McKinley, McShminley!

The time-traveling solution to achieve revolution

The history of “Marxist” revolutions has always struck me (who back in the day taught Marxism at Harvard, so my evil credentials are impeccable!) as sort of a Back to the Future solution-search, with each iteration racing back farther in history to achieve their ends.

Let me explain.

Karl the man himself saw capitalism basically flaming out on its own: creating such a huge disparity in class wealth and ultimately a superabundance of goods (what we might call hyper-consumerism today) that eventually, all those workers (proletariat) would look around, realize that they are the many and that the capitalists are the few, and just take over everything one day — maybe not even with all that much tumult, he thought, because it would all be so logical in terms of class self-awareness.

Seems crazy right? How could a country get to such an odd situation and then, just like flipping a switch, the previously disempowered suddenly realize they have all the power (class consciousness) and all the rich people realize they’re vastly outnumbered and so … the workers grab control of the means of production and institute some sort of worker-led utopian government and the rest is history.

Has such a stunning class-based epiphany ever occurred?

Well, Marx thought he saw it in the original French Revolution, before Napoleon showed up. The problem there and pretty much everywhere else throughout history is that the capitalists and the rich can and will put up a fierce fight (the counter-revolution), creating the conundrum of when to start the revolution in Marx’s historical timeline of capitalism’s birth/rise/maturation/breakdown, with that answer constantly being pushed further “back to the future” by successive theorists and revolutionaries.

Marx at first thought Germany would be the spot, but after the failed European revolutions of 1848, he turned his attention to the furthest-along England — already deep into its Industrial Revolution. Germany had its Marxist revolutionary moment at the conclusion of WWI (my wife and I once owned two cats named Karl and Rosa in their honor), but it fizzled out miserably under the onslaught of counter-revolutionary right-wing forces that eventually birthed Nazism there.

Vladimir Lenin comes along and gives us the Marxist-Leninist rationale that says European capitalist powers were able to extend their rule through imperialism — basically living off and extending the otherwise corrupt and evil and failing capitalist system by leveraging all those stolen resources.

This leads Lenin to be the first to apply a back-to-the-future solution: Marxists can’t wait until capitalism matures because the capitalists grow too strong in the process, so now the deal becomes catching a country far earlier in its industrialization and pulling off an admittedly premature class consciousness then — or BEFORE capitalism gets too far along and figures out how to buy off the workers. This new twist allowed him to argue that Russia was the right spot to pull this off, despite its lack of industrialization and being full mostly of peasants still on the land.

Once successful, the Russian Revolution ended up morphing into Stalinism (or Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism) featuring the rapid industrialization of Russia so it could logically “catch-up” to where it needed to be for the urban proletariat to be truly in charge.

Around the same general time, Mao Zedong comes along in China and says basically, China can’t wait that long, and if we Chinese communists are going to join the party, so to speak, we’ll have to pull it off as a totally pre-industrial peasant revolution that swamps the cities and catches capitalism while it’s too immature to put up a real fight (Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism-Maoism).

So, Lenin goes back in time (forcing Stalin’s catch-up industrialization), and Mao goes even further back in time, forcing some truly crazy attempts, once in power, to catch up with “great leaps forward” and whatnot that eventually killed people there in the tens of millions and marked Mao as the great mass murdering despot of all time (beyond Stalin, who was beyond Hitler).

So, you see the pattern: each time going farther back in time, resulting in a crazier catch-up process that ends up killing off vast swaths of the population (Mao’s totally nuts Cultural Revolution being the apogee that eventually convinces his successor Deng Xiaoping into adopting an if-you-can’t-beat-them-then-join-them glide path that leads to risen China of today).

Eventually, Cambodia’s Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge come along and seek their solution in the most bizarre and deadly back-to-the-future manner — essentially declaring a Year Zero and deciding to kill off pretty much everyone above a certain age or income level (or just for wearing glasses) so as to reset the revolutionary clock as quickly as possible. That logic led to the killing fields of Cambodia and some serious, largely age-rationalized genocide (these enemies of the state are beyond rehabilitation so better to just kill them all!).

But, it didn’t stop there (and here we get into my PhD diss): The Soviet Union’s leadership, once detente kicked in with the US (thanks to Nixon and Kissinger), feared a loss of revolutionary impetus with “peaceful coexistence” and thus started looking around the Third World for truly backward economies where they felt Marxist-style revolutions could work in the most premature fashion (Yuri Andropov was a big advocate).

When the last remnants of the Portuguese Empire fell in the 1970s (Carnation Revolution there in Portugal in 1974 leading to almost instant decolonization of Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Angola across Africa), basically all of those subsequent regimes (and a handful across the Arab world) were pulled into Moscow’s ideological orbit for a time, as the late Brezhnev regime sought to leverage those revolutionary opportunities by adopting these essentially non-Marxist movements as their own — later labeled as Countries of Socialist Orientation (not really Marxist now but someday!). Moscow’s material support of these regimes later came under the assault of counter-revolutionary forces backed by the Reagan Administration (Reagan Doctrine of rollback), eventually contributing to the Soviet regime’s de facto bankruptcy (largely attributed, in myth, to Reagan’s Star Wars threat), later leading to Gorbachev’s reforms and the ultimate collapse of the system.

Yay!

So, did the dream of a quick and painless Marxist revolution ever really happen?

Yes, it did, in Romania in 1989. The hold-out regime, led by the cruel dictator Nicolae Ceausescu (because of whom I had to learn Romanian for my diss.), collapsed in the manner totally dreamt-of by Marx: Ceausescu was giving a speech to a mass outdoor audience, complete with piped-in taped cheering through speakers, when, despite that effort, one hears booing and jeering from the restive crowd. Ceausescu looks shocked, realizes the jig is up, and flees immediately with his even-more-hated wife.

And, just like that, the revolution happened overnight: the many realized they could just take power from the few and did, eventually tracking down Nicolae and his spouse and executing them on the spot — with extreme prejudice.

Now, at this point, you’re wondering, when am I going to get around to McKinley — Donald Trump’s new favorite role-model?

I’ll pivot here by saying I relayed all that history on the other side (communism) to show how seeking to go back in time typically backfires as a revolutionary tactic on the democratic side, because, in many ways, that’s what Trump and MAGA are attempting, starting with the re-litigating of civil rights and women’s rights and gay rights from the 1960s and 1970s (the first great target), then going back in time further to recapture the “golden age” of American post-WWII supremacy in the 1950s, when men were men and women were women and we were 90% White and nothing and nobody else mattered, am I right?

White Christian Nationalism (WCN) seeks the same back-to-the-future outcome by turning back the cultural clock to White Privilege Saving Time (WPST). In its own way, WCN represents a sort of mirror-imaging of the radical Islamic threat (pining for the good old 7th century — the furthest back-in-time proposal yet!).

You wanna grow beards and make women cover up and get back to having babies, well … we do too!

That’s a cultural/ideological instinct that America has indulged before.

Recall the cultural conservatism of the 1950s: why necessary? It was “necessary” that we all conform on our side lest the Commies infiltrate us and body-snatch us like crazy!

Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, much of our youth become infatuated with revolutionary types like Mao with his Cultural Revolution (Castro and Che and the whole cast of characters — to include a younger Nelson Mandela and the ANC in South Africa).

Reagan’s “rollback” strategy with the Soviets across the Third World was matched by cultural-rollback and government-rollback strategies at home (sound familiar?).

Then, in the 1990s, when globalization is taking off like wildfire, we get all “go-go” in our wealth-creating mindset so we can match what’s unfolding around the world but increasingly blowing us away in rising China.

Then there’s 9/11 and we re-traditionalize everything like crazy in response. We grow bad-ass beards to look like the enemy and we start turning on all those pesky minorities and special interests “ruining” America.

Once the Financial Crisis hits in 2008, we’re ready to turn on globalization itself as one big lie and conspiracy, so xenophobia is back on the menu!

And then there’s Trump, riding down that golden escalator in 2015 and telling us that if we could only go back in time, everything would be great again.

And, after the Biden Interregnum, Trump 2.0 is now signaling even greater ambition to go further back in time — to the great Age of McKinley and tariffs and robber barons ruling and splendid little wars to grab colonies from weaker powers.

The mirror-imaging here is stark: Russia under Putin is acting like an aggressive, rising power, and China threatens/displays the same nasty-and-rising tendencies. Hell, in a bad mood, India’s Modi is entirely capable of the same with his Hindu nationalism.

So, with that trio all given to proclaiming we’re #1, it’s only natural that copycat America, so often given to mirror-imaging perceived threats, succumbs to similar ambitions:

You threaten to retake old colonies with military force, well … so do we!

And so, the Great Race for Whatever is on!

We need to grab Greenland before the Chinese do. We need to annex Canada before the Russians — or worse, the Europeans! — do, and so on.

Trump really does seem intent on replaying all the great oldies from America’s “rising power” era of the late 19th and early 20th century: McKinley with his tariffs, TR with his big stick and Panama Canal, Wilson (for a while) keeping us out of a European war while launching military strikes into Mexico … it’s like he’s picking all the rough stuff for external application while going all Jacksonian (i.e., even farther back in time) domestically with his patronage and “spoils” and his who needs the FDIC?

Me, I’m just waiting for the Teapot Domes to start popping up, because you just know they will.

How long will America toy with all this back-to-the-future regressions?

Until we’re sufficiently tired out and ready to embrace serious solutions — aka, the second-great Progressive Era that inevitably must succeed this long period of Angry Populism (2010 and counting) yielding all manner of back-to-the-future attempts to regain lost glory.

Remember: North-South integration WILL happen this century. It just can’t be some braindead re-run from the past. We need a new, original script and not a by-the-19th-century-numbers remake.

Trump is a copycatter and mirror-imager in the best American tradition: Putin seems to be winning, so I’ll be more like Putin; Xi seems to be winning, so I’ll be more like Xi; and so on.

Of course, he can’t say that part out loud, so we’re fed Jackson, and McKinley and maybe some TR … but all completely out of their historical context.

Sometimes … many times, history is a bad role-model, tempting us with all sorts of seemingly easy solutions … if only we could go back in time.

Dare I call it, the Schmigadoon Solution!

Don’t start the music! I have the perfect costume in my closet!

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