Against Revolution

Famous Swedish Political Leaders

Bernie Sanders likes to say that we need a "political revolution" so we can become more like the social democracies of Scandinavia. But this, I think, misjudges both the nature of revolution and the history of Scandinavia. There was no Swedish or Norwegian or Danish Revolution. I believe that they ended up with their enviably stable and equitable systems precisely because they never had a revolution, because revolutions are usually disastrous for the people and nations who experience them.

Here's a question for you: can you name a single event that happened in Scandinavia between the Napoleonic wars and World War II? I can't, or couldn't until I started working on this post, and I have a Ph.D. in European history. Yet somehow the Scandinavian countries evolved from poor societies led by reactionary aristocrats to wealthy beacons of social democracy. How did they achieve that?

Not, let me tell you, in a way that makes for exciting reading. I spent some time last night and this morning reading about the history of these countries at wikipedia and other encyclopedia sites, and I recommend those articles only as a sleep aid. It's a dreary litany of reform bill after reform bill, the gradual extension of the vote, the gradual constriction of royal power, the occasional Parliamentary dust-up. One of the sub-categories in wikipedia's piece on nineteenth-century Sweden is The Barley Question.

But that, if you ask me, is how politics ought to be. If what you want is to make life better for your fellow citizens, that is the way to proceed: One change at a time. One compromise at a time. One election at a time. One regulation at a time. "Politics," Max Weber famously wrote, "is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective." Political change does not happen unless people fight for it, but if you fight too hard, if you abandon perspective and start throwing bombs, then any good you do accomplish will likely be balanced by an equal or greater amount of destruction and misery.

Consider that the Social Democrats who created the modern Swedish welfare state did not think that socialism was the most important part of their program. That would be Folkhemmet, "The People's Home", which imagined the nation as a family to which everyone contributed something, and where all decisions were made collectively. This was an explicitly moderate position, more influenced by John Maynard Keynes than by Marx, and with large roles for businessmen and the church.

For a quick look at the opposite, revolutionary sort of mind, I recommend this piece on V.I. Lenin. Not the silly comparison of Lenin with the leftists of contemporary American campuses, just the description of Lenin himself, for whom violence and terror were not means to an end, but ends in themselves:

When we are reproached with cruelty, we wonder how people can forget the most elementary Marxism. . . . By the dictatorship of the proletariat we mean nothing other than power which is totally unlimited by any laws, totally unrestrained by absolutely any rules, and based directly on force. . . . The law should not limit terror, it should enshrine terror.

As for compromise with others, even other socialists,

Every solution that offers a middle path is a deception . . . or an expression of the dull-wittedness of the petty-bourgeois democrats.

These are the sort of men who make most revolutions, and the states and societies that result are just what you would expect from such thinking.

Obviously not all revolutions are like this; the word has many meanings. When a new or conquered nation casts off the rule of an empire, that is a different situation, with a better historical record. Yet many national heroes have succumbed to the temptations of violence and radicalism, which is why the independence of so many nations has been followed by Civil War rather than peaceful cooperation. Violent change is always dangerous.

I do recognize that sometimes gradual, progressive change is not an option, because those in power refuse to accept it. This happened for example in Russia, where the Tsar's men put an end to the reformist politics of 1905 and re-imposed a reactionary imperium. In such cases violent revolution is likely, because there is no other path forward. But if that happens in your country, you are, historically, screwed. The outcome is rarely good. (See Russia, China, Iran, etc.)

Sometimes compromise and slow change work, and sometimes they just don't, leading to violent explosions. But if the history of the past few centuries teaches anything, it is that gradual reformism is always better, if you can get it.

Why am I writing about this now, when there seems to be no chance that any major nation will have a revolution? What I really want to oppose is a way of thinking that I think is all too common in our time: a demand for change now, coupled with a hatred of our opponents and refusal to even consider talking to them. I think this is tactically terrible, almost certain to lead to four more years of Donald Trump. But it is even worse philosophically. We cannot get to a good world by "destroying" our enemies, either metaphorically or as Lenin would have. Whatever happens, we will end up living with them.

To build a better world, we must work together with as many as will join in.