Open-Ended Revolutions

I’ve often thought how much our revolutionary tradition and those of other nations resemble free-floating anxiety.

It’s as if the psychic energy released from these events spills out into the collective consciousness and never fully dissipates, often manifesting its presence in peculiar, unexpected ways.   

I was reminded of this reading E.J. Dionne’s recent column, “What Fuel’s Grassroots Rage.”

As Dionne relates, the prevailing view among the left is that this rage is stoked almost entirely by underlying racist sentiment.  Without a doubt, there is some measure of that, reflected in Tom Tancredo’s remarks at a recent Tea Party rally, he says.

But the taproot of this rage runs much deeper within the American psyche, he contends.

Something else is going on in the Tea Party movement, and it has deep roots in our history. Anti-statism, a profound mistrust of power in Washington, dates all the way to the Anti-Federalists who opposed the Constitution because they saw it concentrating too much authority in the central government. At any given time, perhaps 20 to 25 percent of Americans can be counted on to denounce anything Washington does as a threat to “our traditional liberties.

Zhou enlai, once prompted for his thoughts about the French Revolution allegedly said, “It is too early to say.”

Wasn’t Zhou right?  Aren’t all revolution’s essentially open-ended, including ours? And isn’t free-floating anxiety, reflected in the recent and astonishing growth of the Tea Party movement, a common characteristic of them all?