Remember Kerensky: The Failure of Reformist Regimes

The Trump administration assumed power in the thick of public fury, following five years of brutal despotism, economic decline, and many years, if not decades, of declining trust. The intensity of the public mood is rarely reported by legacy media without condemnation. The denials of regime failure by the entire establishment in every sector has only caused incredulity to grow and spread.

No matter how much you think people are angry, you are likely underestimating the level of public disgust with the regime, not just in the US but all over the industrialized world.

In 2024, it reached such a fevered pitch that the seemingly impossible happened with the election of a former president who had been subject to nonstop media demonization, lawfare without precedent, and even assassination attempts. 

The attacks only helped him. Trump’s party was swept into power. That includes control of a  Congress with many members who seem to be unaware of the urgency of the moment. 

Under such conditions, this cannot be the end of the story. There is a long history of reformist governments failing to act fast enough to quell public demand for change. It is typical that such governments underestimate the fire behind the historical forces at work. They come to believe that the problem is fixed by a personnel change, whereas the real issue is systemic and comprehensive. 

The classic case is Russia, 1917.

The government of Alexander Kerensky (1881-1970) ruled Russia for only eight months, following the toppling of the Romanov monarchy and before the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. It was supposed to be an agent of calm reform; it ended as a parenthesis between the old regime and the new. 

Kerensky was a lawyer, a reformer, and a non-communist supporter of labor-led social democracy. Active in anti-government protests and denunciations for years, Kerensky seemed like the right man for the job. He had one foot in the old world and one in the new.

On taking power, he found himself in the position of making judgments about the pace and path of reform efforts. He had to deal with a collapsing economy, revolutionary fervor among the workers and peasants, and grave suspicion toward the whole of the ruling classes, the military in particular. 

He proclaimed Russia to be a Republic of the Western variety and had every intention of holding elections and shepherding into being a new type of ruling regime in Russia. The war would end, land would go to the peasants, inflation would stop, and people would find their voice in government. 

Just not yet. It had to be orderly, in Kerensky’s view. 

His mistake was in thinking that he was in charge of the motion of history. He made a fateful judgment in thinking it was all about him and not the movement that gave rise to his position. He decided to continue the war and make one final push for victory. That included an intensification of conscription in the midst of inflation. That decision ended in disaster. 

What was he thinking? In his view, Russia had already sacrificed so much for the war effort. His plan was to make good on these sacrifices by granting the Russian people the pride of victory. He had hoped to tap into the magically forgiving power of patriotism, never more enlivened than by triumph in war. His gamble did not work out. 

His more fundamental error was in believing that his rule was more secure than it was. One can see why. The Russian state had a very long history of compelling assent. With church and state united, the public had a long history of acquiescence. He had not realized fully that the bond with the people broke when the Czar was unseated. 

Kerensky could not imagine the level of public doubt surrounding his position. He was brutal enough to draft people to get killed and maimed in war but lacked the military prowess and loyalty to enforce his new role. Plus, his stated role was to be provisional and bring about elections. That presented to the public a message of vulnerability. 

Meanwhile, in his own thinking, he was overly deferential to the financial and influence networks of the past. He wanted them on board with the next phase of Russian history, which he would lead. He underestimated the massive gap in perceptions that separated the ruling class and the people on the ground. He tried but failed to heal the chasm. 

The October Revolution seems inevitable in retrospect, but it was not. Had Kerensky acted quickly to dismantle the machinery of power, immediately withdraw the troops, unplug the money printers, and slash the spending and bureaucracy, his reformist efforts might have led to orderly elections and the normalization of society. Maybe. 

Instead, Russia experienced a revolution that began with great joy at home and abroad and quickly turned murderous as the entire royal family was slaughtered, the government turned on dissidents, the economy fully collapsed, and a regime far more ferocious than the one it replaced grabbed power and held it for 70 years. 

Kerensky’s failure to move quickly doomed his country to ruin for all but the last ten years of a full century. This is due to a single miscalculation: underestimating the public’s demand for dramatic change. He and his reformist cronies believed they could make the shift from the center, satisfying critics on all sides with slow-go moves and deference to the status quo. 

It is only obvious in retrospect that this plan was completely unworkable.

It is typical for reformist governments to get carried away congratulating themselves for displacing their hated predecessors. They also tend to overestimate the extent of their hold on power. They are squeezed from two directions: legacy institutional corruption, which hates the intrusion of earnest newcomers, and a public deeply impatient for overthrowing evil.

Navigating this maze of influence and pressure is not easy, obviously, but the error is usually the same: too much deference to the existing order and not enough push to accommodate public demands. 

Trump has his cabinet, which is earnest and includes top leaders of the dissident faction. He has DOGE and Elon Musk, who is said to be powerful due to his net worth, but maybe not. Trump has loyalists around him. He has the confidence of his movement and an aura of personal heroism in overcoming every attempt to defeat him. 

Trump’s political party has the Congress. But this Congress shows no signs of understanding the seriousness of the moment. Their budgets read as if nothing is going on, that there is no real need for drastic action. Even the foreign aid that Trump has tried to end is fully funded with a budget that adds more trillions to the debt. 

The larger problem is the machinery that undid his last tenure as president. The Trump administration, even if it is moving as fast and furiously as it is able, constitutes a small faction within a much larger apparatus, including hundreds of agencies, millions of employees, millions more in contractors, and unfathomable webs of finance and influence into every sector of life at home and abroad.

It is not possible to describe the fullness of the opposition to change. On the fifth anniversary of lockdowns, X (formerly Twitter) has been subjected to DDOS attacks that took down a platform that was built to be impenetrable. The culprits are unknown. But those with an interest in stopping reform are known: they are the people powerful enough to have shut down the world five years ago. They want no upheaval and will use every resource to prevent it. 

The Trump administration came to power swearing to take on all of this, beginning with finally bringing some light on the financial books long held in secrecy. It had early successes with an avalanche of executive orders that deleted the most hated features of life under the regime. A month and weeks in, there has been a noticeable slowing of momentum with priority given to cabinet confirmations, budget battles, and trade concerns, which might turn out to be the obsession that distracts from myriad immediate needs. 

The hold that Trump has on government is more fragile than it looks from the outside. This might be the first administration in a century that has fully understood the problem of the administrative state and has had the determination to do something about it. Most other presidential administrations have either approved of the status quo, pretended not to notice that they are not in charge, or otherwise lacked the driving motivation and mandate to gut it. 

So too, the Kerensky government faced pressure in two directions: from the establishment that wanted the status quo and the people who wanted revolution. He chose a middle ground. Eight months later, he was gone and replaced by a new ruling junta that made the Romanovs look liberal by comparison. 

This is justified worry today: Can the reformist government in the US move hard and fast enough to please the fury at the grassroots? Can it stay focused enough to achieve the aim, overcoming myriad obstacles? Or will it go the way of previous post-despotic reformers and become a parenthesis in history, with every earnest aim foiled by a powerful establishment it failed to overthrow?