Revolution, Right or Left?

Kristian Williams

Buttons by artist Ricardo Levin Morales

WE ARE CURRENTLY in the midst of a kind of revolution, though a revolution from the right. The institutions of the administrative state have been hollowed out.(1)

The rule of law, which was always a kind of polite fiction, is now an obscene joke. Two of our three branches of government are only questionably relevant to state action. The institutions of civil society, including the news media and the universities, are being bullied by the national government and in most cases surrender their independence without a fight.

Most of these developments are extremely unpopular, but polling data is either disregarded or denied. Future elections are being undermined through a combination of gerrymandering, voter restrictions, preemptive propaganda, and the threat of armed agents at the polls.

No Going Back: Three Reasons

First, the old order is gone. It is not there to go back to. It has become a cliché of journalistic commentary to say about this or that Trump policy that it will take decades to repair the damage. The damage is certainly real, but the idea that we have decades is fanciful.

Second, a return to the old order would be inadequate for securing a future outside of fascism. Joe Biden campaigned on a return to normalcy, and for four years that is how he governed. He did essentially nothing to bulletproof democracy against an authoritarian takeover.

To a certain degree he was hampered by his own liberal principles: the need to re-assert the Justice Department’s independence led his administration to take an overly cautious approach in prosecuting Trump’s numerous crimes, including the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.(2)

Biden likewise remained committed to an essentially conservative bipartisan consensus, and left in place the repressive apparatus that both parties had spent decades building up.

He made no attempt to disassemble the police state, the surveillance state, or our extralegal torture camp at Guantanamo Bay. He maintained the rate of deportations at Trumpian levels, and responded to the George Floyd protests by increasing police funding.(3)

That brings us to the third reason there is no going back: The status quo ante did not represent a desirable state of affairs. Leaving aside the Biden intermission, let’s look back to Obama — eight years of uninterrupted Democratic Party rule, which began with messianic enthusiasm and ended with the sad-trombone defeat of Hillary Clinton.

During those eight years, the U.S. government deported three million people.(4) Economic inequality reached its highest level since 1928.(5)

At the end of Obama’s second term, 2.2 million people were incarcerated, 45 million lived below the poverty line, and — despite passage of the Affordable Care Act — 9% of Americans still had no health insurance.6 That is not a circumstance to which we should aspire to return.

Necessary Radicalism

We on the left must instead match the radicalism of our enemies. The multiple crises that Trump has produced create openings that the left can exploit as well as the right.

Those institutions that DOGE irreparably damaged can be not so much rebuilt as replaced with others more democratic and more directed toward the equitable redistribution of resources. The cruelty of the current immigration regime has fueled an appetite for abolishing ICE; with help, it could also lead to a general reconsideration of the idea of borders and, in parallel, put the abolition of the police back on the table.

Trump’s personal corruption and his chaotic economic policies represent a stark betrayal of those people who thought that they were voting for a return to industrial manufacturing or cheaper eggs.

Much of the appeal of Trump’s phony populism was that it tapped into real feelings of alienation and real economic hardship. The left needs to speak to those same problems — not only the economic issues, but the existential ones, the questions of meaning, belonging, and purpose. We have to show that we can offer better solutions.

Broadly speaking, I believe we should pursue the twin goals of individual freedom and economic equality, with decisions made by those most affected by them. That means workers controlling workplaces, residents governing neighborhoods, students and teachers co-managing schools.

I have no illusion that my own utopian vision — or anyone’s — can or should dictate future events. What actually comes to pass will inevitably be determined by some combination of experimentation and practical compromise, both in terms of creating the necessary coalition to achieve change on a wide scale, and in finding workable solutions to the problems we face.

For my own part, though I want something along the lines of anarcho-syndicalism, I would fight for socialism, and I would settle for Social Democracy — at least for a while.

Available Revolution

Revolution, I know, is frightening to contemplate. There is no guarantee of good results, and revolutions often lead to dictatorships.

The process itself, even when relatively bloodless, involves much sacrifice. That said, I do not think it can be avoided, and however much we might lament the fact, it will not be bloodless. The civil war is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

The first arc ran from “Unite the Right” to “Stop the Steal,” 2017 – 2021, bracketed by two events which badly misfired, in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Washington, DC, respectively.

In between, much of the fighting took place in Portland, as rightwing goons from around the country repeatedly gathered in the city to battle-test their organizing and their tactics. Some of the combatants were federal officers, who fought with protestors, teargassed whole neighborhoods, and bundled people into unmarked vans — all foreshadowing what was to come.

The apparent quiet of the Biden years, as any student of counterinsurgency could have told you, was illusory. The forces on the right were regrouping, reassessing and planning.

Trump’s second term has thus been more swiftly moving, more forceful, and more effective. Paramilitary incursions into liberal cities have again been a recurring feature, this time mainly Homeland Security rather than Proud Boys.

Liberal democracy is not merely fragile, it is actively failing. And rather than expend our energies trying to save or resuscitate it, we would do better to prepare for what comes next. In the short term — measurable in years — the outlook is extremely bleak.

Ultimately, though, with a bit of forethought, hard work, and courage, we can survive this long midnight and create a better world. But we can only do that by embracing the radicalism that our circumstances demand.

Notes

1. This essay is excerpted from my prepared comments for a panel discussion organized by the Platypus Affiliated Society: “Reform, Revolution, and Resistance.“ Portland State University; Portland, Oregon. April 20, 2026.
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2. Carol D. Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis. “FBI Resisted Opening Probe Into Trump’s Role In Jan. 6 For More Than A Year,“ Washington Post, June 19, 2023. For an exhaustive account, see the book by the same authors: Carol Leoninig and Aaron C. Davis, Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department (New York: Penguin Press, 2025).
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3. Muzaffar Chisti and Kathleen Bush-Joseph, “Comparing the Biden and Trump Deportation Records,“ Migration Policy Institute, June 27, 2024; and Peter Nickeas, “‘The Answer is Not to Defund.’ Here’s What’s in President Biden’s Increased Budget for Policing,” cnn.com, March 31, 2022.
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4. Alex Nowrasteh, “Obama’s Mixed Legacy on Immigration,” cato.org, January 25, 2017.
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5. Michael Dimock, “How America Changed During Barack Obama’s Presidency,” pewresearch.org, January 10, 2017.
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6. Danielle Kaeble and Mary Cowhig, “Correctional Populations in the United States, 2016,” Bureau of Justice Statistics (April 2018), 1; and, “Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2016 [press release],” census.gov, September 12, 2017.
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September-October 2026, ATC 244