Minority Rule: How all successful ascendant movements start out(Part 1)
You need highly motivated small groups of influential people and equally motivated much larger groups of supporters but that's still a small minority of the population
“Wake the people up! One day, for sure this time, the masses will wake up and grant us victory! A wave of national consciousness shall grant us the keys to DC and then the world!” I am sure you have heard this shouted from the rooftops at one point or another. Surely this time, with the way the world is going, the people will learn the truth. The thing is that political change rarely works this way. There are probably examples of a bottom up movement somehow enlisting the masses to their cause and fostering change from the bottom in history. The issue is that its not the norm. Highly motivated minorities are the groups of people who, when working together, foster change. Allow me to give a few examples throughout history, from antiquity to today.
Early Christianity
Christianity is probably one of the purest examples of an ascendant movement that succeeded due to being a highly motivated, organized and resilient enough minority religion, that in spite of persecutions that happened constantly on and off for a period of nearly 300 years, eventually won over the heart of a certain Roman emperor and eventually became the dominant religion in Europe. Why exactly did Christianity succeed? If we’re going by purely transcendental reasons, it was because God willed it. If we’re going by secular reasons, I’d say even then that it is very reductionist to just attribute it to the legalization of Christianity by Constantine. That certainly helped to entrench it in the military and ruling class BUT by the time he won at the battle of the Milvian Bridge, a good 10% of the population or more in the eastern half of the empire was already an adherent of it and probably about 5% of the western half was as well, including a large presence in the army, in spite of Diocletian kicking out Christians from the Roman military and often executing them.
So how did it take over, from a purely historical and secular lense? The reason being is because of its resiliency. I’m not the biggest fan of the strategy of parallelism, that being utilizing parallel institutions built from the ground up, that operate outside the mainstream channels of society, for an eventual victory at an institutional level in the long term(it has a great deal of use but its not the strategy that I personally choose to partake in, at least not now) BUT Christianity, through its development of parallel societies and safe havens throughout the Mediterranean, was able to endure anything the Romans threw at them. If you kill the Bishop of Rome, due to the presence of a somewhat established church hierarchy, a new one will simply be elected in its place. Many christians would go as far as to move into large caravans in the desert, the most famous example being the Desert Fathers, such as Anthony the Great, to establish independent communities away from Roman oversight that could allow the religion to develop. Through the practice of martyrdom and because the message of Christ was a far more compelling one than that of the traditional Greco-Roman pantheon that itself was dying out due to competition with eastern mystery cults, many people, through the example of pious Christians, would convert en-masse, due to being inspired at a level that the average pagan priest simply couldn’t reach. Even ardent pagans came to admire the Christians for their steadfast faith and how often the pain of death wouldn’t deter them.
Through making independent communities, some in the middle of nowhere and some in cities, such as Rome, Tarsus, Philadelphia, Antioch and Jerusalem, they were able to establish the infrastructure to eventually garner the respect and admiration of either the Caesar in the West Constantine, whose father Constantius Chlorus did not spend a great deal of resources in the persecution of Christians himself when Diocletian was still in power or by Constantine’s mother, whom according to theory raised him a secret Christian and eventually, throw power politics and through warfare which saw Constantine as the last one standing in the tetrarchy, it became the religion that was practically necessary to get ahead in the bureaucracy and since the devotion to the dying eastern mystery cults such as Mithraism was often quite surface level, eventually, even if those political opportunists may have not been sincere Christians, within a few decades, their children or grandchildren would be. This all occurred rapidly when Christianity was just 5% of the population in the area of which its first sympathetic Emperor ascended to the purple.
Islam
The faith of the prophet Muhammad is arguably an even more blatant example of a highly motivated and skilled minority of people projecting power onto a much larger population. The image below is supposed to not only show that before the various wars that were fought by the tribe of Muhammad, that Arabia was a decentralized network of many tribes and kingdoms, two of which were client states of the two big middle east superpowers(Ghassanids were a byzantine buffer state, Lahkmids were a Sassanid buffer state) and in Arabia, which itself was a very unpopulated backwater, the bulk of the population lived on the Red Sea Coast. Muhammad through various wars was eventually able to unify most of the Hejaz region under the banner of Islam and within a few years of his death, his immediate successor was able to integrate the entire Arabian peninsula under the control of the Rashidun Caliphate.
After several border skirmishes with the weakened but still far larger Eastern Roman and Sassanid armies(both of which had a standing army which combined had roughly several hundred thousand soldiers), due to having a series of brilliant military leaders and statesmen, within 2 generations they managed to completely annex the Sassanid empire and roughly half of the Eastern Roman empire, comprising of their richest areas(Syria, Egypt, North Africa), reducing Rome to a heavily fortified mountainous rump state and the Persians to a small state in the Zagros Mountains that held out for another century. This was while they only started out with an army of about 40,000 or so. However, due to being able to successfully take advantage of religious unrest in Egypt and Palestine among Monophysite Christians and Jews, this small force was able to not lose these vast territories to revolt and eventually, over the span of centuries, the areas they controlled slowly started to speak Arabic as the language of business and became Muslim.
This occurred over a period of probably 800 years but eventually, Arabs went from 0% of the population of Egypt and Syria to a majority of the population. What is even more remarkable was how fast they were able to recruit vast armies from the inherited infrastructure of the Roman and Sassanid states. 20 years after the Rashidun Caliphate was founded, the first Fitna occurred, which led to the overthrowal of the caliph Ali by Muawiya and in one of the major battles, the once army of roughly 40,000 or so tactically brilliant Arabs numbered 80,000 on one side and 120,000 on the other, totaling at around 200,000 troops, ignoring the amount of troops that were likely garrisoned in cities, a 5x increase in the span of 20 years. This example of ascendant minority rule is even more pertinent than that of early Christianity and while I doubt its a good example of how a western New Righter would eventually take over the institutions and doctrine of western governments, its still drastic enough that I felt obligated to include it.
What else?
In order to get this article out as fast as possible, I will divide the list of historical vanguards into different eras. The next era shall focus on Medieval examples of well motivated minorities fostering change, then from 1400-1800, then from 1800-2000 and then contemporary examples that hit close to home.
Thanks and God Bless!