[Verse 1] Paris seventeen-eighty-nine, the treasury's gone dry, Petersburg and Peking, same cracks spread through the sky, Skocpol said look past the marching, angry crowd, Watch the bureaucrats and soldiers when they stop playing loud, A state turns friable, crumbly like dry clay, Elites start fighting elites before the peasants have their say, Revolution's not a mood, it's a structure gone to seed, The breakdown comes before the banner, before the bleed. [Chorus] State cracks first, then the people pour through the seam, Gap in the gut between the real and the dream, That's relative deprivation, Gurr's old refrain, Terrain and weak borders, not just ethnic pain, Fifty-three beats twenty-six, nonviolent wins the game, Sing it twice so the numbers stick, say the names. [Verse 2] Ted Gurr in seventy wrote why the quiet ones combust, It's not the poorest village, it's the broken trust, You expect a harvest, a ladder, a fair share, You get dust and empty pockets, that injustice in the air, The wider grows the canyon between the want and the have, The faster folks start swinging past the point of staying calm, Nineteen seventy, Why Men Rebel on the shelf, Frustration climbs the stairway and rebellion rings the bell. [Chorus] State cracks first, then the people pour through the seam, Gap in the gut between the real and the dream, That's relative deprivation, Gurr's old refrain, Terrain and weak borders, not just ethnic pain, Fifty-three beats twenty-six, nonviolent wins the game, Sing it twice so the numbers stick, say the names. [Verse 3] Fearon and Laitin crunched the numbers, two thousand three, Said civil war loves mountains more than ethnicity, Rough terrain hides rebels, weak states can't patrol, A thin police line costs more than any ethnic toll, Collier stirred the pot with a question, sharp and plain, Is it greed that loads the rifle, or grievance, or the pain, Loot versus the lawsuit, diamonds versus despair, Internecine struggles — kin turned foe, blood in the square. [Bridge] Chenoweth and Stephan counted a century of fight, Nineteen hundred to two-thousand-six, placards versus dynamite, Nonviolent campaigns, people linking arm to arm, Won more than half the time — defections did the harm, To the regime that lost its soldiers, lost its will to stay, Violent campaigns only scored a quarter of the way, Fifty-three percent to twenty-six, remember as you hum, The marching feet outlast the drum. [Verse 4] Now zoom the lens out wider, state failure's not confined, The same bargaining breakdown starts wars of another kind, Nations misjudge power, can't commit to peace that lasts, Interstate war wears the mask that civil war once cast, So whether borders burn between two countries' spite, Or one weak capital's losing its grip at night, It's power and its limits, not just anger in the street, That tips the scales toward bullets or a treaty at your feet.
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