Claim-Jumping the French Revolution

Drawing parallels is a dangerous game, but some parallels are more dangerous than others.
A blog called The Virginian [http://moneyrunner.blogspot.com/2010/09/french-revolution-coming-to-america.html] tried to make the case early on that the rise of the Tea Party was inspired by some of the same factors that occurred in the French Revolution. The Virginian argues that the absolute rule of the monarchy in France before 1789 is analogous to Big Government in America today, and that “the people,” represented by the grass roots development of the Tea Party, will rise up and reduce the power of government, thereby allowing the free market to flourish. What finally happened in the French Revolution and this interpretation are miles apart.
Yes, the wealth concentration in France in the 1780’s and what we see in America in the 21st Century are somewhat similar. In the United States at the end of 2001, 10% of the population owned 71% of the wealth and the top 1% owned 38%. On the other hand, the bottom 40% owned less than 1% of the nation's wealth. Distribution has only gotten worse since the Great Recession. In 1785 France, Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison to report that “the property of this country [France] is absolutely concentrated in a very few hands.”
In actuality, the Tea Party in America is more like the Jacobins, a second wave more radical that their predecessors, the Girondists, but still an exclusive segment of French society. Furthermore, it is as if The Tea Party is also funded by the American equivalent of the Girondists, the first wave of reformers who represented the wealthier mercantile class mostly from a department (section) in southwest France. Rather than take on the government directly, Big Business [our Girondists] in the form of the Koch brothers, along with other shadowy funders, choose to sit on the sidelines and let the more common Tea Partiers make the ruckus. In France the Jacobins gained power for a while after overthrowing the Girondists, but meanwhile the poor continued to suffer and finally under the name of the Sans-culottes the poor and heretofore disenfranchised masses including small shop keepers rose up and overthrew essentially all privileged classes. The economic trickle down never occurred under the Jacobin or Girondist regimes, and so finally the comprehensive bloody massacre of the privileged ensued.
America is poised to fulfill the promise of the French Revolution in its entirety if it is not careful. The majority of American people feel, according to various polls, that government may be unresponsive, bloated, and deadlocked, but the key issue is that wealth in America is poorly distributed and getting worse. Most Americans feel that rich people and corporations do not pay their fair share of taxes; that corporations and rich people “own” an egregiously disproportionate share of political and economic power; that there is decreasing hope for the little guy to earn an honest living wage in a country that ships so many jobs overseas. The discontent is growing, and the Tea Party’s message is starting to sink in, and not in the way it expects. The Tea Party is looking more and more like the Jacobins or Girondists, just another self-serving elite group that wants to enhance its own position and leave the rest behind to fend for themselves.
America likes to think of itself as “the land of opportunity.” It needs to enhance that opportunity in real terms for all Americans as the major focus of any reform it makes. Balancing budgets and making government efficient and cost effective may be desirable for the long run but does not address opportunity directly. These government reforms mostly serve the immediate desires of the already haves and have mores, not the left behinds.
The assumption so many haves have is that left behinds do not try, do not take responsibility for themselves, deserve to suffer, are a burden to society, can’t find their bootstraps, or are just plain lazy. Let them eat cake. Even if this were true, they are still there. Want a real revolution? Just keep them there, take away any maintenance programs that keep them housed and fed, let them rot, and see what happens. OR figure out what might actually give them hope, a sense of self-worth, a salable skill, and invest in a structured, accountable process that will provide those things successfully.
How a civilization treats its losers is a measure of its relative humaneness. The French in 17 85 were a far cry from serving as a model of goodness. How America handles its poverty in the 21st Century will be watched by the world. Will the challenged but still richest nation in the world lead by example? Can it find a way to reduce poverty, instill or provide a legitimate opportunity for the attainment of self-sufficiency and sustainable solvency among its poor? Will it simply stop trying in the name of balancing budgets over bringing greater socio-economic balance to its culture?
The Founding Fathers created this country as an experiment. It chiseled nothing in stone. It left to future generations the opportunity to make adjustments as needed. The Constitution of the United States is not some holy document that true believers must hold sacred in the original or suffer perdition. Conservatives make the mistake of seeing the rules of the American game, the American experiment as finite, a given, a done deal. It is not and never shall be. That’s why George Washington left office after two terms because he knew he needed to turn the presidency over to someone else, to a newly elected group who might have even better ideas. And if they proved wrong, change them again.
The same can be said for economics. For the past three decades we have been taught to believe in the Free Market as the only way to organize economies. That belief is predicated on Adam Smith’s belief that individuals are rational and know their own self interests better than others do. Smith believed that self-interest is the great motivator of human behavior. Unfortunately, as it turns out, that belief is as reductive as Freud’s belief that all motivation is sexual by nature. There are many gods, many motivations, and man is far more complex a being than any reductive analysis has tried to assume. Karl Marx made the same mistake by assuming that man was essentially altruistic by nature.
Therefore, if man is not mostly self-interested or altruistic or sexually driven, no economic system should be organized around any single belief. A more nuanced understanding of man’s motivations and a more nuanced way of organizing human behavior is required. That, in turn, calls for a nuanced system of checks and balances as well as cooperation both in government and in economic organization that addresses a variety of human motivations and assures real opportunity. In America we need to make changes that enable more people to work and succeed, not rely on a system that produces far more losers and “stagnators” than winners.
The Sans-culottes were the lower class French guys who didn’t wear long stockings below their breeches that ended just below the knee. (The French upper class men looked like football players without pads and helmets). In contrast, the lower class wore trousers. They had no finery, nothing but bare essentials and a sense of having everything to gain and nothing to lose. We see the same impulse playing out across Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Tunisia today. The masses have reached a critical mass of desperation and a way to organize, thanks to technological innovations like Facebook and Twitter. You don’t find many of these guys in the current Tea Party because the Tea Party membership is mostly have something and are interested in keeping more of their hard-earned assets… although they probably will sooner or later figure out that Social Security and Medicare are pretty good deals that we ought to try to figure out how to sustain rather than throw out with the bureaucratic bathwater.
In any case, like it or not, even if your creed is “do no harm” to the other while you take care of number one, there is the problem of unintended consequences and displaced impact that sometimes results in harm to many and huge benefit to few. Capitalism is now borderless. It no longer is contained and forced to play within nationalistic borders. It is now globally “open range.” It may help a few of the globally poorest people gain a higher standard of living so long as capitalism seeks the cheapest form of labor available worldwide. What has happened, however, is American domestic labor that once enjoyed a higher standard of living is now losing employment ground to cheaper labor elsewhere. The only solution posed by Free Market true believers is to develop a more sophisticated, tech-savvy domestic labor force that stays ahead of the curve globally. That means retooling American education to serve that purpose rather than simply aiming public education toward the lately evolved American dream of attending a liberal arts college and losing a high percentage of kids to school drop-out because they see no way to that future. They also call for a greater emphasis on the teaching of math and science to address our growing need for engineers and mathematicians. Instead, the Free Marketeers are busy cutting spending on education in the name of balancing budgets instead of taxing themselves to make schools better.
Our American-based multinational corporations and rich folks might resurrect the notion of civic responsibility which our Founding Fathers very much had and invest more enthusiastically in American education to help prepare the country for the future. That means doing so at the primary and secondary levels of education, not merely investing in research grants at universities. It also might do everything it can to bring manufacturing back to the United States. If we don’t find a way to enfranchise our 21st Century equivalent of the Sans-culottes, we may be facing a bloody revolution that will make the current Tea Party look more like the one in Alice in Wonderland than the one that happened in Boston harbor.*

*although the one in Boston were actually white guys dressed as Indians in order to make it look like an “act of savagery” rather than a frustrated group of colonials rebelling against British imperialism. It is interesting how they hid behind the guise of poorer Native Americans who never got the opportunity to drink imported tea.