The Guillotine Problem

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The French Revolution ended with a dictator. Soviet communism starved millions pursuing ideologically correct agriculture. There's a pattern here that should concern anyone who wants progressive change: leftist movements are structurally incapable of wielding power.

The Coalition Collapse

Revolutionary movements unify against enemies. The Jacobins and Girondins stood together against the monarchy, then immediately turned on each other once Louis XVI was dead. When your movement is defined by moral opposition to evil, anyone who disagrees with your specific vision becomes a collaborator with evil. The Girondins weren’t guillotined for being royalists. They were guillotined for being insufficiently revolutionary. Robespierre followed them to the blade shortly after.

Result? An exhausted France welcomed Napoleon. The revolution for the rights of man produced an emperor.

Ideology Over Reality

When Stalin’s collectivization caused famine, the regime had a choice: admit failure or find someone who said communist ideology could overcome material constraints. They chose Lysenko, a pseudoscientist who claimed Mendelian genetics was "bourgeois science." His methods didn’t work. Crops failed. But admitting this meant admitting ideology was wrong, so officials fabricated yields while people starved.

Mao imported the same logic. Backyard furnaces producing useless pig iron. The Four Pests Campaign killing sparrows, unleashing locust plagues. Close-planting techniques that destroyed harvests. Fifteen to forty-five million dead.

The Great Leap Forward was, as one historian put it, "a collapse of epistemology." No one could tell the truth because truth contradicted ideology.

The Purity Trap

Modern leftism treats morality as discovered rather than constructed, eternal truths existing independent of human systems. This sounds noble but creates paralysis. If morality is cosmic law, then any action producing impure consequences is itself impure. But no real-world decision has purely moral outcomes. Every policy involves trade-offs. Every exercise of power harms someone.

So the only "pure" position becomes permanent opposition. Critique without responsibility. Principles without power.

This is why progressive movements excel at identifying what's wrong and fail at building coalitions to fix it. Potential allies get purity-tested into enemies. The coalition shrinks as standards rise.

Rejecting Your Own Tools

The irony is that leftism actively rejects the intellectual frameworks it would need to succeed.

Take Nietzsche. Contemporary progressives treat him as proto-fascist poison, despite the fact that his entire project was understanding how values get constructed, how slave moralities overthrow masters, how the powerless can reframe reality to their advantage. This is literally the playbook for revolutionary change. But because Nietzsche didn’t moralize, because he described power dynamics without condemning them, he’s untouchable.

Or consider incels. Here’s a growing population of economically discarded men with nothing to lose — exactly the demographic that has powered every revolution in history. Young men without prospects, without stake in the system, without reason to defend existing hierarchies. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution: all driven substantially by men who had been denied economic participation and family formation.

A serious left would see this as an organizing opportunity. Instead, they're treated as irredeemable enemies, mocked rather than mobilized. The people with the most revolutionary potential get pushed toward the right, which is happy to recruit them.

The Fundamental Problem

Conservatives don't face this tension. A movement oriented toward preserving hierarchy doesn't need a theory of transformation. It can tolerate imperfection because it never promised perfection. This is why the right, whatever its failures, tends to actually wield power effectively.

The left treats power as inherently corrupting rather than as a tool. Understandable: power has been used against the dispossessed for centuries. But the result is that those who most need change remain powerless to achieve it.

Taking power seriously means accepting that morality is constructed through outcomes, not discovered through revelation. It means coalition over purity. It means welcoming imperfect allies. It means building feedback loops that privilege reality over ideology.

It's less inspiring than revolutionary slogans. It's also the only thing that works.