by Gordon M. Hahn
The American infatuation with color revolutionism has, in the words of Obama’s high priest ‘Reverend’ Wright, ‘come home to roost.’ I will not ask God or anyone to “damn America,” as Wright did. Rather, I will point out that the U.S. is not so exceptional so as to render the ‘demonstration effect’ of color revolutions null and void. Political scientists have been fond in recent decades of discussing the robustness of the demonstration effect as concerns the prospective spread of democracy across the former USSR by way of illegal overthrow of authoritarian regimes. Many of these regimes have been relatively benign as authoritarianism usually goes. Nevertheless, we Americans have been eager to see revolution break out across the former communist world. With George Soros’s erstwhile assistance, the color revolution’s effect is now being demonstrated to Americans both on the right but especially on the left.
There is nothing wrong with peaceful revolution from below when pro-democratic movements can seize power from their authoritarian oppressors without violence. In some cases, even a violent revolution from below can be better than the authoritarian and even more so – to the extent possible – any totalitarian status quo, since the violence being waged against the population in a non-democracy is very likely to exceed that carried out by democratic revolutionaries in seizing power. In this sense, the attempt by a small portion of ‘pro-Trump’ demonstrators to seize the Capitol building in Washington D.C. on 6 January 2021 was not appropriate. America remains at this moment a democracy, if a rapidly decaying one. The perpetrators of the Capitol storm should be prosecuted no less than the pro-DP BLM and Antifa demonstrators, who have been leveling violence against conservatives, Republicans, and white people for over a year now.
In the case of the Washington revolt, however, it must be noted that the demonstrators as a whole were no less and perhaps a great deal more pro-democracy oriented rather than Trump oriented, and their legitimate protest was hijacked or at least parlayed by radicals into violent protest. The pattern is very similar to that of other color revolutions in at least four ways.
First, the Washington demonstration and Capitol revolt were, like color revolutions, responses to repression. The Obama Administration saw the deployment of the state against the opposition in ways unprecedented in U.S. history. Opposition journalists were spied on. Under so-called ‘Russiagate’, opposition politicians and political operatives were illegally arrested and imprisoned (Carter Page, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone) on trumped up charges or charges leveled for political purposes. President Donald Trump was impeached on false pretenses. Taxpayers’ money was used to fund Democratic Party causes and political allies to the exclusion of the Republican opposition and conservative causes. Media censorship of Republicans and conservatives has been rife, especially in the runup to the 2020 election. Additionally, for decades the DP has backed reverse discrimination against whites, males, and the religious; trends which peaked under Obama (all detailed and sourced in https://gordonhahn.com/2020/12/29/the-authoritarianization-putinization-of-america-parts-1-and-2-complete/). More recently, the DP has essentially called Antifa and BLM thugs on to the streets where they have killed police officers and beaten and harassed whites and Christians. The Governor of New York and the Mayor of New York City have discriminated against the religious, particularly Jews, in implementing anti-COVID policy. In brief, DP repression under the Obama administration at the federal level and DP regimes in some states and DP-supported BLM and Antifa violence more recently equals the color revolutions’ regime repressions and violence.
Second, color revolutions like the nascent one in Washington have been focused on regime and elite corruption. In the U.S. case, demonstrators were responding to the evidence of widespread corruption at the top of the DP in recent years, beginning with Hillary Clinton and the William Clinton Foundation graft connected with the Uranium One deal with RosAtom of “Putin’s Russia” and the Biden family’s use of incoming president Joseph Biden’s vice presidency to close multi-billion dollar business deals with corrupt, criminalized elements in Ukraine, Russia, and China (all detailed in https://gordonhahn.com/2020/12/29/the-authoritarianization-putinization-of-america-parts-1-and-2-complete/). All of this was censored by the majority of U.S. media, which is under DP control.
Third, color revolutions typically have been sparked by election fraud and falsification. For this factor as well, the nascent American color revolution is no different, given the massive pro-DP fraud carried out at the expense of President Trump and the Republicans in the 2020 election (Ibid).
The fourth and final similarity between the color revolutions abroad and America’s nascent one is that a peaceful pro-democracy demonstration was hijacked by nationalist radicals and channeled into violence, as on the Maidan in winter 2013-2014 in Kiev, Ukraine. But in the case of the Washington revolt, there was no thoughtout plan or strategy by the demonstrators or the radicals to seize power and institute a revolutionary overturn of America’s political, economic and social systems. Such a plan, however, is evident on the part of Antifa and BLM – self-avowed anarchists and racist communists, respectively – and can be readily seen on their websites, social media, publications, and interviews.
In sum, America’s democracy is now endangered by a willingness of one political party, the DP, to wield proxy violence against opponents, and another political party – or at least its present leader, Donald Trump – to risk an outbreak of violence in order to resolve political conflicts. This a demonstration of the end of democratic republicanism, not one for democratic republicanism.
But it gets worse. Americans will not only be unable to keep their republic under such circumstances, but they will become decreasingly prosperous. Political scientists have found three differences between prosperous and non-prosperous nations. The first lies in how laws are written. Countries where elites write laws for others, make exceptions for themselves, and can violate their own laws with impunity developing poorly. We now see the DP making laws for the people to obey, while they violate them with impunity. DP, BLM, and Antifa can engage in violence, violate election law, and COVID restructions with impunity, Republicans and conservatives will be punished according and perhaps even beyond the strictures of the law if they do so.
Second is how organizations are generated. In states where parties and companies are made, controlled, and identified with single personalities, development lags. Since the 1990s, the DP has been transformed into an instrument for the enrichment and impunity of the Clinton, Obama, and Biden families among others. The Republican Party was also plagued by quasi-nepotism until Trump broke the Bush machine’s back.
Third, is the way in which the power of coercion is legalized and managed. In prosperous countries, there is common, civilian control over the various organs or bodies of coercion (secret services, military, and law enforcement). In non-prosperous countries, elites divvy up various organs of coercion amongst themselves. One party might get the FBI, another – the military. Since the Obama administration, the DP has ‘privatized’ much of the CIA, FBI and Justice Department and made inroads into the largely Republican-oriented military. In this way, different elite factions (political parties, for example) can wield, say, FISA warrants and false indictments against political enemies as occurred in the DP-conjured ‘Russiagate.’
Overall, the political upshot of the Capitol Maidan will include the successive whittling away of multiparty republicanism, the bill of rights, the rule of law, and middle class-based capitalist prosperity.
The more immediate political consequences of Democrats’ repressiveness, corruption, election fraud, abandonment of the rule of law, personalization of their party, and privatization of the coercive organs in the next few months and years in all likelihood will look like the following. Assuming the Biden-Harris regime is installed and the DP victory in the two Senate races in Georgia stands, the DemParty regime will have a majority in the Senate by virtue of VP Harris’s tie-breaking vote. The storming of the capitol by some, who were apparently Trump supporters, will make it impossible for Republicans to challenge the outcome of the 2020 election. No matter how strong the case proving the massive DP fraud in the election, that fraud will stand. Therefore, the DP will be able to institutionalize nationwide the unfair and unfree electoral system they installed in the six swing states. It also will be the pretext for other authoritarian measures, in particular against Trump and all Republicans and other conservatives and a deepening of the authoritarian trends initiated under Obama. Trump will be accused of inciting the storming of the capitol in an attempted coup (which the DP’s Russiagate and election fraud have been in reality). There may be an attempt to arrest Trump on charges of inciting an insurrection. That false charge could be extended to many others. There may very well be an attempt to claim that Russia’s Putin was behind the storming of the Capitol as ‘payback’ for Ukraine, Georgia, and the like.
It will become virtually impossible, whether Trump is free or not, to oppose DP decrees and legislation. The Republican Party could split, with a large portion of pro-Trump and other anti-establishment elements leaving the GOP. The media will come under increasing DP-state control. In sum, a revolution from above will transform the US political system into de facto single-party rule and ultimately a soft authoritarian form of rule.
The inability of anti-DP forces to challenge America’s new authoritarianism could lead quickly to the formation of radical rightist subgroups that will organize violence against the Obama-Clinton-Biden regime. Civil war is now even more of a distinct possibility than it was when I first began warning about such an outcome.
In foreign affairs, the US will intensify its ‘new cold war’ with Russia. Along with China’s rise and the tightening Sino-Russian ‘strategic partnership,’ this will make a third world war more likely. While pushing for more neo-liberal/Antifa/BLM-style ‘democracy-promotion’ abroad, the DP regime will look the other way and may even encourage repression against conservatives across the West. The tumor of authoritarianism, free from the therapy of reason and freedom, will metastasize killing democracy in the old ‘shining city on the hill.’
Will a new one emerge any time soon? The pursuit may come with secession but will unalterably shift the global balance of power in favor of authoritarian regimes. In that event, any new ‘shining city’ may see itself as less exceptional and be more willing to cooperate with authoritarian regimes for the sake of stability.
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About the Author – Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, http://www.canalyt.com and a Senior Researcher at the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, www.cetisresearch.org. Dr. Hahn is the author of The Russian Dilemma: The West and the Making of Russia’s Security Culture (McFarland, forthcoming in 2021), Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the “New Cold War” (McFarland, 2018), The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media.
Dr. Hahn also has taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and has been a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, and the Hoover Institution.