23
“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
― Warren Buffett
Though this book has examined international cases of revolutions and political violence, this chapter will reorient the analysis to the United States and analyze the social revolutions of the American left. The chapter afterward will examine the social revolutions of the American right. The U.S subject is unique because, unlike the case studies previously covered in this book, its social movements have taken place within a state featuring an advanced capitalist economic system and democratic polity in the Global North, and because the U.S is regarded by many as the global hegemon of the international system. As a result, the U.S exerts considerable influence on the international stage and has had a hand in many revolutionary outcomes in other countries through direct or indirect involvement in foreign politics. As political philosopher James DeFronzo notes, liberal movements are distinguished from their conservative counterparts by their unique aim to transform the political and economic order of a given society, rather than to preserve the status quo (Defronzo, 2015, p. 9). Given the political, economic, and military power of the United States, how do American citizens of the left push for liberal change within the state? To what extent have American leftist revolutionary movements been successful in their aims to bring about liberal change?
In this section, Chalmers’ Johnson’s equation for revolution and James DeFronzo’s five preconditions for a successful revolution will be applied to the Vietnam Antiwar protests, the Occupy Wallstreet Movement, and the Black Lives Matter movement to explain their respective causes and outcomes.
Vietnam Anti-War Movement
Following the policies being put in place by the American government and the disregard of American lives by the government, the Vietnam anti-war movement began. Although the Vietnam anti-war movement did not fully develop into revolutionary war, and somewhat produced a revolutionary outcome, anti-war groups put pressure on the government and action on the part of those involved with the movement that fall in line with the theories put forth by Chalmers Johnson and James DeFronzo.
The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which became the group largely responsible for the organization of the anti-war movement’s activities, originally established themselves as a group concerned with “societal and university reform” (Berry, 2018: p. 31) based on college campuses and communities in the United States. The SDS as well as other anti-war groups shifted their focus to Vietnam particularly when Lyndon B. Johnson became president after Kennedy’s assassination, and the number of drafted men increased accompanying the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The location of apparent North Vietnamese contact with U.S. naval forces, The Gulf of Tonkin, prompted Johnson to ask for Congressional