What do we recognize a revolution? The collapse of an old regime and the advent of new leaders determined to make a clean sweep of the past by promising a “New Golden Age”, as Donald Trump says. This, by destroying the discordant voices to nothing and crushing the opponents. This kind of movement is always carried by a charismatic and intransigent speaker whose powerful voice electrifies crowds. This “grammar” of the Revolution is today at work in the United States, as it was in Russia (1917), Cuba (1959) or Venezuela (1999).
It’s always the same story. The revolutions begin with a system crisis, as in the case of the finishing monarchies of Louis XVI and Nicolas II or in that of the corrupt presidency of the Cuban Batista. The “end of reign” presidency of the octogenarian Joe Biden responds to the same scheme. With Trump 2, here we are at the “breaking point”, generally carried by an unhappy crowd. The American populace had already distinguished itself on January 6, 2021 with the assault of the Capitol, whose resemblance to the taking of the Bastille is not exaggerated.
The establishment of new institutions is another figure in style of the revolutionary abeleder. Hugo Chavez in his time had used and abused it by replacing the ministries of the Old Regime with “missions” supposed to reinvent the way of doing politics, closer to the people. In Washington, the Doge of Elon Musk, an institution responsible for “efficiency”, must “cut in unnecessary expenses”. Another classic of the genre: the change of toponyms, like the Gulf of Mexico promptly renamed Gulf of America by Trump. Before him, all the revolutions have used the same process. The objective? Act on imaginations and mental representations.
Inevitably, revolutions are wallowed in terror. With the Radical Elon Musk, who intimidates the Americans, and the uncompromising JD Vance, who terrified Europeans, America found his Danton and his Robespierre, at the head of a committee of public salvation Made in USA. As for Russel Vought, a less known ideologist but installed at the head of the OMB, the management and budget office, which has the ability to cut heads and funding, it is in line with jeans- Paul Marat, who encouraged brutality and even more. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatized,” he said. “We want them not want to go to work when they wake up in the morning because they will be considered villains.” We know, thanks to Danton, how this kind of ideological escalation ends: by internal settling. “The revolution ends up devouring his children,” he said.