Fascism and Counterrevolution

Ever since William Wordsworth celebrated revolution as a gift of youth and Edmund Burke condemned it as the scourge of age, we've looked upon rebellion and reaction as a clash of generations. The biographies of movement and counter-movement seem to tell the whole story. Both the St. Petersburg uprising of 1905 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 were led by twenty-six-year-olds against regimes donning the mantle of eternity. Malcolm X was killed at forty, Che Guevara at thirty-nine, while Klemens von Metternich—another internationalist with continental vision—didn't get going until his late thirties. Thomas Jefferson was thirty-three when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, Frantz Fanon thirty-six when he wrote The Wretched of the Earth. Burke, by contrast, was sixty-one when he wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France. And when tennis champ Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in three straight sets at Houston, she was twenty-nine, while he was, well, old enough to be her father.