Apparently enough people are going to keep asking me about this, so I may as well answer.

I saw it back when it was tweets, it’s nice to see someone bringing up the forgotten lessons of history and I think it’s basically on target, but I do have some reservations:

For one, the Weatherman or PR independence types were kind of prisoners of the Cold War and it’s normal to release prisoners after you win, their patron collapses, and their cause is obsoleted, I think that context is underaccounted for.

More than that, though I think there are points where his comparisons of the power of left-insurrection and right-insurrection (finding the first stronger) are improperly treated as suggestive of the efficacy of left-insurrection against right-government, like under Trump

Thinking that point through further - that the right holds state security forces, I almost wonder if you shouldn’t go through there and count those state security forces as “institutions”, and strong ones, available to right-insurrection. Because looking back, attempts to overthrow the government from the right tend to come from there.

Paradigmatic example is the Spanish Civil War - the Republicans were the government, but the Nationalists were the army and state security forces that overthrew said government.

Like, around and after the Days of Rage period, Frank Rizzo, Ed Rendell, and Rudy Giuliani did oversee the use of unsanctioned violence to defeat their enemies and move the political situation in a congenial direction, directly in the face of officially legitimated government policy. They just used police forces. They weren’t even punished with light sentences, and more than “assistant professor”, they became mayors, governor, plausible candidate for President.

How’s that for institutional support?