| >And yet the extremely wealthy do face an abiding risk from festering inequity: The have-nots might finally lose patience and turn upon the haves. “That’s the real danger,” Mr. Cohan said. “This little thing called the French Revolution.” Yeah... I keep hearing this threat from people who really ought to know better. Inequality is a major talking point from the left, but it reflects complete ignorance of how the world works. The French Revolution is memorable precisely because it's so incredibly unusual. Look at Mexico, India, China... almost anywhere in the world aside from Europe and North America. There is virtually no society on the planet that doesn't concentrate wealth and power among the elite one percent, gated off from the lower classes. I'm not even speaking historically -- show me a modern country on any other continent that even remotely approaches a middle class. Also, re-distributing wealth doesn't necessarily solve the cultural problems that create inequality. Egypt massively subsidized food... and Egyptians promptly had massive numbers of children that overwhelmed even the ridiculously cheap food prices. Just this week, Afghanis threw acid in the faces of schoolgirls trying to get an education. The Saudis cling to power through massive welfare programs to pacify their increasingly fundamentalist populace. Even here in the US, cultures that discourage education and responsibility aren't suddenly going to churn out engineers and doctors if billionaires give away their wealth. The US will just continue down the well-trodden path that the rest of the world has already blazed, where tiny pockets of wealthy elites try to shelter themselves from the increasingly lawless masses. A revolution requires organization and discipline, which is absurd to expect even before you consider the unbeatable modern surveillance of all communications and movements in developed countries. The only threat that masses pose is lawless violence, much like what we saw in the Arab Spring -- but that's not really a problem when you can concentrate the rabble outside of elite pockets. Particularly when the rabble lack a unifying religious fervor, like what you see in the coalescing identity of fundamentalist Islam across MENA and Europe. So please stop making vague threats about the French Revolution, people. The Second Amendment is not going to help rednecks water the tree of liberty. The people are not going to surge against their capitalist oppressors as a tide of justice or whatever. At worst, less developed countries will turn into Libya... but the more likely result is India, where elites gate off the masses and let them cultivate self-destructive cultures. |
Mexico's revolution was in large part about wealth and land reform [1]; Zapata's famous battle cry was "tierra y libertad", land and freedom. Many of the reforms persists, albeit in weakened form, even today. China's revolution is known as the Chinese Communist Revolution [2] for a reason. The spike in conspicuous inequality is so new in China that the newly rich quite literally need instruction on how to display their wealth [3].
I do think a revolution is unlikely to happen in the US any time soon, but that's because we've got some tradition of taking care of people well enough that they're mostly not desperate enough to start a shooting war with the cops. E.g., during the 2008 crash, we spent zillions of dollars propping up the economy until things got better. We also have enough issues with race that we may see a race war before a class war. But it's a mistake to think it can't happen here. If we're ever dumb enough to pursue an austerity program like the one being inflicted upon Greece, where the interests of a small number of bankers are being hugely privileged over the great bulk of a nation, I would not be shocked at all to see something like Occupy Wall Street crossed with the Cliven Bundy crew.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Revolution
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Communist_Revolution
[3] http://www.gq.com/story/chinas-richest