David A. Bell is Lapidus Professor in the Department of History at Princeton. He is the author of Shadows of Revolution: Reflections on France, Past and Present, published by the Oxford University Press in February.

Is America on the brink of a revolution? Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump would like you to think so. “There’s a path to victory for our political revolution,” Sanders said after his narrow loss to Hillary Clinton in Nevada, referring to the political transformation that would allow him to impose curbs on Wall Street, redistribute wealth and provide universal single-payer healthcare. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has taken to playing the Beatles’ “Revolution” at his rallies and victory parties, promising an uprising that will bring down the Washington establishment, cow our foreign adversaries, expel illegal immigrants and, of course, “make America great again.”

Neither Sanders nor Trump is calling for a violent uprising, with armed crowds charging the White House fence. Neither of them wants to erect guillotines on the Mall, or to set up “reeducation camps” along the Potomac (at least, I hope not). Great revolutions like the ones of the past simply don’t happen anymore—and that is probably a good thing. Instead, these candidates are using “revolution” as a metaphor, hoping to conjure up an image of a mass movement so powerful it will allow them to break the power of special interests (the super-rich for Sanders, the “politically correct” establishment for Trump) and enact radical change.


Yet the metaphor is a deceptive one. Revolutions may be the great political myth of modern times, and that is because, today, they are the political equivalent of a get-rich-quick scheme. They offer the beguiling but illusory promise that substantive change can be brought about by sheer willpower, by merely wanting the result strongly enough. They promise to shake up the entire system, but offer no clue as to how the system could be reconstructed, or worked with.

Modern revolutions first took shape in the late 18th century. In this period, first in America, and then, more radically, in France, there occurred the first sustained, deliberate attempts to effect radical changes in politics, society and culture in the name of a secular ideal of human happiness and reason. The word “revolution” itself, which had previously denoted little more than an upheaval in human affairs, came to be used to describe this new political phenomenon. In France, after 1789, for the first time political actors referred to themselves as “revolutionaries,” and claimed to act “in the name of the Revolution.”

But radical revolutions of this sort have never succeeded in actually bringing about radical change without violently suspending the ordinary rules and limits of political life. Maximilien Robespierre, the most famous leader of the French Revolution, declared that the event represented a rupture in history, one that had set the French people two thousand years ahead of the rest of the human race. But as opposition to revolutionary policies mounted, and turned violent, he and his allies suspended the constitution they themselves had written, and resorted to large-scale violence of their own. Even in the much less bloody American Revolution, Loyalists were the victims of considerable violence and expropriation. Put bluntly, radical revolutions have never taken place without large-scale violations of human rights. As for the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Chinese Revolution of 1949, each was widely hailed as a new birth for humanity, but each ultimately involved millions of deaths. Not every revolution has come at such a cost. But in the final analysis (as the Marxists used to say), if you want to avoid compromise, and to short-circuit the messy, difficult work of consensual political change, there is no option but force.

Our own age can fairly be called a post-revolutionary one. In 1989, the former dissidents who took power in Central and Eastern Europe mostly refused to call themselves “revolutionaries.” Writing in a French newspaper that year, the bicentennial of the French Revolution, the Polish Solidarity leader Jacek Kuron explained soberly that revolutions were not things to be celebrated, because they shed too much blood. Germans deliberately called the collapse of East Germany “die Wende”—“the change”—not “the revolution.” As human rights have assumed a greater importance than ever before in international politics, with violations reported instantaneously, world-wide, world opinion has become far less tolerant than it once was of revolutionary excesses.

Not surprisingly, the most important revolutions that have taken place since the collapse of Communism—the “color revolutions” in post-Soviet Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, and the revolutions of the Arab Spring—have generally been considered failures. And these movements mostly never even aimed at the sort of far-reaching changes associated with the great revolutions of the past. The immediate goal was generally the overthrow of a hated and tyrannical leader. Even in the best cases (e.g. Ukraine) these recent revolutions have produced illiberal, unstable, corrupt regimes. In the worst cases (e.g. Egypt or Libya) they have led either to the return of a repressive autocracy, or to collapse and anarchy. And in nearly every case the revolutionary movements themselves have been widely condemned, at a very early stage, for human rights violations.

It’s also worth noting that democratic socialism, where it has proven most successful, has taken place without a revolution. Bernie Sanders likes to suggest that the United States can learn from the examples of the Scandinavian countries. But in the list of countries that have had great modern revolutions, Denmark, Sweden and Norway are conspicuously absent.

And yet, while real revolutions are vanishing from the world, the myth of revolution retains an enduring place in our political imagination. In America in recent years, pace Sanders, the idea has been seized on above all by the angry, populist right, which has appropriated a key event of the American Revolution to describe itself: The Tea Party. Already in 2010, in a speech to one of the early Tea Party conventions, Sarah Palin was declaring: “America is ready for another revolution.” It is the Tea Party that has done the most to promote the sort of magical thinking according to which sheer willpower will be enough to enact radical change. In its version, if “real Americans” could just express themselves forcefully enough, they could sweep the corrupt, “politically correct” elites out of power, and America would quickly regain both its economic vigor and its proper place in the world. Of course, in reality, the Tea Party has succeeded mostly in enormously exacerbating America’s political paralysis, by electing hardliners who thwart any possible compromise with the Democrats (and intimidating the rest of the Republican Party into going along with them). This paralysis, of course, only further enrages Tea Party voters. And so along has come Donald Trump, whose political platform—or, rather, his lack of one—represents the logical conclusion of the dreams of the angry, populist right. No one is a better master of get-rich-quick schemes.

The Tea Party’s “revolution” was quickly matched, on the left, by the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, which was no less attracted to the word. Its idealistic supporters raged against economic inequality and financial corruption, but failed to articulate a concrete program. Indeed, many prominent members argued against even putting forth a list of demands, as if enthusiastic demonstration was enough to bring about change. Not surprisingly, the movement fizzled. The Sanders campaign, with its narrow focus on breaking up the big banks and its base of youthful support, has inherited much of Occupy’s support and energy, and of course has made “revolution” its centerpiece.

This “revolution” would look very different from Trump’s. But is it any more realistic? Sanders too has failed to explain how he plans to translate these ideas, and the fervent desires of his followers, into actual policy. His revolution, too, is an artful dodge, a way of avoiding the realities of our complex, messy, but not entirely broken political system. However useful it may be as a short-term rallying cry, something so formless has little chance of sustaining a long-term political movement, let alone actually bringing about radical change. Twenty-first century politicians should leave revolution where it belongs: in the past.