Bastille Day: "C'est une révolution."

Today is Bastille Day in France—the anniversary of the world’s first revolution. The U.S.’s Revolutionary War, which produced a revolutionary form of government and involved the sacrificing of thousands, was, as it is more correctly known, a War of Independence.

France’s revolution overthrew the established order, a class war from within, a real revolution, one that still inspires revolutionaries throughout the world.

The American ruling class is under attack today for mismanaging the economy, and it is fighting with all power at its disposal to hang on. The forces lined up against it are out to destroy the state as we know it. The transformation the revolutionaries seek is undoing the massive federal government produced by the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the Great Society, and the federal government’s current Europeanization drive. And as Mao Zedong said, “a revolution is not a dinner party.”

The two seminal events in U.S. history are the Civil War and the Great Depression. The Civil War divided the country North and South, and those divisions remain. The Great Depression created a new ruling order of big government linked to the people dependent on government. Under the new order, the others are losers, the figurative descendents of those who thrived under the Northern business economy from Civil War’s end to the Great Depression.

When the ruling class re-ignited the Civil War’s divisions during the the ‘50s and ‘60s civil rights struggle, it drove the Southern losers and the big government losers together enough for Republicans to hold the White House for all but 12 years between 1969 and 2009. On the other hand, conservatives controlled two branches of government only during 1953-55, 1981-83, and 2003-07, just 8 years out of 58.

The country is divided. And now the country is not working, literally. We need change. We need a revolution that results in a free economy, run by free people. “To the barricades!”