The November 2020 elections delivered a big victory for Democratic presidential challenger Joseph R. Biden along with gains or holds for many Republicans running in congressional and state contests. Reinforced partisan divisions were not, however, the most remarkable aspect of this election. Amid a raging deadly pandemic and sharp economic retraction, about two-thirds of eligible Americans registered their votes by mail or in-person, marking the highest eligible voter turnout in more than a hundred years. Some 74 million voted for Donald Trump, while more than 81 million supported the winner, Joe Biden. This remarkably high voter turnout continued through the early January 2021 Georgia runoffs, where upset victories for Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock delivered control of the US Senate to their party through 2022. A modern US electoral system that has, for decades, exhibited extraordinary slack in voter participation suddenly experienced engaged citizens on both ends of the partisan spectrum, as many more Americans than the usual ideologically attuned elites, interest groups, and party-oriented activists, jumped into a high-stakes, emotionally and morally infused referendum on the meaning and future of US democracy.

Clashes over tax policy have moved front and center in U.S. politics in recent years, reaching a crescendo in the 2012 election. That contest featured debates over the number of Americans who paid no federal income tax, scrutiny of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's low effective federal tax rate, and assessments of the distributional implications of tax cuts proposed in the budget championed by Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan. After President Obama was reelected, Democrats and Republicans immediately went to war over the future of big tax cuts inherited from his White House predecessor, Republican President George W. Bush.

Using the unique – and temporary – leverage afforded by the legal expiration at the end of 2012 of those major tax cuts, President Obama and Congressional Democrats managed to force Congressional Republicans to accept some tax rate hikes applicable to the very wealthiest Americans, though most of the top-heavy Bush tax cuts survived. After that, however, Republicans reasserted their adamant opposition to any revenue increases. And taxes have remained a flashpoint of partisan warfare in ongoing Congressional standoffs over budgets, spending sequesters, and proposals for deficit reduction. As Republican House Speaker John Boehner declared shortly after making the deal with President Obama at the end of 2012, the President “got his tax hikes on January 1 … talk about raising revenue is over” (Politi 2013). Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell reinforced the point that, from the GOP perspective, that deal was the “last word on taxes” (Kapur 2013).

How did we get here? In particular, why have Democrats had such a hard time raising revenues or restructuring the politics of tax decisions to fit their preferences for adequately funded government – even when the prevailing political and economic conditions suggest that shifts could occur? This question is especially pressing given the ongoing contribution of the Bush tax cuts to rising income inequality (CBPP 2012). Eliminating the tax cuts for well-off Americans would have been one clear way that Democrats could have weighed in against inequality. Democratic shortfalls are also puzzling in light of Barbara Sinclair's argument in Chapter 3 of this volume that unified partisan control of government makes passage of nonincremental legislation easier in an era of high and rising political polarization.

The Course Of the French Revolution was shaped by the consequences of a social-revolutionary crisis in which liberal stabilization proved impossible, and by the emergence through mass mobilization of centralized and bureaucratic state organizations. As in Russia and China, such state organizations served to consolidate the Revolution in the context of civil and international warfare. Our examination of the dynamics and outcomes of the French Revolution will emphasize these fundamental developments. As a prelude to this analysis, though, let me first enter into the ongoing historiographical debate about how the French Revolution as a whole should be characterized.

A Bourgeois Revolution?

What fundamentally changed and how in the French Revolution-these are subjects of much controversy among contemporary historians. Telling criticisms have been leveled against the until-recently dominant “social interpretation” —a view of largely Marxist inspiration, which holds that the Revolution was led by the bourgeoisie to displace feudalism and the aristocracy and to establish capitalism instead. No counterinterpretation of comparable scope and power has yet achieved widespread acceptance. This is true in part, perhaps, because debates over possible reinterpretations have remained largely within the socioeconomic terms of the established frame of reference. As Marxist notions about the centrality of the bourgeoisie and the transition from a feudal to a capitalist mode of production have been opened to question, the most vociferous debates about what to put in their place have merely tinkered with parts of the original argument, leaving its substantive focus and structure intact. New groups, other than the bourgeoisie, with economic interests corresponding to the not-so-capitalist economic outcomes of the Revolution have been sought out.

Like The Russian and the French Revolutions, the Chinese Revolution was launched by the breakdown of an autocratic and semibureaucratic Old Regime. And it culminated in a New Regime more centralized, mass-incorporating, and in many ways more fully rationalized and bureaucratic than the prerevolutionary Old Regime. In all three Revolutions, moreover, peasants provided the major insurrectionary force to transform old class relations. In France and Russia, social-revolutionary changes depended upon the occurrence of peasant revolts. Nevertheless, revolutionary state organizations were built up with the aid of primarily urban popular support and imposed through administrative hierarchies upon the rural areas. The postrevolutionary states in France and Russia both were (despite many differences) professional-bureaucratic regimes. In the Chinese Revolution, however, peasants ended up providing both the revolutionary insurrectionary force and the organized popular basis for the consolidation of revolutionary state power. And the result was a revolutionary New Regime uniquely devoted to fostering widespread participation and surprisingly resistant to routinized hierarchical domination by bureaucratic officials and professional experts.

The reasons for these differences that set the Chinese Revolution apart from the French and the Russian lie, as they did for each of the other cases, in the particular characteristics of the social-revolutionary situation and the surviving legacies of the Old Regime. After the fall of the Imperial state in China, gentry landlords remained entrenched in the rural localities, and warlords held sway at provincial and regional levels. Hence revolutionary state-builders faced formidable obstacles. Ultimately, the Chinese Revolution could be completed only when some revolutionary leaders learned to tap the enormous insurrectionary, productive, and political energies of the peasant majority.

The Social-Revolutionary Situation After 1911

Once the facade of Imperial authority was stripped away through the overthrow of the Manchus, state power in China devolved entirely into those regional, provincial, and local centers wherein it had been accumulating for decades. In a sense this situation resembled what happened in France in 1789 and in Russia in 1917.

Social Revolutions in France, Russia, and China emerged from specifically political crises centered in the structures and situations of the old-regime states. The events of 1787-9 in France, of the first half of 1917 in Russia, and of 1911-16 in China not only undermined autocratic monarchical regimes but also disorganized centrally coordinated administrative and coercive controls over the potentially rebellious lower classes. The revolutionary crises developed when the old-regime states became unable to meet the challenges of evolving international situations. Monarchical authorities were subjected to new threats or to intensified competition from more economically developed powers abroad. And they were constrained or checked in their responses by the institutionalized relationships of the autocratic state organizations to the landed upper classes and the agrarian economies. Caught in cross-pressures between domestic class structures and international exigencies, the autocracies and their centralized administrations and armies broke apart, opening the way for social-revolutionary transformations spearheaded by revolts from below.

To understand the nature and causes of the political crises that launched the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions, we need a sense of the structures of the Old Regimes and of the conflicts to which they were prone in the times before the outbreaks of the Revolutions. We may begin with the fact that prerevolutionary France, Russia, and China were countries held together by autocratic monarchies focused upon tasks of maintaining internal order and of contending with external foes. In all three Old Regimes there were fully established imperial states — that is, differentiated, centrally coordinated administrative and military hierarchies functioning under the aegis of the absolute monarchies. These imperial states were proto-bureaucratic: Some offices, especially at higher levels, were functionally specialized; some officials or aspects of official duties were subject to explicit rules and hierarchical supervision; and the separation of state offices and duties from private property and pursuits was partially institutionalized (though in different particular ways) in each regime. None of these imperial states, however, was fully bureaucratic. Concomitantly, none was as fully centralized or powerful within society as a modern national state would be.

Massive As They Were, societal political crises alone were not enough to create social-revolutionary situations in France, Russia, and China. Administrative and military breakdowns of the autocracies inaugurated social-revolutionary transformations—rather than, say, interregnums of intraelite squabbling leading to the break-up of the existing polity or the reconstitution of a similar regime on a more or less liberal basis. This result was due to the fact that widespread peasant revolts coincided with, indeed took advantage of, the hiatus of governmental supervision and sanctions. In Barrington Moore's vivid phrase, “the peasants … provided the dynamite to bring down the old building.” Their revolts destroyed the old agrarian class relations and undermined the political and military supports for liberalism or counterrevolution. They opened the way for marginal political elites, perhaps supported by urban popular movements, to consolidate the Revolutions on the basis of centralized and mass-incorporating state organizations.

Peasant revolts have in truth attracted less attention from historians and social theorists than have urban lower-class actions in revolutions-even for the predominantly agrarian societies with which we are concerned here. This is understandable. Urban workers, whether preindustrial or industrial, have often played highly visible parts in (failed as well as successful) revolutions. And their aims and achievements have been linked to those of self-consciously revolutionary leaderships. Hence insurrectionary urban workers seem like true revolutionaries compared to peasants who merely “rebel” in the countryside, far from the centers of national-political consciousness and decision.

Nevertheless, peasant revolts have been the crucial insurrectionary ingredient in virtually all actual (i.e., successful) social revolutions to date, and certainly in the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions. This is not really surprising, given that social revolutions have occurred in agrarian countries where peasants are the major producing class. Without peasant revolts, urban radicalism in predominantly agrarian countries has not in the end been able to accomplish social-revolutionary transformations. The cases of the English and German (1848) Revolutions (to be discussed below) help to demonstrate this assertion. Both of these contrast cases had vigorous urban-popular revolutionary movements.

Social-Revolutionary Crises in France, Russia, and China set in motion political and class struggles that culminated in fundamental and enduring structural transformations. Important patterns of change were common to all three Revolutions. Peasant revolts against landlords transformed agrarian class relations. Autocratic and protobureaucratic monarchies gave way to bureaucratic and mass-incorporating national states. The prerevolutionary landed upper classes were no longer exclusively privileged in society and politics. They lost their special roles in controlling the peasants and shares of the agrarian surpluses through local and regional quasi-political institutions. Under the Old Regimes, the privileges and the institutional power bases of the landed upper classes had been impediments to full state bureaucratization and to direct mass political incorporation. These impediments were removed by the political conflicts and class upheavals of the revolutionary interregnums. At the same time, emergent political leaderships were challenged by disunity and counterrevolutionary attempts at home, and by military invasions from abroad, to build new state organizations to consolidate the Revolutions. Success in meeting the challenges of political consolidation was possible in large part because revolutionary leaderships could mobilize lower-class groups formerly excluded from national politics, either urban workers or the peasantry. Thus, in all three Revolutions, landed upper classes (at least) lost out to the benefit of lower-class groups on the one hand and new state cadres on the other. In each New Regime, there was much greater popular incorporation into the state-run affairs of the nation. And the new state organizations forged during the Revolutions were more centralized and rationalized than those of the Old Regime. Hence they were more potent within society and more powerful and autonomous over and against competitors within the international states system.

Yet, of course there were also important variations in the outcomes of the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions, which need to be understood along with the patterns common to the outcomes of all three Revolutions.