The Case for a Counterrevolution
Thoughts on Minneapolis and Tehran by way of London and Paris
A few hours after we arrived in London, British Iranians scaled the facade of 16 Prince's Gate, which houses the UK’s Iranian Embassy, and replaced the Islamic Republic flag with the Lion and Sun flag, which had flown over the country from 1907 until its revolution of 1979, and since has become a symbol of Iranians in exile and international resistance. The next day, on the way to meet friends in Hyde Park, I noted that the embassy had restored the flag of the Ayatollah, but it felt like we spotted the Lion and Sun around every corner. There were demonstrations and what seemed like an impromptu march, but more often I saw people in small groups, two or three or four, simply holding the flags, wearing them around their shoulders, occasionally waving at traffic, but otherwise appearing to go about a typical Sunday.
Earlier that weekend in Los Angeles, a rented U-Haul truck bearing pro-regime slogans charged through a group of protestors. In the days since, Iran’s government has mounted a propaganda campaign targeting the West, correctly identifying our exploitable illiteracy in matters of intra-Middle Eastern conflict. This has included offering EU politicians screenings of film allegedly showing protestors firing on Revolutionary Guard members and civilians (a tactic borrowed from Israel) and releasing footage of pro-regime demonstrations. In one curated photo dump, a girl in a hijab hands a white flower to a IRGC soldier.
Pseudo-leftist dictatorships like Iran frequently abuse the language of revolution to the point of absurdity. The “Revolutionary Guard,” as the name implies, is responsible for guarding the revolution from the forces of reaction. But now, forty-seven years after the ouster of the Shah, forty-six years after the ouster of the leftist elements from the revolutionary coalition, the Islamists face not a reaction, but a wholesale rejection.
Who are the revolutionaries and who are the counterrevolutionaries? It depends on whom you ask—or on who controls the media you consume.
The Western response to events in Iran sounds like so much static. Many reporters and commentators seem unsure, fearful that they might pick the wrong side. As some have pointed out, the left has most egregiously misread the situation, falling into the age-old trap of believing that the enemy of my country is my friend. (It shouldn’t be that hard to let go of this illusion: as one Iranian Instagram user noted, “we can hate Israhell and the Ayatollah at the same time.”) I have the tiniest bit of sympathy for this confusion because of the behavior of the right: over the strident objections of Steve Bannon and America First, President Trump has threatened to “come to the rescue” if the Ayatollah’s government kills peaceful protestors. Unlike the interventions of the Bush and Obama eras, surely Trump sees some specific prize to extract, even if it’s just insider trades on Polymarket.
Well, the protests are no longer peaceful, and the Ayatollah’s government may have killed as many as 20,000 civilians as of this writing, according to reports from inside the country. As government forces have gone to great lengths to restrict internet access, shut down airspace, and otherwise prevent information from entering or exiting Iran, the real number may be higher. So far, no U.S. boots or bombs.
Of course, Trump’s promise to ride to the aid of the Persian protest movement comes just days after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross fired one shot through the windshield and two shots through the driver’s side window of a Honda Pilot SUV, hitting and killing his neighbor, 37-year old Renee Nicole Good, an American citizen, mother of two, and recent transplant to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Good a “domestic terrorist” while department apparatchiks claimed the agent “feared for his life.” Following this administration’s tested playbook (claim something false; make this seem more reasonable by quickly claiming something even more outlandishly false), Vice President J.D. Vance went further, insisting that Ross “was doing his job,” “is protected by absolute immunity,” and “deserves a debt of gratitude.” Video footage and eyewitness testimony confirms that Ross was not in danger, that officers gave conflicting orders, and that Good wasn’t even acting as a protestor that day: she had dropped her children off at school and was attempting to move her vehicle out of the way of the ICE enforcement activity.
Perhaps a country like—I don’t know, Denmark?—could take notice and parachute a peacekeeping delegation into the Twin Cities. Or, if the Europeans won’t commit to boots on the ground, perhaps they could simply bomb the Pentagon?
Keeping up with the news at home and abroad, watching both the U.S. and Iran turn guns on civilians, I started to think about our own, recent politics in revolutionary terms.
MAGA was a revolution.
Full stop. Failure to recognize this—writing it off as an electoral accident, a nightmare, a psychosis affecting half the country—means failure to calibrate an effective response.
Like the 1979 revolution in Iran, MAGA arose swiftly and found little resistance from an anemic political establishment and decadent institutions. It borrowed populist language to build critical mass but, once in power, its policies overwhelmingly disfavored its own base. It placed zealots like Stephen Miller and Tom Homan at the head of punishment bureaucracies and foreign policy. Circular short-term dealmaking among an unrestrained oligarchy masks an economic rot poised to ruin the rising generations. Just swap Islamism for White Christian Nationalism, a Supreme Leader for a third Trump term.
If this sounds a little alarmist, I think the left—and more importantly, the center—needs to stop hitting snooze. Liberal voters and their opinion-givers tended to treat 2016 like a freak accident, but in fact it was the 2020 election that proved a hiccup in the arc of history. A pandemic and political news fatigue drove the electorate to Biden, but voters quickly remembered what they had rejected four years before. 2024 proved that MAGA was a revolution, and remarkably successful as revolutions go. Trump’s push for state ownership of corporations, regulation-by-tweet, wholesale capture of universities and cultural institutions, the crushing of independently regulated professions like the law, final say over media mergers and editorial appointments, and dramatic projection of power among regional neighbors would have been the envy of Chairman Mao.
The response of the opposition so far? No Kings, Epstein files, and Protest Frogs.
Initially I found the No Kings and Hands Off protests heartening because of their sheer size, diversity of attendance, and fundamental patriotism, important ideological ground that the left had ceded long ago. However, months on, the lack of organizing structure and messaging focus has failed to translate the protests into any change in policy.
In West London last Sunday I had to catch an uber to get from the Natural History Museum to Rachelle’s reading at Third Man Records in Soho later that night. Traffic was stop-start from Knightsbridge to Pall Mall. We came to a complete halt outside the Army & Navy Club, and I could see seven or eight car lengths ahead of us what had caused the traffic: a score of demonstrators holding what was now the familiar Lion and Sun.
As I watched the progress of the demonstration I thought not of Iran but of America. I couldn’t get out of my head the footage from Ross’s own cell phone, which captured the fatal interaction.
That’s fine dude. I’m not mad at you, Good says.
The car starts to move. Three shots.
Fucking bitch.
We don’t know if Good died instantly or if these were the last words she heard: other ICE officers prevented at at least one doctor from attending to her in the seconds after the shooting.
And in a sign of the administration’s supreme confidence in its ability to bend reality, Vice President J.D. Vance on X actually insisted that followers watch the video that most incriminated Ross.
As we moved inch by inch under the architecture of empire, I thought, we kicked the British out for not much more than this.1
Counterrevolution (while we can)
We left London on Tuesday and I’m writing this from Paris, the land of revolutions. The code to get into our building in the 5th arr.: 1789, surely a reference to the abolition of the Ancien Régime and the introduction of liberal democracy to the early modern world.
The French Revolution went awry, leading into about 150 years of instability, bloodshed, and see-saw authoritarianism. Even after World War II, the student revolts of 1968 nearly toppled the Fifth Republic. But the French people have managed to remain largely prosperous, largely egalitarian, largely happy, and largely free throughout most of the last two and a quarter centuries. They’ve also managed to maintain the spirit of revolution: last month, French farmers entered the capital to coat politicians’ homes in fresh manure to protest cattle culling policy and this week farmers drove their tractors to the National Assembly to protest the EU-Mercosur trade deal. In both cases the Macron administration promised to negotiation and relief.
Our inflatable frogs have failed to result in similar action.
As Ken Klippenstein has observed, the strategy among Congressional Democrats right now seems to be to encourage protest sporadically as a way of maintaining energy until the midterms, based on the “given” that only with a majority in at least one house of Congress can we begin to undo Trump 2.0.
This, of course, is false. Americans must move from a resistance mindset to a counterrevolutionary mindset, recognizing the MAGA revolution for what it is—and we can’t wait until the midterms. If we don’t, we’ll be leaving it to generations Alpha and Beta to mount a plain-old revolution revolution against the new order, as Iranians are doing today. And I don’t want to think about what that looks like.
What will it take to shift into a counterrevolution? Most importantly, it will require moving from inchoate demonstrations to the articulation of specific demands and the application of pressure on the weak points of MAGA and MAGA-aligned institutions. This could involve:
Winning back school boards, town and city councils, and county legislators with candidates who can restore trust through effective action (instead of transferring power and responsibility upward)
Primarying Congressional representatives who lack the will or cognitive capacity to lead the counterrevolution at that level
Stronger oversight of local law enforcement, which Trump has used to project power and confusion into communities2
Sustained divestment and boycott campaigns targeting companies and individuals that have supported Trump and his vanity projects3
Defenestration of presidents and trustees at universities that have caved to the administration’s demands restricting speech and academic freedom
Mass transfer of talent and business from the law firms that most cravenly caved to Trump to those that have resisted him
Continued leaks from within the administration and its national security apparatus
Continued lawsuits to inflict financial and other penalties on authorities that attempt to enforce the administration’s preferences
At all levels, dogged pursuit of economic and healthcare policies that relieve the underlying grievances and lack of trust that fuel MAGA’s populist base (I’ve outlined some of those previously)
Reinvestment in local and independent journalism
If we can’t do all the above, no amount of inflatable animal costume dance parties will save us.
The Boston Massacre only left five dead and three injured. Thirty-two people died in ICE custody last year, an enforcement operation has already killed one in 2026, and someone dies in state or federal prison every two hours. This is against the backdrop of weakening national security, persistent inflation, the dismantling of American civic and cultural institutions, continued federal surveillance of civilians (despite federal court rulings that this is unconstitutional), and electoral practices by the DNC-RNC duumvirate, ranging from they did it first gerrymandering to closed primaries, that have engendered generational political nihilism. To any dumbasses who feel compelled to argue this point in the comments: Yes, we kicked the British out for not much more than this.
Residents of Cheektowaga, New York set a good example this week as they packed a town hall meeting to demand that their local police department completely cut ties with ICE.
This list is incredibly long, and boycotts have a mixed record, so choosing the right targets will be essential. The ideal target would be publicly traded and dependent on consumer purchasing decisions, as Tesla was.