The American color revolution

President Biden gave an impassioned speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia this past Thursday, September 2, 2022. A speech which demonstrated Democrats are not spineless after all. In his speech, the President talking about MAGA Republicans said,

“They promote authoritarian leaders and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country. They look at the mob that stormed the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, brutally attacking law enforcement, not as insurrectionists who placed a dagger at the throat of our democracy, but they look at it as patriots.”

How did we get here?

It seems the presidency of Reagan is a good place to start. Reagan-ism, as an ideology gave huge tax cuts for the rich, and created constraints on the labor markets, thus resulting in a major imbalance in the income of the working people and captains of industries.

This policy continued to create hardships for the working class for decades and made the few immensely rich resulting in the greatest transfer of wealth to less than one percent of the population.

Then came Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement.

According to Michael Ray, “the Tea Party movement is a conservative populist social and political movement that emerged in 2009 in the United States, generally opposing excessive taxation and government intervention in the private sector while supporting stronger immigration controls.”

While emotion is based on subjectivity, reason is based on objectivity. In a Democracy, people have the right to disagree. They also have the right to have religious, political, and philosophical disagreements. But, when certain opposition forces believe that those who do not think as they do are evil, and must be destroyed, it raises the issue of dealing with an irrational force that doesn’t understand dialogue and an open debate.

How else can one explain, the rally in Washington, D.C. against President Obama? During the rally in Freedom Plaza, the demonstrators carried signs that read, “Liar in Chief”, “Parasite in Chief”, “save freedom, stop Obama”, “Don’t blame me, I voted for the American”, etc. Is this not a clear example of politics of hate? Politics of irrational folks? As the great Kahlil Gibran wrote in his poem “Reason and Passion”, “Passion unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction”.

In the United States of America, we witnessed a new phenomenon in politics. The Tea Party movement. People that support this party claim, President Obama, to be a “committed socialist ideologue”, a person who has come to “destroy” America, etc. etc. In spite of a lack of logic, millions of Americans supported this group.

Stuart Whately, writing for The Huffington Post stated that “The Tea Party movement — is a national embarrassment. It is but a parody of the legitimate movements for which American democracy has historically been held in such high regard. It is, in fact, the latest instalment in quite another American tradition: the exploitation of frustrated, desperate, and susceptible people by monied interests and profiteers”.

According to Sarah Palin speaking at the first National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, she said, “This is the future of our country. The tea party movement is the future of politics.”

Maybe Sarah Palin is America’s Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. It might not be an orange revolution; nonetheless, it is a tea party revolution.

Then came the MAGA movement, “Make America Great Again” whose agenda was primarily the love for Trump, and raised issues like lower taxes, anti-immigration, etc.

This movement didn’t accept the outcome of the 2020 election and on January 6th 2021, their supporters stormed the U.S Congress.

This action of the MAGA movement is a clear example of achieving state power by force as it has happened in many countries of the world through mass uprisings. Named and unnamed color revolutions.

So what are color revolutions?

“Whether it is the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia in 2003, the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine in 2004, the “Tulip Revolution” in Kyrgyzstan in 2005, or the “Arab Spring” in Asia and Africa in 2011, the past decades have seen the US plan and implement “color revolutions,” or wars without gunpowder in many places around the world, frantically exporting “American values.” Global Times, by GT staff reporters Published: Dec 02, 2021

According to The Guardian, “USAID, National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs and Freedom House are directly involved with supporting the color revolutions.” One can add to this list, The Soros Foundation, Open Society Institute in which a number of Central Asian nations were forced to shut down OSI regional offices after the Orange revolution in Ukraine and, the U.S.-based Albert Einstein Institution that activists from Serbia and Ukraine have claimed to be trained by in the formation of their strategies.

So, color revolutions are intimately known by officials of the U.S. government. It is just alarming that what has become a regular event in other parts of the world has eventually come to the United States through the leadership of President Trump and the MAGA movement. Finally, President Trump and his followers have blessed America with its own brand of the color revolution.