Okay, so that is the extreme thumbnail of how we get from the last messages of traditional

English government with the Rump Parliament of 1649 to Lord Protector Cromwell in 1655.

The further details of all of this are of course very interesting and important, but it's

the broader strokes that we are actually getting at.

A seemingly unresolvable cycle of straining for political legitimacy, functional government,

form of democratic rule that collapse back onto military rule by those few Puritan

officers and of course Oliver Cromwell.

The social base had not yet developed to the point that it could imbue authority in

any meaningful sense to institutions that did not have some sort of hierarchical connection

to a greater polity.

No matter what their religious belief was, that was the only thing that could unite them.

And Parliament itself is dominated by people who thought that they could fix all this

by applying their specific millenniary understanding of Christianity to the question of government

and thereby resolving all the contradictions through the second couple of Christ.

Which is that is their answer to the question of what about these mounting contradictions

caused as Winston Lee would point out by property relations.

Their answer is we will make these questions meaningless by bringing about Christ's return.

So we don't have to give up any of our stuff before that.

Yes, the second coming of Christ really would fix the dialectical machine that drives history.

But of course there is no popular force to fill in with real demands for reform because

they didn't get, the levelers didn't get their increased democracy.

So they were shut out of the process.

...