The Rhetoric of Revolution and All the Flying Banners
One of the problems with any revolution is this: if you lose it, the survivors learn to live -- and then prosper -- under the victors' rule. This always happens. After the surrender, the survivors make peace, not just militarily, but also socially and ideologically.
This is why the rhetoric of revolution looks silly in retrospect after a failed revolution. It looks magnificent only if the revolution is successful. Then the words will be invoked down through the ages, until there is another successful revolution against the legacy of the old one.
Here is the institutional problem. A revolution by definition rejects the prevailing political order. But it can do this only because the revolutionaries have long accepted at least 90% of the existing order's first principles. Revolutions are not invasions, after all. They are made by recently loyal citizens.
So, the revolutionaries invoke their new rhetoric about a life-and-death confrontation against majority rule. Meanwhile, a majority of the population thinks the prevailing political order is a pretty good system. A revolution takes place only because a hard-core minority finally decides not to be part of the majority. Then they take up arms against the government to which, until a week earlier, the revolutionaries had sworn allegiance. Think "South Carolina in December 1860." They had voted in November.
RALLY ROUND THE FLAG
The showdown always comes with a new flag. There has to be a new flag. The flag represents the troops on the battlefield. It represents the cause, which soon becomes a sacred cause. The cause is equated with a new sovereignty, which is then linked to God.
A classic example is the speech that Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard gave to his troops in 1861 on the occasion of the adoption of yet another Confederate flag, the stars and bars.
A new banner is intrusted to-day, as a battle-flag, to the safe keeping of the Army of the Potomac. Soldiers: your mothers, your wives, and your sisters have made it. Consecrated by their hands, it must lead you to substantial victory, and the complete triumph of our cause. It can never be surrendered, save to your unspeakable dishonor, and with consequences fraught with immeasurable evil. Under its untarnished folds beat back the invader, and find nationality, everlasting immunity from an atrocious despotism, and honor and renown for yourselves--or death.
This came from the lips of the man who oversaw the firing of the first cannon shot from the shore to Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. His target was Maj. Robert Anderson, who had taught him artillery at West Point. The barrage failed to kill anyone in the fort, but a horse died.
The rebellion ended four years and two days after the first barrage against Sumter. After the surrender, the South was reintegrated into the Union. The South's military tradition inspired a later generation of successful soldiers in the Army, who went off to war to spread the post-1898 American empire. The South's generals had been at West Point before the war. A new generation of generals attended after the war. The classic example is George Patton, who as a child had been regaled with stories of bravery by ex-Col. John Mosby, the "Gray Ghost."
The South's military battles, which led to its defeat, became in retrospect inspiring tales of heroism and courage, which motivated a new generation of southerners to rally round the flag: the stars and stripes, but with more stars than in 1860. The men of the South repeatedly went off to war to extend "the atrocious despotism" of the Union. What had happened to the "unspeakable dishonor" of surrender? It was all forgotten.
The problem with the rhetoric of revolution is this: two weeks before the rhetoric was first invoked, the revolutionaries were all good citizens. Two weeks after surrender, most of them will become good citizens again. In short, the rhetoric was fake. The stakes had indeed been life and death, but not ideologically, merely bodily. The rhetoric had been an instrumental tool for rallying the troops to risk their lives, but after the surrender, nobody officially takes it seriously any more. "Oh, yeah. Wartime rhetoric. Oh, well. Let bygones be bygones. It's water under the bridge." Also blood in the ground, dreams smashed, and worthless bonds.
Whenever you commit to this kind of battlefield rhetoric, you risk psychological trauma if your side loses the war, but nothing much changes as a result. That was what happened to the South after 1865. Few people in the South had owned slaves in 1860. Slavery changed into debt servitude after 1865. Cotton did not change. The slave gang system disappeared, but there were still blacks in the fields doing the picking.
People make peace with the prevailing system most of the time. Few revolutions are successful. The Communist revolution in Russia in October 1917 went out with a whimper in December 1991. Communist rhetoric simply disappeared all over the world -- except North Korea and Cuba -- in January 1992. Poof! Gone. What of the 100 million people who died because of Communist rhetoric? Forgotten. Gone with the wind.
Today, Russia is not the vanguard of the world revolution. It is instead the world's capital for dashboard camcorders.
PEOPLE SETTLE
People settle most of the time. Give them enough time, and they settle. Pay them enough to meet the monthly bills, and they settle.
The goal ought to be to persuade them to change their beliefs and their behavior at the margin. Some people will change a lot, the way an alcoholic changes because of AA. But most members drop out of AA and fall off the wagon. Most non-alcoholics don't change their alcohol consumption habits. A few pioneers do change radically -- "vanguards of the revolution." The masses do not. They will side with the winners. I offer as evidence I Kings 18.
And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between two opinions? if the Lord be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word (v. 22).
The masses hedge their bets until the issue is settled. Rhetoric does not change them. Victory does. It changes them at the margin.
I recommend reform, not revolution. The rhetoric of reform can be sustained long-term. The rhetoric of revolution can be sustained only after victory. But the masses still do not change much. They salute a new flag. Their children read re-written textbooks. But their lifestyles do not change much.
Canada had no revolution. Canadians live pretty much the same way that northern state Americans do. The symbol is the Haskell Free Library.
The Haskell Free Library and Opera House (French: Bibliothèque et salle d'opéra Haskell) is a neoclassical building that straddles the international border in Rock Island (now part of Stanstead), Quebec and Derby Line, Vermont. The Opera House opened on June 7, 1904, and was deliberately built on the border between Canada and the United States. It was declared a heritage building by both countries in the 1970s.Today, the library has two different entrances (one from each country), and hence, two different addresses: its American address is 93 Caswell Avenue, while its Canadian address is 1, rue Church (Church Street). Exiting the library through the opposite entrance requires one to report to the country's customs thereafter.
No customs agent monitors anyone. The reporting is voluntary.
The nations divide through the left-hand side of the World Book Encyclopedia.
CONCLUSION
We see the stars and bars flying proudly, but mostly at football games in the Southeastern Conference. But it has been 40 years since the stars and bars have flown over that once-foundational institution of the modern South: the AWB. I don't think Gen Beauregard would understand the symbolism of this. I don't think he would approve.
That is what happens to the once-stirring symbols of lost causes. Contexts change.