Revolutions erupt when conditions improve, not when they worsen

Evidence

Revolution does not always come when things are going from bad to worse. It occurs most often when a nation that has accepted, and indeed has given no sign of even having noticed the most crushing laws, rejects them at the very moment when their load is being lightened…. Usually the most dangerous time for a bad government is when it attempts to reform itself. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4337

Categorization

• XREF: Tocqueville’s ‘dangerous time is when it attempts to reform’ connects to relative deprivation theory and to the wider literature on how partial liberalization triggers backlash in authoritarian systems. — connects to: Habermas saw revolution arising from affluence-induced irritation and repoliticization, not violent coup — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2656
• DEEPTHINKING: This is the single most celebrated sentence in political-violence theory — a paradigm in one paragraph, endlessly reused because it packs a counterintuitive causal claim into an aphoristic form.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4337