So You Say You Want a Revolution

Well, you know, we'd all love to change the world

I'm not here to talk y'all out of a revolution. I'll lose half my subscribers if I try, and if I’ve learned anything during the last 45 or so years, it’s that I’m a capitalist whether I want to be or not. I’ve never really had that urge, but here I am on Substack anyway. So, no. I don’t want to lose subscribers that way if I can help it.

After all, Substack is as much a capitalist tool as Forbes Magazine is. So I’m stuck (stacked?) between that proverbial rock and that proverbial hard place.

Malcolm Forbes spreading his legs for an unknown visitor from the gilded class on a motorcycle he thinks is cool but isn’t; Image snared without permission from Forbes’ Apartheid Twitter account; fair use claimed because, fuck you, Forbes and Leon Muskovite. “Forbes: Capitalist Tool” was the ad slogan for Forbes for years. Maybe it still is. It’s part of the middle finger corporate America is sending to anyone who wants a revolution.

What prompts the headline of this essay is the intense emotion behind the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Many saw the killing as the first shot fired in the coming revolution against corporate greed.

In fact, a consensus on leftish social media platforms and blogs seems to have come down to something like: “I can’t have sympathy for someone directly responsible for so much suffering.” Some folks feel that the inevitable follow-up is a long overdue revolution.

As someone who lost his mother to the irresponsibility of the corporate healthcare industry back in the 1980s, I understand. But targeting one man, sort of out of the blue, and seeing him shot in the back, makes me feel a little tremulous.¹

It also triggers a larger question for me. What, exactly, would be the impetus of the revolution some on the left suggest this represents? And who, exactly, is the enemy?

The easy answer is that the enemy is the corporate state. The angst over corporate greed has been with us for a long time. Nothing, however, has changed since this old song by Ten Years After:

In this 1971 song, Alvin Lee says, “Tax the rich, feed the poor, till there are no rich no more…I’d love to change the world, but I don’t know what to do. So I leave it up to you…”

Instead of taxing the rich, instead of revolution and change, we got Ronald Reagan.

The Beatles, too, sang of revolution long ago:

A similar message exists within the Beatles’ lyrics as the Ten Years After song: “We’d all love to change the world.”

But John Lennon goes on to say, “But when you talk about destruction…Don't you know that you can count me out.” The cynic in me says that line was inspired by a ton of money flowing in from the Beatles’ hit songs, but my pacifist side simply agrees.

More profound was this next line: “You say you got a real solution…Well, you know… We'd all love to see the plan.”

And there, my friends, is where we who have railed against corporate thievery for the past 40-plus years have failed. We have no plan beyond shooting a guy in the back or screeching in our echo chambers. That’s not meant as an insult. I’m a screecher, too.

The question we need to ask is this: If we want a revolution, what is the end game? A Marxist state? A European-style state with yummy things like free healthcare? News flash: Europe is also ruled by corporations. So is the rest of the world through such institutions as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, which hold developing countries or countries that run into fiscal issues hostage with usurious loans that funnel billions of dollars to international financial institutions like Citibank.

Perhaps we want something closer to what China has — a hybrid, state-driven capitalist society with a low tolerance for dissent?

Maybe all we want is for Trump to finally end up in prison where he belongs. Or to blow up Fox News.

Maybe Something else?

In my alternative history novel, Restive Souls (not yet available), corporations never take control of North America, which instead sees its economy governed by something called congregational economics, where the people own everything through churches and where there is no gilded class overseeing the world’s economic activity. It’s basically communism with bishops. It’s a very different world.

Something like that isn’t possible now, but it’s enough to ask the question: What is possible? If we’re to take the economy away from corporations, how do we then deliver it to the people?

There is no plan. That’s a big problem. Even the precise nature of the enemy is fuzzy. Is it really corporations? Or is it the 78 million voters who chose a demented old man full of anger and spite and who is tethered to the world’s richest man, who is also overdue for a comprehensive psychiatric evaluation? These people voted to retain the sadistic, immoral healthcare system that UnitedHealthcare’s CEO represented.

Do we shoot all 78 million of those voters?

The very fact of those 78 million voters, unless you buy one of the various blueanon election conspiracy theories that say they were conjured by things like Elon Musk machines², means that the people we consider the good guys in this fight aren’t even in the majority. We’re just a loud, unhappy, disgusted opposition.

We can argue that millions of people didn’t vote, which therefore means that the election doesn’t represent the will of the people, but that’s an argument that crash lands during takeoff because, although voter apathy is the bedrock of any emerging dictatorship, it also means that a whole hell of a lot of people just don’t give a shit about what matters to the people who voted against Trump.

That, then, lands our broken aircraft of righteousness into the sediment of a revolution with no firm foundation among the general population.

That’s okay, though. The American Revolution didn’t have the support of everyone in its formative years. It didn’t gain majority support until Lord Dunmore’s proclamation that offered freedom to slaves who were willing to join the British.³ This turned many landowners who were neutral in the argument between loyalists and revolutionaries to the revolution’s cause. It can be argued that the Revolutionary War was the first war over slavery. It can also be argued that Thomas Jefferson’s treatment of slaves at Monticello didn’t happen without the support of the vast majority of Americans.

The uncomfortable truth we are up against is that the majority of Americans haven’t changed much since the nation’s founding in their perspectives regarding Blacks and, now, immigrants. Any revolution will run smack dab against this reality.

This doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen. It simply means that we need to consider the full range of possibilities if it does, including the potential for a level of death and mayhem that will be quite unfamiliar to most of us. This country is armed to the teeth. A Revolution will do a lot more than wreck your nightly streaming choices.

Notes

Former Labor Secretary turned activist Robert Reich also has thoughts today on the potential of Civil War:

How Trump could bring on a second civil war

Footnotes

1. I’ll be surprised if there was any intent on the part of the shooter to start a revolution. Most likely, he lost someone dear to him and snapped.

2. Hey. Anything’s possible. Given the breadth and scope of Cambridge Analytica’s 2016 attack on the country, I won’t dismiss anything: Graham-Harrison, Emma, and Carole Cadwalladr. 2018. “Revealed: 50 Million Facebook Profiles Harvested for Cambridge Analytica in Major Data Breach.” The Guardian. The Guardian. March 17, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election.

3. “Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation, 1775 | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.” 2024. Gilderlehrman.org. 2024. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/lord-dunmores-proclamation-1775.