The Occupiers have gone home. The last mic check seems to have sounded. The Tea Partiers, on the other hand, are in full swing keeping pressure on their elected representatives to stick to their guns, and on the Republican party as a whole to stay close to its conservative traditions. There may be a revolution in the Republican party this year, but there will be no revolution in the United States of America.

One of the first things I remember learning about the French Revolution was the traditional description of France's pre-revolutionary social classes - 1% of France's pre-revolutionary population was made up of clergy, another 1% was formed by the nobility, and the other 98% was just "the rest." That struck me as so unfair when I was a teenager first learning about it. How could 98% of the population be lumped together like that? And how was it that they paid most of the taxes and did most of the work in France, but had little money to show for it and no political power? This, too, seemed so unfair. It still seems unfair.

Of course, political power is much more widely distributed in the US today than it was in France in 1789. It is also possible, though not common, to go from rags to riches in a way that was virtually inconceivable within the ancien regime. We do have a widening chasm, however, between the wealthy few and a stagnant multitude, and as the echoes of the Occupiers' calls for equity disappear into that chasm and fade into memory, I can't help but wonder - did they really give up that easily?

I don't think that they did.

The beauty of American democracy - one of its many beauties, I should say - is that it incentivizes attempts to make change by reform while providing strong disincentives for attempting to make change by revolution. Most people have just enough political power, just enough voice, just enough money, or perhaps just enough debt, to believe that the system could work for them. Many people have more than " just enough" and the system really does work for them. If you're a changemaker, you quickly find that even people with "just enough," although they may get angry, are unlikely to get angry enough to instigate a revolution. Those people want to hang onto whatever they have... their houses, their cars, their jobs, their tickets to the ball game, their 401Ks if they are lucky enough to have one. Revolutions are destructive of such trappings of stability. Even when Icelanders engaged in civil disobedience en masse by refusing to bail out their defaulted bankers, they did so within the context of a democratic vote. Icelanders like their mortgages as much as the next guy. Revolutions are not good for the stock market.


On the other hand, the incentives for participation are many. Perhaps the Occupiers have not given up so much as changed tactics. They communicated their message and they were heard. They succeeded in affecting the dialogue in Washington and that has carried over into the primaries. In January Mitt Romney, in an appearance on The Today Show, commented that the recent focus on the income gap - a major topic for the Occupiers and clearly a direct reference to them - is "about envy." Such comments are sure to keep the discussion echoing through the Presidential contest once the Republicans have chosen their candidate. Perhaps that same discussion will succeed in affecting the policies of the winner. Revolutions are exciting, but they are for people who are desparate, disempowered, disenfranchised, or perhaps just thoroughly disillusioned. People who have nothing to lose. People like "the rest" of the French population in 1789. Americans today have too much at stake to give up on our political system. Messy as it is, we need instead to call upon ourselves to do the hard work necessary to help it live up to its potential. I expect to see some Occupy protests later in the year as the election heats up, but I also expect to see some Occupiers occupying roles within the political campaigns.