Green Revolution! - an exercise in possible futures

Here in DU, we hear a fair amount of noise from various people who "want their (fill in the blank) back" and are at least willing to talk a good game about breaking things and generally causing Damage. This in and of itself is pretty harmless stress relief, but every now and again you get the dedicated type who swears to be ready for the BFEE Takeover when it happens.

So, what happens when the time for talk is over and the time for action begins? When I'm not fufilling my duties as Emperor I am something of an amateur allohistorian(1) with an interest in divergent American politics - what if the South won the Civil War, what if California/Texas/New England declared independence, etc. - and the idea of a left-wing general insurrection appealed to me.

This scenario isn't quite as improbable as it might sound at first - the polarizing effect Clinton had on political debate in the 1990s hasn't abated with age, and in fact may have gotten worse with the onset of the Bush Administration and the various wars we've gotten ourselves into since 2001.

Still, most people are happy, or at least content to leave well enough alone. A rough rule of thumb suggests that a successful insurrection - that is, one that has more than a snowball's chance in Hell of winning, or at least surviving the first 48 hours - needs at least 3% of the adult population actively taking up arms against the government and another 10% who supporting the rebels. In the US that means about 8.5 million people taking up arms and another 29 million giving aid and comfort.

That's a lot of people to get good and pissed. And yet, so far the Feds have not gone quite far enough to rally the masses. So, let's imagine a hypothetical trigger event:

(Before we begin, I'd like to stress that the trigger event does NOT, I repeat, NOT involve George Bush going strange(r), clothing himself in imperial purple and naming his horse Senate Majority Leader. The whole thing is set off by the usual tragic series of fuckups that most Major Events in History are made of. Now back to the show.)

It's spring 2003, just before or just after the beginning of the conquest of Iraq. Federal, state and local law-enforcement attempts to "bring to justice" the members of a more-millitant-than-normal ANSWER(2) office in the suburbs of $midwestern_city. (Think less "peaceful protest" and more "wannabe Weathermen.") The warrant is relatively trivial, illegal gun/drug possession or something like that, but the reaction from the people inside is somewhat overdramatic. Deciding that this was Emperor George coming to throw all the progressives in the camps, they do what comes naturally and open fire.

We now have begun Waco 2. When Federal forces surround the building, the group inside uses the Internet to call for help. Various leftist/libertarian groups (including a few militias - hey, the New World Order makes for strange bedfellows) converge on the site to relieve the compound. Civil war erupts.

Now, the most likely outcome of a war between the extreme left and the Feds is that the extreme left gets crushed like insects just in time for the evening CNN broadcast. But, just for fun, let's suppose that there are enough rebels to keep the war running for a little bit longer.

Who are these people?

Well, the most disaffected members of the left - the ones who still vote, anyway - are the Greens. Nader pulled an official tally of 2.74% in the 2000 election; let's through the magic of extrapolation convert that 2.74% to 3%, which gives us plenty of resistance fighters. The remaining 10% of the population can come from various stripes of Democratic, Libertarian, Reform or miscellaneous progressive movements, all distributed roughly the same geographically as in the 2000 election.

http://schmitty.best.vwh.net/greens/natlpercent.htm

The Nader vote was strongest in New England, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, Hawaii, Wisconsin, Minnesota and the central Rockies. The mountainous areas make for good partisan country, being mostly empty and fairly rugged, as does Alaska - a good place for a glorious last stand, if needs be. Let's say some 3M of our rebels and 8M sympathizers are holed up in a long crescent streching from Puget Sound to the Big Bend area of Texas (this would leave between 9M and 12M loyalists in the main combat zone). The other 25M or so rebels and sympathizers are scattered in smaller groups across the country, mostly in urban or suburban areas in California and New England. The north-central coalition in MN and WI would probably break up and flee west to the Rockies or east over the lakes, as the territory isn't as well-suited to long-term guerrilla warfare. Hawaii will become the site of intifada-style tactics against the military bases. A truly crazed or well-supported rebel group may try to seize Pearl Harbor; the activity is more than likely doomed to utter failure, but stranger things have happened in history...

On the whole, the Feds will keep a lock on everything south of the Great Lakes and east of the Rockies. They'll also more than likely hold complete control of all but the most rebellious cities (Boulder, CO and Berkeley, CA immediately come to mind; no doubt there are others), as the loyalist:rebel ratio is still heavily weighted in favor of the Feds. The Feds will also have complete control of the air, so there probably won't be any outright secession as the 82nd Airborne could be dropped into any state capitol if needed. The fight would be more like the current activities in Iraq than anything else - potshots at convoys, boobytraps and ambushes being the order of the day, with rebels fading in and out of sight more or less at will.

How many people would die in this rebellion? Well, I've, ah, borrowed a graph(3) showing the death tolls from 50 civil wars fought during the perople 1975-1999. Graphed as a percentage of the nation's total population, the death rates look like this:



If we take the middle half of our 50 wars (numbers 13 to 38) and apply that range of percentages (.7% to 2%) to our current 2003 population of 291,637,681, then we see that there's a good chance that the Naderista Revolution would kill bewteen 2,000,000 and 6,000,000 people. At Northern Ireland levels of conflict the death rate would be "only" 30,000, and at Afghan death rates we'd reach 29,000,000 casualties.

So, maybe this armed rebellion thing isn't such a good idea after all.

I now open the floor to questions, comments and additions.

Footnotes:
(1) Not to be confused with a brontohistorian, a tyrannohistorian or a velocihistorian.
(2) ANSWER was chosen mainly because it had a reasonably high profile thanks to the antiwar marches. No slights are intended.
(3) With thanks to Matthew White, whose work on a Perotista Revolt AH inspired this happy little work, and whose graph I'm borrowing sans permission.

as always

This is analysis and prediction, not disruption. You don't like it, fine, I'm not asking you to, just don't label it as disruption when it really isn't.

Besides, how many freepers you think could form that many coherent sentences. ;-)

Two points:

1) People who talk a line about wanting another Revolution don't know what the hell they're planning on getting themselves and everybody else into.

2) Me (who happens to be non-Green as well) looking into my cracked crystal ball and placing bets on the outcome of Left v. Bush in terms of armed combat.

Clearer?

however, this will probably be locked due to Rule VI Para. 3:

Please do not post messages or jokes that could be construed as advocating harm or death to the president, or that could be construed as advocating violent overthrow of the government of the United States. The Secret Service is not known for its sense of humor.

I don't view this as advocating gov't overthrow, but I'm neither a mod nor an admin.

but I figured the risk was worth getting people to see and discuss the analysis for themselves.

Yrs in aggravation,

You discover quite late into the book (or perhaps the sequel), that although there was some skirmishing when Ecotopia (Washington, Oregon, and Northern California) declared it's independence, the key factor that prevented the US military from taking it back over was a nuclear weapon.

You, the reader, learn that the Ecotopian rebels either planted, or convinced the US government that they'd planted, a nuclear bomb in Washington DC, and essentially blackmailed the government for their independence.

Just throwing that out there, since you hadn't mentioned it.

Susan Sarandon

Phil Donahue

Michael Moore

Tim Robbins

They're going to mount a revolution

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

To do what

Take over Santa Monica

We're all friends and comrades here, after all.

<pause to sing a quick stanza of the Internatonale>

In any case, the "prominent Greenies" aren't the ones mounting the revolution. In the scenario, it's one heavily radicalized cell triggering an overkill response by the Feds which is then capitalized on by other radicalized cells and eventually less radical organizations. By the time the celebs have anything to say about it the civil war is a fait accompli.

"when you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it any how."

The point I was trying to drive home was that the "prominent" people in the Green movement aren't the ones planning the revolt.

Maybe if you were to, say, not just throw out an enigmatic quote and speak plainly, we could improve the conversation?

because it was, and still is, true.

"I'm sick and tired of hearing things
From uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocritics"

so...what is it that they've said that you've disagreed with. FURTHERMORE, do you disagree with their point-of-view so much that you dismiss their support of Nader and the Green party?

that they gave the election to Chimpy nothing.

This fits in well with the liberal myth that Gore lost the 2001 election because of Ralph Nader. In fact, Gore lost the election because he was a poor candidate, ran a bad campaign, and failed to separate himself morally from Clinton. Further, not only the Democratic Party, but the liberals within it, made it absolutely clear over eight years that they had no interest in, nor would respond to, the sort of politics espoused by Greens.

A study by the Review of national and Florida polls during the 2000 election indicates that Ralph Nader's influence on the final results was minimal to non-existent. The Review tested the widely held Democratic assumption that Nader caused Gore's loss by checking changes in poll results. Presumably, if Nader was actually responsible for Gore's troubles, his tallies would change inversely to those of Gore: if Gore did better, Nader would do worse and vice versa. In fact, the only time any correlation could be found was when the changes were so small - 1 or 2 percentage points - that they were statistically insignificant. On the other hand when, in September of 2000, Gore's average poll result went up 7.5 points over August, Nader's only declined by 1 point. Similarly, in November, Gore's average poll tally declined 5.7 points but Nader's only went up 0.8 points. In the close Florida race, there were similar results: statistically insignificant correlation when the Gore tally changed by only one or two points, but dramatic non-correlation when the change was bigger.

During almost all of 2000, Bush led Gore with the major exception of a month-long period following the Democratic convention. During this high point for Gore, Nader was pulling a running average of 2-4% in the polls. While it is true that during October, Nader began pulling a running average of 6% at a time when Gore was fading, Gore continued to lose ground even as Nader's support dropped to its final 3%. In other words, despite the help of defectors from Nader, Gore did worse.

Further, as Michael Eisencher reported in Z Magazine, 20% of all Democratic voters, 12% of all self-identified liberal voters, 39% of all women voters, 44% of all seniors, one-third of all voters earning under $20,000 per year and 42% of those earning $20-30,000 annually, and 31% of all voting union members cast their ballots for Bush. In other words, Bush did better among these traditional liberal constituencies than did Nader.


ALSO


http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?cp=3&kaid=86&subid=84&contentid=2919

The assertion that Nader's marginal vote hurt Gore is not borne out by polling data. --Al From


So the crap you keep disseminating about all the bad Nader supporters means less than nothing.

MOREOVER, you're like every other partisan Dem on this board...you'll spend all day figuring out who else to blame, while ignorning the failings of the Democratic party. Good luck to you...you'll need it.

respectfully

I share many of the goals of my allies to the left

equal rights

a strong safety net with a guarantee that if you are willing to work you are entitled to a decent life by earning a living wage

an internationalist yet peaceful foreign policy that uses force as a last resort

Where I disagree with you and my brethren to the left is on tactics.

I hope you don't take it personally.

But so far to date no small-scale rebel group like the hypothetical has been able to buy, steal or produce a nuclear weapon. This may change in the future; I don't know and I certainly hope not.

As far as secession goes, it doesn't strike me as likely for the reasons I specified above as well as the rebels are still in the minority no matter what. To secede would require a greater and more concentrated popular uprising than a Green revolt could provide.

A leftish rebel group with a WMD (it wouldn't have to be nuclear, why not bio or chem?). I suspect that the support wouldn't be as large as you speculate for this exercise. Something about that prospect smacks of hypocrisy to me.

Of course, we advocates of non-violence will probably be the first against the wall...

It was never really certain (to me) whether they ACTUALLY planted a bomb, or just managed to convince the President that they did. The threat was made privately, so that the US government wouldn't have to publicly cave to a blackmail threat, and they showed the US the bomb they HAD made in Ecotopia, and stated that another just like it was in DC (IIRC -- correct me if I'm wrong).

The hypocrisy of actually using one was examined in the book. One of the questions the 'reporter' (our viewpoint throughout the book) never had answered was, "would the president of Ecotopia have actually carried out the threat?" This is left unresolved for the reader to ponder.

It's pretty clear in the novel that, without the blackmail ploy, while they were able to cause some attrition to the half-hearted helicopter invasion that was attempted, they wouldn't be able to hold off a full-fledged attack.

(on edit: removed an excess of parenthetical comments...and speling)

I think it's not outside the bounds of possibility that you could get 38,000,000 left-leaning Americans sufficiently pissed about the Bush government to maybe attempt a general strike or just wander around urban centers breaking shit, but a halfway organized revolt like in the hypothetical is stretching plausibility.

As for WMD, the closest I'm willing to come is the possible Hail Mary attempt by the Hawaii Greens to seize Pearl Harbor. It's completely insane, but the technothriller author part of my brain loves the idea. :D

http://www.gpus.org/tenkey.html

...

4. NON-VIOLENCE
It is essential that we develop effective alternatives to society’s current patterns of violence. We will work to demilitarize, and eliminate weapons of mass destruction, without being naive about the intentions of other governments. We recognize the need for self-defense and the defense of others who are in helpless situations. We promote non-violent methods to oppose practices and policies with which we disagree, and will guide our actions toward lasting personal, community and global peace.

Or would really care as long as their views meshed otherwise?

I think that relatively few know that, which is why I had an obligation to pass it along.

And (dragging this back to the scenario) most of the people who do know that would more than likely be part of the "support-but-not-fight" part of the rebel population.

?

:eyes:

This is a hypothetical scenario, playing games to determine the course of the future. What it accomplishes I leave entriely to you.

is an excellent way to describe this

The selection includes Global Thermonuclear War...

Cheap humor aside, is this a bad thing? Or am I misreading your tone here?

Yrs in Skynet,