Dr. Jack Goldstone

I mean, in the French Revolution, it was a lot of the nobles who felt that the tax system was ruining them and ruining France.

They went over to join the revolutionary forces.

It's the common thing that for a revolution to get going, it's not total suffering in the population as a whole.

It's whether specific groups that have leverage become...

disenchanted or angered with the government to the point where they might be willing to go out and stir up the people and stir up the crowds and say, this government... I mean, to bring it home, look at the attacks that the Republican officials, including our president, have been making on the Democratic Party.

And that's the kind of thing where you see, you know, for a long time in this country, we had kind of little policy debates where people would argue over a few percent of taxes or spending or, you know, do we do this?

Do we do that?

Now they're arguing, should the opposition party be treated like Americans or the enemy?

And it's when you get kind of people who have been successful, like Donald Trump, saying, this country's in carnage and it's got to be rescued and the Democrats have run this country into the ground.

That's revolutionary rhetoric.

That's someone who is in an elite position who's nonetheless so angry or upset with the direction that his country has taken that he's trying to stir up people to support radical change.

And so I think that this is kind of a revolutionary moment in American history.

It's just that in the old days, revolutions came with bayonets.

Now they often come with elected leaders taking more authority and changing institutions and the way they operate with popular support.

Like I say, not all revolutions require people to be hung on lampposts.

Sometimes they just have to be investigated, kicked out of office, lose their jobs, have the department that they were working for dismantled, have the federal government take precedence over state and local.

This is what happened in the French Revolution, as I said, the central government remodeled the state and local governments and so on.

So for someone like me, who's kind of been studying revolutions and seen how they play out over decades and decades, first time in my, well, I can't say the first time in my life because I was in Egypt during the Arab Spring as a researcher, but certainly first time in my own country that I start to say, hey, this actually looks like the kind of action and change and institutional struggle that you see in revolutions.

Well, counter-revolution is always an important part of what can happen when a revolution begins.

So I told you I was in Egypt, and in the early phase of the Egyptian revolution, everybody was cheering that the old dictator, Hosni Mubarak, who wanted to put his son in power and have his family stay forever, he was forced out.