Skip to main content

Home/ Comparative Politics/ Group items matching "settlers" in title, tags, annotations or url

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Ed Webb

The Revolution Is Only Getting Started - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...609463

pandemics USA US France history revolutions revolution opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Apr 20 - Cached
  • revolutions are periods in which social actors with different agendas (peasants stealing rabbits, city dwellers sacking tollbooths, lawmakers writing a constitution, anxious Parisians looking for weapons at the Bastille Fortress) become fused into a more or less stable constellation. The most timeless and emancipatory lesson of the French Revolution is that people make history. Likewise, the actions we take and the choices we make today will shape both what future we get and what we remember of the past.
  • That comparisons can so easily be made between the beginning of the French Revolution and the United States today does not mean that Americans are fated to see a Reign of Terror or that a military dictatorship like Napoleon’s looms large in our future. What it does mean is that everything is up for grabs. The United States of America can implode under external pressure and its own grave contradictions, or it can be reimagined and repurposed.
  • Life will not go back to normal for us, either, because the norms of the past decades are simply no longer tenable for huge numbers of Americans. In a single week in March, 3.3 million American workers filed new unemployment claims. The following week, 6.6 million more did the same. Middle-class Americans who placed their retirement savings in the stock market have recently experienced huge losses. Even before the pandemic, black Americans on average had only 7 percent of the wealth of white ones (Native Americans, even less). Among non-Hispanic white Americans, deaths from drug abuse, suicide, and alcohol continue to rise. Nearly 2.5 million people are incarcerated. Trust in existing institutions (including the Electoral College and Congress) was already vanishingly small.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • As sources of information proliferated, long-standing sources of authority (monarchy, aristocracy, and the established Church) feared losing power and turned reactionary. At the same time, the longer-term transformations on which these social and cultural innovations were built—the growth of European overseas empires and the emergence of settler colonialism, massive silver exports from South and Central America, the trans-Atlantic slave trade—continued, and in ever more brutal forms. More than 6 million Africans were sold into slavery in the 18th century—a time that some still call the “Age of Enlightenment.”
  • Today, as in the 1790s, an old order is ending in convulsions. Even before the coronavirus prompted flight cancellations and entry bans, climate activists were rightly telling us to change our modes and patterns of travel. Even before nonessential businesses were shut by government orders, online shopping and same-day deliveries were rapidly remaking retail commerce, while environmental concerns and anti-consumerism were revolutionizing the fashion industry.
  • real revolutions are the ones that nobody sees coming
  • The men and women who made the French Revolution—a revolution which, in a few short and hectic years, decriminalized heresy, blasphemy, and witchcraft; replaced one of the oldest European monarchies with a republic based on universal male suffrage; introduced no-fault divorce and easy adoption; embraced the ideal of formal equality before the law; and, for a short time at least, defined employment, education, and subsistence as basic human rights—had no model to follow, no plans, no platform agreed upon in advance. As the UCLA historian Lynn A. Hunt has argued, they made it up as they went along. Yet for more than two centuries, elements of their improvised politics have been revolution’s signature features: a declared sovereignty, devised symbols, an anthem, war. At the junction Americans face today, however, we need to imitate not the outcome of the French revolution but the energy, creativity, and optimism of the French revolutionaries.
  • In hindsight a revolution may look like a single event, but they are never experienced that way. Instead they are extended periods in which the routines of normal life are dislocated and existing rituals lose their meaning. They are deeply unsettling, but they are also periods of great creativity.
1 - 2 of 2
Showing 20▼ items per page