This model is the most complete you have presented to date, but it
still seems rather amorphous. You keep saying that there is potential for
a broad coalition, consensus, mobilisation, and so on. But can you offer
a more concrete analysis, even in retrospect from a hypothetical
postrevolutionary vantage point, of how the relevant social forces and
institutions are supposed to interact? What would be the chapter headings
of a history book written five years after victory? Any revolutionary
history involves specific social sectors, crises, exploitation of
particular cleavages, framing of appeals to political subcultures,
dynamics of relative group leverage, elite splits and defections, ranking
of priorities, issue linkages, constituency side-payments, capture or
incapacitation of the coercive apparatus, negotiated settlement pacts,
phases of coalition formation and disintegration, empowerment of
counterelites, management of reactionary insurgency, etc. My apologies if
I sound too much like a social scientist, but I doubt that any movement is
going to succeed simply by taking the most inclusive, optimistic, and
aggregative of views. Can you sketch out for me even one scenario of how
this revolutionary process is supposed to work? At times it seems that
you are resting all hopes on appealing to public opinion and winning
elections, after which the whole system magically responds to the popular
will. It sounds like a cross between Perot's United We Stand America and
Allende's Unidad Popular, neither of which figure in history as great
successes. Frankly I doubt the hypothetical movement could even win
Congressional representation, given the political culture and structure of
electoral incentives in the United States or anywhere else in the G7, much
less majority power for long enough to undertake irreversible changes.
One plausible scenario, that's all I ask--and from whatever theoretical
(or atheoretical) perspective you like....
Regards,
--AKW
===============================================================================
Adam K. Webb
Department of Politics
Princeton University
Princeton NJ 08544 USA
609-258-9028
http://www.princeton.edu/~akwebb