After eight long years of the Bush administration, it was clear to all of us that we wanted to achieve great change in our nation and in our world. Those years were more, to us all, than simply two terms of government by a President whose political views we did not share. Those years were years which laid bare a fundamental abuse of our trust by our government, and which cost a terrible toll in lives both at home and abroad. Something had to be done about this. We sought a revolutionary change in how our nation is governed.
We did this knowing that revolutionary change is a difficult thing to achieve. We know that it has all too often come about with a steep price in blood and moral turpitude by the revolutionaries. So, following the example of many nations over the past twenty years, we strove for a "velvet revolution". Timothy Garton Ash recently wrote about the idea of "velvet revolution" in the New York Review of Books:
In old-style revolution, the angry masses on the street are stirred up by extremist revolutionary leaders—Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Mao—to support radicalization, including violence and terror, in the name of utopia. Bring on the red guards! In new-style revolution, the masses on the street are there to bring the powerholders to the negotiating table. The moment of maximum mass mobilization is the moment of turn to negotiation; that is, to compromise. Or in some cases, to violent repression—at least for the time being. For also characteristic of [velvet revolution] is that it often takes a long time to succeed, after many failed attempts, in the course of which opposition organizers, but also some of those in power, learn from their own mistakes and failures—as, for example, in Poland, Serbia, and Ukraine. Protesters "fail again, fail better," to adopt Samuel Beckett's memorable phrasing. Both sides do it differently next time. Eventually, the moment comes when there are two to tango.
So another name for the genus is "negotiated revolution." Exit prospects for the ruling elites are critical. Instead of losing their heads on the guillotine, or ending up hanging from lampposts, transition-ready members of an ancien régime, from a president such as F.W. de Klerk all the way down to local apparatchiks and secret policemen, see a bearable, even a rosier future for themselves under a new dispensation. Not merely will they get away with their lives; not only will they remain at liberty; they will also get to retain some of their social position and wealth, or to convert their former political power into economic power (the "privatization of the nomenklatura"), which sometimes helps them to make startling returns to political power under more democratic rules (as, for example, have post-communists all over post- communist Europe). In [velvet revolution], it is not just the Abbé Sieyès who survives. Louis XVI gets to keep a nice little palace in Versailles, and Marie Antoinette starts a successful line in upmarket lingerie.
It is important that we understand this. Traveling on this road of compromise, letting many of the bad guys get away, it was a choice on our part. Perhaps some of us had fever dreams of an Obama administration that rounded up and tried the criminals of the last eight years, and which birthed a host of new policies that would rival the New Deal in their scope and degree of radical change. But realistically, we all knew we had made a different choice. To get the change that we wanted now, we would have to resort to means that go against everything we hold most dear. We would compromise, and work with the established order and the powers-that-be. We would strive and fail, and vow to learn to fail better.
This is the price of velvet, the burden that we owe to the history that brought us here. There are years of corruption, of back room deals, of an incoherent press and an inchoate grassroots. That price has to be paid, either by stains on our conscience or by compromise and delay and half-measures and justice undone. Either way will pain us dearly. But we've made our choice. We want to have our revolution and to be able to live with ourselves at the same time.
And we're paying the price for it now. And hopefully, learning how to fail better.