America’s newly elected president may be a demagogue and a populist, but what he is above all is a revolutionary. In hoping to make America great again, Donald Trump promises to introduce a fundamental, comprehensive and rapid transformation of American political, economic, social and cultural institutions. Such a massive change is what we mean by the term “revolution.”

America has chosen a new direction

In that sense, Trump is comparable to, and in the same category as, such revolutionaries as Maximilien Robespierre, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler and Mao Zedong. This comparison isn’t intended to imply that their revolutionary programs are identical. It’s only to say that their programs aspire to fundamental, comprehensive and rapid change.

Like all revolutionaries, President Trump will quickly come to face what the German American political scientist Otto Kirchheimer called “confining conditions.”

According to Kirchheimer, confining conditions are “the particular social and intellectual conditions present at the births of [revolutionary] regimes.” These are the conditions “that have to be overcome if the new regime is to continue.” They include “social structure; the nature of the new regime; and the nature of the methods available to it, as well as those it adopts to overcome the confining conditions.”

Revolutionary America

When revolutionary regimes encounter confining conditions, they can either engage in “revolutionary breakthroughs” and thereby survive, or fail to do so and peter out or collapse.

The problem for revolutionaries is that they always come to power within an extant social structure that is, at the least, conservative and self-satisfied, or, at the most, inimical or indifferent to their aims. Simply put, institutions are always barriers to radical change simply by virtue of establishing set patterns of generally accepted behavior.

The revolutionary regime is always divided between radicals and moderates who agree on the ultimate goal — such misty objectives as making America great again — but disagree on the means to achieve it. In the run-up to the seizure of power, they all agree on who the enemy is and that it must be destroyed. Differences, conflicts and infighting inevitably emerge after power is seized and questions of concrete policy come to the fore.

At that point, the means available to a regime — and, no less important, the degree to which it is willing to employ them ruthlessly — become salient. One can pressure opponents politically and economically, which means tolerating their existence for a long time and possibly adopting a reformist platform. Or one can employ violence, whether targeted or mass, to impose change on recalcitrant social, political and economic actors.

The Bolshevik regime in Russia is the classic example of confining conditions and revolutionary breakthroughs. Their immediate challenge was coming to power as a proletarian party in a “sea of peasantry.” Their second challenge was that Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin were at loggerheads until Stalin finally triumphed and seized control.

Their third challenge came with Stalin realizing that his regime could survive only if it embarked on a revolutionary breakthrough via collectivization, industrialization and totalitarianism. Millions were killed, and the Soviet regime almost collapsed when Hitler attacked Russia in 1941, only to find that millions of soldiers and civilians were willing to surrender.

Similar dynamics, with similarly disastrous consequences for millions of people, were in evidence in revolutionary France, Nazi Germany and Communist China.

Similar dilemmas will face Trump the revolutionary

Americans may talk a lot about change, but they’re basically conservative and want to be left alone. The American social structure is highly institutionalized and thus resistant to revolutionary change. This represents a formidable confining condition.

So, too, are the inevitable tensions that will come to the fore in Trump’s camp as attention turns to policy and the means for implementing it. Republican majorities in Congress and the Supreme Court will quickly experience fissures as life intervenes and revolutionary simplicity proves inadequate to deal with empirical complexity.

The two areas in which Trump will face unexpected complexity almost immediately relate to immigration and the Russia-Ukraine war. Deporting 10 million immigrants will prove well-nigh impossible, even if it involves the use of the U.S. military. And expecting to resolve a deep-rooted conflict in Ukraine within 24 hours — especially as Vladimir Putin has made it perfectly clear that he will settle for nothing less than total victory — is at best naive, at worst silly.

Robespierre, Lenin, Hitler and Mao all employed mass violence, because they understood that ultimately that was the only way of breaking through their confining conditions and pursuing revolution. Trump will abjure mass violence, partly because he doesn’t have the nerve to kill or jail millions, mostly because even the vast majority of his supporters would be outraged. This means that Trump’s revolutionary aspirations will fail.

But all will not be lost for Trump if, when confronted with unbreakable confining conditions, he decides to retreat from revolution and adopt a more moderate form of governance. His base might howl, but he would survive.

Unfortunately, by that point, the failure of Trump’s revolutionary domestic and foreign policies will have caused enormous damage to millions of people — foremost Americans and Ukrainians — and will take time, and a new government, to undo.

Photo: trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov

About the Author: Dr. Alexander Motyl

Dr. Alexander Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia, and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires, and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, including Pidsumky imperii (2009); Puti imperii (2004); Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (2001); Revolutions, Nations, Empires: Conceptual Limits and Theoretical Possibilities (1999); Dilemmas of Independence: Ukraine after Totalitarianism (1993); and The Turn to the Right: The Ideological Origins and Development of Ukrainian Nationalism, 1919–1929 (1980); the editor of 15 volumes, including The Encyclopedia of Nationalism (2000) and The Holodomor Reader (2012); and a contributor of dozens of articles to academic and policy journals, newspaper op-ed pages, and magazines.

He also has a weekly blog, “Ukraine’s Orange Blues.” The text you just read was published in The Hill.