It's been three months since I wrote for @TheAtlantic that if the USA was not having a revolution, we were definitely living in revolutionary times. (#Kant) Much [sic] has happened since April 6th. Delighted to have published a follow-up essay today: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
2/ When protesters in San Juan & Ferguson marched with a guillotine, folks said “Rebecca, here’s your revolution!” This misstates role of guillotine in Fr Rev (was used in official executions, not cause of most deaths), imagines symbols of past revns = content of new ones 
3/ In one of my favorite texts, _ The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte_, Marx wrote that revolutions "dress up" in the past to delude themselves about own content. Luther as the apostles, the bourgeois Fr Revn as Roman Republic/Empire. marxists.org/archive/marx/w…
But that only works for a while. Eventually, revolutions "draw their poetry from the future." The French Revolution of the 1790s did this as well; revolutionaries "made up their symbols as they went along" (Lynn Hunt, _Politics, Culture, Class in the FR_) theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
5/ As activists + reactionaries both reference history today, I must insist that making and living IN history never follows the tidy before/after or cause/effect structure common (perhaps necessary, at some educational levels) in learning history. Tolstoy and Freud knew this.
6/ What I *do* know from studying revolutions is that dramatic change occurs when different interests, concerns are "soldered" together. So Romney at the #BLM March, @ProjectLincoln, the pro-protesters statement by George W. Bush ("and Laura")--those are gamechangers.
7/ BLM Movement has worked and built for years. Establishment GOP politicians (even many Dems) did not actively support them even after the widely discussed killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, so many more in 2014-2015. But now they do! Both (BLM + anti-Trump GOP) legitimated
8/ I desperately hope the USA achieves #BigStructuralChange through electoral politics. But voter suppression, disenfranchisement, gerrymandering all make that SO difficult
#VoteLikeOurLifeDependsOnIt
washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/0…
#VoteLikeOurLifeDependsOnIt
washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/0…
If this were South Korea or East Germany in the 1980s, these protests would be called "Pro-Democracy." In the USA, racism (especially anti-Black) has so far prevented both real democracy and this way of understanding current crisis nytimes.com/interactive/20…
10/ Racism also makes it difficult to see fundamental problem of ECONOMIC inequality in USA today. I could say more about what revolutions are, how they happen, what they do, but that's for another time. For now, read @RevDrBarber @liztheo @CornelWest nytimes.com/2020/06/19/opi…
