How to Overthrow A Government

1776, The Taliban, and Truck Go Honk

None of you would enjoy Colonial America. None of you would enjoy living under the rule of the Taliban. Lots of you might enjoy partying in Ottawa with the Trucker Protest.

Herein lies the problem.

As I’ve said before, I’m not in favor of overthrowing the government. Of Canada, the U.S., or pretty much anywhere. Paraguay maybe, but that’s an issue for another post. What’s interesting though is that so many people who do seem to want to overthrow the government have a shockingly unrealistic view about what that would actually entail. I’m not even talking about the violence it would require, frankly that would be the least of your worries. Successful revolutions in history have so much build up behind them that, when it actually does come time to shoot, doing so is almost an afterthought. America was always going to break free from British rule, just as Afghanistan was always going to break free from the United States. If the revolution of 1776 had failed militarily there would’ve been another one after that. And then, if that one had failed, another after that. So on and so on until they were successful. You saw this try try again method play out in Afghanistan. The fighting doesn’t really matter. For the dude being shot it matters a lot, granted. But weapons and soldiers are never the heart of a revolution.

The heart of a revolution is culture.

A culture which is actually competent. One that can actually do things.

In the town hall meetings of colonial Concord, Massachusetts, people sat in assigned seats. These seats were voted on by the assembly. Men sat on one side, women on the other, and you were closer or farther from the front based on your socioeconomic status. Wealthy, older farmers and professionals, like doctors and pastors, sat at the front. Poorer, younger men and women sat up in the bleachers. Black people, if there were any, had to stand.

The egalitarian “first come, first serve” public treatment that we are used to would’ve completely foreign to them and the other colonists. You got your literal seat, and your metaphorical seat of power in local politics, based explicitly and unapologetically on how much money and influence you had. Moreover, you had to be the same religion as everybody else in the town, usually Anglican, and every town had one church everybody was expected to attend. Moral codes were strict and rigidly enforced. Corporal punishment was common. People who broke the law could be placed in the pillory, tied to a whipping post (and then, of course, whipped), put on the dunking stool, or be literally tarred and feathered. For worse crimes, one could be killed. And not nicely. Hanging, burning, and crushing people to death were not uncommon. Tell me, does all this sound all that dissimilar from the internal justice system of the Taliban?

It doesn’t.

For all of the liberal hyperventilating about “Y’all Qaeda” and Southern Baptists being militant extremists because they have AR-15s, nothing of the sort exists. “Y’all Qaeda”, Baptists, Red Necks, Trump supporters… all soft. Weak. There’s nothing whatsoever threatening there. Conservatives are just liberals from 50 years ago who are still on the progressive train like everybody else. They’re just a few cars back. They don’t actually believe in anything. Not enough to care to enforce it anyway. A Trump supporter’s wife will cheat on him and then he’ll just complain about it on Facebook and be a bitter divorcé for the rest of his life. That’s not a culture that has teeth for a revolution. When they start building devices to drown cheating women in a creek, then you can start worrying.

Again, I’m not condoning or promoting any of this. It’s just the facts. There are no extremists in America. At least none that could even possibly pose any sort of a threat to the government. There may be a few groups of psychos here and there, but all they’ll ever accomplish is random acts of terrorism. You know, shooting up a mall or something. Not pleasant, but hardly threatening to the feds. America is a soft country of soft people and our “extremists” are soft as well. At the end of a good night’s protesting, Antifa wants to go back to their apartment and crawl into warm bed. They want to get up the next morning and watch some Netflix. They want to send a couple Snapchats to their latest Tinder conquest before heading back out for a night of waving posters. Similarly, the chief concern of the Truckers in Ottawa appears to be throwing raves. “FREEDOM!!!” they cry while a guitar wails onstage, complete with light show. None of this is serious. It’s LARPing.

The men and women of 1776 would, quite literally, be disgusted. They would want the people at the trucker’s protest hung from gallows. That’s not an exaggeration, they would literally want you executed if you were sitting up all night honking for weeks on end.

The Taliban would too.

Because, here’s the central problem.

What are you going to replace it with???

The answer, from both side of the political aisle, is “Nothing.”

They’ve got nothing. No alternative. No plan. They want to tear down a system that they are, all of them, deeply and profoundly reliant upon. The Antifa kids wouldn’t last one week without capitalism. Just a fact. It sells them all their necessities, provides all their services, gives them all their toys for entertainment. And, truth is, the honkers aren’t any better. Their groceries come from a just-in-time delivery system they don’t understand. Their electricity from a plant they cannot operate. Their water from pipes they cannot fix. Moreover, they don’t even have a different value system from which a counter culture which could provide those things could be built. They’re platform is, “Make things how they were a bit ago!” That’s nothing. And, what little it is, they are not willing to die for, let alone kill for, so what’s the point?

The Taliban had an alternative.

Day 1 after the US pulled out they started setting up courts, police departments, licensing agencies, border security, fire departments, all of it. Day 1. The colonists of 1776 did exactly the same. The instant they declared independence they had parallel institutions up, ready to go. In both cases this was possible because they had a culture that people actually cared about. A culture they had actually built. The libertarian / anarcho-capitalist dream of a barbarian uprising of “pure freedom” against tyranny is just that. A dream. Same is true for the Antifa anarchists. The American revolution was successful because it was a stricter, more rigid system of government moving in and replacing one that was far away, more permissive, less devout, and less homogeneous. Same same for the revolution of the Taliban. In both cases a people had a culture that was actually competent. They told the society, “Hey, you know that government you hate? We can actually do it better.” And, they weren’t just blowing smoke.

You have to earn your right to be “a people.”

The colonialists saw themselves as “not British” because they weren’t anymore. They’d developed their own thing, become their own, insular, mostly self sustaining group. They had their own morality, their own laws, their own economy, their own everything. Through many long hard years of work and devotion to their communities they had built something durable. YOU, trucker, antifa, by contrast, have done nothing to be independent of the system your entire life. And then you have the audacity to think that you can just waltz in with some signs and raised fists or some honking and have the system reorganize itself around you.

Doesn’t work like that.

You want to actually overthrow the government? You have to be able to provide a replacement government. It’s that simple. And, you can’t.

AR-15s and protests aren’t actually that powerful. Culture is. Values are. Having things you’re willing to actually not have a cellphone or shop at Walmart over. You’re against mandates? Did you literally shop at every single big box store that required you to wear a mask or get a vaccine? Then shut up. You weren’t willing to even be inconvenienced. Are you against capitalism and “systemic racism?” Oh? But you can’t be bothered to not have the latest iPhone made by slave labor in China because you wouldn’t be as trendy? Then shut up. You’re LARPing.

You want a better world? Build it. Make sacrifices for it. Hate the Taliban all you want but nobody can say they didn’t sacrifice to make the country they wanted. They lived in caves for twenty years. They didn’t use cell phones so that they couldn’t be triangulated. They insisted on their followers following strict moral and religious codes, and they were willing to enforce those codes. Physically. With violence if required. They created a parallel world with parallel institutions and were able to give people the option of a different deal. They had their own parallel underground economy, their own private postal service, their own religious court system for dealing out justice the official U.S. government did not recognize…

And the colonists did the same. They did it over a period of decades and decades. Becoming always tighter knit, stronger, more self sufficient, more devout, more devoted to their cause.

The truth is that people that actually overthrow governments are pretty darn intense. Way more so that you or I will probably ever be comfortable being. The actual men and women of 1776 would see most all of us as slothful degenerates. Seriously. They would think you were a harlot needing an actual beating because you wear a bikini or a wastrel who needed to be literally tarred and feathered because you sometimes get drunk.

So… quit LARPing.

Build the culture you want to see inherit the earth and maybe, just maybe, in forty or fifty years, it will.