Dying to hear Rob's thoughts on the Revolutions podcast in tonight's Waypoints. I was just re-listening to the French Revolution episodes last week. I thought it was strange how Mike Duncan went from describing the oppressive feudal apparatus of the Ancien Regime to reminding everyone that Louis really wasn't a bad guy. He also obsesses over the fake scandals about Marie Antoinette then throws in the whole "she was trying to get Austria to invade and squash the revolution" thing almost as a footnote.
The normalisation of Bourbon oppression contrasted with hyperbolization of Jacobin terror seem to be frequent features in American interpretations of the Revolution.
It's also interesting to hear about the French Revolution after reading Austin's essay on breaking ties. Sometimes the system needs to be smashed apart instead of half-hearted incrementalism.
Honestly, i think it's a bit overstated how much was "smashed" by the french revolution. 15 years later we have Napoleon crowning himself emperor and waging war across all of europe in the name of "the revolution".
"smashing the system" to me means a lot of political instability and war and the vague hope that historians deem it "worth it" in hindsight. More often than not it's just another totalitarian regime that rises up. At least in European history, that's the general pattern. The big exeption being the World Wars.
Destroying american sosciety could lead to a socialist revoultion. It could also break up the state and lead to something worse than we have now if the people that win the power struggle are bad people. And let's not forget - these are the people that currently have the headstart. The idea that destroying the current structure is a "cleansing" that'll lead to somehting better is naive.
Edit: sorry for the rant, sometimes you do need to replace something wholesale, but people calling for large scale violence (like, deadly violence, not just some protests) irk me.
