Wretchard –

Autocracy depends keeping the thugs paid. Seen the salaries of both LEO and the military lately? Is ACORN big enough to act as the Basij did in Iran (answer: no).

Moreover, the process in the ME and elsewhere was NOT middle class people suddenly made poor over a year — it was poor people held poor, which required either a safety valve of Jihad or a ruthless thug class indebted to the powerful — the Tikriti and Alawai clans in Iraq and Syria, and a huge, massive, and well paid Secret Police. The Shah could not maintain SAVAK when his money ran short, same for the Soviets and the KGB.

In order to pay for ObamaCare and Global Warming (of some sort) AND the various stimuli and Amnesty … taxes will have to be raised massively, suddenly, on everything. Including taxes on tanning salons and “Cadillac” health plans and sodas and everything else. The taxes and the (lack of for the Middle Class) results are as illegitimate as Tiger Wood’s love children.

Note: these are taxes that LEOs, and the military, pay as well, while salaries are low and frozen. SOME crisis will arise (it always does) and the “margin” of legitimacy, success, and so on will be so low as to inspire revolt. Note that the Syrians had a mass revolt in Hama and had to use their thug army to kill the entire city, essentially. However, the Syrian Army was well paid and insulated from economic crisis. With all the latest toys too.

America has had revolts and insurrections and flips constantly: Shays Rebellion, New England’s abortive succession in the early 1800′s, South Carolina in the 1830′s, Mormons, John Brown, the Civil War, the IWW, the New Deal, the 1960′s, the Reagan Revolution, the Contract with America, etc.

Elites rule in America successfully (Ike, FDR, TR, JFK, Clinton) when they deliver either economic growth or patronage to the common man (excluding non-Whites ala the New Deal which was “White Only.”)

You can see that most clearly in Klan-admirer Woodrow Wilson who excluded Blacks from political and social and cultural life for generations.

Populists rule by massive alliances against the elite. [Reagan, Jackson, etc.]

The taxes required to fund all of this will make people suddenly poor. Machiavelli advises this is a sure-fire recipe for revolution. You will see people down to one car, renting instead of owning their home (if lucky), homeless if not lucky, and particularly those who NEED provider status ready and willing to sign on for any lunatic idea or person that will restore them.

The Weimar Republic did not fall because people in Germany were uniquely evil because they ate potatoes and schnitzel and listened to Beethoven. It fell because the Republic offered nothing to most men (and women) had no one to fight for it.