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Speed slower above 40 gigabytes of city tales. My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big row as man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend. My friends still laughing at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B. But with LinkedIn, you'll be able to reach people who do. Get a $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com/results to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com/results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn. The place to be. To be. Welcome to the new books network. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of new books network. This is Morteza Haggis. I'm your host from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm here with Professor Jack Goldstone to talk about a great book that he recently published with Oxford University Press. The book is called Revolutions, a very short introduction. It's a second edition of the book. Jack Goldstone is the Professor of Public Policy and Director at the Center for the Study of Social Change Institutions and Policy at George Mason University. Jack, thank you very much for accepting this invitation. Well, I'm glad to be here. Revolution, a very short introduction. I think it's a very timely topic. Everybody is talking about revolution these days, whether in the West or in the East. But before we start talking about the book, can we just very briefly introduce yourself, talk about your field of expertise and your field of expertise? Sure. I am a professional academic. I've never been a government official or policy maker. So I try and call it as I see it. I don't feel compelled to support any particular political line. Now, my field is kind of world history. And my particular interest in world history is revolutions, regime change, the rise of democracies. And I've been writing about revolutions for pretty much my whole career. My first book was a reader of articles about revolution by other great writers. Unfortunately, I've been able to contribute some of my own and build a reputation in the field as well. I've been studying revolutions really across different locations and different time periods since I got my PhD in 1981, so over 40 years. It's been a long time. And it rightly makes you an expert in this area. This is the second edition of the book. The first edition came out in 2013. Can you tell us what has changed, what have you added to the book in this new edition? Sure. When the book came out, there was a revived interest in revolutions. In large part due to the turmoil in the Arab world. People were trying to assess what was going on. Are these revolutions? How are they going to turn out? Are there going to be more? And it was still unclear. But I agreed with the publisher. We needed to put something out there for the demand for courses and students and general readers. But in the last 10 years, we've been able to see what developed across the Middle East, unfortunately, not as good as people hoped. But we've also seen many more revolutions and revolutionary uprisings. Armenia, the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, in just the last month, the uprising in Pakistan before that in Sudan. So when I wrote this edition, it was with an awareness that revolutions were still happening. Indeed, happening around the world in large numbers. I added material on uprisings in Africa, which had become more common in the last 10 years. And revised and kind of updated everything from the sections on the post-communist revolutions in eastern Europe to the Arab Spring. And I'm also updated a little bit on the theory of revolutions because it's now become clear that the violent revolutions that dominated history in the past are less common. Doesn't mean they're fewer revolutions. It means the style of revolution has changed. And that non-violent revolutions have now become more common and indeed seem to be more effective. So this edition really registers what we see about revolution in the long run, being able to now look back on the quarter century of this 21st century. And by the way, when you say that the revolutions have become less violent these days, does it have to do anything with geography depending on where that revolution takes place or is it in general? No, it's not in general. What it has to do with really is changes in the age structure of society. Now that may sound, what does that have to do with anything? But it turns out that populations that have large numbers of young people, somewhere like half the population is under 25, are more prone to be ideologically extreme and to have more violence, whereas populations that are older, that is average age over 35, have a lot more people who have families, they have mortgages, they have jobs, they're willing to participate in peaceful marches, but they're not as willing to try and take up arms against the government. So whether it's in Iran or Armenia or Thailand, these are surprisingly now all much more mature societies than they were 20, 30 years ago. And mature societies, whether Belarus, Kazakhstan, they still are capable of having mass movements for change, but they are really overwhelmingly better organized, non-violent rather than guerrilla warfare. Now, let me also add, sorry to go on, but I think it's important, where we still see very young societies in the Middle East, Syria, Yemen, there we do get kind of violent civil wars. So younger societies do have that. Libya is something of an exception. Libya, we did not expect to have as violent as civil war, I think that's partly because of the way NATO kind of interfered by arming and supporting one faction, but then withdrawing when multiple factions presented themselves, so kind of the outside powers in Libya fomented a mess. But in Tunisia, which is I think the most age mature society in the Arab world, you had a really peaceful and thorough revolution overthrowing Ben Ali. Now, the outcome, you know, 20 years later is not what people hoped for, but it's certainly the kind of revolution that we're seeing as more typical in countries that have gotten to low fertility, older average age and therefore a different style of revolutionary mobilization. I think we'll pick up on some of the points you've raised, lots of great points, I kind of jumped ahead. Sorry, let's start with a, as you rightly mentioned, there was maybe 10 years ago, a lot of discussion even today. How to categorize these movements? Is it an uprising? Is it a social movement? Is it urban uprising or revolution? And even in my country, what happened to years ago, there is still discussion about it as if it constitutes stage to a revolution or simply a civil uprising. But what is a revolution? What constitutes a revolution? How can we distinguish it from similar forms of protests? Well, the nature of revolution has been changing over history. So it's impossible to simply say a revolution is X. I like to say revolution is a category. It's a genus and in it are many different species and the species themselves are evolving over time. So the ancient Greeks recognized a revolution as a change, forcible change in the kind of regime. So if democratic movement overthrew a tyranny, that was a revolution. If oligarchs displaced a democratic regime, that was a revolution. And the Greeks saw these changes from one kind of government to another, from democracy, to oligarchy, to tyranny as part of a natural order of political competition. And it was kind of like a cycle. Different types would reappear and that's how the Greek word stasis eventually transferred into Latin as revolution. But it's no accident that these terms democracy, tyranny, oligarchy are all Greek words because they were the first political theorists Plato and Aristotle to systematically look at these changes in regime and label them revolution. Thucydides told the story of many revolutions in the greater Greek world. So in that sense, a changing regime is a common element. But when the French revolution occurred, they were in the grip of a set of philosophers who argued that history was about to change. And that instead of being a cycle, this French revolution was the dawn of a new age, a citizen age in which the old concept of having aristocrats, having kings, would be pushed aside and people would become equal citizens. Now democratic regimes in ancient Greece treated people as citizens, but they were also slave societies. So it was a limited idea of citizenship. The French Revolution had this idea of the natural rights of man and citizen, which they borrowed in a sense from the American Revolution processing of English rights. But the French kind of raised it to a high abstract idea. And after the French Revolution, Karl Marx felt that the hallmark of revolution was a historic change, driven by changes in the underlying mode of production. And so from the French Revolution to Karl Marx and communism, we see the idea of revolution becoming much more than just a change of regime, rather a transformation of the whole type of society. Now for a while, that image became, yes, that's what a revolution is all about. It's this massive transformation. And so there were only a handful of cases in history that really satisfied that. The French Revolution, the Russian Communist Revolution, the Chinese Communist Revolution, those were kind of classic cases. And then people looked around and said, well, the Cuban Revolution was a pretty major change too. It was a military effort to create communism. And maybe we should throw in the Vietnamese Revolution. And actually the Mexican Civil War and Revolution, although a messy 10 year struggle, did result in a change from a kind of elected dictatorship under Porfirio Villas to a populist one party state. So cases were added, but always with this idea that the French Revolution represented, that's what a real revolution looks like. The body is hanging from lampposts, civil wars in the provinces, armies of conquest. These were really a big deal. But that actually meant overlooking some other historically important events. What about the Haitian Revolution, which was the first anti-slavery revolution in the New World? What about the Netherlands revolution against Spain? The Netherlands revolution against Spain. Some people said, oh, that was an old fashioned religious type revolution, protestants against Catholics. We don't have religious revolutions anymore. After the French Revolution, they're all secular. Well, so it was said until the Iranian Islamic Republic came along, and we had another religious revolution. So the reality of both history and the present world is that revolutions have broken out of this framework that was limited by the prominence of the French Revolution. And for a while, people were debating, can you have a nonviolent revolution or must revolutions be violent by their very nature? Well, communist regimes collapsed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the face of huge mobilizations of people in the street. And scholars had to look at that and say, is that a revolution or is that not? They debated for a long time. But the more it was studied, the more it was clear that communist regimes didn't go down willingly. They were overthrown by a combination of oppositional elites and popular action, just like other revolutions. And so, as I say, events forced scholars to say, we need to rethink this narrow idea. And today, in my book, and as I talk to most scholars of revolution, they're moving toward a broader definition in which a revolution is any mass mobilized effort to change the character of the political regime. So this might be going from democracy to dictatorship, dictatorship to democracy, from a one party state to a military regime. But the common elements are mass mobilization. So it's not just a military coup and a change in the nature of government. But that also includes attempted revolutions. So it's now possible to ask, when is a revolution successful? Whereas, you know, if revolutions were like the French Revolution, they're successful by definition. Otherwise, they don't count. But now we say that's not helpful. We want to know what are the conditions under which revolutions begin? When do they succeed in changing the government? When are they successful in installing the lasting new regime? Is it better if they're violent or nonviolent, under what conditions is violence arise? And now we have, I think, a much better appreciation that revolutions kind of evolve dynamically. They're influenced by what happened in the past, and they're influenced by the ideas of leaders and what they want to accomplish. So long answer, it's complicated. The definition of a revolution now is fairly broad and encompasses many different kinds of events. Anti-colonial, communist, nationalist, and even attempted changes in regime. 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Of course, they know how to kind of relieve the tension, but at the same time, keep the structures of power the way it's operating. And there was this concept of stable equilibrium. I think before we started recording this interview, I did mention that my friends and I sometimes get together and talk and we would live in the West, of course. And you're keen to have democracy. There is liberal democracy here. You can't compare it with what's happening in other countries around the world, but you can see that democracy is also in crisis. And my friend said, there's never ever a possibility of revolution here. Maybe because people are too much deep politicized. But I guess it's more complicated because you talk about stable equilibrium in the book. So if that equilibrium is upset, that's what maybe instigate a series of changes. But again, you come up again with some interesting factors, five factors. And it helped me better understand even my country, Ron, why things don't happen to ask who these people might expect. So you talk about national economic strain, alienation and opposition among elites, revolution and branding popular and elites, bringing popular and elite grievances together. And also favorable international relations. I know there is a lot in there, but very, very briefly, can you tell us something about these factors that combination of these factors? It's not that complicated. The basic formula for what makes a revolution is that you need an opposition that is united and well led. And you need a government that is under stress and does dumb things. The situation always starts out with the government in the stronger position. Any modern state government is going to have more resources financially, a trained military with superior weapons, and usually some smart administrators and military minds. And so it's usually futile for popular groups to try and overturn the government. Now, is it possible? Yes, we've seen it happen throughout history. But in order for it to happen, you need the government to reveal some weakness, some incompetence, some degree of frankly shortsightedness so that the government does things that make itself illegitimate, not just in the eyes of the population, which may be suffering for a long time. But if the government does things that actually divide the elite that lead some of the military or civil administrative leaders to say, this ruler or this government, they are no longer leading this country where we want to go. The communism only collapsed when the leaders of communist societies felt that we've fallen so far behind the West and this society has become so unpleasant, frankly, to live in even for elites. We need to do something to clear the air. And so, Mikhail Gorbachev started to kind of disassemble the power of the communist party, inviting people to protest and demand change. And this is often the case, revolutions may start when elites want change, and they encourage the population to demand change as well. And then it gets out of control, changes go further than they expect. It may be that a overconfident leader calls an election and that is stunned to find that they lose or that they have to intervene and fix the election in such a blatant way that they lose the confidence of their supporters. It may be that they engage in some military adventure that turns out to be a failure, or they may just mis-manage the economy, rewarding a small group of cronies and paying insufficient attention, even to the elites beyond their narrow circle. And then those elites feel that they're not getting their fair share and turn against the government. But it always takes some division among the elites and a popular base that is broad enough, usually some type of broad coalition of different groups, not just peasants, not just students, not just workers going on strike. But if you have all of them at once and leaders within the elite, then it's possible to persuade the military to stand aside or to divide itself, not to put all of their effort into defending this old, failing, unpopular regime. But that's what you need. And you mentioned the, you mentioned the organized opposition and also leadership, but that's another important part of your book. And that gets, again, I do remember in the past few years, reading what's happening around the world. And people were talking about the role of leadership. Does a revolution, to be successful, does a revolution need? First of all, what is, what are the criteria of a successful leader for a revolution? You talk about visionary leaders and organizational leaders. And the second part of my question, has there been a successful revolution without a leader? The answer is no. Even though nowadays it's kind of popular for iconoclasts to say, we should have a leaderless revolution because it'll be harder for the authorities to stop. If they can't just arrest our leader and throw them in prison, they won't know who to go after and we can keep going. Well, that doesn't really work. If there's no one leader, the authorities, if they're strong, will arrest dozens of people. They'll keep going until they've stopped the movement. What a good leader is able to do, and this is why they're essential, is they're able to build enthusiasm for the revolution among a number of different groups. They're able to paint a story in which the people are heroes. The government is the villain, and they encourage people to see this is their story that they can make come true. Now, in a sense, in the United States today, Donald Trump is a revolutionary, in a sense, because he also is encouraging people to say, we're going to transform this country. Put me in power, and we will change the judiciary, we'll change the laws. We'll make it a better country. Now, you may or may not believe what his plan entails. You may or may not support it, but just historically, Trump's approach is that of a revolutionary leader trying to bring different groups together. Christian Evangelicals, Midwestern white workers, even disaffected minorities who are worried that immigration is additional immigration will undermine their position. He's trying to pull all these groups together, turn them against the establishment, and if he loses the election, he'll probably try an even bigger rally than he had January 6, and again, ask people to change the outcome because he's trained them to see it as unfair. So you have a movement there with a kind of popular leader who's organizing people. If you look at the pivotal role of Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1979 revolution, now problem is leaders aren't all good and they aren't all lasting. So Daniel Ortega was part of a leadership group with his brother and a few others who led the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. And for the first few years of the revolution, they were determined to be good leaders. They even had an election that they said, we're going to make this a fair election, and they lost. And they were out of power for a few years. And everybody said, wow, that's remarkable. You have elected revolutionaries who accepted elections and left. Well, except they didn't leave. They just stepped to the side and then did everything they could to undermine the opposition government. And after the next election, when the Sandinistas got back in power, they started undermining the basis of democracy. And today Daniel Ortega is just as much of a dictator as the one he overthrew. So the story of revolutions is often complicated and long, but leadership to get it going and to make it succeed is essential. But leaders are human beings. They can make mistakes. They can be corrupted by power. And all too often, where they end up is not where they expect it to go. And when we speak about revolutions, we more or less tend to think it's a modern phenomenal or something that started maybe with French Revolution. Yeah, we had peasant revolts in Europe before. But is it by nature and kind of a modern phenomenon? Getting parts of it are so parts of revolution are as old as government. So whenever you have governments that are unjust and they lose the support of their elites, you can have a revolution. I told you the ancient Greeks had them. You had revolutions in the city states of Renaissance Italy, when almost kind of every commercial city had competing commercial elites. And some of the commercial elites would look to get popular support. And so you'd have a popular party and an oligarch party, or you'd have a pro Pope party and a pro Emperor party. And these parties would fight, throw each other out every now and then, you even had religious revolutions. So you had this religious visionary, seven Arola, who came to power in Florence telling people, you know, the leaders of the Florentine government, there are a bunch of corrupt hypocrites who don't care about you. We're going to create a new godly republic and he encouraged people to burn the fancy elaborate furniture of the elites and burn their libraries and create what he called the bonfire of the vanities. That's where that phrase comes from is a Renaissance revolution. But unfortunately, seven Arola got power drunk, became a dictator and he was thrown out himself as often occurs. So revolutions are essentially as old as there are states, you can look back to the Roman Empire was founded in a revolution against the Etruscan kings. That's how Romans set up their first republic. Now, that said, until modern times, there really wasn't an idea of one directional progress. Almost throughout history, people look back to a golden age. That was kind of the myth of history is in the old days, things were always better. Governments are screwing things up. So we're going to overthrow the government and try and go back to a better earlier period. The industrial revolution, the scientific revolution, the discovery of the new world, the creation of the new United States, that started to persuade philosophers that maybe the golden age wasn't in the past. Maybe the golden age would be something created by reason and that you could create a rational framework, not a religious framework or a historical framework or traditional framework, but something new created just out of reasoning that you could put down in a constitution and create a new state. So the idea of a revolution as a turning point in history where everything that went before is traditional and obsolete, superstitious and outmoded and everything that comes after the revolution is something new and creative and creates a new kind of human being, that's modern. So that element, that kind of innovative, world changing idea about revolution, that is modern. Which I guess you do talk about again in the book that the nature of revolution has changed I think after 18th century and they sought to limit the power of king. Yeah, now what's also interesting is if we look at the revolutions of the last 20 years, they generally have more modest goals. They simply want to hold a authoritarian and failing government accountable and replace it with something more like a Western democracy and citizenship rights. So the anti-communist revolutions, the Maidan revolution in Ukraine, the Armenian revolution, the uprising that I think will be seen as a revolution in Bangladesh that occurred a few weeks ago with the people rising up and throwing out Shikasani. Their aspirations are to create a normal government, like the other leading governments of the world, not to create something that the world has never seen. I think the last aspiration for that was in Iran where Ayajel Ahimeini said, I'm going to create something the world has never seen. It will be an Islamic Republic that combines the best elements of Quranic wisdom and the Republican model of popular voting and citizenship. And it was indeed a new thing. You know, before we had theocracies without citizenship, or we had secular pluralist republics, this was the first republic with elected officials combined with religious supervision, something new. So, you know, revolutions can be extremely ambitious, but they can also be less so and most of them recently have had more reasonable or more manageable aims. And last few chapters of your book, you talk, so you have the discussions of what constitutes a revolution, you give us a bit of a history, causes of a revolution. And the last chapter of the book is an analysis of some revolutions, like I said, by categories. I don't know if that's the right to choose. You have communist revolutions, revolutions against dictators, color, revolutions, and Arab revolutions. So, I'm interested in communist revolutions. They definitely didn't produce that kind of democracy of equality of freedom if the people wanted to expect it. Someone had failed, but some of them, not they were not really democratic, but they produce an industrial basis for their country, which produce economic growth. China and so with union was an example. Can you talk about that, please? Sure. You know, I hope if people want to pick up the book, they'll be fascinated by how diverse the experience of revolution is. There are human beings who are always trying to make things better, and they're experimenting with different kinds of change. The communist revolutions were interesting because in a sense, they were not what communist theory expected. That is, when Marx wrote about communism, he thought the most advanced capitalist countries in the world were the places that communist revolution was most likely. Because for Marx, every mode of production had to kind of reach its maximum once it peaked and couldn't go anywhere from there, then the next phase of material production would naturally arise. So it would only be in a country where a great majority of the ordinary people were industrial workers. Marx thought that you would get communism, but he was disappointed. It turned out that once capitalists got scared, they were willing to share profits with workers, and workers were willing to take a bigger paycheck rather than join the Communist Party. So efforts to create communism in Britain, France, Germany, Italy failed because they couldn't promise workers a better life when workers were getting raises and, you know, Otto von Bismarck said, give the workers health care, give them something to make them so secure that they'll follow the state and not these communists. So where did communism arise? In countries that had huge peasant populations and very small numbers of workers. Now, in Russia, Imperial Russia was this huge sprawling territory, very underdeveloped, the weakest economy in all of Europe. They were so far behind that they got their butts kicked in the Crimean War by France and Britain. I mean, it was amazing. France and Britain using railroads and modern weapons could project their military power. Thousands of kilometers into the Crimean Peninsula and beat the Russians who were right there. So it was really a staggering defeat for Russia. And Russia, you know, said we're going to have some reforms. We're going to create our own industrial centers outside Moscow and St. Petersburg, and we're going to start opening the mines and the urals to produce iron that we can turn into a steel. And so the Tsarist regime tried to start change, but it was a slow process. 80% of the population remained peasants under control of landlords. Now, when the Marxist theory started to penetrate the Russian intellectuals, they had to think about this for a minute. They thought, you know, we really want to get rid of this Tsarist regime. And Marx gives us a blueprint for revolution. But you know, what are we going to do? Well, we can mobilize the workers in Petersburg and Moscow and create this revolution. But we've got all these peasants that we have to bring along. And so Vladimir Lenin in his brilliance said, we're going to, you know, ride this slogan of peace, land, and bread. We're going to give better wages to the workers. We're going to give land to the peasants. And we're going to give peace instead of this World War one debacle that we're in. Once in power, the Russians still face the problem. Okay, we're communists. Now we've taken control of the country, but it's still a very poor and underdeveloped country. What do we do? Well, in the course of winning the Civil War, they have built this powerful Red Army, manned mainly by industrial workers. And they said, you know, the peasants, they're not really our people. So we're going to go beat them up, get as much grain as we can out of them, sell that to get modern machinery and build up our industry. And so it was a literal trade off of blood for growth. That is the communist regime under Stalin, starved millions of peasants, mainly in the Ukraine, by taking their animals and their grain and using the revenues from selling those resources, largely to Western Europe, or those resources in the building railroads and factories so that when World War II came around, they were in better position to compete. So there are situations where even though you have to say, God, there was a horrible, costly disaster for the people. The government did succeed in building up a more modern industrial base. China didn't even have a strong worker support, so they tried to build up the economy from the countryside. And that was a total disaster. I mean, Chinese communism left China so poor that in 1980, a couple of years after Mao died, the entire gross domestic product of the billion people in China was a little less than that of the Netherlands. That's how bad it was. But the pragmatic successors of Mao and the CCP, they said, we have to learn from the West. We're going to invite Western investment. We're going to encourage local communist party officials to encourage entrepreneurship, tell townships, to create businesses. Any way you can make money and products will reward you. And so China has become a great success story out of what looked like a failure. Cuba not so much. Cuba was actually already one of the more prosperous Latin American societies before Castro took over. And unfortunately, Cuban communism, although it increased the level of education and health care, basically did nothing for Cuba's industry. And Cuba's economy has now fallen behind the others in Latin America, from which it fell ahead, from which it previously hadn't been ahead. If you keep a scorecard and you say, what's the good revolutions they've done and what's the bad that they've done? It's very diverse. Some revolutions that were brutal and bloody and horrible produced modern superpowers in the Soviet Union and China, others created stagnant economies, but at least they were more equal. And people had some better basic education and health care. Cuba fits into that model. Other cases, revolutions delivered very little change at all and kind of a circle went around. So Tunisia escaped one dictator. They now have another Nicaragua escaped one dictator. They now have another. So it's very hard to say that revolutions produce these outcomes, just like the very nature of revolution. It's the variety and the humanity and the flaws and the interaction of human ambition and reality that gives a whole variety of different outcomes. I'm also interested to know more about color revolutions. And one question that I have is, is it more or less a European phenomenon? Do you see it's a peaceful revolution? Do you see, for example, color pollution happening in more authoritative governments? Or do you think it's more or less, you know, a European phenomenon that happens in them? More or less a liberal democracy with some kind of working democracy? Well, just as revolutions started in ancient Greece and Rome and the Renaissance, you could say that revolutions have been a European phenomenon to spread around the world. The first color revolutions, you can maybe point to the French Revolution of 1830 as a kind of peaceful urban revolution that was brought about by mass protest. They forced the king to flee and created a constitution. So the French Revolution of 1830 actually looks a lot like some of the anti-communist revolutions in Eastern Europe, but it spread fairly, you know, the model spread. So for example, the Philippines in 1986 had maybe the first color revolution there because the name came about. Why are they color? You know, what's the point of that? The peaceful marches in the Philippines identified themselves as being anti-government by wearing yellow ribbons. And so they called it for some people. This was the yellow ribbon or the yellow revolution. And so color became a mark of peaceful opposition to the government. Then other revolutionaries who tried to copy what the Philippines had done adopted their own symbols as colorful ribbons like a pink ribbon in Georgia or a flower or the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia. And so these non-violent revolutions are called color revolutions because the early ones adopted a color as kind of the team symbol for the opposition. But what is most remarkable about them, excuse me, is that they've become more common and more successful in recent years? You do talk about Arab revolution. Well, Arab Spring, let's say. Yeah. As a historian of revolutions, why do you think it failed or was it just a flash in the pan, you know, there was this great, great feeling of liberation and democracy, especially in Egypt. But then the Muslim brothers took over and then the military dictator, why do you think it failed? And then she just reinstated the yeah, some indicators, more or less. The most common outcome of revolutions throughout history has been to zigzag from autocracy to hopeful dreams of a republic only to fall back into an authoritarian regime. And the reason for that is it's very hard to build and sustain a democracy. Most revolutionaries have not been able to do it because in order to create a democracy, you have to get the vast majority of citizens to accept the legitimacy of a new set of institutions and turn over their fate to the vote of their fellow citizens. Now, that's not easy if people don't trust their fellow citizens. And if they don't have any experience with democracy, there's no reason they should. Or if you have leaders who say, this is an opportunity for me or things aren't going well, I think we should give up on this idea. We need to get a strong government that can really force people to do things than democracy fades. So it's very difficult. I think the United States, they could have made George Washington a king. And if he'd been ambitious and wanted to be, then the American Revolution couldn't, might have not turned out like that. I mean, George Washington was one of these exceptional characters in history who really believed in this idea, and gotten from the Romans, that you can have a strong state with citizens and without kings. The Romans had aristocratic government, but the leaders were what they called consuls who changed power every few years. So the idea that what's permanent is a republic with elected leaders and a ruler who changed, who has changed frequently. That kind of appealing, oh, we're going to rebuild this classical idea and make a republic work. The American elites bought into that and sure enough made it happen. But it was a near thing. It required remarkable leadership and sacrifice by George Washington. I say the same thing for the Philippines. If Corazon Aquino had not been willing to step aside and let someone else take power in an election, she could have become a successor to the Filipino leader Marcos and could have been herself reelected and become a long term leader. Similarly, Mandela in South Africa was willing to see, he could have become a leader for life. He was the most popular person in the country, but he said, no, I want to see citizens guide their own destiny and he stepped aside. But for a revolution to create a stable democracy, again, I think it takes an exceptional leader who can bring people kind of to the edge of the river Jordan and not cross himself or herself and say, you continue without me and build this republic. It's a remarkable thing. And you can't expect most revolutions to achieve it. Now, what happened in the Arab Spring? Well, different story in different places. Tunisia probably had the best opportunity to create a democracy because they had the most educated elite and the kind of broadest support that lawyers, teachers, unions, a variety of professionals who understood and believed in the republic. The problem was the rest of the world didn't give the government the economic support they needed. And so the disruption of the Tunisian revolution and the inability to rebuild the economy and make it effective led to people getting poorer and poorer while different factions fought to see who would take charge. And eventually, the situation was ripe for one person, Said to say, you know, this is not working. I'm going to step in and fix this. But I think it didn't have to be that way. I think there was a there was enough talent in the Tunisian elite that if the economy had been supported, I think they could have developed a constitution that would have last didn't happen. Egypt is a little bit different. In Egypt, you had three groups after the fall of Mubarak that were contending for power. There was the military, which had always been dominant. Mubarak was from the military, NASA was from the military. So the military didn't want to be left out of the new Egypt. In fact, they pushed Mubarak out because they were afraid his son Gamal would marginalize the military. So the military wanted back in against them. You had the Muslim Brotherhood who had been trying to get in for decades. They'd been organizing throughout the country. And then you had a third group, what I call kind of the Westernized intellectuals who had been reading about democracy and traveled in the West and thought that democracy was the way to go. But here's the thing, the military was well organized and had a lot of resources. They owned good chunks of the economy. The Muslim Brotherhood was well organized. They had kind of charitable organizations around the country that could mobilize people. They'd been working to build their support kind of underground for decades. And the Western intellectuals had nobody but themselves who they'd been talking to each other. And so when it came time to mobilize the country for elections, the people who were really able to get support were the Muslim Brotherhood and the military. And then the Western intellectuals who set up 20 different splinter parties thinking they were promoting democracy, they just undermined themselves. And they were left with a very close election between the Brotherhood military. Now the Brotherhood won, but their candidate thought, Okay, I'm elected now I can be the dictator. And he started implementing a host of unpopular religious policies that weren't widely supported. He didn't realize, yeah, I said, look, you weren't elected by a majority. You got a majority of the boats cast, which was barely half the population voting. So you really only got just over a quarter of the people you should reach out, expand your coalition, be generous. But no, he said, we're Muslim Brotherhood. We've been out in the wilderness waiting to take power for decades. Now we're going to implement our plan whether you like it or not. People didn't like it. Military saw an opportunity. They rallied the population against the Brotherhood leadership. And the people demonstrated against it. And then the military staged a coup knowing that they got popular support. So that's kind of an easy story to explain. There weren't any Democrats who had laid the groundwork for a democratic society. What you said about Egypt is very true. And at the same time, very sad as well. There's, I guess, in most revolutions, there's always that small group of people who know democracy is the way to go. But unfortunately, they don't have the resources. And unfortunately, they're not good at mobilizing or organizing to be able to, you know, shore up enough support. That's, I don't know, the tyranny of history or whatever it is. And the funny thing is, there is this classic movie "Mary Widow." You might know of the movie by Ernest Lubitsch, my favorite director. Yeah, the movie is 1930s, very, very old. And there's this king. And the whole idea is that there is this really, really rich widow who has like 70% of the country's economy is about to get married and move out. And the king is worried because the country will collapse. When his message just comes to him and he says, there's news of a revolution or some, you know, rebellion from eastern shepherds. It's all the imaginary society. And it says, oh, they intellectually just talk, forget about them. That's not my worry. So yeah, just one final question. It's, it's a question about the future. I know that historians like to talk about the past more, but any past is easier to know for sure. Yeah, that's right. So in the West, there are lots of challenges in the West, especially nowadays, we have the rise of more right being some kind of cases, even some fascist parties. But you have a lot of economic grievances. There is talk about immigration. There is conspiratorial theories. That's just a great replacement. They are flying off Europe. There are lots of problems anyway. I personally, to me, when our revolution is not something that I would associate with Europe these days, at least. But do you think as a historian, historically speaking, how do you see the future of Europe? Let's say I see the future of Europe and the United States as fairly uncertain. Europe and the United States have had dangerous periods in the past where democracy was in trouble. In the 1930s, curtain fell on democracy all across continental Europe. And if not for the efforts of Britain and the United States, democracy in Europe would have ended. The United States had a civil war that if it had gone differently, could have been the end of democracy here. Now, the big mistake that revolutionaries, politicians, and even ordinary people make is they somehow think democracy, because it seems preferable to dictatorship, is somehow naturally going to win out. So we don't have to do anything to make it happen. It's just a natural order of things. But that's not true. People forget, but a successful prosperous dictatorship is generally preferred to a democracy. It's a lot less work. Democracy, you have to stay informed, talk to your neighbors, participate in parties and rallies and get out the vote. It can be a full-time occupation for lots of people. It's very demanding. Now, it's rewarding, but you can't assume that democracy will manage by itself. The essence of democracies it requires constant effort, constant organization, voting doesn't come easily. We still can't get voting up above 50, 60% of the population in most cases. So it's a lot of work to keep a democracy going, but people kind of forget that. They start to relax and they say, "Oh, we can pursue our special projects. We can focus on building up minorities, or we can focus on making corporations more efficient." And they kind of forget that actually, if democracy isn't helping the vast majority of the population achieve the life they want, it can easily be cast aside. So there are a lot of people who don't see things going the way they want, whether it's Christians in the United States who are worried that the country is becoming less revearing toward their version of Christianity, or people who live in rural areas who feel all the money is going to the big cities, or whether it's people who are worried about immigration. These are people who are upset by the changes they see in the world, globalization, diversity, women's rights. All of these are big changes. And economically, a lot of these changes are not helpful. Men who are accustomed to making a good income and being breadwinner for a family now find that they're struggling to support their family. They need their wives to work, or their wives make more money than they do. They may find that their neighborhood now has people from Haiti or Venezuela. They may find that their kids are having a harder time getting into the state flagship university because students from China and India are starting to take university places. I think it's fair to say that whether it's in Europe or the United States, leaders have kind of looked at overall GDP and said, well, as long as the economy is growing, we're okay. Diversification is good. Globalization is good. The free market is good. And they haven't said, but are we really taking care of the majority of our countrymen? And the answer is no. Whether you get the yellow vests protesting in France or East Germans voting for the AFD because they feel West Germany is not giving them the respect and support they need. Even if people are economically getting better off, if they can afford a bigger TV or they can get a used car, if they feel that they don't have their dignity and respect, if they don't feel that their kids have every opportunity to move ahead, they'll resent the elite. They'll resent the government. And that's what we're finding. Now, could that lead to revolutions? You might say, well, it's absurd to think of revolutions in modern industrial democracies. It's not. I mean, Germany was a modern industrial democracy in the 30s. But what happened is in the face of traumatic events that undermine trust in government, people are willing to give up. So whether it was the great inflation in Germany, the effect of World War I in Italy, those opened the way to the fascist and Nazi parties. They didn't have to get a majority. Remember, they only had to get 30 or 40% support and the rest of society was willing to go along to their sorrow. Now, in the United States, we had the Great Recession, which undermined a lot of homeowners. We had the Great Pandemic. And these two traumas have undermined people's trust in government. They're not certain the government can meet their needs or take care anymore. So someone like Donald Trump says, oh, government elites, we have to crash it all and change it. Imagine if instead of 5,000 Trump supporters on January 6, there had been 20,000 Trump supporters show up in Washington. And they took control of the capital, say, for 24 or 48 hours. And that gave time for similar-minded people to attack the statehouse in Arizona or the governor's mansion in Michigan. Well, then there's a national crisis. And President Trump may call out the army to restore peace, declare martial law, and order Congress to take over and put in the new elector groups that he had standing by and have him reelected because the emergency demanded action. So we could have had a revolutionary coup, basically a mass mobilization to overthrow the democratic election and install a new government could have happened here. I think it was a near thing. And it could happen, God forbid, in 2024, because Trump is already telling his people, don't believe it. If we lose, it can only be by fraud. And I want you to fight for me. So I'm very worried that after 2020, what happened after January 6, you should have had the entire political elite of America say, this was a near revolution. Our democracy is at risk. We need to do everything to keep Donald Trump away from power and bring ourselves together. And that's the opposite of what happened. The Republican Party decided that they needed to get back in power, that Donald Trump was still their best ticket to do so, and that they were willing to do or say anything to support Trump, because being out of power, even in a democracy, was worse for them than being in power in a less democratic government. And that's a terrible thing in this country. But, you know, historically, most democracies have only lasted a few hundred years. The Roman Republic, the Athenian Republic, the Florentine Republic, they didn't have an unlimited lease on life, because the forces seeking to install authoritarian government are always lurking, and they're always strong, and democracy has to be fought for. I think that's why the world continues to have revolutions, because authoritarians give rise to anti-authoritarian revolutionary movements, but we haven't gotten rid of the authoritarians, they keep coming back, because it's so hard to make democracy work. So that's my future for you. I see a future in which people have to fight for democracy. If they don't, authoritarian government comes back, like it did in Russia. And once authoritarian government comes back, if you want democracy, you have to fight for it again. So, I do not see revolutions ending anytime soon. I was actually hoping to aim on a positive note, but that was a very, let's say, alarming warning to people. But for all the right reasons, and I guess, as you mentioned, democracy comes at a price, it needs enlightened, educated, optimistic, closing note. If people are willing to fight for democracy, eventually, they tend to win. But it requires a lot of patience and effort. I've told people, I think in 20 years, Iran, China, and Russia will all be more democratic than they are today. They may not be perfect democracies, but I think in all three countries, the authoritarian regimes are running out of steam. The economies are slowing down. The leaders are getting more isolated. There's no clear succession to keep things going. Those are good conditions for a democratic opposition to pursue a peaceful revolution. So, I think, be patient. I hope I live to see it, but I think there's a good chance. Thank you. Let's end on that positive note. Thank you very much, Professor Jack Goldstone. The book we just discussed was Revolution. It's a very short introduction. I do strongly recommend our listeners, if you were to pick up the book, read it. It's an easy read. You can read it over a day. There's a lot to think about in the book as well. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you for having me as your guest. I wish all of your listeners success and peace. [Music]
