But the great Victorian year of protest actually feels more recent than it has for decades. In its chaos and its power, it resembles our own historical moment, buffeted by populist uprisings and social turmoil, climate rebellion and violent insurrection. “We can take that place,” one man said confidently as he pointed to the Capitol on January 6. “And then do what?” responded his partner in crime. “Heads on pikes!” the first replied without really having the slightest idea of what to do next. As in 1848, radical and even violent protests are now expected, sometimes even desired, but without any clear programme or manifesto. Revolution doesn’t seem unlikely anymore, but at the same time, it’s hard to concretely envision a post-capitalist world.

Whether it’s the bolsonaristas invading the Brazilian National Congress, the gilets jaunes assembling spontaneously in the streets of France, or the “square movements” following the 2008 crash, the more traditional repertoires of contention that characterised the past century seem to be changing both on the Left and the Right. But far from being on the verge of a carefully planned coup d’état or a new social order, contemporary revolts instead resemble that tumultuous mid-century upheaval: “poorly planned, dispersed, patchy and bristling with contradictions” as Christopher Clark notes in his gripping new history, Revolutionary Spring. “The people of 1848,” he adds, “could see themselves in us.”

While the inter-war period and the rise of fascism has often been raised as a comparison for our present, Clark offers us a different and more accurate analogue. Far from being a failed revolution as Karl Marx had thought, 1848 successfully transformed Palermo, Paris and Vienna, and reverberated in Chile and Martinique. The year progressed not as chain or domino effect, but more like our own “populist revolts”: nearly simultaneous, interconnected and rooted in common socio-economical changes, but without being directly caused by one another. It was the “particle collision chamber at the centre of the European nineteenth century”. “People, groups and ideas,” Clark says, “flew into it, crashed together, fused or fragmented, and emerged in showers of new entities” with “profound consequences for the modern history of Europe”. The world, as Bismarck recalled in his memoirs, would never be the same after. Of course, at the time, the hopes of radicals were crushed. Many fled into exile in the United States or London, like the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, the French socialist Louis Blanc, or Marx himself. For them, the disillusion was intense and the prospects of an immediate socialist transformation had rapidly vanished. But in the years to come, 1848 transformed how liberals, conservatives and socialists alike would relate to politics.

In response to the revolts, which were largely defeated, significant constitutional changes were passed, that slowly defined our modern representative politics and shaped for good the nature of the state and government. These new political constellations were more open to reform and to the aspirations of the moderate elements of society, but the state apparatus was significantly expanded, with the establishment of armed police forces trained to combat insurrections. The armed civic state is taken for granted now, but it was a marked novelty after the period spanning from the Vienna congress of 1815 to 1848. Most regimes had obviously been repressive, illiberal and change averse, but were also, as the historian Paul W. Schroeder has noted, inefficient and quite reluctant to use brute force against their own citizens. This allowed for a proliferation of conspiracies and popular revolts.

For a long time, ordinary people did not demonstrate, rally or strike, but would rather parade in mocking routines, seize grain, invade fields, attack tax collectors, destruct tollgates or sack machines. Conflicts unfolded generally at a local level, with a narrow focus and without coherent political aims. And revolutions themselves were rather the preserve of austere figures such as the Italian Robespierrist Philippe Buonarroti, who favoured revolutionary dictatorship over mass movements, convinced of the difficulty of involving the multitudes. Despite censorship, it was, in fact, Schroeder observed, “relatively easy and safe to promote revolution”. As a result, in 1848, the authorities of Europe weren’t ready to respond properly to the insurrections, used instead to small and carefully-planned uprisings.

Suggested reading

Neoliberalism killed the liberal dream

By Ashley Frawley

In that year, something quite different emerged for the first time. As Clark writes, the uprisings were “inchoate, multifocal, socially deep” rather than anchored in the “seditious conspiracy” characteristics of the 1830s. The revolutionary ideas “reverberated in cafés and political clubs, circulating in communicative networks that were incomparably denser, socially deeper and more sophisticated than their late-eighteenth-century predecessors”. Even if there weren’t yet “political parties capable of disciplining their members or binding them to commonly agreed positions” or “doctrinally authoritative ‘ideologies’”, it marked the beginning of the end of a certain form of protest. From here on, not only the middle classes and liberals renounced revolution for good, but the emerging working class would progressively work through parties, unions and strikes rather than coups d’états and barricades.

As the sociologist Charles Tilly later argued in the case of France, 1848 therefore stands in the middle of two crucial intertwined changes that would transform the repertoire of collective action for the following century. The first involved the centralisation of the state into a more complex apparatus, internally coordinated and with enhanced means of coercion. This was coupled with an unprecedented expansion of capital, producing a large and modern working class which populated large units of production. And within this new nexus of capital and state, social movements as we know them began to take hold within an emerging civil society. Change couldn’t be the product of a few heroes dedicated to the revolution, but had to come from organised and ideologically-driven masses. If class struggle was the steam of History, it would now require strong and sophisticated engines to move forwards and channel collective struggles into specific directions. The “social”, as Clark notes, could now “be grasped as an autonomous category, irreducible to politics”.

This transition wasn’t just a concern for revolutionaries. Even conservatives, as Eric Hobsbawm noted, “would have to defend themselves in new ways” and “to learn the politics of the people”. “Public opinion” — a distinctively liberal notion — could not be ignored any more. Defeating insurrections or censoring the press was not enough, and influencing and controlling the masses would become increasingly important over the next decades, shaping a new form of statecraft and political activity. It marked, Hobsbawm argued, “the end…of the politics of tradition”. As the rate of literacy increased, all political forces had to develop their own ideological apparatuses to shape the mentality of large groups, through political newspapers, youth movements or rallies. Politics was slowly embedded in a “thick” civil society, with a large range of deeply networked organisations and institutions that served as intermediaries between citizens and the state. Parties became not just machines to conquer power, but mediators between institutions and citizens, embodying the interests of mobilised and conscious social groups.

This kind of politics, that culminated with the total mobilisations of the first half of the 20th century, would shape the whole political spectrum. From socialists and communists creating their own counter-society within capitalism, to fascists who, while they crushed unions and labour organisations, still tried to fully integrate a broad range of voluntary associations and organisations within the fascist state. In that sense, everything was political, from the sport club to the local newspapers. This held for much of the 20th century, where even during the post-war period, politics remained transactional, and programmes and reforms generally reflecting pre-electoral deals with specific constituencies. It’s only with the more individualised ethos following the century’s own year of global protest, 1968, that this settlement began to unravel, opening the space for the more speculative and public relations-driven public sphere of the Eighties.

More from this author

Big Tech's welfare dystopia

By Daniel Zamora and Anton Jager

And with the demise of social democracy and the collapse of the Soviet Union, collective engines to define human needs and collective endeavours slowly disappeared in favour of a more atomised civil society. That is why, as Alex Hochuli, George Hoare and Philip Cunliffe recently argued, “our political world…retained its external appearance, but if you crack open the shell, there’s nothing inside”. The formal institutions of democracy are still there, but are “divested of popular energies and innovation”. The populist explosions of the 2010s marked therefore what we could call the final disintermediation of politics, an exit from the associative structures that shaped politics for a century: parties, unions, mass organisations. And while the era of apathetic citizens characteristic of the Nineties has come to an end, the renewal of social turmoil and ideological battles hasn’t brought back such engines. People assemble and demonstrate not on the orders of parties and unions leaders but through the spread of messages and call for action posted on social media. We have been plunged back into the spontaneous, disorganised and unpredictable world that shaped 1848.

In the newly digitalised public sphere, political figures combine a strong and charismatic authority with a less mediated relation with their base. They speak to them through Facebook, Twitter, or even their own social media platform, rather than the outmoded bureaucratic structures of the mass parties. Within such a shift, in a sense ending the dynamic that began in 1848, even ideologies are not stable but rather, like in the era of Tocqueville, “an archipelago of texts and personalities across which [are] plotted quite idiosyncratic courses”. Large and influential newspapers have been replaced by a proliferation of media platforms, shaping the ideas of evanescent crowds on specific issues rather than precise political projects. Even the decorporation that went along the proletarisation of labour echoes this. Rather than a labour movement built upon a formalised labour market, we have witnessed a proliferation of the “working poor” and the “Uberisation” of workers. Social conflict has itself deserted the workplace, where the “great resignation” replaced coordinated strikes and mass labour militancy.

Whether it be the syncretic nature of their ideas, the irruption of spirituality into politics, the resurgence of violence, the tension between representation and direct forms of democracy, or even the rise of influential feminist figures and writers, our past decade has allowed the rebirth of the radicalism that ended with the mid-century revolutions. A world that would probably appear more familiar to Blanqui than Jaurès. Politics is now everywhere, but in a very different and more elusive sense than during the mass mobilisations of the 20th century.

Suggested reading

The American experiment has just begun

By Anton Jager

But among all these similarities, there is a difference. If 1848 led to an ascendency of the centre and the idea of superseding politics through technocracy and scientific government, our time appears to be heading the other way. Technocracy has been shattered, and the ability of the state to effectively govern is at its lowest since the late Sixties. Even if the idea of revolution has made a comeback, we still lack of engines to actually allow collective forms of decision making and to politicise human needs. Despite the development of new forms of digital engagement, the participation of citizens remains narrow and unable to sustain enduring political participation. There isn’t a week without headlines mentioning a riot or spontaneous assemblies or demonstrations. But the question still remains: what’s next?

But as Tocqueville had himself experienced, the end of an era is always an unpredictable process. “I cannot say and have no idea when this long journey will end,” he wrote in his Souvenirs, “and often wonder whether the terra firma for which we have so long been searching actually exists, or whether our destiny is not rather to ply the seas forever”. If the agony of the old can be a long and a painful thing it also, as the story of 1848 demonstrates, opens history to unexpected turns and innovations.

It was at this point that political scientist James Q. Wilson came up with the theory of Broken Windows, an idea that was to become hugely influential in turning the tide and restoring American cities to civility (much of which has been undone in 2020). Wilson argued that if the authorities crack down on minor incivility – graffiti, fare-dodging, panhandling – then very soon it will start to have an effect on major crimes too. It was to some degree basic common sense – give them an inch and they’ll take a mile – but then the 1960s had been a unique time of unlearning common sense in favour of exciting and fashionable new theories about human behaviour.

Broken Windows works partly because, even in the most violent places, huge amounts of serious crime is committed by a very small percentage of men. In Central American countries such as El Salvador or Honduras, which are plagued by horrific homicide rates, violence is mostly concentrated not just in a few neighbourhoods but even a few streets. Removing only a very small number of men has a drastic effect on wider society.

I often think about Wilson when perusing everyone’s favourite forum of thoughtful political debate, Twitter, which in terms of civility is somewhere around the period of The Warriors or Joker, the nadir of late 70s/early 80s urban decay.

If Twitter were a city it would be the sort of city where the authorities allow people to defecate in public or shoot up outside a school, and then express surprise when middle-class families wish to leave because of “the better quality of life” found in a four-hour commute away exurb.

The situation has been deteriorating for some time, although users of the site have rather adopted a Golden Age myth of a non-existent time when Twitter wasn’t filled with hysterics and fanatics. But this weekend, and with the moral courage of Ecuador or Paraguay declaring war on Germany in February 1945, Twitter finally decided to ban Donald Trump. After years of winding people up, lying, inciting hatred and worse, the outgoing President had finally overstepped the mark on 6 January.  Three days later, and his Twitter opus was gone.

To anyone who still believes in liberal democracy, the question of what to do with Donald Trump provides no easy answers – and anyone who says it is simple is a partisan with an axe to grind.

Most people tend to be more favourable to censorship when they think they’re the ones who will do the censoring, rather than being the censored. And censorship, of course, comes in gradations; the government sending goons around to your house for a critical YouTube comment is at the hard end, but being de-platformed by tech monopolies still entails a degree of lost liberty.

Tech monopolies, after all, aren’t like ordinary websites; they have the sort of media power that just didn’t exist before the 21^st century, the ability to overthrow governments, to shape the news agenda, to curate our views not just of current affairs but of history, too. In terms of cultural power they are closer in scope to the churches of old than any newspaper.

More from this author

Welcome to the new Middle Ages

By Ed West

Monopolies are generally bad for freedom and despite, or perhaps because of, its great love of capitalism, the United States has historically been very strong on breaking up monopolies, far stricter than Britain. But then America was founded on the idea of breaking up the most important monopoly of all: belief.

Before the late 17th century, almost no one believed in “freedom” of conscience or speech in the modern sense: they simply wanted more freedom for themselves. The first English colonies were founded by sectarian groups who fled persecution so they could do the persecuting, and this they did – Rhode Island was founded by people escaping Massachusetts, for instance. However there grew such a diversity of religious congregations in the colonies – Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Independents, Methodists, Quakers, even Catholics and Jews – that a balance was established.

America’s founding ideals — and its subsequent success — derived from this diversity of beliefs, and the fact that no sect could dominate the others.

The problem arising in the 21st century is that politics has evolved into a new form of sectarianism, with two rival worldviews at loggerheads, and with the internet doing the job that pamphlets once did, of stirring up hatred between the two. And while a country might flourish with one sect or with many sects, a society with two is doomed to unending conflict.

Conservatives fear giving big tech further control because they believe, with good reason, that big tech is against them; it is controlled by the other sect. Even before Trump and when the Republican Party was fairly normal, employees at Facebook, Twitter, Google and elsewhere were overwhelmingly more likely to be liberal and Democrat-voting – and as with all of these patterns, the same thing applies to Britain, too.

And yet, by any Wilsonian reading of social media, Donald Trump ought to have been banned ages ago. He does to online debate what a man selling drugs outside your kid’s school does to neighbourliness; his behaviour is corrosive for the wider community.

For most Twitter users, the site is a fun, informative and entertaining place to make friends, learn things, share articles and find out about the world. For a small but significant amount of time, it’s marred by horrendous bullying and incivility; and just like with big cities, where life is often scarred by violence even in relatively wealthy areas, much of this is preventable.

As in real life, where you only need to lock away a few people to turn a city around, social media platforms can make a huge difference by removing a small number of individuals. For example, an analysis of 1.8 billion Reddit comments found that “0.1% of all communities generate 38% of attacks” and “1% accounts for 74%”.

Suggested reading

Donald Trump's ruinous legacy

By Michael Tracey

Unfortunately, while Twitter tends to reward and promote provocateurs and narcissists, the real problem is that, like with many American cities in the 1970s, the Twitter police cannot be trusted to be fair.

The platform has a consistent policy of allowing high-follower accounts to get away with extreme incivility, incitement to violence and even racial hatred. It lets them do so for the same reason that bad behaviour is often indulged – because the people doing it are seen as having the right politics, in this case of the progressive variety.

But it’s also the deeper problem of the social media site that, despite its progressive vibe – and it is no more than a vibe – it is obsessively hierarchical. The entire system is designed to signify people’s status; not just the follower count, but the very idea of blue ticks which initiate a modern-day noblesse de la robe. Blue ticks were supposed to be used for authentication — to distinguish real users from painfully unfunny parody accounts — but they are quite clearly treated as an endorsement. That is why conservative Douglas Murray had to have two bestselling books and 200,000 followers before being raised to the nobility of the blue tick, a far higher bar than for progressive writers.

In the English-speaking world, status derives chiefly either from wealth or education, but it also increasingly comes from political virtue, the possession of correct beliefs, and having those views often exempts the privileged from the boring rules everyone else has to observe. Nothing better epitomises this system of political privilege than the Yale students found screaming obscenities at a Master because he didn’t take seriously their concerns about Halloween costumes. That is a level of overt, aristocratic privilege far more resembling ancien regime Europe than a democratic republic.

Twitter’s privileged elite often behave in absolutely appalling ways, including inciting violence or fantasising about teenaged boys getting killed, and yet nothing happens. Other blue ticks have popularised the racially derogatory use of “white” (“white feminists”, “white tears”, “mediocre white men”) which has seeped into wider media discourse. At best it’s tiresome – especially as a lot of the worst offenders are white people; at worst it’s needlessly degrading and inflammatory, and lowers the tone. Yet they are excused because they are privileged by the right politics.

Suggested reading

The day QAnon captured America

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

The problem with Twitter is that it mixes this essentially pre-modern aristocratic mindset with a radical egalitarianism. It wants to be a democracy without the values necessary for a democracy, including restraint and civility; these are all things that America’s founding fathers well understood. They saw that “virtue” was necessary for democracy — and being an ostentatiously virtuous Christian did not excuse anyone from obeying ordinary rules of behaviour.

The most reactionary of the Founding Fathers, a man called Fisher Ames, worried that the people didn’t possess enough virtue and that eventually a demagogue would rise to power in America. The Massachusetts representative wrote in his wonderfully pessimistic-sounding The Dangers of American Liberty that “Our country is too big for union, too sordid for patriotism, too democratick for liberty” and declared that “Few can reason, all can feel” – which could almost be Twitter’s motto.

Despite Ames’s worries, representative democracy has proved the best form of government to date, but social media pushes us much closer towards an ancient Athenian form of direct democracy, a system which lasted barely decades before bad decision-making by the mob brought it to disaster. And following a year in which China has successfully dealt with an external threat while the United States has seemingly fallen apart, I do wonder if social media and democracy are essentially incompatible, eroding all the qualities necessary for its initial creation – moderation, tolerance and, most of all, loser’s consent.

Trump is an antithesis to all these democratic virtues, and the world would have been a much better place had Twitter banned him a decade ago. But then the real problem is the medium itself, a system which mixes aristocratic arrogance with populist anarchy, a toxic combination almost perfectly designed to erode democracy.

This scene was broadcast across the globe — and I imagine many people looked upon it with a certain kind of awe, as I have looked upon footage of the botched Gullenist coup in Turkey in 2016, or the live-streamed terrorist attacks around Paris in 2015. This is history, live. A state is being challenged. But this time the world got to see it happening in the most important country in the world, the United States. The added frisson must have been delectable. Not only “this is history”, but perhaps, this is a symbol of a changing world order. Or, maybe, this is a fate richly deserved, comeuppance for a puffed-up hegemon who arrogantly elected an obnoxious oaf as the leader of the free world.

Every which way it was gripping to watch; the whole ragtag look enjoyably daft. And the world learned: this is what the world’s superpower looks like right now. The most powerful country on earth can see its Senate dispersed, its election results delayed, and its Vice President fleeing for protection from a relatively small rabble that was entirely unarmed, save for their memes.

One could say that Q Shaman and his friends had been sent to the Senate by Donald Trump himself, to hunt out the Vice President. In the day before these events, Trump had taken his White House pressure campaign public. Having failed to uncover evidence of voter fraud, the Trump campaign had tried to disqualify votes or whole states from the 2020 presidential election with bizarre legal theories. Maybe the election violated American civil rights, or wasn’t scrutinising mail-in ballots differently at least? American courts, many of them staffed with judges Trump appointed, rejected these theories.

Suggested reading

Whose weird world are we living in?

By Mary Harrington

The latest idea, one that had been circulating widely among conspiracy theory social media accounts associated with QAnon, focused on the Vice President. The Queueties held that Mike Pence had the power to keep Trump as president. The 12th Amendment specifies that the President of the Senate — the Vice President — counts the certified votes of the Electoral College. Pence, they believed, could simply refuse to count the votes from Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and so on. Technically, the sitting Vice President could annul all 50 states and disenfranchise 150 million or more voters. Couldn’t he? Trump warmed to the theory.

It’s not even clear whether Constitutional interpretation interests QAnon. For those who don’t know the conspiracy theory, Q holds that Donald Trump is confronting the malevolent people — many of them paedophiles — who want to politically enslave us, and that he is succeeding. Most of the news is just a shadow of the real events: the pandemic, the death of a GOP Congressman from Covid-19, and the harassment of Senator Josh Hawley were all planned volleys in this ongoing shadow war between good and evil. In this black and white moral battle, Mike Pence was the only character whose ultimate loyalties were unknown. One could tally the evidence up either way. Stay tuned!

Suggested reading

QAnon is indestructible

By Gavin Haynes

Donald Trump spoke about Mike Pence exactly this way at the pre-riot rally, emphasising the forthcoming turn of the plot and heightening the drama. “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election… ” Trump said: “All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the States to recertify, and we become president, and you are the happiest people.”

Pence released a letter confirming that he obviously did not have constitutional powers to overrule the people in an election. Within a few hours, he would be rushed out of the Senate chamber for his safety. And Trump tweeted:

The American public is in many ways inured to Trump, having long internalised his generally high level of bullshit. But in a day of many strange happenings, the president publicly accusing the Vice President of participating in the overthrow of the American form of government has to rank in history somewhere.

Most of the MAGA occupiers were not violent. They simply walked into the Capitol building after the initial violent wave caused the overmatched Capitol police to retreat.  Many were unlikely to know the stranger menagerie of second and third-tier internet rabble rousers who strolled into Congressional offices with them. Legislative staffers who remained in their offices boarded up their doors, waiting for an all-clear from the police. In an affray near the Senate Chamber, a young woman was shot and killed by Capitol police; Trumpers are now echoing their BLM counterparts with demands to “say her name”.

Her name was Ashli Elizabeth Babbitt. She was 35 years old and a veteran of the Air Force. Three others died of medical complications in the melee.

Suggested reading

National Populism is here to stay

By Michael Lind

Here I must admit that, like several other contrarians, I believed that the danger for America was likelier to come in the form of resistance to Trump, rather than from Trump himself. I read the many prestige publications fantasising about “toppling” Trump as child-like fantasies, the liberal inteligentsia’s vain hope for the villain to finally reveal the depth of his wickedness at the culmination of the story. By doing so, Trump would justify not just his removal, but discredit all his supporters forever.

And forgive me but I still believe it.

Had Trump narrowly prevailed in the Electoral College, I believe hundreds of thousands of the resistance would have gathered in Washington DC and a reprise of the summer’s unrest would have flamed out across the country. This demonstration would have sought to provoke the kind of precipitating events that led to a government losing “moral legitimacy”. The sentiments of this resistance would have had the backing of the powers and principalities in American life. As bad as the brief reign of Q Shaman was, I still think that this Wednesday’s ragtag farce of an insurrection was easier to put down than the alternative.

And yet, the bedlam in Washington D.C. cannot be unseen. A relatively small rabble quickly seized the Capitol from retreating law enforcement. They ran wild in the offices of our elected government. If any rival power was lucky enough to have a capable operative and a thumb drive in DC today, our Congress got pwned today. America’s friends, frenemies and rivals saw these events. You think Angela Merkel is having any second thoughts about the investment agreement with China after this? I don’t.

And then there is Q Shaman himself, and what he represents. Q types will simply present their followers little snippets and clips of the news in a slightly twisted context. The story of the congressman who died of Covid and the story of a protest — maybe an Antifa mob‚ at Senator Josh Hawley’s house are linked to events like the Electoral College certification. And the human mind, talented at pattern formation, will fill in the gaps, and construct for itself the impression that there is a shadowy war between the forces aligned with Trump and the forces that oppose him, with real drama and real casualties.

Suggested reading

When will my fellow liberals learn?

By Mark Lilla

What Q is doing is just intensifying and slightly re-shaping the common experience of social media, where snippets of outrage and fear are torn slightly out of context and linked together across the most addictive parts of the platforms like Instagram “stories”. Our pattern-making minds work on this constant stimulus, leading us to ever-more adamantine convictions, unshakable suspicions and disquieting fears.

Perhaps my own belief that a liberal insurrection would have been worse than this is one of these confected convictions, imprinted on me by the collision of my biases with the overstimulation of internet media. I can’t discount that possibility.

No one should forget the disgrace and danger that President Trump inflicted on America yesterday. But the thing that will keep me up at night is the knowledge that, in an instant, these confected beliefs and lurid fantasies can leap out of Facebook and Instagram and cause my countrymen to simulate the overthrow of my government. This is a psychological weapon, and somebody is going to learn to use it more effectively. Q Shaman reigned for an instant, and I’ll always wonder if he’s coming back.