Insurgency: A History of the Word
Democracy itself is on the ballot next week. A linguistic and historical analysis about why.
Hi friends, enemies, ex-lovers, strangers, and Mom!
Let’s talk about insurgency. I was speaking to a producer for PBS’ Amanpour and Company a few days ago, in prep for an interview Joan and I did on Tuesday, and I mentioned that many of the folks dragging our political system to the far right explicitly believe that democracy as a system of government isn’t best for America. She was surprised to hear this stated like that, and I understand why. The mainstream media and mainstream culture often take the belief in democracy as a given in the US.
We talk about increased partisanship and misinformation and nefarious political provocatuers, but much of that discussion — in the media and in our daily lives — is about how the left and the right are opposed, when the truth of the matter is that what we’re up against right now is not Republicans versus Democrats, or progressives versus conservatives. We are in a bifurcating system, but the bifurcation is happening along different lines than many of us have the stomach to admit: it’s the people who believe representative democracy is the best system for America, and the people who believe it is not.
“Shit sucks man. I hate the US socialist government, I hate democracy, and I'm getting mentally exhausted of all this bullshit where we're not even allowed to have decent bullshit while we get fucked in the ass by the system,” one anonymous 4chan user on /pol/ wrote Wednesday, summing up what a lot of the folks hanging out in that particular forum express frequently.
Not all anti-democratic people favor autocracy. Though some do, as this thread makes clear. Some favor anarchy. Or monarchy. Or whatever libertarianism would actually be in practice. In fact, the folks who have been taken in by #StoptheSteal and the rhetoric of the MAGA leaders don’t all come from the same political viewpoint and many disagree about a lot. But increasingly, what they do agree with is that American democracy is not working and should be changed. That’s the insurgent feeling brewing in the growing political fringe, the fringe represented by 100s of candidates running for office in the midterms.
It’s scary. But it isn’t going to be any less scary if we refuse to admit it.
Here’s some proof, if you find yourself shaking your head in disbelief:
That tweet is from a very influential and smart anarchist who wrote the book on The New Right and is a charismatic and funny thought-leader to the redpilled right, and a self identified troll. I say this not to flatter him but to describe his position. Some of his tweets are jokes. That one is not.
So, without further ado, let’s think about insurgency.
The following essay was written in a fever last year as a part of first draft for the introduction of MEME WARS, the book I co-authored with Brian Friedberg and Dr. Joan Donovan. (Disclosure: Though I wrote this the ideas in it are informed HUGELY by Brian and Joan’s input, though this essay in no way represents their opinions or speaks for them. It is merely indebted to them.) Ultimately we wrote a different intro for the book, one that wasn’t so focused on an event that took place nearly 500 years ago. And also one that wasn’t so linguistic in nature. But, I think the idea here — that insurgency is a state of mind, one that has been reinforced and fostered by the media and technological ecosystems of our era — bears stating clearly. So, I’ve adapted it slightly and am pressing publish without addressing any of the editing notes our book editors left in the margins of the google doc. SORRY GUYS!!!!!
This Is an Insurgency
The noun “insurrection” comes from the adjective “insurgent,” which comes from the Latin verb “insurgere,” a combination of two words: surgere, to “rise up,” and “in,” meaning “against.” From its earliest uses in antiquity, the word “insurgent” describes someone who rises up against authorities. From the Latin it was absorbed into French and then Middle English in the 15th century, where it was used in English for the first time in reference to the English commoner and rebel Jack Cade.
Jack Cade’s Rebellion, as his skirmish came to be known, in the summer of 1450 was doomed from the start. Cade and his followers were angry about how the ruling class treated common folk like them and the corruption they saw from both the crown and the parliament. They published a list of grievances and demands, titled “A Proclamation of Grievances,” but when Henry VI failed to address them, historians estimate that around 5,000 men marched through southern England to the seat of government in London to attack the King. Some accounts of this march say they carried red flags with a dagger at their center. On their way to London, Cade’s rebels were met with government troops who they managed to overpower, because the crown had vastly underestimated the rebels’ number and support. The rebels were mostly common people, but there were also a few sitting politicians as well as one or two knights of the realm. Still, the rebels were no match for the Crown’s army in London, and so, after a few days of fighting in the streets, they clashed a final time on the London Bridge and were run out of town. Two hundred are estimated to have died. Cade fled. The King signed a letter ordering Cade to be captured and killed. Within days he met an extremely British end: a royal foe found Cade hiding in the rose bushes of a pretty English garden and stabbed him to death, his blood presumably sinking into the soil he’d wanted to defend.
After Cade was killed, his body was dragged through the streets of the nation’s capital, propped up on a chair and made to sit through a mock trial, in which he was posthumously convicted of treason. His body was ceremonially beheaded in front of a large crowd, then dismembered piece by piece. Kingsmen trotted Cade’s limbs out to the surrounding areas and put them on display in rebel-aligned towns as a warning to future would-be insurgents. It was gruesome political theater, but it got the message of deterrence across.
Five-hundred and seventy one years later, insurgents in a former British colony set up a gallows on the steps of the government’s house in another act of theatrical rebellion. This, too, was ill-fated. The thousands of insurrectionists who swarmed the capitol in Washington January 6, 2021 were never going to be able to overtake the entire US government. Like Cade’s rebellion, this one was made up mostly of people of modest means, but there were many wealthy folk among them, too, who flew in on private jets and fled the same way. Unlike Cade’s rebellion, which had some support from a few politicians, this one had the support of many, including the sitting president of the nation, and yet it was still doomed, since the government is far more than just one man’s will. Yet the similarities between these two events speak to the true meaning of insurgency.
Insurgents are never part of or sympathetic to the establishment. Insurgency is a form of antiestablishmentarianism, one in which disaffected people actually take action against their government. And it is the establishment that labels them insurgent. This is as true in the 21st century as it was in the middle ages. The major difference between then and now, though, was the use of the military to quash Cade and countrymen. At the Capitol, law enforcement were scarcely resourced and easily toppled.
Insurgents detest the powerful people who rule their lives, and they attempt to rise up against them. By definition, this is almost always an impossible task because governments — both authoritarian and democratic — by design can crush the common man. In these times, successful rebellions usually require military might and are not really rebellions at all, so much as coups. One cannot be insurgent if one’s power matches that of one’s foes. Like Goliath and David, insurgents are always fighting against something far bigger than themselves.
And “insurgent,” as we can see from the word’s etymology, is not flattering and is not self-ascribed. One does not refer to oneself as an insurgent. The point of view of the word is from the authorities, who view insurgents as wearisome and thankless agitators. Revolutionary. Rebel. These are the words David might use to describe his fight with the Goliath of government. Cade called himself a rebel. But in the Rolls of Parliament, which the British government used to document its bureaucracy, parliamentarians referred to Cade’s actions as an “insurrection.” An insurrection, almost by definition, fails to achieve its goals. It is a breach of order, an attempt at a coup, but if that attempt is successful it moves past insurgency to revolution.
Now, more than a year after the failed coup, some participants have been held accountable for their actions during the insurrection, but the leaders have not. The leaders have been on the campaign trail, stumping for candidates running on an insurgent platform. These insurgent candidates are up in the polls in many places as of today, November 2, 2022, six days before election day.
The January 6 insurrection failed, but as a media spectacle and a cultural turning point, it has succeeded in spreading the feeling of insurgency throughout the populace.
Today PBS will air a segment of me and my coauthor Dr. Joan Donovan talking about how we got to this moment in American politics and culture. The woman whose interview aired yesterday — political science professor Barbara Walter — was on to explain that America is actually for real on the brink of a potential civil war. When insurgency grows big enough to match the might of the government, it becomes the potential for system-shattering upheaval.
Insurgency is a state of being.
The people who stormed Washington DC had many names for themselves, but none was more important than “patriot.”
Not absorbed into English until a hundred years after Cade’s Rebellion, “patriot” comes from the French for “fatherland,” and speaks to a proud self-identification as part of a national family. The word had literal significance for many Trump supporters, who, in keeping with a classic interpretations of populist or right-wing ideology, viewed their powerful leader as a kind of father figure. The father they were loyal to was not the United States of America, whose building they were breaking into, but the figurehead whose name they carried on their flags. They were patriots for Trump. In this way, the rioters of January 6 could be both insurgent and patriotic -- one label was applied by outsiders, like journalists; the other by insiders, like Trump’s MAGA followers.
Words evolve over time. The Latin surgere brought us the English word “insurrection” first, a noun defining a single violent act, a moment. Whether that moment was months long like Jack Cade’s Rebellion or a single day like January 6, an insurrection exists as an event. It is not a process. But insurgency, a word that derived from it, can be. Insurgency is a state of being. In modern usage it’s defined as “the condition of being in revolt against one’s government or authorities.” Insurgency could be considered its own political orientation: against all authority.
This political orientation is growing.
A person can experience insurgency their whole life. In our current mass-media mediated world, that insurgency can be reinforced externally every day. Memes and media keep insurgencies going. Alex Jones, the supplement salesman who rails against the “deep state,” is an insurgent selling insurgency. His “InfoWars” show depends on a group of superfans he has dubbed “infowarriors,” who have internalized the idea that there is no end to their revolt. They must fight forever, patriots to a state they believe has been turned against itself.
Through videos, memes, podcasts, speeches, rallies, and stunts, Jones constantly reminds his audience that they are up against a ceaseless foe hellbent on their destruction. Every few months he presents his infowarriors with a new or evolving threat to the political, social, and moral order of the US that they must combat. All of this is a way to reinforce their identities as insurgents. Theirs is an insurgency that never necessarily needs to lead to a literal insurrection -- though when Jones hit the road in the lead up to the Capitol siege, and fired his infowarriors up for a real battle, they were primed and ready for January 6th. Ironically, Jones tried to lead some away from the barricades when they mayhem was actually taking place, probably because he realized how culpable he would be if the insurgents he had incited for years were to actually attempt to overthrow the authorities en masse. But it was too late for him to take it back. As he stood yelling for his infowarriors to turn around, they ignored him and pushed past, following the memes to their logical conclusion.
History can help us understand what happens next. After Cade’s body was quartered and displayed, those commoners and gentry who had supported him did not abandon their insurgent beliefs. Some of them were rounded up and tried for their involvement, but as British historian Alison Wier explained, this did not quell the aggrieved or calm the sense of rebellion that was brewing. No, in fact, the Jack Cade Rebellion is viewed as the precursor to the War of the Roses, which toppled a dynasty (the Lancasters), only to enthrone another (the house of York).
We are now living in the aftermath of the insurrection at the US capitol on January 6, 2021, and it's clear that the feeling of insurgency that animated those events did not end with the rounding up and criminal charging of hundreds of insurrectionists. The state could kill Jack Cade, but it couldn’t kill the feeling he represented.
Insurgent Against Democracy Itself
Cade was insurgent against the monarchy of England. That system was not, in his opinion, serving the population. It was serving the elites.
The United States was forged by a similar feeling: that the crown of Britain was not supporting the citizens of its colony. With rhetoric, violence, planning, diplomacy, and luck, the colonists turned that insurgency into revolution and created a system of government intended to serve the people: a Republican democracy rooted in stated promises made to its citizenship in the form of a constitution.
Now, the insurgents in America are rebelling against that very system of government. Ironically, some pine for a form of monarchy. There’s a growing group of Technomonarchists who think folks like Elon Musk should run the world because they are smart and rich and capable. There’s also various anarchist movements brewing, with variations on both the left and right of social issues, who believe the idea of a government that has the power to crush the common man is itself grotesque (see the tweet from the intro to this essay). And then there are outright authoritarians who long for a system of government where the leader doesn’t need to ask permission of congress to go to war or to exile entire categories of people based on [insert identity-based descriptor here]. Trump and his most powerful ally, Tucker Carlson (who last year interviewed one of the OG anti-democratic bloggers, Curtis Yarvin, sometimes described as a tech bro philosopher, who has ardently advocated for a form on monarchy in the US) appear to fall in this category.
It’s less than a week away from the midterms, and America is seriously discussing how to avoid Civil War.
This is pretty scary shit. And no one is going to save democracy this week. This is a slow-moving insurgency, one that is building momentum like a snowball. What happens in the 2022 midterms will determine a lot about where the snowball goes next and how fast it accretes snowflakes to its edges. But it won’t immediately determine where democracy in America ends.
To really “fix” things, to come together and unite around some common sense of values, those like me, and presumably you if you are reading this (though maybe you’re hate reading this and if so, hey, welcome!), those who think republican democracy is the best system anyone has thought up so far must recognize that the insurgent feeling in this country is not irrational.
Insurgents are not crazy. They are not evil, either. They have their problems, like all of us, and in many cases those problems manifest in ways that hurt other people, in bigotry and hatred and violence. I don’t condone any of this, but I feel very strongly that if we focus only on those aspects of the folks driving this insurgency, we will miss the forest for the trees. Underlying their anger and hatred is the feeling that they have been failed. We can argue whether or not that’s true, but it is a fact that the systems in this country — from health care to schooling to home ownership to cultural cache — do not foster equality of life. These insurgents have been taken advantage of, as our book details, by systems and people intent on capitalizing on their grievances into to sow chaos and accrue their own power. Read the testimonies and defense statements of many of the individuals charged on January 6 and you get a clear picture of how duped and manipulated many were. These are vulnerable people. As we all are. They are vulnerable. They are mean, sometimes, and they are funny sometimes, and they are smart sometimes. But most of all, they are serious. They are not kidding around about how they feel. They really do not think democracy is good anymore. We need to acknowledge that fact and engage with it directly.
But first, we should probably vote, since the one major thing you and anyone can do to defend democracy against people who think it’s a bad system is to engage in the democractic process. Use the rights you have within this system to try to bolster and improve it.
Then maybe, in the coming era, we can have a conversation about how to harness the feeling of insurgency that has grown in this country — especially since COVID upended all our lives — to foster a pro-social movement that would improve American democracy rather than obliterate it.
God, wouldn’t that be grand.
Anyway, here’s a painting I painted last night to make myself feel better about things. I might add some eye lashes to the right side of the tunnel just to make it even more confusing, but we’ll see.
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