Seven Reasons Conservatives Are Unlikely to Start a Revolution

Don't sit around waiting, 'cause it ain't gonna happen (DN 5.7)

We have begun this chapter (5.0) with a detailed discussion of revolution. To sum up:

• All imposed governance trespasses the person, property, and liberty of the individual, and resistance to any such trespass is morally justified. As such, all humans reserve a legitimate right to revolution (5.1).

• However, several inescapable facts make revolution unwise and undesirable (5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6).

Ultimately, we will use these discoveries as the basis for a Declaration of Peace, in which we acknowledge the right to revolution while announcing our intention to seek better means for fostering the freedom and independence of the human person.

Before we get there, however, we have to make one final point, which is this:

The people you would want as allies in a revolution are unlikely to start one.

And the people who are likely to start one are people whose revolution you would not like very much.

Why You Want Classical Liberals as Allies

You say you want a revolution.
We all want to change the world.

The existing order of much of the world can reasonably be described as leftist-globalist.

On the surface, most governance (especially in the West) is of a neo-left-wing character. Behind the scenes, a variety of other forces are at work, and while they may not be operating in a conventional left-right paradigm, they are by no means classical liberals.

In other words, most of the extraction, control, and unreasoning weirdness is coming from a direction that most conservatives and libertarians strenuously oppose. Meanwhile, extraction, control, and unreasoning weirdness are the stated aims of the political left.

We saw this in the microcosmic example of covid. There was a direct correlation between political views and support for, or opposition to, restrictive government policies. Conservatives and libertarians called it covid tyranny, the plandemic, and covidtalitarianism. Lefties said Take the vaccine or die. Lock down or go to jail.

The crosstabs of this poll alone are enough to freeze the blood. The correlation between political ideology and support for measures that you and I would consider oppression wasn’t one-to-one, but it was close enough.

If your goal is freedom, independence, and an end to oppression, you would not want lefties as allies. Any revolutionary uprising they would launch would take us in the opposite direction. An uprising of the classical-liberal right—that is, conservatives and libertarians—would be your best bet.

And yet an uprising from the classical-liberal right is pretty unlikely.

In exploring the reasons why, I will focus primarily on conservatives. Libertarians and conservatives have far more in common than either would like to admit, but conservatives are far greater in number—and if you were to want a revolution against a large and powerful government, you would need numbers. Here’s why you likely would not get them.

Why It’s Not Gonna Happen

Conservatives are conservative

There is significant overlap between political conservatism (limited government) and temperamental conservatism (preservation of the existing order). For some reason, classical liberalism attracts both the temperamentally conservative (George Washington and John Adams) and the temperamentally radical (Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine). The reasons are, for our purposes in this moment, unimportant. The fact is, a lot of political conservatives are also inclined, by personal temperament, to conserve the social order, not to upend it.

You can easily see this by watching how the American right reacts to political violence from the left. Conservatives call for calm, prayer, and forgiveness. Rarely do calls for violence escalate beyond the occasional meme.

The endless growth and left-wing drift of government produces little more than calls for more political efforts. More voting. More campaign contributions. Better candidates.

Meanwhile, people on the political left call for—and commit—violence regularly. The election of anyone to the right of FDR is cause for rallies and riots, protests and property destruction, and sometimes much worse.

Back the blue

These inclinations are seen clearly in conservatives’ reflexive impulse to support the police. Generally speaking, conservatives–especially temperamental conservatives—prefer law and order.

Lefties, among whom temperamental radicalism is much more common, have less of a problem with chaos. Indeed, some seem to crave it.

More to lose

Conservatives, in the aggregate, are more likely to be married, have children, and be employed. Though it may sound unfair, this is what is frequently and colloquially described as “having a life.” This life gives conservatives more to lose in the event of social upheaval.

Side note: Please don’t tell me that many people on the left are also married and gainfully employed. We are talking about averages here. More conservatives per capita are married and have children. People on the left also skew younger, which makes it less likely that they will have careers and more likely that they will be unemployed or underemployed. And the unmarried and underemployed are exactly the ranks from which radicals and street thugs tend to spring…egged on by university students with lots of arrogant ideas and little knowledge of real life.

A rock to cling to

The things we have to lose are also the things to which we cleave in difficult times. Any bubbling of revolutionary fervor is usually calmed by the comfort of hearth and home. No matter how bad things get, someone with a good life can always say, “At least I have this.”

People on the political left, by contrast, are generally more angry at the world—at the seeming unfairness of it all, or at their own lot in life—and are less likely to have a calming domestic release valve for that anger.

Faith

Conservatives are also more likely to be religiously observant, which reduces revolutionary fervor in several ways.

First, for people who believe, God is the ultimate rock in any storm. No matter how bad things get, faith in God—and in a better world to come—provides comfort and hope.

Second, their faith teaches them to forgive, turn the other cheek, and pray—even for the worst of enemies. Predictably, this is precisely what we saw after the Charlie Kirk assassination event. Within a few days—after the initial shock wore off—many conservatives were talking about prayer and forgiveness.

Side note: I must be a bad person or something, because my reaction was different. So-called “normal” people—quite literally millions of them—were justifying the murder of someone because of words he said. Teachers and travel agents, baristas and barbers. People on social media, and people who live just a few houses away from me. My impulse wasn’t to pray for these people or forgive them—my impulse was to say, “Yikes, I really need to stay far away from these lunatics!”

Political violence

As it happens, that fear is entirely borne out by historical reality. The modern left has a history of political violence going back more than 200 years: shootings, bombings, assassinations, kidnapping and hostage taking, assault and street violence, vandalism, looting, arson, and more.

And that is to say nothing of the revolutionary violence that has brought them to power in various countries, or the institutional violence they commit every time they gain total control, the victims of which number over 150 million.

There is no equivalent on the classical-liberal right. No one has the exact numbers, but you would not be exaggerating if you posited that the ratio of left–right political violence is 10,000 to 1. Conservatives, on average, just aren’t the type.

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Sidebar:

At this juncture, I want to make it clear that it is not my intent to insult anyone’s manly vigor and resilience. I know that some of you conservatives would indeed take up arms. But not as many as you think.

There is ample evidence for this contention. Conservatives have been given more than enough provocation over the decades, and their aggregate response is never more than politics and pontificating. Meanwhile, the left cannot go more than a few years without rioting, assaulting political opponents, or burning half a city to the ground.

If you’re looking for someone just itching to start a revolution, it ain’t conservatives.

Let us continue with more reasons why…

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Happiness

We have gone over this before: conservatives are, in the aggregate, happier people. Multiple surveys have shown that conservatives smile more, express greater life satisfaction, and have more and better sex. They are higher in sexual dimorphism (manlier men, more feminine women), and their faces are deemed to be more attractive (even by left-leaning women). Add in marriage, children, and career—all of which raise overall quality of life—and it really is a recipe for greater happiness.

(The sex thing should be obvious, but in case it isn’t—married people have more sex in a year than the average single person will have in several years. Unless a single is a real player—which is not the norm—most singles spend far more time wanting it than having it. Meanwhile, married people are having it all the time, and practice makes perfect.)

Happy people are less likely to revolt. Unhappy people are more likely to revolt. That is just how things are.

Conservatives still believe in America

The American Revolution was a classical liberal revolution. Setting aside Alexander Hamilton’s villainy in undoing many of its gains, it was one of the few revolutions that can be said to have been motivated, in significant measure, by classical liberal ideas.

As such, American conservatives will treasure and defend it for two reasons: Political conservatives will agree with its objectives and underlying philosophy, and temperamental conservatives will seek to conserve the social order it produced.

A revolution now would be a revolution against the country created by that treasured event. And while what we have now has drifted wildly away from the American Revolution’s initial political gains, many conservatives hold out hope that we can somehow restore those gains and, by political means, return to something closer to what they see as the Founders’ “original vision.”

As I have written before—here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and elsewhere—I believe this view is misguided. But it is what it is. Most conservatives are not going to shed these views anytime soon, thus making revolution by conservatives—whether spontaneous or planned—a lot less likely.

Bottom line

All of this is borne out by observations anyone can easily make. Conservatives occasionally speak in the language of revolution, but this is largely nostalgia for the American Revolution rather than an expression of any revolutionary impulse today.

I have recently observed others noting the same tendencies. Writing in the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting, The Starfire Codes said this:

If these are a series of psyops and simulacra that we have been witnessing, events orchestrated and planted in the hopes to instigate some kind of flare up, to attempt to incite the right to take offensive action, I would argue that the left completely misunderstands the right’s psychology. The right is wired to protect. True conservatives can’t be goaded into taking the first strike because it goes against their core wiring, and the few outliers with fiery tempers who want to jump in the ring and start a battle will be quickly reeled in by their former mil and former intel peers. The message will be to stand down, to refuse to play into their hand, to disallow oneself to be goaded into taking action. And ultimately, cooler heads will prevail, and the right will go back to doomscrolling and incessant puzzle solving to quell that same urge, and will ultimately pour that energy into bolstering family and community while partaking in some low key prepping to make themselves feel better about “being prepared for what’s coming.” But “what’s coming” will never be something that they themselves incite. In fact, these conversations will only ever lead to more conversations about why it’s important to have better defense.

Kulak recently made the same observation: conservatives don’t fight back, even when the most egregious things are done to them, their children, and their society. She was coming from a place of disappointment (she wishes they would fight back), but whether someone is disappointed or relieved, the fact remains—conservatives are not really the revolutionary types. (Interestingly, in an earlier piece, Kulak expressed the belief that Western states are vulnerable to civil unrest, but the example she used was civil unrest produced by the left.)

Leftists revolt. It’s what they do. They fight and claw and tear at the fabric of every existing order until they can overthrow it and become the existing order. (Of course, once they have total power, they become completely reactionary and totalitarian, but that is another discussion.)

People on the classical-liberal right are extremely unlikely to revolt. If pushed hard enough, fast enough, they might be roused from these conservative tendencies. But the powers that be appear to know this, which is why they continue to boil the frog slowly.

This, then, is the bottom line and final piece of the revolutionary puzzle:

Unless there is a sudden lurch into blatant oppression—martial law and door-to-door gun confiscation, for example—conservatives are not going to revolt.

(And even in the event of door-to-door gun confiscation, they might not. When Australia’s government came for everyone’s guns, I spoke with people from the Australian right who vigorously justified the government’s actions. And the rest is history—no one fought back, and now Australians are largely disarmed.)

The people you would want as allies in a revolution—the classical liberal right—are unlikely to start one.

Leftists, by contrast, are ready to wreak havoc at the drop of a hat. And trust me—what the left produces when they win a revolution is never a good thing.

Cover page | Preface | Introduction 1 | Introduction 2 | Introduction 3 |

(Part I) Why: 1.0 | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 1.5 | 1.6 | 1.7 | 1.8 | 1.9 | 1.10 | 1.11 | 1.12 | 1.13 | 1.14 | 1.15 | 1.16 | 1.17 | 1.18 | 1.19 | 1.20 | 1.21 |1.22

(Part II) What: 2.0 | 2.1 | 2.2 | 2.3 | 2.4 | 2.5 | 2.6 | 2.7 | 2.8 | 2.9 | 2.10 I 2.11 | 2.12 | 2.13 | 2.14 | 2.15 | 2.16 | 2.17 | 2.XX | 2.18 | 2.19 | 2.20 | 2.21 | | Where: 3.0 | 3.1 | 3.2 | 3.3 | 3.4 | 3.5 | 3.6 | 3.7 | 3.8 | 3.9 | 3.10 | 3.11 | 3.12 | 3.13 || Who: 4.0 | 4.1 | 4.2 | 4.3 | 4.4 | 4.5 | 4.XX | 4.XY | 4.6 | 4.7 | 4.8 | 4.9 | 4.10 | 4.11 | 4.12 | 4.XZ | 4.13 | 4.YX | 4.14 | 4.15 | 4.16 | 4.17 | 4.18 | 4.19 | 4.YY | 4.YZ | 4.ZX | 4.20 | 4.21 | 4.22 || How: 5.0 | 5.1 | 5.2 | 5.3 | 5.4 | 5.5 | 5.6 | 5.X.1 | 5.7