Social Stability

Jul 4, 2025 ∞

Justice and Peace or Tyranny and Violence?

We in the United States were once on a path of gradual, if uneven reform, expanding human rights protections and equality of opportunity. Achieving these ends came to entail protecting or expanding access to safe drinking water, clean air, nourishing food, reliable health care, and good public education. Of course, we often fell short on these goals, but we understood that they mattered. The question was less whether they were desirable and more about how to achieve them. Or so many of us thought.

Now our federal institutions have been captured by a party of extremists hell-bent on violating human rights and limiting opportunities for all but the most prosperous. The grotesque bill Congress has just passed will help them realize these goals, making a mockery of our best political traditions, not least our Declaration of Independence, now 249 years old. Our elected leaders, many representing heavily gerrymandered districts and most beholden to moneyed interests, have chosen to exacerbate already unprecedented economic inequalities and to limit or eliminate equality of opportunity.

If we do not course correct, if we do not vote these bums out of office and demand or do better ourselves, we can look forward to the end of comity. Instead of gradual, if often bumpy or unsettling change, we’ll get brutal, systematic oppression followed eventually by violent, institution-destroying revolution. Imagine something like the French Revolution or the Russian/Bolshevik Revolutions instead of the American Revolution. The last of these, in many respects, sought to defend rights and institutions, if at enormous cost to the people we continued to enslave, expropriate, and drive off the land. By defending and reforming our system of government, our leaders avoided the bloody fate of King Louis XVI, and the country grew, redefining itself to include ever wider circles of people.

Can we return to a path of reform? Or will we allow our leaders to exacerbate our differences to the point where too many conclude that violent revolution is the only way to re-establish liberty and justice for all?

Related Posts

Aug 14, 2010 ∞

Learning to Synthesize History

When confronted with history too narrowly conceived or framed, I often think back to one graduate course I took, "Issues in British Literature," which challenged me on a number of levels. To start with, the British historiography we learned seemed to have nothing in common with what I had encountered for German, French, and Russian history. Of course, different countries and different histories were involved, but not even the language or categories of analysis employed in the British historiography were as familiar as I expected them to be. This circumstance did not stop the authors from writing history and arguing with each other as if the assumptions that informed their language were self-explanatory. Their writings offered an odd mixture of history as common sense that rejected social theory combined with the expectation that readers should not dare question how they framed and wrote about history, because, well, readers with enough uncommon intelligence and specialized training would understand. The rest should not bother trying.

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Jun 18, 2009 ∞

The Fast Pace of Time in Iran

It seems to me that Iran’s clerical leadership is playing a dangerous game. The main opposition candidate is a conservative political insider who supports the current system, but who looks moderate in an Iranian context. His supporters are not demanding a change to the system either. They too just want the system to live up to its own official standards. But as time passes, expectations and goals might very easily expand to a vision that is even more at odds with what Iran’s clerical leadership wants for the country. Shouldn’t they concede before this happens?

One problem is that the opposition wants a new election, because the one they just had is tainted. But what would a new election mean? Among other things, more national discourse on the future of the country, and I suspect such a conversation would lead people to probe even deeper into the country’s problems, perhaps even to their systemic foundation, even if politicians are not allowed to question the country’s political system.

Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad’s supporters could become increasingly insistent about their desires, and that could easily undermine Iran’s social stability still further. Time is not on the side of those who support the status quo. Unfortunately, that does not mean it is on the side of the opposition.