PARIS, 1789 — Imagine a country where anyone who opposes the ruling regime is called a traitor. Imagine a country with huge debts, dominated economically and politically by barely-taxed wealthy people — about 2% of the population — who get their money through inheritance or investments instead of work. Now imagine members of the country’s clergy allying themselves with the wealthy aristocrats, with the most powerful preachers living as high on the hog as the nobility. And while the people on top live well and make laws that ensure they and their descendants will continue to live well without working, 80% of the population is only a paycheck or two away from homelessness. This is a recipe for revolution. In France, that revolution started on July 14, 1789. We probably won’t have anything similar in the United States in the next 10 or 20 years, but if we hold to our present political course I’m afraid we may end up having a similar upheaval 30, 40 or 50 years from now.

I am not a political scientist or historian, but I read heavily (and rapidly). As a journalist, I take the “writing the first rough draft of history” part of my job seriously, and that means I like to see what has happened in the past so that I can see how current events relate to the totality of human experience — not just over the past few years, but over past centuries and millenia.

You’ve heard the expression, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” I believe there is a fair amount of truth in this now-hackneyed phrase. Looking at the sweep of human experience as far back as we have written records, and reading our scant written-down oral records of what happened before writing became common, you see that the same causes beget the same effects over and over.

Since the beginning — and I suspect this goes all the way back to small tribal groups of proto-humans on the African veldt — overly repressive governments have inevitably led to bloody wars and revolts. The more oppressive the government, the bloodier the revolt or war. A recent example was the German Nazi Party, which started a bloody war, and lost it so badly that without help from Germany’s conquerors the country might have broken up into small fiefdoms, which is what the region we now call “Germany” was between the fall of the Holy Roman Empire and the second half of the 19th Century.

The Nazis, the last Russian Tsars, the pre-revolution French nobility and clergy, the crowd running Cuba before its 1950s Communist revolution (and the “revolutionaries” running Cuba today), the later Roman Caesars, and many modern American business chieftains have all suffered from hubris. And in most cases, people surrounding or subordinate to the hubristas (a word I just made up) have suffered at least as much as the self-glorifiers did when they fell from grace.

I do not personally expect to live to see American society disintegrate in the manner of a latter-day French Revolution. I am 53, and two of my four brothers (including my younger brother) are already dead. But I have children and stepchildren and grandchildren. They are the ones I worry about, and I also worry about other people who are younger than myself (or at least likely to live longer), and their (your) children and grandchildren.

The lesson I am trying to impart here is that the more we — the people called the Third Estate in France before the revolution there — let the people who style themselves as our “betters” run our country to suit themselves, the worse the backlash will be when we inevitably rise up and throw them out of power.

I do not want to see a Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez running the U.S., and the way people like that attain power is always in reaction to dominance of a country’s economy and government by a small elite that considers itself to be above the law of the land.

Compare these two (possibly apocryphal) quotes:

“Let them eat cake” - French Queen Marie Antoinette

“Only the little people pay taxes” - Republican role model Leona Helmsley

Marie Antoinette was beheaded. Leona Helmsley went to prison (but got out, as rich as ever).

Now imagine a government dominated by people like this pair, in cahoots with corporate CEOs who feel it is their God-given right to earn as much before lunch in one day as many of their employees earn all year. Add in politicians who support those CEOs — and give themselves regular raises while voting against any income increase for the lowest-paid people in the society they supposedly “represent.”

And now, add a major recession to this dark vision. It doesn’t matter whether that recession is caused by U.S. corporate failures, Chinese unwillingness to keep buying our government bonds, a major interruption in our flow of oil from overseas, a crop-killing climate change, an epidemic disease or some other natural disaster. Even the most cursory reading of history (or economics) texts tells you that economic downturns do happen sooner or later, and that a radical drop in the standard of living for a majority of a nation’s population almost inevitably leads to political upheaval followed by national “salvation” by a dictatorship or oligopoly of some sort.

Again, go back to the French Revolution — except this time, look at what came after it: starting in 1799 you had Napoleon (and his series of expensive wars), a new (and supposedly improved) monarchy, a revolt in 1830, another one in 1848, and other revolts and machinations and oscillations in government that lasted well into the 20th Century.

You hear “class warfare” decried in modern America as an evil thing in that Democrats want to wage unjustly against Republicans. I agree that class warfare is bad. I don’t want it to happen here, tomorrow or fifty years or a hundred years from now. Notice, though, that in every country where the richest segment of society has decided — usually in conjunction with leaders of the country’s dominant religion — that they should run things to suit themselves, and that the commoners’ needs and desires don’t matter, sooner or later an economic problem of some sort makes the commoners’ lives bad enough that “class warfare” breaks out, often under another name, and the country is plunged into chaos.

But that’s enough depression for now. We have a holiday coming up, and we should celebrate it with joy, not sorrow.

Happy Bastille Day, everybody!

This entry was posted on Friday, July 7th, 2006 at 10:11 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.