We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The American Declaration of Independence, 1776.
virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless.
Maximilien Robespierre, 1794.
There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.
Homero Aridjis, 1991.
Since the American Revolution at the end of the eighteenth-century revolutionary vanguards have assumed responsibility – as “We the People” – for nations, proletariat, ummah and other perceived collective identities. Invariably, targeted violence or even prolonged military struggles have preceded the establishment of any new regime. Despite their birth pangs, we find a broadly supportive reception to this form of political upheaval in liberal discourse, as at least being well-motivated or altruistic – even if such conflagrations are said to devour their children.
Such a characterisation is at a remove from altogether darker connotations associated with a coup d’état, putsch or golpe. These latter usurpations of a ‘legitimate’ government are identified with the seizure of power by a faction within the military or police in an unstable, often post-colonial, setting.
Another species of revolt is crystallizing in the minds of mainstream commentators, including that of the prominent Irish Times journalist and ‘public intellectual’, Fintan O’Toole. This is the spectre of the Populist insurrection in an advanced Western country, depicted as a groundswell of misguided rage harnessed by malign actors, who disavow broadly universal values. Lacking lofty ideals, an eruption of this sort is disqualified from laying claim to the allegiance of the community at large as “We the People.”
As a lumpenproletariat or rabble devoid of ideas, participants’ aims are portrayed as confined to outcomes such as restoring a president, or, as in the recent Irish case, forcing the government to remove taxation on gasoline. They are therefore subjected to ridicule, their concerns dismissed as selfish or based on ludicrous conspiracy theories.
Thus, O’Toole mockingly welcomed: ‘the dictatorship of the breakfast roll-atariat!’ Clearly only a fool would sympathise with such troglodytes. He goes on to describe the protests as a ‘blokeocracy,’ claiming to have ‘watched the blockades both in the west and in Dublin and I’ve yet to see a single woman in the driving seat.’ Obviously, no woman in her right mind should sympathise with such creatures.
One may reasonably disagree with the protestors’ viewpoints and tactics, but to undermine them in such terms serves to deny the real difficulties, and outright panic, caused by the spike in oil prices, which came at a time when many people were already worried about putting food on the table.
Democratic Legitimacy
Nonetheless, this kind of upheaval, like the coup d’état, but unlike the classic revolution, is defined as a challenge to legitimate government, the institutions of the state, and democracy itself. The lines, however, between this new strain of revolt – the Capitol Riot is paradigmatic – the enlightened revolution, and the standard coup d’état are blurred. Indeed, the French Revolution is commonly referred to as an extended bread riot.
Moreover, even in many developed countries the substance of democratic legitimacy may be questioned. The educational philosopher Joe Dunne writes:
If we ever supposed that democracy could survive, let alone flourish, just by having a constitutional framework, parliamentary institutions, and legislative and judicial processes in place, irrespective of the character of citizens, recent years should have disabused us of this complacency.
(Dunne, Joseph, What’s the Good of Education? A Philosophy of Persons in Practices, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2025)
In this respect, it is notable that the head of the OECD’s education division recently stated that Ireland’s education system is based on a twentieth century model of learning and needs to modernise in order to avoid producing ‘second-class robots.’
Plato believed democracy pandered to the uneducated masses and brought chaos and tyranny. The political theorist Noam Chomsky has argued, convincingly, that mainstream media ‘manufactures consent’ for the ruling class in the U.S. and other Western countries. Winston Churchill probably described it best as ‘the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’
‘Change Ireland Forever’
Last April, James Geoghegan, one of the organisers of the fuel protests claimed to be leading a revolution that would ‘change Ireland forever.’ The blockading of fuel terminals certainly posed a challenge to the institutions of the state, and private enterprise. Fintan O’Toole described it as ‘the most serious insurrection the State has experienced in a century.’
In that article, O’Toole vents an opposition to revolutionary politics that goes far beyond the fuel protests:
There’s a point in any social upheaval when it shifts from being against the government to being against the state. The first is entirely healthy – a vigorous and disputatious citizenship is essential to a democracy. The second – and we’ve been here before through the long history of militant Irish republicanism – attacks the legitimacy of democracy itself.
Yet in a 2016 article Toole alluded to the ‘imaginative potency’ of the 1916 Rising ‘staged by a minority of a minority of Irish nationalists.’ He claimed the power ‘that made it resonate in world history, came through the kind of repeated distillation that makes a spirit increasingly potent.’
His justification for the Rising is based on the 1918 election result: a victory for its political heirs in Sinn Féin. Apparently, this ‘cast a glow of democratic legitimacy back onto the Rising, suggesting that it was not a putsch but an expression of the popular will.’ He adds that its ‘legitimacy ultimately resides not in the sacramental power of martyrdom, but in the hard grind of electoral politics.’
It is unclear whether O’Toole’s ideas have changed over the intervening decade, but his assessment of the 1916 Rising is clearly inconsistent with a strident defence of “democracy itself,” including against “militant republicanism.”
The 1916 rebels were undoubtedly “militant republicans,” who took power in their own hands without popular support, let alone a democratic mandate. O’Toole seemed unable to reconcile a grudging sympathy with the anti-colonial cause and a studied disdain for political violence, such as was witnessed in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
One might argue that the fuel protestors of 2026 enjoyed more popular support than the 1916 rebels. If the crisis had persisted, political representatives associated with the protests might perhaps have gained a popular mandate in elections. Would this give retrospective justification to their actions?!
Far Right tendencies
In that recent article Fintan O’Toole also speaks more generally about ‘revolts of the disaffected middling business class always’ going ‘to the far right.’ Leaving aside the inaccuracy of this assessment of the fuel protestors – reporters from The Journal subsequently found that ‘those attempting to pivot the conversation to immigration being removed from organising WhatsApp groups in multiple cases’ – he seems oblivious to how the French Revolution was instigated by members of the bourgeoisie. Indeed, artisans, shopkeepers, and master craftsmen formed the backbone of the United Irishmen who promoted the political ideals of the Enlightenment in Ireland.
It is almost impossible for ‘the Wretched of the Earth’ to rise up against their masters without middle class involvement. Starving peasants don’t make for effective revolutionaries, as the muted response to the horrors of the Great Famine in Ireland demonstrates.
In a simplistic appeal to democracy, O’Toole fails to acknowledge its limitations, and the extent to which mainstream media, including his own publication, is beholden to special interests, and government subsidies. Journalists such as O’Toole often frame the ‘talking points’ during elections. The advent of the internet is certainly changing our politics – for better and worse – but the old formula for manufacturing consent has not broken down entirely.
France’s long history of radical political change since 1789 – five republics, two empires and two monarchies – hints at the possibilities of revolutionary shifts in a Western democracy. Fintan O’Toole’s outlook is more in line with conservative British traditions.
Standing to the Left
In response to adverse social conditions a revolutionary vanguard classically sets out a political programme or even presents a nascent constitution. In seeking a re-distribution of resources, such revolutions are generally assumed to be left-wing. This delineation can be traced to the French Revolution, during which delegates opposing monarchy happened to be seated to the presiding officer’s left. Yet the left-right distinction offers little insight into the complexity of most political upheavals.
Although the wealth and corruption of an absolute monarch – the Shah – was attacked by ideologues, those behind the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran promoted a return to traditional or conservative ‘Islamic’ values. Moreover, many of the rights set out in the American Constitution are (right-wing?) checks on the excesses of government power, including limiting taxation and preserving a right to bear arms.
Coups are conventionally assumed to be conservative and ‘right-wing’ – as with General Pinochet in Chile in 1973 – and mobilised against a ‘legitimate’, democratic and presumably left-wing government. Yet there have also been numerous left-wing coups, including the 1974 ‘Carnation’ Revolution in Portugal, in which military officers overthrew the authoritarian Estado Novo regime after the death of Salazar.
Prior to its 1923 Putsch, the Nazi’s 25-point plan contained distinctly socialist policies, albeit Hitler reveals the duplicitous nature of Nazi propaganda in his meandering Mein Kampf:
A colossal lie bears within itself a power that banishes doubt … A clever and persevering propaganda will finally lead people to believe that heaven is no better than hell, and that the most wretched existence is, on the contrary, a paradise.
Both supposedly left- and right-wing regimes have sown widespread delusion, a hallmark of totalitarian rule reminiscent of Plato’s allegory of the cave. This emphasises the limited descriptive value of our left-right dichotomy. The current (over-)use of the term ‘far-right’ by journalists such as Fintan O’Toole is similarly problematic.
Public discourse would be better served by emphasising a distinction between conservative and radical, rather than left- and right-wing. In most political systems conservatives hold power and are well practised in the management of public affairs, especially by exerting control over the information space. Whether in a capitalist or socialist country, the conservative objective is to preserve existing patterns of wealth and privilege.
Radicals, on the other hand, wish to change society, but are prone to self-righteousness or ideological inflexibility, leading to splits in their ranks. A recurring tension exists between those who work on behalf of a single ethnic group – ‘socialism in one country!’ – and those with more universal aspirations – ‘global revolution!’. As radicals are generally divided and excluded from positions of influence, they have recourse to extra-parliamentary tactics. The circumstances in which radical ideas give rise to successful revolutions are, however, rare – generally during or after major wars in a period of ideological ferment – but their effects are far-reaching.
The Blood Sacrifice
Moral justification for the usurpation of even a democratic state cannot be excluded in all circumstances. A violent insurrection against the democratically elected government of Germany in 1933 would surely have been warranted. “We the People” is an almost mystical force in history that brings paradigmatic shifts. It is for posterity to decide when a moral breakdown sufficient to justify an insurrection has occurred.
The recent fuel protests in Ireland suggested that the government’s responsibility for the material conditions of the population during an era of unprecedented prosperity might have generated revolutionary conditions. The relative stability in its aftermath reveals this was not the case. Whether it is a harbinger for future upheavals remains to be seen.
Who is to say what will happen if the war in Ukraine generates a wider European conflagration, or if the Middle East crisis metastasizes into an unprecedented global recession? After all, “there are weeks where decades happen.”
To be clear, this is no justification for insurrections, coups, or revolutions for that matter – which generally bring enormous suffering to civilian populations. Nor is democracy repudiated, but to disqualify in absolute terms any movement that does not embrace electoral politics betrays a profound conservatism that denies the seismic role “We the People” have played throughout history.
All Image: (c) Daniele Idini
