication is always there. However, the revolutionary path twists and turns and rises and falls and ebbs and flows, it takes us to this place: some charismatic leaders accruing more and more political power with less and less resistance.
Usually the rise of this leader comes as they personally win over the loyalty of a large section of the armed population — by which I mean, an army. And resistance dissolves, not necessarily from a feeling of oh gee whiz, I’d rather go about my business and not pay attention to politics anymore, but more, oh, that guy commands such an overwhelming amount of violent force that it would be suicidal to try to challenge them. And so the revolution that started with the many becomes the one.
So who are we talking about specifically here? Well, if you’ve paid any attention at all to the podcast, you can probably name each individual I am about to discuss off the top of your head. Because they wound up as the great charismatic leader defining the end game of their particular revolution, we had to talk about them a lot. So none of these names should be unfamiliar, most of them should be right on the tip of your tongue.
So who are we talking about in the English Revolution? It’s obviously Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell rises up through the ranks of the Parliamentary Army, becomes a key figure in the New Model Army, is a forceful leader inside the particular faction looking to turn the kingdom into a commonwealth, give it a written constitution, and an orderly republican form of government. The problem, of course, as you might remember from those episodes, is that as Cromwell tried to produce these written constitutions and new structures of government, people just kept not doing what they were supposed to do. The good lord protector, elevated to maintain security in the realm and act as an executive inside of a new constitutional order, kept finding the other branches not behaving the way they were supposed to behave, and so he had to keep dismissing them, improvising a new approach, and finding out that those new ways also didn’t work. And so in exasperation, Cromwell would blow them up. Appointed lord protector for life, Cromwell ruled from 1653 until his death in 1658. Now it’s true he kept refusing to wear the crown, and he never stopped trying to get a power sharing system in place, but as the Rump Parliament and the Bare Bones parliament and the Rule of the Major-Generals came and went, the one thing that stayed was Cromwell, indisputably holding power to the end.
Now, as you may have noticed, the American Revolution tends to miss a lot of these beats in the latter stages of the revolution, but it was still an incredibly chaotic event, and obviously there’s only one man who fits the bill here, and that’s George Washington. Washington is the central, indisputable leader of the American Revolution. He’s the indispensable man. Never authoritarian, but always authoritative. It’s true he got dragged kicking and screaming to be the first president of the United States, but it’s very telling that everybody told him he had to do it, and that the absence of his presence would make the whole project fall apart. The presidency was a uniquely powerful executive institution at the time. Both head of government and head of state. It was designed specifically for Washington, but Washington is a different breed of cat here. He defied human nature and instead of ruling for life, retired. But the revolution does revolve around Washington, doesn’t it? And it resolves to Washington, doesn’t it? He’s not a dictator, he never was a dictator, but had he been born of a slightly different cloth, King George the First of America was absolutely on the table. It remains utterly remarkable that he wouldn’t take what nearly every other man in his position would have — or at least, every other person we’re talking about here today would have. And even though he’s not a dictator, the American Revolution absolutely ended with a single charismatic leader in charge.
Now, when we get to the French Revolution, you know, the only person we could be talking about here is Napoleon Bonaparte. Like so many things about the French Revolution, Bonaparte is the prototypical example of all this. Bonaparte seized power in a nearly fumbled coup in 1799, and then set about deliberately consolidating power after the Directory had discredited itself with chicanery, hijinks, and corruption. Bonaparte’s power only grew as he continued to fight wars with the rest of Europe, won those wars, the result of which being European conquest revitalizing the French economy. This made him very popular. He then set about trying to reconcile French society, and he invited back the old tossed out bits, the the old aristocracy and the Catholic church, and he built up a personalist empire that by the time he unveiled it, no one could stop him.
In Haiti, things obviously revolve around Toussaint Louverture. And where does he come from? Ah, yes, just like the first three, he’s a great military leader who was winning battles on the field, that’s a bit of a theme here. In the beginning, Louverture was merely one player in a much larger game, but by the mid 1790s, he had consolidated power by successfully playing external opponents like the French, British, Spanish, and Americans, and internal opponents like Andre Rigaud. Commanding the largest and most powerful army on an island ravaged by chaos and war, there was no political entity to transfer power to even had Louverture wanted. Him and his army were it. And so wherever Louverture was, that’s where political power was. He spent a good five or six years as a dictator, calling the shots as he tried to mold his tricolor society that would be built on the back of plantation cash crops. But eventually, even those closest to him in the upper rungs of the Haitian military apparatus decided that what Louverture wanted was not necessarily what they wanted, so they betrayed him and allowed him to be arrested by the French, and he wound up dying in captivity.
So who’s next? Well, of course, it’s Simone Bolivar.
Bolivar is the only one of our group who actually assumed the literal title of dictator. Although those of you from the good old history of Rome days know that a dictator in the context of the Roman Republic was not the unseemly anathema of free goverment, but was instead a vital emergency tool that was used by a free republic at a time of crisis. Bolivar, a lot like Cromwell and Washington, but not like Bonaparte or Louverture, was forever thinking he would be able to set down his dictatorial authority and hand power to some kind of representative government founded on the rule of law, et cetera, et cetera. But Bolivar could never find people willing to do it in exactly the way he wanted them to do it, and so because of that, he had to keep brushing them aside and reinstalling himself as dictator well after the point when everybody actually wanted him to go away. But when Bolivar was in the room, nobody could say no to him.
Now the Revolution of 1830 is maybe, even more than the American Revolution, is probably the most conservative of all the revolutions we’ve talked about. The leader on the white horse who comes riding in to restore order in July of 1830 is… Louis-Philippe. Louis-Philippe may have been conservative and he may have reigned over a smallish electorate, but it’s not like he was ever anything resembling a dictator in any meaningful sense of that word. There was a charter of government in place, there was a legislative branch with an upper house and a lower house, there were judges and laws, and Louis-Philippe knew exactly the role that he had been cast in. Both publicly and privately, he tried to rule as a constitutional monarch bound by certain constraints. I mean, that’s why they had overthrown Charles X in the first place. So the revolution of 1830 does not really fit the mold here.
Now most of the revolutions of 1848 also don’t really fit the mold because most of them failed. And we wind up with neo-absolutist monarchists coming back into power. When they came back into power, they tended to have a few more rules about what they could and could not do, but it was far more of a restoration than a revolution. In France specifically, though, the Second Republic managed to last for about three years before another Bonaparte decided he wanted to be another Napoleon. The justifications for Napoleon III were roughly the same: everything is so chaotic, the leaders around me are wildly unpopular with most people, so I’ll just self-coup my way into power. Napoleon III’s legitimacy and charismatic authority came exclusively from the fact of his name, that’s it, he had nothing else to recommend him for any job. He was in this sense a lot like Octavian from the History of Rome days trotting around the name of Caesar without having done anything to actually earn it.
Now, like the revolution of 1830, the French Third Republican Paris Commune era also do not really resolve towards a dictatorial outcome. It’s very possible that the Paris Commune would have gone towards a dictator had their charismatic dictator been around, and there is somebody who would’ve fit the mold. It’s August Blanqui, the man who was born to play that role, but he had already been arrested and locked up, and so he wasn’t there for the Paris Commune, so they did committee rule until the end.
Meanwhile, for the French Third Republic, it maybe could have gone towards a dictatorship, but instead there was just enough multiplicity of interest without a single charismatic figure on any side that everyone wound up crammed into a very tense and uneasy republic that nobody loved, but everyone was willing to tolerate, at least until the next revolutionary turn of the screw. Except that didn’t really happen. The French Third Republic lasted until World War II, and after that it’s, here comes Charles de Gaulle, who absolutely fits the bill here, but it’s like 75 years later.
Now in Mexico. Carranza very much wanted to play the role of the charismatic dictator after Madera, but the man had no charisma. He was so deeply unpopular, even among his own subordinates, and he could point to no military or political track record that he could lay claim to popular power. Meanwhile, the people who did have that track record in charisma, people like Villa and Zapata, had different agendas, and they didn’t really want the job, so as the Mexican Revolution progressed, it progressed to Alvaro Obregon and the crew from Sonora. So in the Mexican context, Obregon is playing this role here. He’s got the military accolades, the legend of his one arm, and his astute politicking. But with no reelection being such a huge part of the Mexican Revolution, Obregon gave way to a successor, and from there, the PRI developed itself into a unique system where the party became the dictator rather than any single man.
And then finally in the Russian Revolution, you know who we’re talking about, we’re talking about Lenin and then Stalin, about whom we have just spent about a gazillion years talking about, and whose careers likely don’t need much of a rehearsing here. But obviously, post-February Revolution Russian democracy didn’t even last the year before it was back to a single leader calling the shots — and yes, they technically did this while adhering to the byzantine ethics of Party Committee rules, but still ,be real. Everybody knows they were dictators.
So let’s make some observations. First, where does the authority of so many of these guys come from? It’s simple. It’s military victory. Look at these names: General Cromwell, General Washington, General Bonaparte, General Louverture, General Bolivar, General Obregon. They all made their name as military men. So what is it about generals that so many of these individual leaders who define the end game of a revolution come from the military?
Well, let’s start by not overthinking it. Sovereign power is all about holding a preponderance of force over your society, we’ve talked about this at length. And if you are a military leader who has developed a loyal army, well that’s kind of the ballgame, isn’t it? Because who can possibly stand against you, but another army. And these guys were all successful, not just in combating foreign threats, but more importantly, they had very likely just won a civil war. And so at that point, there’s quite literally no army that can stand against them, that army was just defeated. But also just in terms of the cult of personality type influence that’s necessary to go along with these kind of rulers, military victory is a great way to have your name and face spread far and wide, either by word of mouth or in newspapers or radio broadcasts. For that kind of mass reach, you need to be doing something that affects all of society, be involved in something that all of society cares about. The course of a war is one of those things that everybody is gonna be talking about, and so the victorious leader in one side of this war is gonna get talked about a lot. And if they are victorious, they are gonna be talked about in positive terms. The military, of course, also functions as a hierarchy, with a commander-in-chief at the very top, and so it’s practically built for personalist rule. When all the other institutions of society have fallen apart, the army structure transfers very nicely into the political arena, which necessarily involves one person at the very top giving orders.
Now with Lenin and Stalin, we have a unique situation among our dictators as they commanded their authority as political operators, not military generals. The military men who tried to become dictators, people like Kornilov, or Denikin or Kolchak, were all Whites, they weren’t Reds. Now, Trotsky ultimately derived some of his personal authority from his successful organization of the Red Army, but he was a civilian hand guiding the ship, not General Trotsky, Commander-in-Chief, and he got out flanked and booted out of the revolution anyway. But though Lenin and Stalin derived their authority from their ability to manipulate political parties rather than their charismatic authority as military leaders, it is worth remembering that both of them were acutely aware that they couldn’t have charismatic military heroes running around out there challenging their authority. They had to guard against such figures emerging, and they did, constantly. And we know what happened as a result when World War II got started.
Now, the second thing we can observe here is that almost none of these leaders explicitly set out on a road to be a dictator. It is something that developed organically over the course of the revolution, and developed from their own experiences with politics during this period. Cromwell didn’t start out by saying, oh, I’m gonna start as a member of the landed gentry, but when I’m done, I’ll be lord protector. George Washington didn’t really want to be a political leader at all. He kept trying to get out of that job in a way that I think transcends mere showmanship. Napoleon was an ambitious young man, but he was improvising all along the way, I don’t think Emperor Napoleon was his plan from the start. Absent the Mexican Revolution, Alvaro Obregon is just out there in the north raising chickpeas. But revolution did come and war came with it, and a mix of frustration and duty and opportunity and ego convinced each of these men that they must for the good of society, take power and reign supreme. But in almost all of these cases, it feels like something that they arrived at in the due course of time, not something that they laid out as a goal for themselves at the start of the revolution.
A third thing we can observe comes directly from that thought, but which needs fuller expression, and that is the bit about ego. For a variety of reasons, our leaders have come to regard their own judgments and decisions and choices as vital to the health and wellbeing of their society. That to remove themselves from the situation would be to doom society to a return to chaos. When we look at people like Bolivar and Cromwell basically concluding that everyone around them is doing it wrong, and therefore I must remain so that the good and right thing must be done, we can ask what their motivation is here. Because not doing it how I want it done is not necessarily the same as not doing it right, unless you’ve got a rather large ego. To reach the point where dictatorial power is even a possibility, you have to be something of an egomaniac. Even Washington, with his supernatural aversion to dictatorial power, was an egomaniac. Of course he was. You can’t spend any time around the guy and not conclude that, at least compared to a normal person. You don’t have the kinds of careers these people have without an unreasonable amount of ambition and an unhealthy level of self regard. It’s very abnormal, and their egos are doing a lot of the work of convincing them that they have to stay in power at all costs, otherwise it’s catastrophic, not just for them as individuals, but for society as a whole.
Now, fourth thing we can observe is that our charismatic authority figures are always operating out of something resembling a middle ground. Now, they’re naturally gonna be to the right of the most left wing radical elements of any revolution, but they’re always also gonna be much further to the left than any right wing element. Whatever else these people are, they’re not restorationists or reactionaries or conservatives. They’re all revolutionary leaders, who often continue to do revolutionary things, even as they pull in a more conservative direction. Cromwell was a Republican, but he’s not a Leveler or a Digger. Washington tended to be a Centralist and a Federalist, but is clearly trying to balance the interests of everyone in the American revolutionary coalition. I mean, he went off and put down a proto-populist uprising in the west, clearly prioritizing order over liberty, but he’s also not trying to create a monarchy in America. Bonaparte tried to reconcile the Revolution with traditional French society, inviting back conservatives and cutting deals with the Catholic church and restoring slavery in the colonies, but even in full dictator mode, he was doing progressive things that the Revolution wanted done. Educational and bureaucratic and legal reform that the more technocratic side of the enlightenment always wanted, a side that had always called for this, being delivered by an enlightened dictator, naturally. And even Lenin and Stalin who come to power from a radical left flank of the Russian Revolution had left wing critics that they put down in their rise to power, Left Communists and anarchists and Left SRs. Anyone who would’ve preferred more bottom up styles of authority and less top down styles of authority? They had to go.
And that brings me to the last observation I wanna make, which will lead into what we’re gonna talk about next week, is that in all of these cases — with the real exception of Louis-Philippe — all of our charismatic authority figures wind up wielding more power and have a greater reach than whatever ruler was in place prior to the revolution. If you look at the military resources and financial resources available to them, the size of the bureaucracy out there doing their bidding, the breadth and depth that they can expect their laws and decrees to be enforced throughout society, we always find a very big jump in the power of the executive. From what King Charles was able to do to what Oliver Cromwell was able to do. Crown and Parliament and the North American colonies versus President Washington in the United States. Louis XVI versus Emperor Napoleon. The French Colonial Administration of Saint-Domingue vs Toussaint Louverture. The Spanish Colonial Administration of South America versus Simone Bolivar. Louis-Philippe versus Napoleon III. Porfirio Díaz versus the PRI. And finally, Tsar Nicholas against Lenin and Stalin. You would be extremely hard pressed to make the case that the former’s political authority exceeded the latter’s. Revolutions don’t just produce dictators, they produce powerful dictators.
And that will segue us nicely into what we’re gonna talk about next week in our final appendix. We will take a large sweeping look back from the end of the revolution to the beginning of the revolution. When we look back, we will ask, what happened? What changed? Was it worth it? What did these revolutions accomplish? Are revolutions horrendous nightmares to be avoided at all costs, or are they vital lurches forward to be cherished and celebrated?
This final appendix will be the second to last episode of the Revolutions Podcast, and so we will wrap up the appendices by wrapping up our revolutions, and then the week after that will be the final episode of Revolutions, when I bid all of you a bittersweet adieu.