I’ve written here of the use of gradualism to habituate a people to ever more rigid government control over their lives. It’s not a new idea. It has several names, according to the era in which it’s addressed. James Madison called it “consolidation.” Twentieth Century strategic thinkers called it “salami tactics.” Today, gradualism or habituation are the preferred terms. But the process is the same regardless of its cognomen.

     However, a kind of Newton’s Third Law operates in the shadows behind the gradualist enterprise. That is, as the State tightens its grip, an equal but opposite tendency to defy “the authorities” sets in among private persons. They do as they please, singly or in groups, while taking care to keep their actions hidden from anyone who would take exception. Black markets swell; men make quiet agreements with one another; private action and cooperation to mutual benefit continue ever more silently.

     Note that, in George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece 1984, he had to introduce inescapable State surveillance through the telescreen to thwart that natural reassertion of freedom. Technology was incapable of such a device when Orwell wrote that book. There are indications that things are different today. However, it’s the impulse to rebel and the processes it engenders that are on my mind this morning.

     I believe that impulse to be unquenchable. But if so, just how powerful is it? Is it capable not merely of resisting the State but of overthrowing it?

     The evidence from history tends to be negative. In the tyrannies of which we have good records, private individuals have almost always contented themselves with operating in the shadows, if by doing so they can achieve a tolerable existence. While there have always been firebrands striving to incite open rebellion, their successes have been few.

     Still, the dynamic of resistance – what Glenn Reynolds has called Irish democracy — will operate. Overweening State power is antithetical to prosperity. As people want to live well, they will follow a course that allows it, if they believe that they can survive it. The outright popular rejection and destruction of the State, whatever may follow, is rare.

     Yet States do fall! Now and then they do so spectacularly, with a thundering crash. Is it thinkable that such an event could be entirely disconnected from the quiet, private rebellions that people embrace to make their lives tolerable? Can it be causally traced, or are its lineaments always obscure to the post hoc analyst?

     These are just early-morning thoughts, Gentle Reader. I’m struggling to integrate them with Robert Higgs’s thesis of crises as the keys to the expansion of State power, the pattern of outside interventions in revolutionary movements, and the Public Choice effect. But fear not! It’s not something you should allow to trouble you. You have us for that. The mad scribblers of Liberty’s Torch do this sort of thing so you won’t need to.