The sorts of gadgets that made the Jetsons’ lives so simple keep appearing in our world, but life doesn’t get any easier. We keep learning to create things faster and faster, not so we can finally relax, but so money gets made at an ever-accelerating rate.

So how do we actually ‘lighten our toil?’

Early nineteenth century utopian socialists like Robert Owen or Charles Fourier thought existing systems of social organization that exploited workers ought to be discarded entirely and replaced from scratch. Owen’s “New Moral World” would replace the old immoral one by creating new towns from the ground up and imagining everything anew. They imagined new buildings, new schedules, new hierarchies, and new familial systems. Everything must go!

About a century after Robert Owen purchased the town of New Harmony, Indiana to put his ideas into practice, Buckminster Fuller drew up plans for Lightful Towers—mass-produced hexagonal towers for communal living that people would fly between in blimps. He advised his mother to sell their property in Cambridge, Massachusetts because his design was about to make urban living obsolete.

Neither plan worked out as planned. Robert Owen bought the town of New Harmony as a complete and ready to go place from George Rapp and his religious community called the Rappites. Owen was astoundingly wealthy, but even he didn’t have the resources to start from nothing. A few years later, his community had splintered into several competing communities. Meanwhile, real estate in Cambridge, Massachusetts is more expensive than ever. Hopefully, Buckminster’s mom knew better than to listen to her son.

The new world does not emerge fully formed in an instant of reimagining and total overhaul. Change and development occur at different rates in different places. Buildings from different centuries and social systems stand side by side and will continue to do so. Minds change slowly. Customs remain customary and are only gradually forgotten. And our world won’t sustain much more technological expansion.

But how do we repurpose machines, technologies, and living spaces that were implemented to disempower people and extract the most profit possible? If the new world will emerge from the shell of the old, how will we reuse parts of a shell designed to constrain us?

Some contemporary developments, such as cameras designed to surveil and police us, or new frontiers in prison architecture, belong in the dustbin of history. They are worse than worthless. But some labor-saving devices could serve a purpose in a future with more leisure and freedom for all. Creating a world where this is the case is no simple task. Owen was right that we need a “new moral world.” But he was confused about how to get there. Rather than systems that demand individual competition for individual profit where everything (including leisure) comes with a price tag, we need systems that provide for everyone’s needs, where no one needs to prove their worthiness to get it. Literally, ‘to each according to need, from each according to ability.’

This will require a new morality based on collective care rather than individual gain. How will that be possible in a world built to encourage selfish behaviors and any refusal to participate results in malnutrition and an early grave? The “fully automated luxury communism” movement and the corny promises of “the internet of things” put way too much emphasis on technological advances making a better world possible without the profound political and psychological changes that would also need to occur.

Our physical world and our moral worlds need to be restructured in tandem. Creating tactics to make everyone’s lives better while learning to want to make everyone’s lives better are part of the same process. Psychological transformations are important, but insufficient without material changes. Material changes are important, but they will get twisted into new sources of new profits without psychological transformations. I refuse to trust robots until further notice.

Tommy is one of many liberals who believe bizarre compound swear words are funny. Tommy’s writing is a sea of unnecessary modifiers. Not only does he create new compound words with “fuck” in them, but he further modifies each with adjectives—“general” and “cromulent.”

(Cromulent itself is a made-up word. It was not created by Tommy, but The Simpsons. In season 7, episode 16, Lisa the Iconoclast, students watch a short film about Jebediah Springfield, the founder of their town. In the film, Jebediah says, “A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.” We cut to the back of the classroom, where Edna Crabapple says to Ms. Hoover, “Embiggens? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield.” Ms. Hoover responds, “I don’t know why. It’s a perfectly cromulent word.”

Both cromulent and embiggens were invented for this episode. Both words are now in dictionaries. Cromulent is a thus a made-up word of some renown. Pair it with a brand-new compound word featuring “fuck” and we have ourselves a very specific joke a very specific type of person would make. (They probably have a “But Her Emails!” bumper sticker.))

Tommy is not the only liberal to follow this formula. Here are some others I encountered recently: Doc_Blox of Minnesota called Donald Trump an “insufferable cockwaffle,” while someone I screenshotted but forgot to save citations for called him an “immoral shitweasel.”

This style feels like the writing of a precociously intelligent child who wrote long whimsical sentences in school assignments, was told he had talent and intelligence, and then decided to never develop as a writer from that day forward. This is swearing that calls attention to itself as transgressive when swearing isn’t even necessary. This is the writing of a guy who loves stylistic flourishes more than conveying meaning.

I say “guy” intentionally. These all read like educated, white, middle-class males writing angry screeds at a world leaving them behind. They want to be funny. They need to be heard. But it’s not working.

The far right and left dominate online political discourse. Young people are either becoming right wing groypers fetishizing fascism or Leninists in polycules. Meanwhile, Tommy, Doc, and the guy who wrote “shitweasel” consider the liberalism of LBJ and Obama as the moments when America was truly great. But their version of liberalism is dying out.

The right has free speech warriors posting Wojaks and Soyjaks, whose “free speech” is mostly using slurs about marginalized identities. They are on the leading edge of something terrible, but they are on the leading edge of something. Meanwhile, the “dirtbag left” has had wildly popular podcasts like Cumtown with styles of humor we’d never heard before. (“Cumtown” is a compound word with a “naughty” word in it, but it’s short, to the point, and not modified by a five-syllable adjective.) The online right and left both have jokes that work and go viral. Liberals have Tommy and his “chumpfuckery,” and he was mocked for it so much he deleted his tweet. (Until recently, liberals also had Steven Colbert, who was gently mocking Republicans using a show format pioneered by Steve Allen back before TV was in color.)

A punchline has to hit you with something you didn’t see coming. A dying ideology will never bring us anything unexpected. It’s the political tendencies with new outlooks that are generating the jokes that work.

The liberalism that burst into the world with the French and American Revolutions is disappearing. As it dies, it recedes from the forefront of our minds and the popular imagination. It’s not there for us to quickly assemble into an understood punchline. As we struggle to remember what these guys think, we fail to make sense of their jokes.

Tommy-style “fuckcrustable” jokes are liberal attempts to join the world of transgressive online humor. The authors of these posts are projecting a self-image into the Internet, an online avatar demanding a place in the political discourse. They scream to be let in: “Immoral shitweasel!” “Insufferable cockwaffle!” “General chumpfuckery!” No one laughs. Very few listen. They write even longer sentences with even more modifiers and swear words. No one laughs. No one listens. The odd dog barks. The world moves along.

I felt compelled to screenshot this meme, post it here, and explain why it’s nonsense after seeing it (or something a lot like it) one too many times. In the meme, some patriotic U.S. citizen is getting excited to celebrate 250 years since the Declaration of Independence while some knowing “historian” looks on condescendingly because 250 years is somehow exactly how long empires can last. This is it. The U.S. is done.

The idea that “an empire” has a fixed definition across time and space, and that due to the characteristics that make it meet that definition, it will inevitably collapse after roughly two and a half centuries. “Empire” is an abstract concept we apply to various political entities throughout history. There are sets of characteristics that each of these entities may possess to varying degrees, but the world’s historians and political scientists do not agree on what the definition of an empire actually is, which political entities might meet that definition, let alone how long they might last.

Material conditions, military technology, and political practices vary wildly across time. Why would an empire that marches armies over borders to bring back slaves, livestock, and gold be subject to the same material and temporal limitations as one that controls the IMF, and has airplanes and aircraft carriers?

And just when do these “historians” (and there are precisely zero trained historians who believe what the meme says) count the beginning and end of these various empires? Let’s start with everyone’s favorite empire to compare to the United States: Rome.

The Romans really started acting like an empire and conquering the Italian Peninsula around 340 BC with the Samnite Wars. Just over 500 years later, in the early 300s AD, Constantine permanently moved the capitol to Constantinople (after Diocletian and other Emperors had already moved it away from Rome), but despite the fact that the city of Rome was no longer the center of the Roman Empire, there was still an unbroken line of political succession that lasted until 1453 AD, when the Ottomans broke down the walls of Constantinople and the Roman Empire finally ended.

The Romans in Constantinople had slowed down on their empire-like behaviors in the preceding century or so, but there were at least 1500 years of the Roman Empire. Even if you decide to deny that the Eastern Empire was “Roman” (and there aren’t very good reasons to do that), the Western Empire collapsed in the 470s AD, so that still gets us more than 800 years of Rome.

For the readers who are bad at math: Both 1500 and 800 are larger than 250.

Charlemagne was one of the people who decided that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 470s left a vacuum in “Roman” authority that was there to be filled, and then got himself named “Holy Roman Emperor” by the Pope in 800 AD. He waged some wars, did some fighting, and made the Carolingian Empire. It lasted around 80 years. This is considerably less than 250.

The title Holy Roman Emperor persisted and was later applied to the Holy Roman Empire. It really got going around 1500. Most of the Holy Roman Emperors were members of the Habsburg family. Their empire lasted until 1806, when Napoleon defeated them. The Habsburgs maintained a semblance of this empire until the end of the First World War in 1918. If we count the defeat to Napoleon as the end, then they lasted about 300 years. That’s actually sort of close to 250! If we consider that the Habsburgs maintained control of the same political machinery and a lot of the same territory until 1918, it’s closer to 400 years. That’s less close to 250.

The starts and ends of these things are often ambiguous, which makes calculating exact lifespans difficult. It also makes that meme seem even dumber.

Coincidentally, the Ottomans who conquered the Romans in 1453 also came to an end at the end of the First World War. They really started to rise around 1300 AD, so they managed to last about 600 years. Which is more than double 250.

But when did U.S. Empire begin? The British Empire rolled into North America around 1600 AD, started settling the land, and then displacing and killing the native population. When the colonists declared and won their independence from Britain, the same property-owning class that had been in charge in the colonies remained in charge in the new United States. From that perspective, we are already at over 400 years of unbroken empire-like behavior. Or maybe we should start counting the years of U.S. Empire after the Spanish-American War when the U.S. started crossing oceans to control other people? Then it would be just over a century and few decades.

But at this point you should know that none of this matters, because “empires” don’t have some magic expiration date built into them. They can go through a lot and just keep going for centuries and centuries. If you are rooting for the U.S. Empire to end, don’t just count to 250 and then gleefully await its collapse.

For instance, The Shriver Center on Poverty Law, under the headline “Trump and Congress rewrite the social contract,” claims that Trump’s 2025 “Big, Beautiful Bill”: “rewrites the social contract as we know it by transferring trillions of dollars upwards to the wealthiest Americans at the expense of low-income and working people.”[1] A few months earlier, The Roosevelt Institute published “Social Security Cuts Betray the Social Contract,” making a similar claim about recent innovations in trickle-up economics and the social contract.[2] Meanwhile, Trump’s Treasury Department put out a press release about “Trump Accounts.” These would “return us to a social contract anchored in individual ownership.”[3]

Many people assume that social contracts legitimize our governments. We can break or maintain these contracts. But they exist, and are the basis of how and why we interact.

There are good reasons to doubt social contract theory. Way back in the eighteenth century, David Hume pointed out that “almost all the governments, which exist at present, or of which there remains any record in story, have been founded originally, either on usurpation or conquest.”[4] Following Hume’s logic, governments were little more than protection rackets that gained legitimacy through ubiquity.

That’s not the only problem. Social contract theorists inevitably imagine isolated individuals coming together to make a pact to meet their collective needs. But humans are social beings. We have always exercised collective power to get things done. States and hierarchical institutions are unnecessary additions to already existing systems for cooperating. The whole theory is based on modern rights-based individualism that is then projected onto earlier eras before these ideas were commonplace.

But even if we accept social contract theory as an accurate account of why and how we made nation-states, the states they describe cannot guarantee peace or safety. In fact, peace is impossible while states so conceived continue to exist.

States of Nature

We’ll take Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau as the paradigmatic social contract theorists. They all agree that humans were once in a “state of nature” but found it necessary to contract governments into existence. The reasons vary. Hobbes argues that in the state of nature, “notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place.”[5] Without legal impediments, everything is permitted and no one is safe. And so, everyone chooses to leave the state of nature and make a covenant with one another to have a sovereign—whether king or committee—whom they will all obey.

Locke rejects Hobbes’ amoral state of nature and insists that there is a natural law that gives moral guidelines in advance of sovereign authority. We can all use reason to apprehend natural law and understand how to treat each other, with or without governments. But Locke’s state of nature still devolves into a Hobbesian war of all against all, and everyone gets together to make a contract.

Rousseau imagines humans in the state of nature living solitary lives with very few needs. It was pretty peaceful. Then people came up with metallurgy and agriculture, and that simple life was destroyed. “As soon as men were needed to smelt and forge iron, others were needed to feed them.”[6] Cultivating land led to dividing land being, which led to property laws, inequality, and subjugation. This devolved into a Hobbesian war of all against all, and everyone got together to make a contract.

There was almost certainly never a moment when people came together to make governments from scratch. In that sense, social contract theory is completely fictional. But it seems like many of us accept an at least imagined covenant as the basis of government. In that sense, we have made the social contract real, thereby turning a thought experiment into common sense. Consider the quotes at the beginning of this. Even if there never was a contract, enough people act and talk like there was one that it has become a form of reality.

States Can’t Make Us Safe

Looking back at the big names in social contract theory, they all agree that humans wanted a contract for safety and protection. But if we look back even more carefully, we realize that the states they imagine can’t make us safe.

Even after the social contract, the various sovereign powers remain in a state of nature with one another. For instance, Locke describes people in his state of nature as “all being kings.”[7] Most of us stop being kings after the imaginary ink on the imaginary contract dries, but “all Princes and Rulers of Independent Governments all through the World, are in a State of Nature.”[8]

Hobbes similarly says that “In all times, kings and persons of sovereign authority” maintain “a posture of war.”[9]

Rousseau agrees with Locke and Hobbes, but also explains how dangerous this is. “As individuals, we live in the civil state, under the control of the Law; as nations, each is in the state of nature. And it is this which makes our position worse than if such distinctions were unknown. For, living as we do at once in the civil order and in the state of nature, we find ourselves exposed to the evils of both conditions, without winning the security we need in either.”[10]

Because governments are composed of people, when nations treat each other like individuals in a state of nature, it’s the people composing the nations who do the dying.

Even when we look at social contract theory in the best possible light, it seems like all nation-states really manage to do is pull us out of an imagined state of nature between one another and into a real state of nature between nation-states where the possible levels of death and destruction are incomprehensibly worse.

A small group of astronauts with a malfunctioning toilet recently flew around the moon and back. They sent back photographs of Earth from space. From that distance, we just see land masses with no discernible borders. Here on the ground, fences, signs, and people demanding our passports delineate abstractions we call “nations” that coexist in a Hobbesian state of nature.

Right now, citizens of Gaza, Iran, Sudan, Lebanon, and numerous other places may live among fellow citizens with whom they have juridical relations. But if world leaders remain in Hobbesian relations with other world leaders, those juridical relations do them little good, and they might suffer a violent death at any moment and that’s just a consequence of states being states.

The modern nation-state is a bad idea, in several senses of “being a bad idea.” Social contract theory may be a fiction, but it’s a fiction many people believe. And by believing it, we keep ourselves in a very dangerous situation where we see that dangerous situation as rooted in a real agreement. Don’t be fooled. The state is not your friend.

[1] “Trump and Congress rewrite the social contract,” www.povertylaw.org, July 11, 2025.

[2] “Social Security Cuts Betray the Social Contract,” www.rooseveltinstitute.org, March 28, 2025.

[3] “Trump Accounts, The Defining Policy of America’s 250^th Anniversary,” U.S. Department of the Treasury, January 28, 2026.

[4] David Hume, Political Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1994), 168.

[5] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651: Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1996), 85, Head Edition 63.

[6] The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 173.

[7] John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), paragraph 123, p. 350.

[8] Ibid., paragraph 14, p. 176.

[9] Hobbes, Leviathan, 85, Head 63.

[10] Jean Jacques Rousseau, A Lasting Peace Through the Federation of Europe and The State of War, (London: Constable and Company, 1917), 127. Emphasis mine.

Who is Thucydides? Thucydides was a historian and general who fought for Athens in the Peloponnesian War and then wrote a history of that long conflict between Sparta and Athens.

But how is a historian a cure for Platonism, and why does Platonism even require a cure?

For Nietzsche, “Plato is a coward in face of reality—consequently he flees into the ideal.”[2] But Thucydides, along with Machiavelli, “are related to me closely by their unconditional will not to deceive themselves and not to see reason in reality.”[3]

In the Laws and the Republic, Plato tries to lay out the ideal society or system of laws that would serve the “good.” The laws and social structures are discovered in advance of the city, and the idea of life precedes the living of it. This is a typical line of thought for Plato. There’s an ideal toward which reality aspires but inevitably falls short.

Plato wants to uncover reason in reality. For Nietzsche, this is a mistake. Plato puts “the ‘highest concepts,’ that is to say the most general, the emptiest concepts, the last fumes of evaporating reality, at the beginning as the beginning.”[4]

He sees Thucydides as grounded in unevaporated reality. His history of the Peloponnesian War is filled with speeches from various participants in the war, allowing Thucydides to use their mouths to expound eloquently on political and military theory. But their eloquence is almost inevitably followed by ruthless and destructive violence.

Pericles, who was Athens’ leading figure in the early years of the war, delivers a funeral oration in honor of the war dead. He talks about what they’re fighting for. “Let me say that our system of government does not copy the institutions of our neighbors. It is more the case of our being a model to others, than imitating anyone else. Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people.”[5] Of the two great powers in Greece at the time, the Athenian way of life was the one worth fighting and dying for, and Pericles wanted them to know it. “This, then, is the kind of city for which these men, who could not bear the thought of losing her, nobly fought and nobly died. It is only natural that every one of us who survive them should be willing to undergo hardships in her service.”[6]

Later in the war, the island of Melos allied with Sparta. They had been neutral, but when “the Athenians had brought force to bear on them by laying waste to their land, they had become open enemies of Athens.”[7] In other words, Athens attacked a neutral party and they stopped being neutral. So Athens showed up with their navy and gave Melos the choice between subjugation and destruction. The Athenians let them know, “It is not so much your hostility that injures us; it is rather the case that, if we were on friendly terms with you, our subjects would regard that as a sign of weakness in us.”[8] For the sake of their empire, they need to look tough. The Athenians besieged Melos, conquered them, and then “put to death all the men of military age whom they took, and sold the women and children as slaves.”[9] Athens might declare their empire “good” and worth fighting for, but the cruel logic of empire inevitably destroys innocent lives for reasons of state.

Thucydides pulls our attention away from any idealized good and shows us power acting solely in the interest of power. This is how Thucydides cures Platonism.

Nietzsche is by no means an anarchist, but passages like the one we’ve been examining may be why an anarchist like Emma Goldman admired him. Once you decipher why Thucydides is Nietzsche’s cure for Platonism, you can only conclude that the state is not your friend.

[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ (1889: New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 117.

[2] Ibid., 118.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 47.

[5] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), 145.

[6] Ibid., 148.

[7] Ibid., 400.

[8] Ibid., 402.

[9] Ibid., 408.

Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were both born on February 12, 1809. Same day. Same year.

Darwin sailed on the HMS Beagle when he compiled his evidence for evolution. An anagram of “beagle” is “Abe leg.”

Abraham Lincoln had long legs. A woman once asked Lincoln just how long his legs were. He said, “Long enough to reach the ground.”

Both Lincoln and Darwin died in the month of April. Darwin died on April 19, 1882, and Lincoln on April 15, 1856, or as the Romans would call it, “the Ides of April.” Lincoln had been shot the previous day in Ford’s Theater by an actor named John Wilkes Booth. John Wilkes Booth came from a family of actors, with his father Junius Brutus Booth being the most famous actor of the bunch.

The elder Booth was named for Marcus Junius Brutus, a Roman politician who assassinated Julius Caesar on the Ides of March in 44 BC and then died in a civil war fighting Caesar’s adopted heir. Marcus Junius Brutus is widely believed to have said “Sic semper tyrannus”—Latin for “thus always to tyrants”—after stabbing Caesar. There are no ancient sources to suggest this was the case, but it was widely believed in the early years of the United States and “Sic Semper Tyrannus” became Virginia’s state motto.

When John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater near the Ides of April, he jumped onto the stage and shouted “Sic semper tyrannus!” This may have been done in honor of his late father.

Almost one hundred years after Lincoln’s death, another U.S. President took an assassin’s bullet (or three?) to the head. John F. Kennedy was not at Ford’s Theater. He was riding in a Lincoln Continental—a car made by the Ford Motor Company and named for Abraham Lincoln.

It might seem odd that a company owned by the famously racist Henry Ford would name a car after the Great Emancipator, but the Lincoln Motor Company was started by Henry Leland in 1917 before Ford bought it in 1922.

Below is a picture of President Gerald Ford, right after Squeaky Fromme shot him. He lived. As a teenager, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme was a member of the Westchester Lariats, a dance group that performed on The Lawrence Welk Show and at the White House back when Richard Nixon was Eisenhower’s Vice President. Decades later, Gerald Ford became President when Nixon resigned. He had become Nixon’s Vice President when Spiro Agnew resigned. Ford was never elected to either position. An anagram of “Spiro Agnew” is “Gains Power.”

I think this should help explain things.

I’ve been thinking about this ever since I learned that Karl Popper founded the free market think tank the Mount Pelerin Society alongside the conservative economists Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ludwig von Mises. In his The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper spends the first half of the book attacking Plato’s Republic. Hayek and Friedman both taught at the University of Chicago alongside Leo Strauss—where all three directly trained or influenced many notable Reagan and Bush era neoconservatives. Strauss drew heavily from Plato’s Republic, adopting the ‘noble lie’ and ‘rule of the wise’ into his political philosophy. It struck me as strange that Popper and Strauss could work effectively in the same political and economic circles, yet arrive there through such different philosophical trajectories.

Maybe there’s not much to conservative political thought beyond conservatism? Consider John C. Calhoun and Thomas Hobbes, another two quintessentially conservative thinkers whose political theories are almost completely different.

Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher born in 1588. His mother went into labor with him while the Spanish Armada sailed up the English Channel. Hobbes lived into his nineties, and chaos and war continued to unfold all around him. The Thirty Years’ War tore across Europe, and then the English Civil Wars resulted in King Charles losing his head and Oliver Cromwell coming to power. At the height of the Civil Wars, Hobbes fled to France, where he tutored the future King Charles II in mathematics and wrote Leviathan, arguably the most influential work of political philosophy ever written in the English language.

Hobbes, living through extreme violence and unrest, tries to find ways to maintain political stability. He imagines humans before political systems came to be, living as individuals in a “state of nature.” Hobbes argues that “notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law: where there is no law, no injustice.”[1] Without legal impediments, everything is permitted and no one is safe. And so, everyone chooses to leave the state of nature and make a covenant with one another to have a sovereign—whether king or committee—whom they will all obey. And when that sovereign power makes a law, “no law can be unjust.”[2]

The English Civil Wars had started when King Charles and Parliament clashed over taxation and political authority. As Hobbes writes, “If there had not first been an opinion received of the greatest part of England, that these powers were divided between the King, and the Lords, and the House of Commons, the people had never been divided and fallen into this civil war.”[3] Whatever form the sovereign takes, according to Hobbes, it must be a single, undifferentiated power. Dividing power destroys it.

Two centuries later and an ocean away, John C. Calhoun was a U.S. politician from South Carolina with intense eyes and a massive intellect. Sadly, he used his powerful mind to argue on behalf of slavery, slaveholders, and “natural” hierarchies. Calhoun rejected social contract theory’s “state of nature.” People have always been social beings, so society has existed as long as people have. No such “state of nature” ever existed, so why use it to explain why we are the way we are? While that argument makes sense, as a slavery enthusiast, Calhoun also adds that people are not naturally equal, and we only have the rights society gives us, so contracting as free and equal individuals from outside society makes no sense.

Calhoun also thinks different groups and interests should share and balance political power. He makes a distinction between constitutional governments based on the “numerical majority” and those using the “concurrent majority.” The numerical majority is simple majority rule. More people vote for one person or faction, that person or faction gains power, and groups in the numerical minorities get left out of political decision making.

Calhoun prefers the concurrent majority. It “regards interests as well as numbers—considering the community as made up of different and conflicting interests, as far as the action of the government is concerned—and takes the sense of each through its majority or appropriate organ, and the united sense of all as the sense of the entire community.”[4] Different regions and industries receive a voice in the government and veto powers against one another, so that no single section or interest can dominate the others. In his political life, Calhoun applied this principle to argue that South Carolina could nullify a federal tariff that aided northern manufacturing and hurt southern slaveholders.

Calhoun wrote from a southern slaveholding perspective at a time when the non-slaveholding north was experiencing a population boom and farmers too poor to own people were moving west into the new territories. Slaveholders were becoming numerically and geographically isolated. Calhoun’s concurrent majority was designed to serve slaveholder interests, not dissenters, and certainly not ethnic minorities. As Richard Hofstadter writes in his chapter on Calhoun, “He was not interested in any minority that was not a propertied minority. The concurrent majority itself was a device without relevance to the protection of dissent, but designed specifically to protect a vested interest of considerable power.”[5]

Calhoun and Hobbes were both deeply conservative men devoted to a stable status quo and obedience to authority. But they did so on different continents in different centuries, and the paths they saw toward stability were remarkably different. Hobbes argued that we all agreed to obey from an imagined state of equality, so please quit complaining and get back to obeying. Calhoun thought that natural equality is a myth and what really matters is that different leaders from different groups should work together so they can all stay powerful and everything can remain as it is.

These two conservative thinkers could hardly agree less. Considering Calhoun and Hobbes, as well as Popper and Strauss: What exactly is conservative political thought? What are its first principles? Are there any? Or is it as simple as, “Respect power and authority. Make sure the people in power stay there.”?

It seems like there might not be an ideological through-line any more complicated than that. This is why pointing out contradictions in conservative thought generally won’t slow them down or make them rethink their actions. The U.S. Republican Party is supposed to be the party of small government, yet it keeps increasing federal power and spends and spends and spends. An antiwar candidate becomes a prowar president. These are complete contradictions, but pointing them out will probably never have a practical application.

Hobbes feared civil war and political instability. Calhoun was scared to lose the race-based hierarchy that made his family wealthy and powerful. They were driven to their conclusions through fear and emotion. They may have believed that they reasoned dispassionately and carefully using facts and logic, but there was a highly emotional fear and distrust of other humans that set them on their philosophical trajectories. There is a moral bankruptcy at the core of conservative thinking that gets covered up with whatever arguments make sense in the moment.

Conservative politics is about maintaining power and authority. There is no real philosophical core. We don’t need to unravel their ideologies or uncover their contradictions. We just need to stop them.

[1] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651: Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1996), 85, Head Edition 63.

[2] Ibid., 230, Head 182.

[3] Ibid., 121, Head 93.

[4] John C. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1995), 23.

[5] Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948: New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 116.

Returning to the opening passages of Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte for inspiration may seem ironic by the time you reach the end of this section, but sometimes you just need a ladder to kick away when you’re done climbing it.

A lot of Marx’s point is embedded in the title. The title is also likely confusing to contemporary eyes. So, you may ask, who was Louis Bonaparte, what’s a Brumaire, and why did he have eighteen of them?

Louis Bonaparte was Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew. From 1848 to 1851, this nephew was president of the Second French Republic. But in late 1851, he did a coup and turned the Second French Republic into the Second French Empire with himself as emperor. His uncle had been First Consul in the First French Republic, but did a coup that turned the First French Republic into the First French Empire with himself as emperor. Uncle Napoleon did his coup on a date in the French Republican Calendar called the eighteenth of Brumaire in the Year VIII (but we might better understand as the ninth of November 1799).

When the first Napoleon did his coup, it was a tragedy. When his comparatively buffoonish nephew did his, it was a farce, according to a famous line Marx gets out of the way in the second sentence of his Eighteenth Brumaire. A little later on, Marx writes, “Tradition from all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”[1] The French Revolution of 1789 that Napoleon Bonaparte ended with his original, tragic coup drew from Roman history—he was “First Consul” but became an “emperor” to take one example. The revolution of 1848 that brought his nephew to power made frequent reference to that earlier French revolution of 1789.

We look for guidance and precedents. Marx compares this tendency to “a beginner studying a new language [who] always translates it back into his mother tongue.” However, “only when he can use it without referring back, and thus forsake his native language for the new, only then has he entered into the spirit of the new language, and gained the ability to speak it fluently.”[2]

There is currently no shortage of minute-long social media videos where someone tries to show which historical precedent we really need to look at to understand what sort of authoritarian Donald Trump is. Usually, it’s revealed that we’re living in a point-by-point and moment-by-moment recreation of Nazi Germany. January 6, 2021 was Trump’s Beer Hall Putsch and everything that followed since then has an exact corollary. Then another short video explains that he’s more like Mussolini and we’re reliving Italian Fascism. Or he’s not actually a fascist but more of a monarchist who wants absolute authority. Louis XIV said L’etat, c’est moi—I am the state. Trump’s just like that. Or maybe he’s exactly like the corrupt oligarchs who ran Eastern Europe after the Cold War. He’s running a mob-like syndicate through the state to enrich his friends and family while punishing his enemies.

But the historical, political, and economic conditions that produced Trump are different from every one of these examples. He’s greedy, vain, amoral, and vindictive. These are terrible human traits we see throughout history. He will be similar to other awful people who wielded power in awful ways. But a guy who somehow went bankrupt running casinos and saved his name and solvency through reality TV and tweeting relentlessly and then became the leader of a flailing empire with enough nuclear missiles to destroy every living thing on Earth is going to be a new version of greedy, vain, amoral, and vindictive.

It is important to note that it is “tradition” from past generations that “weighs like a nightmare” on the living. Marx analyzes the class divides and material circumstances that allowed Louis Bonaparte to make himself emperor, but sees that “traditions”—cultural touchstones and half-remembered figures from the past—weigh down our brains. There is a thing-in-itself behind our experience, but we interpret that thing through a language fit to describe past events. We misunderstand what’s actually happening because we lack the language to describe our new experience. The owl of Minerva usually flies at dusk, it turns out.

We are experiencing new contradictions and new possibilities. We now carry computers in our pockets that track our every move, but we can also send messages around the world in seconds. There has a been a revolution in communication, but a few billionaires own all the media. We are living through a tumultuous time mediated by systems and devices no one has seen before, undergoing endless changes in service agreements and privacy levels. Meanwhile, a well-funded but poorly trained federal militia that gets to ignore the Constitution is out on the streets executing anyone they find annoying. The U.S. military is already patrolling every other inch of the planet. The United States is not an empire trying to conquer the world. It already did that decades ago. But its control is weakening. There has never been a time like this. And it will never be repeated again, just like the times we keep comparing it to.

There are lessons we can learn from seeing past successes and failures when facing unjust institutions, but we are living a new drama that demands a new vocabulary. If we want to stop translating what we see back into languages we already know, we need to learn the language of the present.

Part II: So, Should We Just Ignore the Past and Push Forward into the Future?

If we can’t look back to find patterns to help us predict “their” next move, why study history at all? Well, it’s how we got where we are, and we’ll never understand what we’re standing on the edge of if we can’t see the trajectory that brought us here.

Take, for just one example, the revolutions of 1848 that brought Louis Bonaparte to the presidency. Even if we can’t find patterns and precedents, we can still learn something useful.

It was the “springtime of the peoples.” There were uprisings in favor of rights-based orders and constitutions all across Europe, from Hungary, to Italy, to Prussia, to Austria, to just about everywhere in between. By 1849, a strong counterrevolutionary movement shut it all down with very few obvious changes taking place. The French King abdicated and the archconservative Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich went into exile, but there was little else anyone could point to as a real success.

However, a new type of nationalism became a major force in world history. In the “springtime of the peoples,” the “peoples” demanding representative institutions and constitutions needed to define themselves. Who were all these “peoples” demanding equal protection under the law? For instance, in 1848, there was an Italian peninsula, but Italy the country did not exist. Since the fall of the Western Roman Empire, it had been a patchwork of independent cities, duchies, and kingdoms, many under the rotating control of French kings, Spanish Hapsburgs, or the Holy Roman Empire. When Niccolò Machiavelli was a Florentine diplomat, Florence was besieging Pisa because they were in revolt against Florentine control, all while Cesare Borgia’s army had left the Papal States to conquer everyone else, the results of which depended on how long the King of France would take which side. This was not some sort of Italian civil war. There was no Italy, so these were just wars.

By 1848, the bottom of the Italian boot was The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, up north, the Kingdom of Lombardo-Venetia was part of the Austrian Hapsburg’s domain, and had been ever since the waning days of the original Napoleon’s world domination, which is to say, three decades or so. Sardinia joined Lombardo-Venetia in their fight against the Hapsburgs. Revolts occurred in the Papal States and Naples, while Machiavelli’s Florence was now within Tuscany, just south of the Duchies of Parma and Modena. It was a confusing mess.

To become a “people” that could demand independence, the revolutionaries of 1848 looked into the past to find proof that they were, in fact, “a people.” As Christopher Clark writes in Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849, “For patriots, the nation was emphatically not a new invention, but something inherited from the past, something unique but not arbitrary.”[3] In Italy, the “Risorgimento fed on a variety of meta-historical myths, focusing respectively on the pre-historical Etruscans, the ancient Romans, the medieval communes and so on.”[4] Creating national identities in 1848 was an act of collating, consolidating, and improvisationally inventing an imagined past based loosely on the actual past.

A lot of the “traditional clothes” of European nations we see at folk dances were invented by tailors in the 1840s grabbing various elements from the past and pushing them through contemporary styles and materials. The same was true of the “traditional” steps in the dances. It was this era that also saw the birth of the concept of the Italian nonna, a sweet grandmother maintaining traditional foods from long ago. They were out hunting for “traditions” from past generations.

These revolutionary patriots would also often seek a single language to help them stand together against foreign overlords. “Patriots confident in the superiority of their own national civilization sometimes expected the members of other groups to merge with them through a process of linguistic assimilation, seeing this not as an imposition but as the conferral of a benefit.”[5]

This emergent nationalism coalesced unevenly. Centuries of fighting up and down the Italian peninsula (for instance) created local resentments that outweighed disgust over foreign control. Many poor farmers understood themselves as imperial peasants of the Hapsburgs and distrusted these rich locals suddenly demanding they all fight a war together against the empire. National feeling “was an evolving field of awareness, a form of affiliation that had to live alongside others: religious commitments, regional and dynastic attachments, political visions.”[6]

The revolutions largely failed in their goals. Counterrevolutions left almost exactly the same people in charge as in 1847. But the power of “the nation” and “a people” as a unifying force began to get more potent. Prussian nationalists failed to get a constitution in 1848, but the conservative Otto von Bismarck could unify a German nation a few decades later. The revolutions of 1848 on the Italian peninsula are sometimes called The First War of Italian Unification. Both of these nations did their unifying in the early 1870s, and then ended up causing some real problems in the ensuing decades.

Nationalism emerged as a tool of “the good guys” fighting for universal rights and representative government against declining feudal despotism. It quickly transformed into a new tool of cruelty and oppression, with firm borders and an ancient and great “us” who has always existed and needs to violently defend itself against outside pollution and internal deviations.

It’s not like we need to look back and view Italian freedom fighters like Garibaldi and Mazzini as “bad all along.” They did what made sense to them in the times they inhabited. But they unleashed an idea of nations, peoples, and imagined traditions that created an awful situation that puts everyone on Earth in great danger.

We can look back at the tumult of 1848 and learn a lot about the present, not in how history is repeating itself, but in how we got where we are. 1848 is a big part of where nationalism came from. It’s just one example, used in part because it followed nicely from talking about the Eighteenth Brumaire. Understanding history helps us understand where we are. Why is the present the way it is? We will only write the poetry of the future if we speak the language of the present, and we’ll only become fluent if we know what we’re talking about.

[1] Mark Cowling and James Martin, eds., Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, (Post) Modern Interpretations (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 19.

[2] Ibid., 20.

[3] Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849 (New York: Random House, 2023), 142.

[4] Ibid., 141.

[5] Ibid., 147.

[6] Ibid., 156.

Why do Americans live inside a grid, and what has it done to them?

The reasons for this grid go back more than two centuries. About two hundred and fifty years ago, a portion of the British citizens living in North America got so mad about paying their taxes that they waged a war for independence and won. (The British declared the Colony of Massachusetts in rebellion in February of 1775 and the battle of Lexington and Concord occurred in April of that same year, so in 2026, when people are celebrating 250 years of the USA, please remind them that the nation’s 250^th birthday was last year, and any real patriot would know that.) After their successful revolution, these suddenly former subjects of the British Crown faced many daunting challenges. One of the biggest challenges was that wars are expensive, so paying back war debts in a country dedicated to the proposition that high taxes are grounds for revolution was going to be tricky.

One way out of bankruptcy involved selling western lands to farmers. Most of this land was inhabited by indigenous people and had never been surveyed. Future president Thomas Jefferson chaired a committee tasked with figuring out how to divide and sell all that acreage. They came up with six-mile square townships divided into thirty-six lots of 640 acres, aligned along latitude and longitude—even though longitude converges at the poles, making this grid geographically irregular.[1]

This bureaucratic landscaping enacted by lawyers in love with the Enlightenment was a bad way to build a nation. A Cartesian plane, plastered across the plains, demands Americans move within and through its logic. It did not have to be like this. There are other ways.

In the 1970s, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren developed permaculture, a design system that advocates mimicking flourishing ecosystems to create an ecologically regenerative society. The first of permaculture’s twelve principles is “observe and interact.” The natural world does not repeat itself in regular grids. Every chunk of Earth, at any scale, is unique. And that ever-changing landscape will dictate how we interact with it. Where does water drain? Which side of this hill receives the most sunlight? What type of soil is this? What wild animals come here and for what purpose? The questions are endless when we observe and interact.

Sending surveyors to force a grid onto whatever they encounter is not a great way to relate to the natural world. But that is exactly what the U.S. Government did almost as soon as it existed. Rigid right angles have shaped American interactions with a fluid planet, and the repercussions continue into the present.

We are inevitably shaped by the landscapes we create. Thomas Jefferson chaired a committee that laid a grid across the United States and the nation was made to conform to it. The ways one can move through and interact with the land is largely determined by those shapes and lines. Movements and interactions within and through the grid shape the people inside it, who then further warp the world to fit their increasingly grid-shaped lives.

To “observe and interact” requires slowing down and trying to understand a place and how to inhabit it. The modern market economy cannot accept such slowness. A grid provides straight lines, the shortest distance between two places. We annihilate time as we ignore space in in our quest to get somewhere else. But that somewhere else is often nowhere at all. Just more of the grid we pass through on our way to someplace else.

[1] John R Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 103.

Confederates seceded to protect a society by and for property-owning white men, wherein “property” includes other people. In the process, they created the conditions for that society to become untenable. Uncompensated, immediate abolition was a political impossibility in 1860, but became reality after just a few short years of a long, hard war.

Consider this. During the French Revolution, slaves in the French colony of Saint-Domingue took up arms, eventually defeated the French, and established the independent nation of Haiti. After winning independence in 1804, no existing nation formally recognized Haiti until the French finally did in 1825. This recognition came with a 150 million franc indemnity (agreed to with warships in the harbor) for lost “property” that left Haiti in crippling debt from which it has never really recovered. The Haitians beat Napoleon’s seemingly unstoppable army more than a decade before the Duke of Wellington figured out how, and they still had to pay their former enslavers for the loss of their “property,” which in this case was themselves.

Or consider this. During the American Civil War, not every slave state seceded. In March 1862, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution in favor of gradual and compensated emancipation in the remaining slave states. It was ignored. Lincoln explained in an address that he does not “speak of emancipation at once, but a decision at once to emancipate gradually.” The border state congressmen responded. “No one is authorized to question the right [to slavery] or to limit its enjoyment.” Early in the war, even gradual and compensated emancipation was too radical to consider. Three years later, the constitution outlawed slavery and no one received a cent.

Between Haiti and early attempts at emancipation, there was always time or money promised to slaveholders in exchange for eventual emancipation. But the slaveholders’ rebellion begun in South Carolina led to the sudden nonexistence of slaveholders. Only by making a nation centered around slavery did slavery end decades before it would have otherwise. Now that all the shooting, bleeding, and dying of the Civil War is done, we can see that it’s pretty hilarious.

It is probably ill-advised to compare the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, or government-sanctioned slavery to the nefarious, but also legal, acts of the contemporary ruling classes. However, the slaveholders’ belief in their unstoppable economic and political power just a few short years before the system that made them powerful disappeared is interesting to compare to the hubris of the most powerful people today.

A recent Oxfam study showed that the wealth of the ten richest humans grows by $100 million a day. Meanwhile, the U.S. federal minimum wage has sat at $7.25 an hour since 2009. A dollar in 2025 has the buying power of $.67 in 2009. So someone making $7.25 now has the economic power of someone making $4.85 in 2009, which was illegal at the time because that’s way too little money to live on. The poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer.

The moment when the contradictions of an illogical system make that system untenable is looming. These patterns cannot last. Inequality is currently growing, and the political willingness to address it is disappearing. Something is going to give. And when it does, decades of history will happen in weeks.

This is not some accelerationist call to bring on chaos so we can build something new in the rubble. Rather, it’s a call to keep advocating for better ways to treat one another. At the start of the Civil War, abolitionists were considered the lunatic fringe. They were radicals with almost no voice in mainstream politics. A few years later, their once-impossible platform became part of the Constitution. The ideas and movements that will make this world a better place for all of us will need to be there, ready and waiting, when the time comes. And the only way those ideas and movements will be there is if we put them here right now.

It’s April 1832. Black Hawk and about 1,500 followers cross to the east side of the Mississippi River and head north toward their village of Saukenuk. They are mostly Sauk, but there are some Meskwaki and Kickapoo. There are men, women, children, and elderly people. Though some of them are armed, this is not an invading army.

They had been forced to leave Saukenuk when the government started selling their land to settlers. But they had farms there. Their relatives were buried there. None of this seemed fair, and so they headed back.

Black Hawk was an unlikely leader for such an audacious undertaking. He was not a chief or a religious leader, and held no formal political power within the Sauk. He was not known as a great orator. He had been a respected war leader, but that was decades ago. He was in his sixties now. Maybe so many joined him because finally someone decided they had experienced enough dislocation and humiliation and it was time to disobey.

Black Hawk and his band would never set foot in Saukenuk on this journey. Five months later, it would all end in a massacre as they tried to get back across the Mississippi.

Prelude to “War”

There was a treaty that said they had to leave Saukenuk (present-day Rock Island, Illinois) and move to present-day Iowa. In 1804, William Henry Harrison—then Governor of the Indiana Territory who would go on to a long and storied term as President of the United States—met with five representatives of the Sauk and Meskwaki (or the Sac and Fox). Some young Sauk warriors had killed three U.S. citizens near St. Louis, and five chiefs from the Sauk and Meskwaki went to negotiate payment for the murders. (The chiefs’ names were Pashepaho, Quashquame, Outchequaka, Layavois, and Hashequarhiqua.)[1]

These representatives weren’t authorized to sell any land, let alone all of it, but that’s what they did, whether they knew it or not. As John P. Bowes writes in Black Hawk and the War of 1832, “The true story of this treaty remains somewhat mysterious. Harrison did not keep notes of the council, and the memories of the Sauk delegation were not very detailed. Pashepaho and his colleagues would later state that they did not know what they were signing. They also argued that Harrison kept them drunk during their stay in St. Louis. Until his death, Quashquame denied that he ‘ever sold any land above the Rock River.’”[2]

The U.S. Government made this treaty with the “United Sac and Fox Tribes.” The “United Sac and Fox” was a legal fiction forced into being through this treaty—not an existing political entity these men represented when they arrived. The Sauk and Meskwaki had been closely linked since 1735 when they fought together against the allied French, Huron, Ottawa, and Potawatomi, but they remained separate nations.

In his memoirs, Black Hawk says of the 1804 treaty: “I will leave it to the people of the United States to say, whether our nation was properly represented in this treaty? or whether we received a fair compensation for the extent of country ceded by those four [actually five] individuals? I could say much about this treaty, but I will not, at this time. It has been the origin of all our difficulties.”[3]

The difficulties did not begin immediately. Article VII of the treaty stipulated that the Sauk and Meskwaki could continue using their land until the Federal Government started selling it to private citizens—only then would they have to leave. Not much changed for several decades, but in the 1820s and ’30s, lead mining became a booming business in the region, and huge numbers of settlers started purchasing property from the government.

It wasn’t just white settlers that were making money digging lead from the ground. The Sauk had mines of their own and were active in the growing lead market. Major Morrell Marston, who lived in the region at the time, wrote about the scale of the Sauk mining operations: “Four or five hundred thousand weight of this mineral is dug by them in a season.”[4] These were lucrative lead mines, just waiting to be purchased out from under the Sauk.

In the winter of 1828-29, while the Sauk were away on their winter hunt, squatters deemed Saukenuk “deserted” and began moving in. They fenced off crops and knocked down houses. Judge John Pence of Indiana moved his family into Black Hawk’s home.[5] After a few years of conflict and confusion between the Sauk and settlers, the militia came in May 1831 and forcibly removed the Sauk. Afterward, some militiamen dug up and desecrated Sauk graves.

The Sauk now lived west of the Mississippi River, needing new houses and new crops. It was too late in the year to do anything but scramble to survive. The following April, Black Hawk and his followers crossed the Mississippi to go home, and set off what is known as the Black Hawk War.

The “War”

News spread quickly that fifteen hundred Native Americans had unexpectedly arrived where they’d been told not to be. Governor Reynolds of Illinois called out the militia and began pursuing Black Hawk’s Band. But the Sauk and their allies changed course, moved fast, and successfully evaded the militia—which included a young Abraham Lincoln—until the Battle of Stillman’s Run in the middle of May.

“Stillman’s Run” is not the name of the place where the battle took place. The fighting occurred in northern Illinois near Sycamore Creek. It’s called “Stillman’s Run” because Isiah Stillman commanded the militia, and run is what most of them did. Accounts vary, but it seems Black Hawk sent three warriors under a flag of truce to discuss the pursuit or arrange safe passage for his people. Another group of warriors watched from a distance. Part of the militia attacked these observers. Once the firing started, the militia shot one of the warriors under the flag of truce. The other two fled. As the militia launched an uncoordinated attack, Black Hawk counterattacked, killed eleven militiamen, and sent the rest on a chaotic stampede away from the fighting.

This skirmish changed everything. What could have been settled with words had turned violent. It also set off widespread paranoia and fear. The U.S. army was still mobilizing and the militia was embarrassed and wanted to go home. Settlers in the region were in a total panic because a band of killers was on the loose and the force sent to stop them had failed miserably.

Black Hawk did little to alleviate these fears when a group of Potawatomi traveling with him raided a farm in northern Illinois, killed almost everyone present, kidnapped two women, and stole as much food as they could carry. Black Hawk was seemingly anywhere, everywhere, and capable of anything. Fear spread across the region.

Black Hawk and his Band moved north into present-day Wisconsin, undetected in the swampy series of lakes where Madison, Wisconsin now sits. Things were not going well. They were starting to starve and had resolved to cross back over the Mississippi as soon as possible.

A new militia, under the command of Henry Dodge, caught up with them in late July along the Wisconsin River for the Battle of Wisconsin Heights. The Sauk and their allies took a good defensive position on a thickly wooded hill. They suffered heavy losses, but managed to silently make a nighttime retreat. The entire band of hungry, injured, and tired people of all ages started traveling toward the Mississippi River well ahead of Dodge and his militia.

But on August 1, 1832, the U.S. Army intercepted Black Hawk and his Band as they attempted to cross the Mississippi. Daniel Parkinson, who took part in the ensuing two-day Battle of Bad Axe, described it as “more a massacre than a battle.”[6] The Warrior, a steamboat piloted by Captain James Throckmorton, found the Sauk and their allies still on the east side of the river. Black Hawk waved a white flag and tried to surrender. Throckmorton, afraid of falling into a trap, decided to open fire. The Warrior fired its cannons and its troops fired their guns until Throckmorton headed off to refuel.

Black Hawk and a few others fled north and hid deep in the woods. The rest of his followers were left on the banks of the Mississippi with little to do but run and hide. Around two o’ clock in the morning, Dodge’s militia and U.S. Army troops found and attacked the remainder of the band from land. The Warrior returned later that morning and attacked from water. Very few made it across the river alive. Dakota Sioux later attacked those who successfully crossed, leaving even fewer survivors.

Black Hawk surrendered himself on August 27, 1832. Lieutenant Robert Anderson was assigned to escort Black Hawk to military prison, but the cholera epidemic of 1832 caught up with Anderson and he became too ill to do the job. Lieutenant Jefferson Davis stepped in.[7] Decades later, at the start of the U.S. Civil War, Anderson would command Fort Sumter in South Carolina and Davis would be President of the Confederacy, ordering the first shots of the Civil War fired in Anderson’s direction.

Black Hawk would be dead long before then, passing away in 1838, but not before meeting President Andrew Jackson and receiving a tour of the eastern seaboard, where he was treated like a celebrity.

This is a sad story filled with misunderstandings, cruelty, and unnecessary deaths. The U.S. hunger for land and lead mines drove these settlers to displace or kill many Native Peoples. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was in effect. Dispossession, forced removal, and murder were all too common.

In addition, the United States was expanding rapidly while also developing its identity—an identity in crisis as the founding generation passed away. New men were in charge. Henry Dodge, Isiah Stillman, and so many others wanted to fight for their land like George Washington fought for his. This new generation killed to assert their masculinity and feel some self-worth. They needed land to win and an enemy to kill. The Old Northwest was some of the land they found, and the Sauk were some of the people they killed.

[1] John P. Bowes, Black Hawk and the War of 1832: Removal in the North (New York: Chelsea House, 2007), 29.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Black Hawk, Black Hawk: An Autobiography (1833: Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 54.

[4] Qtd. In Kerry A. Trask, Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 38.

[5] Ibid., 65.

[6] Ibid., 284.

[7] K. Jack Bauer, Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planter, Statesmen of the Old Southwest (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 64-5. See also, William J. Cooper, Jr., Jefferson Davis, American (New York: Vintage, 2000), 59-60.

Adam

I.

Horace Greeley, the founder and editor of the New York Tribune, used the power of his newspaper to help the Republican Party win the U.S. Presidency just six years after their first meeting. Greeley and the Tribune had also been instrumental in popularizing Charles Fourier’s ideas in the United States. Fourier is a now-obscure French philosopher who despised laissez-faire capitalism and promised the coming of an egalitarian Harmonic Order. Notably, there was significant overlap between Fourierist socialists and early Republicans.

Fourierist communities, or “phalanxes,” appeared across Europe and the United States throughout the 1840s. One of the most successful of these was the Wisconsin Phalanx in present-day Ripon, Wisconsin. When that Fourierist experiment ended, several members of the Wisconsin Phalanx remained in Ripon, where they helped create and name the Republican Party in 1854.

While the Wisconsin Phalanx and its members’ roles in founding the Republican Party will be the focus of what follows, these were hardly the only socialists or socialist sympathizers involved in the early history of the Republicans. Modern Republicans love to hate socialism. Yet the initial Republicans included early feminists, associates of Karl Marx, but especially followers of Fourier.

Parke Godwin, a journalist, labor organizer, and the author of A Popular View of the Doctrines of Charles Fourier, served as clerk on the platform committee at the first Republican Convention in 1856. According to the publisher George Putnam, because of this, “certain of the important planks in the platform came to be identical in expression with Godwin’s articles in Putnam’s Monthly.”[1]  

The first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, never declared himself a socialist, but his Assistant Secretary of War Charles Dana certainly did. Dana had previously been an editor and contributor to the Fourierist journal The Harbinger, a member of the Fourierist Brook Farm community in Massachusetts, and the managing editor of Greeley’s New York Tribune.

Charles Dana’s ties to socialism extend beyond Fourierism. Dana met Karl Marx in Cologne in November 1848, hiring him as a foreign correspondent for the Tribune. Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels ended up contributing almost five hundred articles for Greeley’s paper.[2]

Yet less than one hundred years after the Republicans first appeared, its members vilified and attacked anyone suspected of even thinking positive thoughts about socialism or Marx. Joe McCarthy, a Republican Senator from Wisconsin (born about forty miles from the Republicans’ birthplace in Ripon), did much of the vilifying. In 1954, McCarthy spoke at the Republican Party’s centennial celebration in Ripon.[3] He remembered to attack communism but neglected to mention that his political party had been founded by socialists.

While the Republicans abandoned socialism long ago, its influence continued reverberating from places like Ripon. Milwaukee, Wisconsin—about 90 miles away —had a Socialist Mayor at the same time Joe McCarthy served as a Wisconsin Senator. In fact, Milwaukee had three Socialist mayors in the twentieth century and sent the first Socialist to the U.S. House of Representatives. At the height of their power, the Milwaukee Socialists met at Brisbane Hall, named in honor of Albert Brisbane, probably the most enthusiastic Fourierist the United States ever produced.[4] Republicans and socialists both remained powerful in Wisconsin politics, but their shared heritage has largely been forgotten.  

II.

Maybe the strangest part of this story is where it begins. Charles Fourier’s writings are eccentric, dense, difficult to follow, and include passages that seem more like the ravings of a lunatic than the writings of an influential philosopher. He filled pages listing the classifications of cuckolds and explaining how the coming Harmonic Order will straighten the Earth’s axis. Yet followers around the planet dedicated their lives to his system.

Charles Fourier was born in Besançon, France in 1772, the youngest child and only son of a cloth merchant.[5] His father died when Charles was only nine, and he was mostly raised by his mother and four sisters. He came of age just as the French Revolution began in 1789, and soon found himself swept up in the chaos.

After attending college in Besançon, Fourier became a merchant’s apprentice in Lyon in 1791. When Lyon became a hub of royalist counterrevolution, the revolutionary government decided to make an example of the city. On the same day Queen Marie Antoinette lost her head, the troops stationed in Lyon received a remarkable order from the government in Paris. “On the ruins of Lyon shall be raised a column attesting to posterity the crimes and punishment of the royalists of the city, with this inscription: Lyon made war on liberty. Lyon is no more.”[6] Fourier escaped with his life but not his inheritance, and soon found himself drafted into the Army of the Rhine, fighting on behalf of the people who just tried to destroy his city.

As the French Revolution gave way to the Napoleonic era, Fourier settled in Marseille and took a job as a cloth merchant. He went on business trips across Europe collecting observations for a book he was certain would change everything. “All the Earth offers today is hideous political chaos which demands the strength of a new Hercules to purge it of the social monstrosities which disfigure it.”[7]

But fear not, “This new Hercules is here,”[8] and Hercules had taken the form of Charles Fourier, a cloth merchant in Marseille. As he writes, “It is a shop-sergeant who is going to confound all the voluminous writings of the politicians and moralists, the shameful products of ancient and modern quackery.”[9] With The Theory of the Four Movements in 1808, Charles Fourier placed his discovery before the world. He would continue to publish until his death in 1837, but everything he wrote after The Theory of the Four Movements was a restatement or clarification of that strange, confounding, and occasionally inspiring book.

Fourier had a mania for making lists and enumerating everything. The Four Movements of the title are the Animal, Organic, Material, and Social Movements. Animal Movement refers to the drives and instincts of non-human animals. Organic Movement encompasses things like colors and smells. Material Movement concerns geometry, astronomy, and physics. Social Movement describes human interactions and social organization.

All four movements are connected, so a change in any one of them will alter all the others. For instance, a change in the Social Movement from the incoherent Civilizational Order toward the coherent Harmonic Order will also change smells, tastes, planetary orbits, and make dangerous animals docile. To make the transition from Civilization to Harmony, we must organize everyone into agricultural associations Fourier calls “phalanxes.” These require at least 1620 people—so two of all 810 passional types will be present, of course—sharing resources in buildings based on the floorplan of the Palace at Versailles.

Because this change in the Social Movement will transform all the other Movements, helpful animals like antilions will replace dangerous ones like lions. The now-undrinkable oceans will taste of lemonade. We “will see the North Pole under full cultivation because of the shining ring of light, or northern crown, which will appear after two centuries of combined order.”[10] Fourier predicts the Earth’s axis will straighten out, and a comet the size of Jupiter will enter the Sun’s orbit. “The intruder would form an association with Venus, Mars, Earth, and all the smaller globes between the Sun and Jupiter, creating a brilliant retinue of seven or eight satellites and, like Saturn, would produce a double equatorial ring or a double corona at both poles.”[11]

Among these wild predictions are occasional bursts of insight into society’s failures and recommendations for new ways of living. He recognized poverty as definitive proof that Civilization has failed. Fourier writes of the “shameful numbers of the poor who crowd your cities, impoverished workers deprived of jobs, harassed by creditors and bailiffs, subjected to one humiliation after another until they finally turn to begging and parade their sores, their nakedness and their starving children through your cities, which resound with their doleful laments.”[12]

Fourier saw chaos in for-profit capitalism. He also recognized that dispersed, isolated homes were an inefficient way to live. His Harmonic Order would feature three or four large ovens run by a few passionate cooks rather than hundreds of small ovens tended by mostly indifferent homemakers. There would be one good granary, not hundreds of horrible ones. People would freely organize their shared work, joyfully moving from job to job throughout the day, never forced into a single profession for life.

Fourier wasn’t trying to fix people broken by a broken world. People are fine as they are, we just need to change the world to accommodate them. Humans will grow tails in the Harmonic Order, but their basic psychology will remain unchanged. Even their worst vices will prove useful once they are properly organized. Transforming our social and productive practices will cause animals, planetary orbits, and the taste of seawater to all change, but Fourier thinks people and their passions are unchanging.

At one point he writes that in the coming Harmonic Order, household tasks will become “so much simpler that they will not require the quarter of women who are occupied with them today; if a quarter, or even a sixth, of women enjoy housework that will be more than enough. Fortunately, God was bound to act in accordance with proportion and create a number of housewives appropriate to the 70,000 years of happiness, rather than the 5,000 years of misery in which we find ourselves.”[13]

Fourier urged his readers to stop trying to fix the Civilizational Order and get busy replacing it. “Our task now is to emerge from it, rather than studying it or improving it. This is why I am always trying to persuade readers of the necessity of rejecting all half-measures and going straight to the goal by immediately founding a canton of progressive series.”[14]

In 1845, a young Karl Marx echoed Fourier’s belief that in a better world, jobs would change every few hours. “In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity, but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic.”[15] A few years later, in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels named Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen as particularly important predecessors to their work. Because of this, Fourier became a major subject of study in the Soviet Union.[16]

Marx and Engels deemed Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Owen “utopian” socialists. The class antagonisms capital creates were not developed enough for these writers to perceive the “scientific” socialism Marx and Engels later presented. This would have baffled Fourier, who thought he had made a timeless and irrefutable discovery similar to the laws of physics. His discovery is true for all times and places. Historical developments are irrelevant.

III.

Because his work presents a timeless discovery, it should be sufficient to simply share it. While the French revolutionaries forced their vision on the world by beheading the King and Queen and trying to destroy Lyon, Charles Fourier thought the best way to remake the world was to build a working prototype of a phalanx and then let everyone see how nice it is. The old world would fall, not through violence, but abandonment.

After decades of obscurity and book sales in the dozens, Fourier eventually gained not just devoted readers, but devoted disciples. As these disciples popularized his work, they often focused on the practical aspects of making a phalanx and avoided all the cosmogony, wild predictions, and especially Fourier’s support for free love and his frequent attacks on monogamous marriage.

In The Theory of the Four Movements, Fourier writes that in the seventh series—the “dawn of happiness” just before “the advent of happiness”—we will destroy all “the hypocrisy caused by marriage.”[17] People will have multiple partners and “couples only progress through amorous stages over time, having at first no title beyond that of favorite, which carries few rights with it and can be revoked if the parties are unsuitable.”[18]

Fourier was enraged when his followers only shared the most socially acceptable parts of his work. His writings present a single “discovery” that no one can break into discrete parts. Do you want a world where you can freely explore your passions and everyone has what they need? Then you’d better get used to antilions, free love, and planetary realignment.

One of Charles Fourier’s most devoted disciples came from the United States to explore the latest in European philosophy. After studying with Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel and then a brief flirtation with the Saint-Simonians, he discovered Fourier’s work and dedicated the rest of his life to spreading word of Fourier’s discovery.

This young American, Albert Brisbane, first met Charles Fourier at the offices of La Réforme Industrielle, a Fourierist newspaper in Paris. As Brisbane describes that initial encounter: “Fourier had a large gray eye, the pupil of which was so small that it seemed a mere pin-point. This gave great intensity to his look. The nose was rather aquiline, and the corners of the large mouth curved downward—the lion mouth. This, with a strong, firm chin, completed a fixed, abstract, settled expression of countenance. [. . .] The ensemble of the face expressed great intensity; and I may remark here that during the subsequent three years with Fourier I never saw him smile.”[19]

Brisbane paid Fourier for private lessons in Fourierism, and then returned to the United States an enthusiastic apostle, writing and speaking about Fourier’s work everywhere he could—calling it “Associationism” rather than “Fourierism” as he introduced it to North America. The poet Walt Whitman once described Brisbane in New York. “His step is quick, and his arms swing awkwardly, as if he were trying to knock his elbows together behind him. Albert Brisbane the Socialist; the capitalist too—an odd circumstance for a radical in New York! Somehow or other he always looks as if he were trying to think out some problem a little too hard for him.”[20]

While Whitman was unimpressed, Horace Greeley was so enamored with Brisbane’s 1840 book, Social Destiny of Man, or Association and Reorganization of Industry, that he let Brisbane print a series of front-page columns on Fourierism in the New York Tribune. Greeley and Brisbane also started publishing The Future, a Fourierist periodical mostly written by Brisbane.[21] Thanks to the Tribune’s enormous circulation, Brisbane’s newspaper columns inspired Fourierist phalanxes across the East Coast, Upper Midwest, and eventually as far south as Texas. (Although Horace Greeley never joined a Fourierist community, he donated several thousand dollars to numerous phalanxes and served as Treasurer for the Sylvania Association in present-day Greeley, Pennsylvania.[22])

The two longest-lasting phalanxes in the United States, Brook Farm (1841-1847) and the North American Phalanx (1843-1855), were located near major cities. Brook Farm was just outside of Boston, and the North American Phalanx was in New Jersey, close to New York City. Both communities had access to ample resources and markets for the goods they produced.

The third longest-lasting phalanx in the United States was nowhere near any city. The Wisconsin Phalanx (1844-1850) was in present-day Ripon, Wisconsin. Ripon did not exist when the Phalanx began. There was just an empty field, where Wisconsin Phalanx member Eugenia Wilson Mason recalled, “The roads were sometimes impassible.”[23]

Warren Chase, the first President of the Wisconsin Phalanx, was one of the many Americans who encountered Fourier through Brisbane’s columns in the Tribune. As Chase writes in his memoirs: “At this time the country was being much agitated by the discussion of Fourier’s principles of association, and the zeal with which the New York Tribune and several other papers defended the science of the new social relations, and the reorganization of society; and the glowing prospects of several societies already commenced—as they were portrayed by enthusiastic believers, who lived in, or visited them,—brought the subject before the lyceum of the little village.”[24]

Chase was active in the Franklin Lyceum in Southport (now Kenosha), Wisconsin, where members discussed the events and ideas of the day. On December 12, 1843, below an article covering Marshall Strong’s election as President of the Wisconsin Territorial Council, the Southport Telegraph announced that the Franklin Lyceum would hold a talk on Tuesday at the Village Hall to discuss, “Would the principles of Fourier, if adopted generally, tend to diminish the evils of society?”[25]

The attendees seem to have answered yes, because two weeks later, the same paper was reporting on the proceedings of the newly formed Southport Fourier Club, where “an able and appropriate address was delivered by Doctor Parnell on the subject of Association.”[26] Then the Telegraph shared the bylaws of this new club. “Its object shall be to investigate the Social System discovered by Charles Fourier.”[27] The elected officers were Lester Rounds, Theodore Newell, R.B. Waldo, and Warren Chase.

Chase was almost as idiosyncratic as Fourier. His memoirs, The Life-Line of the Lone One, or, Autobiography of the World’s Child, are written in the third person, and he refers to himself throughout as “the Lone One.” He writes, “The Lone One entered ardently and earnestly into this new system, and sought all the information he could obtain of its principles and results. Then came the taunt from the opponents to him and others, ‘Why not practice it, if you believe it is the best way to live?’ and they answered, ‘We will.’”[28]

By May of 1844, members of the Wisconsin Phalanx were already on their way to land they had purchased to precipitate the coming Harmonic Order. “On the morning of May 27—to them ever memorable—they repaired to the valley below, on the beautiful plain surrounded by hills, like an amphitheater, and one of the most beautiful spots nature has formed in Wisconsin, and then, on their own land, pitched their tents, stuck their stakes, dipped their spades; and laid the cornerstone of the town of Ceresco, as the Lone One called the place.”[29]

Legally, they were creating the Wisconsin Phalanx in the town of Ceresco, but Ceresco—named for Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture—was used interchangeably for both the town and the Phalanx. They established a post office for Ceresco, with Lester Rounds as postmaster. Rounds, an anti-slavery activist from Southport, was the only serious contender for President of the Phalanx besides Chase. In December of 1845, on the tenth ballot, Chase won the Presidency with 36 votes. Rounds received 22 votes, and eight went to various other candidates.

Warren Chase’s life leading up to this narrow victory had been a difficult one. He was born in Pittsfield, New Hampshire in 1813 to an unmarried mother. His father, who was married to someone other than Warren’s mother when Warren was conceived, died in the War of 1812. Then his mother passed away when Warren was only five, and he truly became the Lone One. “Both parents (if he had two) were gone up out of their bodies, and he was left alone in his,—fatherless, motherless, penniless, friendless, worthless, useless, and deathless.”[30]

Chase became a ward of David Fogg and his family. He was supposed to receive an education, but he mostly received abuse and chores. He was an illiterate teenager when he ran away, eventually ending up under the care of his paternal grandfather. Chase finally received an education, and according to his own memoirs, he went from illiterate to the best student in school so quickly that it amazed everyone.

He moved west, failed at a series of businesses, married Mary White, had a child, and lived in poverty in Southport. They had two more children, one of whom died as a toddler. They had another, who died as an infant. This had been the life of the “Lone One” up until the Wisconsin Phalanx.

Nineteen men and one boy traveled from Southport to break ground in Ceresco. They planted crops and began work on a sawmill. Warren Chase makes only passing reference to the destruction and displacement of the Indigenous inhabitants of this surprisingly empty area in his memoirs. The 1823 Supreme Court ruling Johnson v. Mcintosh made it law that settlers can sell each other Indigenous land and the Phalanx took full advantage. Or, as Chase blithely put it, “Uncle Sam bought the lands between the Mississippi and Lake Michigan of those who never owned them.”[31]

No matter how the land became available, by June of 1844, families were arriving. The following February, the territorial government approved the organization’s charter, and the Wisconsin Phalanx became a legal entity. In addition to the post office and sawmill, they built a school, a grist mill, blacksmith shop, and a long building that could house thirty families. The phalanx was chartered as a joint stock company, and members bought shares in the enterprise.

Although they shared labor and resources and ate at a single table, it is inaccurate to call the Wisconsin Phalanx a commune. As was normal in Fourierist communities, property was not held communally, but owned separately by individuals who worked and ate collectively. Albert Brisbane frequently emphasizes that private property would remain in phalanxes, making statements like, “In the Combined Order all individual Rights—the fundamental one of which is the Right of Property—will be sacredly respected and strictly preserved.”[32]

Membership in the Wisconsin Phalanx did not require owning stock, and every member could vote on matters that would not impact the stock’s value. On matters that would impact its value—like buying or selling land—stockholders would cast votes based on the number of shares they owned. One share meant one vote, with an additional vote for every five shares after that, but a maximum of ten votes for any individual.

Women could be stockholders, and there were women in the Phalanx with more voting power than many of the men. This degree of gender equality was unique at the time, especially considering that the 19^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—prohibiting states from denying women the right to vote—would pass about seventy years after the Wisconsin Phalanx ended.

The sisters Charlotte and Harriot Haven came to Ceresco in September 1848. Charlotte was twenty-seven, and Harriot eighteen. As Charlotte describes a typical week, “Monday night there was a business meeting of the council; Tuesday evening there was a meeting of the Philaletheian society, various subjects were discussed and a paper read called The Gleaner. The motto of The Gleaner was ‘Let the Gleaner go forth and glean, and gather up the fragments that nothing be lost.’ On Wednesday evening a singing school was held. A dance and a social enlivened Thursday evening. There was no meeting on Friday evening. Saturday was a general meeting for reports from foremen.”[33] So many young men visited the Haven sisters to play “whist, euchre, or chess” that they sometimes “found it difficult to have any privacy whatever.”[34]

All this flirting and dancing happened in total sobriety. Ceresco was a temperance town, and the very first thing the bylaws stipulate as “punishable by reprimand or expulsion” is “using ardent spirits as a beverage.”[35]    

Eugenia Wilson Mason first traveled to Ceresco in 1845 to visit her sister. In 1848, she joined the Phalanx, eventually marrying fellow member Robert Mason in 1850. In a 1906 interview, she recalled that “the common living house was very pleasant; our social times were delightful in fellowship. Not all ate at the public or common table, but all did who chose. The Phalanx quarters were all filled. They nearly always had company. People would come from a distance, some people of note, to see its workings.”[36]

One visitor to the Wisconsin Phalanx, identified only as Mr. Hine, but most likely Lucius Hine of Cincinnati, wrote a letter about his experiences in Ceresco. It was reprinted in The Harbinger, a Fourierist periodical published by Brook Farm. Hine notes the Wisconsin Phalanx’s successful agriculture and that “The Phalanx is entirely free from debt, and though but three years old, substantially independent.”[37]

He claims that the inhabitants “sufficiently appreciate the True Object of Life to induce a strict attention to every branch of improvement. If they strive for this end, they will do good to the world that cannot be fully estimated, and coming generations will bless them for this splendid moral victory, achieved by the harmonious union of mental and physical labor.”[38]

At its peak, the Wisconsin Phalanx had 180 members, with 259 throughout its history. Eventually, the excitement and enthusiasm began to dissipate and members increasingly talked about selling their shares and moving on. Warren Chase, the President and most enthusiastic member, was often absent, working on the Wisconsin State Constitution or serving as a State Senator. The California Gold Rush was underway, and there were fortunes to be made further west. Eugenia Wilson Mason recalled that “Many of the Phalanx people went to California in 49-50,” and claimed that “The spirit of speculation is what broke up the Phalanx.”

Someone referred to as “Mr. Daniels” offered a similar explanation, but instead of gold fever, it was real estate. “Mr. Daniels, a gentleman who saw the whole progress of the Wisconsin Phalanx, says the cause of its breaking up was speculation; the love of money and the want of love of Association. Their property becoming valuable, they sold it for the purpose of making money out of it.”[39]   

In a June 1850 journal entry, Ripon resident Cutting Marsh advanced yet another explanation. “There Fourierism, the child of infidelity has succeeded in maintaining an existence for six years. It has been shown that a community wh[ich] discards the Chris[tian] religion, desecrates its Sabbaths by doing business on that day, running the public mills and making it a day of recreation also, cannot long hold together. It soon becomes a mere map of moral corruption too loathsome for their own endurance.”[40]

Whatever the reasons, in December 1849, members selected officers to dissolve and divide the Phalanx. In 1850 it was officially over. Ceresco soon became part of Ripon, which had been established in 1849. The large housing complex is now an apartment building across the street from Ceresco Park, but little else remains.

In October 1849, Warren Chase wrote a letter to The Spirit of the Age magazine. News of the Wisconsin Phalanx’s demise “raised a shout of joy in those who hate and despise every effort for social reform, but it is of no importance; ours is not a failure but a triumph of principles, and may if you choose be made a practical realization of the true life.”[41]

IV.

As Wisconsin went from a territory to a state, Warren Chase served as a delegate at both constitutional conventions. He introduced or supported amendements granting the vote to women and African Americans, but too few of his fellow delegates went along with him. Chase successfully added an amendment allowing married women to own property. In 1846, this was a radical move, and the people of Wisconsin voted down the first constitution partly because of Chase’s controversial amendment.

Another delegate, Marshall Strong, advocated loudly against it. A similar law existed in France, and Strong implied it was the reason “more than one-fourth of the children born in Paris are illegitimate.” He claimed that “the effect of this law upon the husband, upon the wife, upon the children, and upon all the domestic relations will be most fearful.”[42]

The Madison Argus declared that Strong would have “the honor of saving ‘our beloved Wisconsin’ from being converted into a Fourier phalanx—a playground for lunatics and idiots.”[43] He was probably quite honored. When a Fourierist group in Sheboygan, Wisconsin tried to charter their Spring Farm Phalanx in 1847, this same Marshall Strong denied the request, refusing to make Wisconsin “a breeding place for reformers.”[44]

Warren Chase’s advocacy for women’s rights is in keeping with Charles Fourier’s philosophy. Fourier is credited with first using the term “feminism,” and often makes statements like, “there is no other cause which produces such rapid social progress or decline as a change in the condition of women.”[45] Sadly, Fourier links his surprisingly progressive opposition to patriarchy with some embarrassing bursts of retrograde racism. He writes that “the Chinese and the Jews, the nations most faithful to patriarchal customs, are also the most vicious and deceitful in the world.”[46]

Warren Chase was not the only Wisconsin Phalanx member to go on record as an advocate of women’s rights. Myron Morse, who joined the Phalanx in 1848, served as its secretary, and was later present at the founding of the Republican Party, wrote a letter to The Social Revolutionist, a free love and spiritualist journal, about what he’d learned in Ceresco. He writes, “the elevation of woman to an equality with man is the natural, safe, and only exodus out of the evils consequent upon present unhappy and repugnant relations of the sexes.”[47]

Chase tried to insert property rights for married women into the next draft of the Wisconsin State Constitution but failed. In a letter from the second convention, fellow delegate Theodore Prentiss wrote, “I have no doubt this time we shall succeed. The convention differs widely in character from the other, there is not in this that wild, headlong, ultra spirit that ruled the other, but a more quiet, gentlemanly, and national disposition.”[48]

Prentiss predicted correctly. The Constitution passed and in 1848 Wisconsin became a state. As a State Senator at the inaugural session in Wisconsin’s history, Chase successfully passed a bill granting married women property rights. Marshall Strong was unable to stop him. As Chase writes, “The rights of married women to hold property, real and personal, were soon and early secured; and thus that principle, at first so odious, was secured, and the state not ruined by its adoption.”[49]

V.

The Wisconsin Phalanx may have died, but ex-members radically influenced the course of American history. In February of 1854, four years after the Wisconsin Phalanx disbanded, the battle over slavery galvanized former phalanstarians into political action. The first public action took place at the First Congregationalist Church in Ripon, whose deacon William Dunham had also been a founding member of the Wisconsin Phalanx. The church hosted a public meeting in response to the proposed Kansas-Nebraska Act, where attendees decided to start a new political party if the bill should pass.

When the bill passed the Senate in March, there was a second meeting at a Ripon schoolhouse.  It was determined that they would indeed start a new political party and this new party would be called the Republicans. Years later, a pair of Ripon historians compiled a list of people who attended one or both of these meetings. Exactly one quarter of the thirty-two known attendees—all men—were former members of the Wisconsin Phalanx. The Phalanx members who helped found the Republican Party were Warren Chase, Garrett Baker, William Dunham, John Limbert, Robert Mason, Myron Morse, and Jacob Woodruff.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act was a bloody disaster. Stephen A. Douglas, a Democratic Senator from Illinois, introduced the Act on January 4, 1854 to organize the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. These new territories would be made from land left unorganized when the state of Missouri was carved out of the much larger Missouri Territory back in 1820.

According to the geographic line established by the 1820 Missouri Compromise, Kansas and Nebraska should be off-limits to slavery. Under pressure from southern senators, Douglas added a specific repeal of this geographic limitation to his bill and stipulated that slavery’s legality in these new territories would be decided by popular referendum at some undetermined date. If the bill passed, Kansas and Nebraska would be open to slavery until further notice.

Beginning with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787—which organized the territory that would become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota—the legality or illegality of slavery was decided by congressional mandate simultaneous to the organization of any new territory. This tradition had started to come undone in the Compromise of 1850, but with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, it was explicitly abandoned. The question of slavery would be ignored until some unknown later date, the Missouri Compromise would be repealed, and unless later illegalized, slavery would be legal by default.

With the failure and impotence of existing anti-slavery parties, Alvan Bovay called the schoolhouse meeting in Ripon where the Republican party was born. Jacob Woodruff, the former librarian of the Wisconsin Phalanx, was appointed to the committee of the new party, along with Bovay and three other men. (Woodruff would remain in Ripon and build an octagonal house based on plans popularized by Orson Squire Fowler, a famous phrenologist and vegetarian.)

Alvan Bovay had been a teacher and journalist in New York City, where he wrote for progressive publications like the Workingman’s Advocate and organized an industrial congress with the journalist, Fourierist, and future clerk on the Republican’s platform committee Parke Godwin. While spending time at the Tribune offices with his friend Horace Greeley, Bovay saw letters from Warren Chase extolling the beauty of Central Wisconsin and decided to go west. The Wisconsin Phalanx was dissolving when he arrived, but he bought a large portion of their land, which was soon annexed into Ripon.[50]    

Bovay had been dreaming about a new party for years. At the Whig Party Convention in 1852, he had talked to Horace Greeley about the impending need for a new political party. The pair even concluded that Republican would be a great name. (It had been applied to Thomas Jefferson’s faction in the early years of the United States and had a simplicity that other third parties of the era, like the Free Soil Party, lacked.)

Although Horace Greeley was not an immediate convert to the Republican Party, once he decided to become a supporter, “the Tribune offices became the center for Republican propaganda.”[51] When John C. Frémont became the first Republican presidential candidate in 1856, the Tribune lent its support with newspaper coverage and favorable editorials. Greeley published an inexpensive Frémont biography, plus pamphlets in English, German, and Welsh. (German for the recently arrived refugees from the failed revolutions of 1848 and Welsh for the Pennsylvania coal miners.)

Frémont lost to Democrat James Buchanan, but Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, by then the most widely read newspaper in the world[52], helped make the Republicans a legitimate contender for national power in just a few years. And in the next presidential election, Abraham Lincoln became the first Republican President.

With the incredibly rapid rise of the Republicans—a party explicitly formed to slow or stop the expansion of slavery—came the secession of all but four of the slaveholding states and the American Civil War. The socialists who founded the Republican Party were soon forgotten.

[1] George Haven Putnam, Memories of a Publisher: 1865-1915 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915), 13. Godwin published a series of articles in Putnam’s Monthly that were later collected in a book called Political Essays, many of which prefigured early Republican policies. Putnam has a singlular “article” in this quotation, but I took the liberty of making it “articles,” as Godwin had published several. Thomas Bender, discussing Godwin’s role at the convention, uses the plural when he writes: “The ideology of the Republican Party, whose first platform was, as we have already noted, drafted by Godwin, using much of the very language of his Putnam’s articles.” See, Thomas Bender,  New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City From 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 167.

[2] Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013), 295. See also, Carl J. Guarneri, Lincoln’s Informer: Charles A Dana and the Inside Story of the Union War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019), 21-22, and Carl Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative, 337.  

[3] “McCarthy Raps Symington in Major Address Here,” The Ripon Commonwealth, June 10, 1954.

[4] Chris Foran, “Our Back Pages: Bucks build on old Socialist site,” Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, June 13, 2016.

[5] Most of the following biographical information comes from Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World (Berkeley: Berkeley University Press, 1986). The information was checked against other sources, but most of these seem to rely on Beecher’s excellent work.

[6] R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of Terror in the French Revolution (1941: Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 156.

[7] Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements (1808: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 104.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., 105.

[10] Ibid., 33-4.

[11] Ibid., 55.

[12] Ibid., 280.

[13] Ibid., 73.

[14] Ibid., 272.

[15] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Guilford, Connecticut: Prometheus Books, 1998), 53.

[16] David Riazonov, the first director of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, purchased many of Fourier’s letters for the Institute’s collection,^[16] and Soviet scholars like I.I. Zilberfarb produced some of the most in-depth work on Fourier and Fourierism in the twentieth century. See, Jonathan Beecher and Valerii N. Fomichev, “French Socialism in Lenin’s and Stalin’s Moscow: David Riazonov and the French Archive of the Marx-Engels Institute,” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 78, No. 1 (March 2006): 136.

[17] Charles Fourier, Four Movements, 125.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Albert Bisbane, Albert Brisbane: A Mental Biography with a Character Study by his Wife Redelia Brisbane (Boston: Arena Publishing, 1893), 185-6.

[20] Walt Whitman, “New York Dissected,” Life Illustrated, Vol. 2, No. 16 (August 16, 1856), 125. This article is unsigned, but Emory Holloway and Ralph Adimari argue that Whitman is the author of the "New York Dissected" series in New York Dissected: A Sheaf of Recently Discovered Newspaper Articles by the Author of Leaves of Grass (New York: Rufus Rockwell Wilson, 1936). 

[21] Carl Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 32.

[22] Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative, 36. Guarneri lists the Sylvania Association, the Clermont Phalanx, Brook Farm, and the North American Phalanx as Associations to whom Greeley made significant contributions. For Greeley’s role as Treasurer at the Sylvania Association, see John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms (1870: New York: Hillary House, 1961), 233.

[23] The history of the Wisconsin Phalanx that follows comes from a combination of the Phalanx’s archives held by the Wisconsin Historical Society: Wisconsin Phalanx (Ripon, Wis.). Records, 1844-1971, n.d., Warren Chase’s memoir: Warren Chase, The Life-Line of the Lone One, or, Autobiography of the World’s Child (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1857), plus Carl Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative, and Samuel M. Pedrick, “The Wisconsin Phalanx at Ceresco,” Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin at its 50^th annual meeting held Dec. 11, 1902 (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society, 1903), John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms (1870: New York: Hillary House, 1961), 411-448, as well as the contemporary newspaper and journal articles cited throughout.

[24] Warren Chase, Life-Line of the Lone One, 113.

[25] Southport Telegraph, Vol. 4, No. 24 (December 12, 1843), 2.

[26] “Meeting of the Friends of Association,” Southport Telegraph, Vol. 4, No. 26 (December 26, 1843), 2.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Warren Chase, Life-Line of the Lone One, 114.

[29] Ibid., 116.

[30] Ibid., 18-19.

[31] Warren Chase, Life-Line of the Lone One, 116.

[32] Albert Brisbane, A Concise Exposition of the Doctrine of Association, or, Plan for a Re-Organization of Society (New York: J.S. Redfield, 1844), 30.

[33] Frances Mason Allensworth, “Six Years of Communal Life,” Prepared for the Mosaic Club, Galesburg, Illinois in November 1939 in Wisconsin Phalanx (Ripon, Wis.). Records, 1844-1971, n.d.

[34] Ibid.

[35] “Wisconsin Phalanx By Laws” in Wisconsin Phalanx (Ripon, Wis.). Records, 1844-1971, n.d.

[36] All quotes from Eugenia Wilson Mason from Wisconsin Historical Society, Kidder, S.T., collected recollections, 1906 (Vol. 11) Wisconsin Phalanx (Ripon, Wis.). Records, 1844-1971, n.d.

[37] Mr. Hine, “Wisconsin Phalanx,” The Harbinger, Vol. 5, No. 11 (August 21, 1847), 169.

[38] Ibid.

[39] John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms, 448.

[40] Wisconsin Phalanx (Ripon, Wis.). Records, 1844-1971, n.d.

[41] Warren Chase, “To the Friends of Social Reform,” The Spirit of the Age (October 1, 1849), 260. In Wisconsin Phalanx (Ripon, Wis.). Records, 1844-1971, n.d.

[42] “Speech of Marshall M. Strong, February 5, 1847.” Wisconsin Historical Collections, vol. 28 (Madison, 1920), 240.

[43] Madison Argus, March 9, 1847, qtd. In Frederic L. Paxson, “A Constitution of Wisconsin, 1847,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 2, No. 1 (June 1915), 17.

[44] Gustave William Buchen, Historic Sheboygan County (1944: Sheboygan: Sheboygan County Historical Society, 1976), 318.

[45] Charles Fourier, Theory of the Four Movements, 132.

[46] Ibid., 63.

[47] Myron Morse, “The Ceresco Union,” The Social Revolutionist, Vol. 1, No. 4 (April 1856), 104.

[48] Theodore Prentiss to John Hubbard Tweedy, January 15, 1848, in Tweedy, John Hubbard, 1814-1891. Papers, 1800, 1824, 1832-1890, n.d.

[49] Warren Chase, Life-Line of the Lone One, 139.

[50] Samuel M. Pedrick, The Life of Alvan E. Bovay: Founder of the Republican Party in Ripon, Wis., March 20, 1854 (Ripon, WI: Commonwealth Printers, n.d., ca. 1950.

[51] Jeter Allen Isely, Horace Greeley and the Republican Party, 1853-1861: A Study of the New York Tribune (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 171.

[52] Robert C. Williams, Horace Greeley: Champion of American Freedom (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 169-70.

Victor Berger emigrated from Austria to the United States in 1878 and settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There, he worked as a public school teacher, established and edited several socialist newspapers, helped found the Socialist Party of America in 1901, and in 1910, became the first Socialist Party candidate elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He served one term, and did not regain his seat until 1918. He was never sworn in that second time, since he had just been convicted under the Espionage Act for opposing U.S. entry in the First World War and the other members of the House took that as a great excuse to declare him unacceptable.

In his adopted hometown of Milwaukee, Berger and his fellow Socialists created a city with clean government, an alarming number of public parks, and very strong unions. In an era of corrupt boss-driven politics, people like Mayor David Rose had fulfilled that role in Milwaukee, making money off public utilities through every conceivable method. Rose was defeated by Socialist Emil Seidel in 1910, who, after losing to a unity party of the opposition 1912, was followed eventually by fellow Socialist Daniel Hoan, who served as mayor from 1916 to 1940. Milwaukee started winning the national award for public health so often that it had to be barred from competition so other cities might have a chance. The Socialist Charles Whitnall served as Parks Commissioner from 1907 to 1941, and set aside much of the land along rivers and the lake shore as public space and created over 150 parks across 15,000 acres. Milwaukee became such a dedicated union town that in 1955, Milwaukee Mayor Frank Zeidler refused to let a freighter unload materials destined for the Kohler plant in nearby Sheboygan, where the workers were on strike and the scabs were in the factory.    

Victor Berger was the chief theorist, tactician, and director of the Milwaukee Socialists who helped make all that possible. While he may sound like a forgotten hero of the left, it’s worth noting that Berger was firmly on the right wing of his era’s leftists, often using his position on the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party to support the gradualist electoral strategies he favored. For instance, he forced the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and other “direct actionists” out of the party altogether. He was also remarkably racist, and that’s where it gets ugly.

Victor Berger and the Milwaukee socialists receive a lot of well-earned praise, but the legacy of racism Berger normalized as their most influential figure helped make Milwaukee one of the most segregated cities in the United States—earning it the epithet “the Selma of the North” right around the time the Sherriff of Selma was deputizing white men to beat and kill civil rights protesters.

The Committee on Immigration Speaks

It is the middle of May in 1910. In Chicago, the Committee on Immigration reads its report to the the Socialist Party Conference. In the report, Ernest Untermann, Victor Berger, and Joshua Wanhope argue for the “exclusion of immigrants from specific and definite nations,” namely, “Chinese, Japanese, Coreans, and Hindus.”[1] Other than the spelling of “Koreans” and the idea that there’s a place called “Hindu,” you may wonder, why should we exclude them? “These people occupy definite portions of the earth in which they are so far behind the general modern development of industry, psychologically as well as economically, that they constitute a drawback, an obstacle and menace to the most aggressive, militant and intelligent elements of our working class population.”[2]

The following day, Berger took the floor and said “We get about a million immigrants from Europe every year and we can digest them very nicely. This country has digested me pretty well. [. . .] But, comrades, it is entirely different with these other races. They have their own history of about fifty thousand years. That cannot be undone in a generation or in two generations, or in three generations. Now there are about five hundred million chinamen. They can send us about five million a year and not feel it.”[3] Later, Berger states that “we have the black race problem with us now. We don’t want any additional race problems. We have troubles enough already.”[4]

Berger believed that the well-organized and well-compensated workers in Milwaukee ought to stop less well-off workers from coming to town and driving down wages. This belief is a departure from socialist tradition. The International Workingmen’s Association, founded in 1864, helped make international working class solidarity central to the labor movement. Berger’s regional protectionism is opposed to the basic values of “The International,” which would hold that the political and economic goals of workers in Milwaukee and everywhere else on Earth are more closely aligned than the political and economic goals of workers in Milwaukee and their bosses in the same town. Working class solidarity needs to be international to be effectual.

While defending his stance on immigration at the 1910 Socialist Party Conference, Berger attempted to connect his views with Karl Marx’s, the primary author of the International Workingmen’s Association’s organizational program. Berger does a less-than-convincing job. “Now I believe in the motto of Marx that the proletarians of all countries should unite, absolutely. But he did not say, nor would he say if he lived to-day, that we should unite in Milwaukee or Chicago or New York. We unite in spirit; we fight in the same cause; but we do not come together in the same place unless it is absolutely necessary.”[5] He continues, “Immigration from foreign countries, even European countries, did lower and does lower our standard of living. Anybody who tells you it does not is not telling the truth.”[6] Berger, an immigrant, takes time to mention that he came imbued with “the right kind of Americanism.”[7]

This type of nationalist, regionalist, and racist protectionism can never function for long. Even in a place like Milwaukee in the early twentieth century—where workers were paid more, exploited less, and politicians got away with way less graft—if you make sure people who are paid less and exploited more stay out of your relatively comfortable oasis, the people who own the factories will eventually find a way to move where the wages are lower. Labor struggles often occur on an extremely local level, but if all the gains remain localized, those gains will eventually go away. Tariffs and border patrols can delay the decline, but if the struggle isn’t global, the decline eventually comes.

The big breweries that employed so many Milwaukeeans in Berger’s day are mostly gone now. Schlitz, “The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous,” was bought by Pabst, another Milwaukee beer maker. Pabst is now headquartered in Texas and owned by Blue Ribbon Holdings, LLC, part of a San Francisco-based equity firm. Pabst now owns no breweries, and all their brewing is done through subcontracting. Without international solidarity, something as seemingly simple as the invention of refrigerated trucks can make jobs that seem permanent go away faster than you can finish saying that racist thing you just thought of.

When perennial presidential candidate for the Socialist Party Eugene Debs was serving a prison sentence for his role in the 1894 Pullman strike, Berger gifted him all three volumes of Marx’s Capital to read.[8] Berger was an avid reader of Marx and was certainly familiar with Marx’s labor theory of value. Marx’s predecessor David Ricardo also had a labor theory of value. He held that the amount of labor put into transforming one thing into another thing determines how much added value the new thing possesses. In short, labor creates value. Marx transformed the “labor theory of value” into something more like a “value theory of labor” by adding the key caveat that value is truly determined by “socially necessary labor time.” How long does it take to make a particular thing, on average and globally? According to Marx, a worker under capitalism performs concrete, actual labor, but that concrete labor is judged against a globally determined abstraction. Yes, there is work that you’re performing, but the amount of work you personally perform doesn’t determine the exchange value of the commodity as much as the work you perform aggregated with all other similar work. Protectionist strategies can only operate for so long. If someone is doing the same thing faster or for less, eventually, you will have to meet their price or face failure.

A Legacy of Bigotry

Berger’s racist protectionism was short-sighted and bound to fail. It is also not worth forgiving as a symptom of the times. Granted, he was hardly the only person in the U.S. in the early twentieth century to make sweeping generalizations about immigrants. Racism was rampant. The Chinese Exclusion Act was in effect. Jim Crow laws were appearing all across the South. The Ku Klux Klan was experiencing a resurgence, particularly in the Midwest. But Berger’s bigotry seems less forgivable. He had to willfully reject the internationalism of the socialist tradition and purposefully misread Marx and Engel’s suggestion that all the workers of the world unite. In addition, many people did manage to evade the prejudices of the era.

Fighting Bob La Follette—the Wisconsin progressive who served in the U.S. House, as governor, and in the Senate, and like Berger, also got in trouble for opposing U.S. entry into WWI—was outspoken against racism from the start of his career. Moreover, he was antiracist long before there were enough minorities in Wisconsin that his stance could be dismissed as callous vote-grabbing. As his biographer Nancy Unger writes:

La Follette’s fervent belief in the equality of all people led him to actively oppose anti-Semitism and discrimination against Asian Americans as well, but in the House he received more notice for his defense of African Americans. In 1889, during the bitterly contested election of an African American representative from South Carolina, La Follette lectured white racists: “There is nothing threatening or portentous in the negro problem today, excepting as you make it so. The difficulty does not lie with him, but with you instead.”[9]

Berger and the Milwaukee socialists left a legacy of clean government, ample public parks, free and easy access to Lake Michigan, and a city filled with strong unions and worker protections. But Berger’s bigotry, racism, and nationalism, combined with his role as one of the most prominent socialists and Milwaukeeans of the era, helped turn his city into one of the most segregated cities in the nation.

In 1929, a streetcar hit Victor Berger and he died, aged 69. (Perhaps getting struck by public transit is an ironic end for a socialist. What’s maybe more ironic is a bigoted socialist getting hit by a streetcar on a stretch of Third Street now named Dr. Martin Luther King Drive.) Berger’s more negative impacts were immediately apparent in the years following his death. He helped create clean government and workers’ protections, but also fostered a climate of racism. As Patrick Jones writes in The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee: “Two major breweries, Schlitz and Pabst, refused to hire black workers at the peak of the Depression in 1933. Similarly, despite the city’s strong labor movement, no black-white working-class alliance materialized as it did in other major industrial cities at the time.”[10]

Milwaukee’s history of good government and terrible racism is most apparent in Frank Zeidler’s tenure as mayor from 1948 to 1960. Zeidler himself was not racist, but it was Milwaukee’s rampant racism that brought him down. Zeidler was a Socialist. Although Milwaukee Mayor is a non-partisan position, the newspapers tried to play up Zeidler’s politics to do a little red-baiting in those early years of the Cold War. Zeidler writes in his memoirs that “the editorial board or management of the Milwaukee Journal is said to have issued orders to its staff writers early after the primary that in all stories about the campaign Mr. [Henry] Reuss’ name would appear first with the word ‘non-partisan’ afterward and my name would appear second with the word ‘Socialist.’”[11] Yet Zeidler won. He was then re-elected in 1952 with 72% of the vote.[12]

It’s worth noting that Joe McCarthy, that alcoholic enemy of everything to the left of Allen Dulles, was a Wisconsin Senator from 1947 to 1957, overlapping almost perfectly with Zeidler’s time as mayor. (McCarthy beat Robert La Follette Jr. to snatch the Senate seat the younger La Follette had held since his father’s death. La Follette Jr. committed suicide in 1953.) Milwaukee, Wisconsin repeatedly re-elected Frank Zeidler (Socialist) at the same time the state of Wisconsin kept re-electing Joe McCarthy (Loudmouth), all while “socialist” remained among the most feared and misunderstood words in English.

Ultimately, it wasn’t red-baiting, but race-baiting that made Zeidler not run again in 1960. The 1956 election was a tough one, and race was the biggest issue. The black population of Milwaukee roughly tripled in the 1950s, and rumors spread that Zeidler was placing billboards throughout the South urging African Americans to move to Milwaukee. Another rumor had his eldest daughter married to a black man, in a time when you still might see the word “miscegenation” outside of Atomwaffen message boards. Zeidler’s opponent in 1956 was Milton McGuire, whose campaign actually used the slogan “Milwaukee needs an honest white man for mayor.”[13] Zeidler was narrowly re-elected in 1956, but chose not to go through more of the same in 1960.

One of Zeidler’s last acts as mayor was a report on conditions in the predominantly black inner city, looking for ways to improve housing and at least take some steps toward equality. Zeidler’s successor, Henry Maier, shelved the report and tried to ignore issues of segregation and racial inequality to the best of his ability. On June 11, 1963, President John F. Kennedy addressed Congress and the nation on civil rights. The National Guard had just gone to Alabama to force integration. Kennedy said, “It is time to act in Congress, in your state and local legislative body and, above all, in all of our daily lives.” On exactly the same evening that Kennedy demanded immediate action on racial justice from all U.S. citizens, Henry Maier made a speech suggesting Milwaukeeans “go slow” on civil rights.[14] Sixty years later it’s still embarrassing.

Milwaukee’s socialists, led by Victor Berger, created a well-governed city with ample green space and comfortable jobs for much of its working class. There were corrupt political machines in Milwaukee before the rise of the Socialist Party, but the bosses were put out of work and graft became astonishingly rare for the era. There is a direct causal relationship between the rise of the Milwaukee Socialists and the decline in municipal corruption. It’s actually pretty amazing. Those are the nice parts of their legacy. The bad parts come out of their bigotry, especially Victor Berger’s. The extreme distrust of outsiders from unfamiliar places and the tendency to treat those outsiders poorly whenever they arrived ultimately made the city worse for everyone.

There are a lot of positive lessons we can take from the Milwaukee Socialists, such as their ability to actually take some power and use it for the common good. Hopefully, the negative aspects of their legacy can help us see how to make the future even better than the present they left us. Because if you only secure the existence of your people, you haven’t secured anything at all. The future will either be anti-racist or bleak as Hell.

[1] Proceedings: National Party of the Socialist Party, Held in Masonic Temple, Chicago, Ill., May 15 to 21, 1910 (Chicago: The Socialist Party, 1910), 76.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 120.

[4] Ibid., 121.

[5] Ibid., 118.

[6] Ibid., 119.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 150.

[9] Nancy Unger, Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 89-90.

[10] Patrick Jones, The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 23.

[11] Frank Zeidler, A Liberal in City Government: My Experience as Mayor of Milwaukee (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Publishers, 2005), 25.

[12] Jim Arndorfer, “Cream City Confidential: The Black-Baiting of Milwaukee’s Last Pink Mayor,” The Baffler, Number 13, Winter 1999, 71.

[13] Jones, Selma of the North, 29.

[14] Ibid., 51.

A small group of people saw a naked boy run on all fours through a forest in France. According to the French Republican calendar, it was “Year V.” For those who don’t think the French First Republic marked the dawn of a new era, it was 1797. The boy was spotted again a year later, but this time, captured and briefly put on display before escaping. In the summer of “Year VII,” better known as 1799, he was caught again. He spoke no words, and seemed so indifferent to anything anyone said to him that he was declared deaf. But when someone cracked a walnut behind him, he spun around in excitement. So he could hear, but was selective about what sounds were worthy of attention. A letter describing him at this time states that “It is certain that he lives only on potatoes and nuts. If given some bread, he smells it, bites it, then spits it out and throws it away. It is the same for all other foods. These facts leave little doubt that the child has lived in the woods for a long time.”[1] He would live in the woods a little longer, because after eight days in captivity, he escaped again, this time fleeing to the mountains of Aveyron.

He was captured one last time in the winter of 1800, and transferred to a school for the deaf in Paris, where a young doctor, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, attempted to teach the so-called “Wild Boy of Aveyron” how to be a normal person in Napoleonic France—something not even Napoleon could do. At first, according to Itard, “except for the occasions when hunger took him to the kitchen, he was always to be found squatting in a corner of the garden or hiding in the attic behind some builder’s rubbish.”[2] Itard eventually named the Wild Boy “Victor,” got him to wear clothes, use forks, understand French, and even write some simple sentences. But Victor never managed to speak more than a few syllables, as he may have missed some important developmental stages in speech acquisition.

Three years before Victor was first seen running naked through the forest, the remains of composer, engraver, memoirist, and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau were moved from the rural burial plot he had requested to the Panthéon in Paris. By the end of his life, Rousseau had grown to loathe Paris, so he probably would have been rolling over in his grave if they hadn’t just dug him out of it. Rousseau was not even French. As the title page of the essay that first brought him fame states, it was written “by a citizen of Geneva.” He submitted it to an essay contest on “Whether the restoration of the Sciences and Arts has contributed to the purification of morals.” Rousseau answered with a “no” and won.

Because “Discourse that won the Prize of The Academy of Dijon In the year 1750 On this Question proposed by the Academy: Whether the restoration of the Sciences and the Arts has contributed to the purification of morals” is quite a few words, that essay is usually just called “The First Discourse.” Rousseau followed “The First Discourse” with “The Second Discourse,” or the “Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men” for long. He also submitted it to an Academy of Dijon essay contest, but this time, he did not win.

While “The First Discourse” made Rousseau famous, “The Second Discourse” made him legendary. In it, Rousseau tries to imagine how humans behaved before cities, states, and social hierarchies. He noticed that Hobbes and others who had previously tried to describe humans in a state of nature attribute wants, needs, and desires to their imagined “natural” humans that would only arise in later political orders. To remedy this, Rousseau attempts to describe people uncorrupted by education or socialization. What he ends up imagining is a world of Victors of Aveyron—everyone running naked through the forest, eating roots from the ground, and talking to no one. Rousseau admits it is difficult “to know a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never did exist.”[3] It’s unclear if he adds this warning because he thinks his speculations are probably inaccurate, or if he just wanted a defense built into his text in case any authorities noticed how different his history of early humans is from the biblical account.

Throughout the essay, Rousseau refuses to even consider that early humans might have hung out with each other or even kept track of their children. He writes that “as soon as they had the strength to forage on their own, they left even the Mother; And since almost the only way to find one another again was not to lose sight of one another in the first place, they soon were at the point of not even recognizing each other.”[4] He has trouble imagining how such solitary humans might have ever invented languages, stating that “Men having no relations with one another and no need of any, this invention is inconceivable unless it was unavoidable.”[5]

At some point, although Rousseau is not entirely certain why this change took place, these solitary people settled down, started to talk, developed agriculture and metallurgy, and also began mistreating each other. “Nascent society gave way to the most horrible state of war.”[6] This era was no fun for anyone. Eventually, someone suggested that “instead of turning our forces against one another, let us gather them into a supreme power that might govern us according to wise Laws, protect and defend all the members of the association, repulse common enemies, and preserve us in everlasting concord.”[7]

This attempt to create and preserve everlasting concord did not work out well for them or any subsequent people, and is, according to Rousseau, the source of political inequality. “All ran toward their chains in the belief that they were securing their freedom; for while they had enough reason to sense the advantages of a political establishment, they did not have enough experience to foresee its dangers.”[8] By creating a social contract to alleviate the suffering they were causing each other, they accidentally subjugated the many to the few, and forced most people to live lives of misery and servitude.

For Rousseau, political inequality emerged from a mistake our ancestors made. It did not emerge from violence, coercion, or force. He writes that “Peoples gave themselves Chiefs to defend their freedom, and not to enslave them,”[9] and that “Arbitrary Power, being by its Nature illegitimate, cannot have served as the foundations for the Rights of Society, nor, consequently, for instituted inequality.”[10]

Do We Have To Agree?

Eight years after “The Second Discourse,” Rousseau published Emile, or on Education. A section of that book is called “The Creed of a Savoyard Priest,” and it angered enough authorities that warrants went out for his arrest all across the European continent. His books were burnt. Rousseau eventually accepted fellow philosopher David Hume’s offer of exile in England, but less than a year later, Rousseau was leaving England and reentering France under a fake name after a bitter argument with Hume. It had little to do with philosophical differences, and much more to do with an anonymously published personal attack that Rousseau decided Hume must have at least helped write.

Although their friendship ended over personal differences, they also had philosophical differences they could have fought over if they wanted. In “The Second Discourse,” Rousseau insists that our ancestors must have submitted to authority voluntarily, since neither violence, coercion, or force could function as the foundations for government. In his essay “Of The Original Contract,” Hume argues for the opposite. He writes that “Almost all governments, which exist at present, or of which there remains any record in story, have been founded originally, either on usurpation, conquest, or both, without any pretence of a fair consent, or voluntary subjection of the people.”[11] In a justifiably famous passage later in the essay, Hume points out that the poor are generally incapable of leaving the places they find themselves, comparing them to kidnapped sailors, stating that “We may as well assert, that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean, and perish, the moment he leaves her.”[12]

Hume acts as if his arguments annihilate all social contract theories. His points are certainly good ones. Sometimes, and maybe always, the best way to establish a state is to find a group of people and beat them into submission. Although Hume’s essay certainly makes Rousseau’s account of creating governments appear fundamentally flawed, other proponents of social contract theory actually agree with Hume. Thomas Hobbes, for instance, thought legitimate sovereign power could emerge from either voluntary contract or violent conquest. The end result will be identical in both cases—we agree to obey.

Hobbes published his most famous work, the Leviathan, just a few years after Charles I lost his head to an executioner’s sword, an event that signaled the end of the British monarchy and the start of the Commonwealth of England. Charles’ beheading occurred near the Westminster School, where yet another social contract theorist, John Locke, was then a student. Locke heard the collective groan from the crowd when the sword came down and the King’s head came off. Hobbes, however, was not close enough to hear what Locke heard. He was in France, quite possibly tutoring Charles II at that very moment.

The fact that Hobbes wrote the Leviathan during the English Civil War may help explain why he decided we can only choose between total obedience to an absolute sovereign or a chaotic war of all against all. Hobbes claims that without a sovereign authority providing and enforcing laws, we return to a state of nature and total freedom. While this might sound nice, Hobbes insists it’s horrific. Anyone could kill us at any time, which is why we left the state of nature and accepted limitations on our freedom in exchange for safety. Importantly, this may happen peacefully, as “when men agree among themselves, to submit to some man, or assembly of men, voluntarily.” But he also agrees with Hume that states can emerge without “the voluntary subjection of the people.” Hobbes writes that sovereign power can also arise when someone “by war subdueth his enemies to his will.”[13] Hume’s critique of social contract theory is thus inapplicable to Hobbes, and his argument does not destroy the entire field as well as he seems to think it does.

But there are other, more damaging, critiques of social contract theory. Although Rousseau and Hobbes had very different accounts of the state of nature, both agree that it probably never existed. So their arguments are best understood, not as explaining the actual historical origins of states, but as philosophical justifications for our political obligations in the present. These are thought experiments to help us understand why we live like we do. But these thought experiments are based on flawed conceptions of human beings and how we create our collective powers.

For both thinkers, individuals precede society and constitute the unit from which we construct political structures. In an often-quoted passage in the Leviathan, Hobbes describes life in a state of nature as “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.”[14] It’s noteworthy that solitary is first on the list. Like Rousseau’s imagined early humans who live in total solitude and speak to no one, Hobbes attempts to strip all socialization away from us to better imagine what sort of society we would like to make. If Victor of Aveyron is any indication, we would all hide from each other, stockpile walnuts, and say nothing to anyone. There would never be cities, kings, metallurgy, or the need to make a social contract.

The primacy of the individual is also evident in Emile, the book that got Rousseau in enough trouble that he had to go hide at Hume’s house. In it, Rousseau describes the education of a fictional boy named Emile from the perspective of his brilliant tutor Jean-Jacques. At one point, Jean-Jacques says that “Since we absolutely must have books, there exists one which, to my taste, provides the most felicitous treatise on natural education. This book will be the first that my Emile will read. For a long time it will alone compose his whole library.”[15] This book is Robinson Crusoe.

Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe in 1719, making it one of the earliest novels in English. The title character is the sole survivor of a shipwreck who spends twenty-eight years on an island, and most of that time as the only human inhabitant. His experience has an almost Hobbesian movement from fear and uncertainty in a state of nature to safety and security through sovereignty. Immediately after the shipwreck, unsure what dangerous creatures might be around, Robinson decides his only option “was, to get up into a thick bushy tree like a firr, but thorny, which grew near me, and where I resolved to set all night, and consider the next day what death I should dye, for as yet I saw no prospect of life.”[16] Several decades later, having established a goat farm and sufficient crops to bake bread, Robinson befriends a man who escapes cannibals. Rather than ask this man his name, Robinson decides to call him “Friday,” and tells Friday to call him “Master.” Later, Robinson and Friday save Friday’s father and a Spanish sailor from a cannibalistic sacrifice similar to the one Friday had escaped. Robinson muses that he had become king of his island. “The whole country had become my meer property; so that I had undoubted right of dominion.”[17]

Rousseau writes that Emile will learn from Robinson Crusoe that “The surest means of raising oneself above prejudices and ordering one’s judgements about the true relations of things is to put oneself in the place of an isolated man and to judge everything as this man himself ought to judge of it with respect to his own utility.”[18] As this passage illustrates, for Rousseau, imagining oneself as an isolated individual is the ideal starting point for all inquiries, and imparting this wisdom is a central part of any good education.

Although Robinson Crusoe is fiction, Daniel Defoe modeled his title character from a composite of several very real shipwrecked sailors who survived to tell their tales. The most well-known of these was Alexander Selkirk. He was kicked off a ship for annoying his captain and then left on an uninhabited island for over four years. Selkirk had a Bible and a few other books, and attempted to maintain his use of words and language, but when he was finally rescued, he spoke haltingly, pausing awkwardly in the middle of words, as if he had almost lost the power of speech.

Considering Selkirk and Victor of Aveyron, it seems that isolation hinders our ability to speak or communicate. This makes sense. Our thoughts are embedded in, and take shape through, shared languages and interactions. Languages exist socially and historically, changing and developing over time through collective use. As languages and the words within them shift and change meaning, the realm of possible thoughts also shifts and changes. But in the intellectual milieu in which Hobbes and Rousseau operated, there is not just an emphasis on analyzing individuals in isolation, but an assumption that these individuals possess an internal theater of the mind where they can watch their reason produce propositions—propositions that just need to take shape in a language.

For most Enlightenment-era philosophers, propositions are mental entities with a life of their own, and putting them into words is a secondary act. However, propositions cannot preexist our interactions with one another, because they are generated by and through our interactions. It is through associating that we learn how to think. So without one another, we cannot become ourselves. This does not mean that groups are more important than individuals or that we should all subsume our wills to some collective. But true individuation does not happen in isolation. The power to become ourselves is a collective one, and we cannot actualize ourselves without each other.

Social contract theory imagines isolated individuals, and then tries to imagine how they might choose to interact. Even as a thought experiment, social contract theory misunderstands how people with the collective power to charter future interactions could ever come into being. We are always already interacting, and can choose, in the languages and practices we have, how we could do better or differently in the future. From isolation, with no common language, this is impossible. We cannot generate a social order from isolated individuals. Social orders generate individuals, who can then refine or reconfigure those social orders, and in turn, reconfigure themselves to fit that new social order, on and on, into whatever world their actions are helping them generate.

Beaten Into Submission

It is here that Hume’s critique returns, only slightly transformed and refocused. In our small sampling of social contract theorists, only half of them actually thought we have to agree to be governed to make a government legitimate—Rousseau thought we had to agree, but Hobbes figured it didn’t really matter. The real problem with social contract theory—and Hume’s critique leaves this unchallenged—is the assumption we need to figure out why individuals choose to be governed. A better question is, how does our collectively generated power become estranged from us? How is it that we, as groups, come to be governed? In Hume’s metaphor of poor people as sailors involuntarily impressed into service on a ship, he is still treating the individual as the primary unit of politics. But Hume’s point that almost all governments are founded on usurpation or conquest is still an important one when analyzing state formation and how power gets hoarded.

Hume is not the only philosopher to point out that it takes violence to rule over others. In the Republic, Plato describes his ideal guardians descending on a city they plan to rule. “Let’s arm these earthborn scions of ours and lead them out, with the rulers at their head. When they arrive at the city, let them look and see what the best location will be for them to pitch their camp, one that would make it easiest for them both to keep those inside the city in check, should anyone refuse to obey the laws, and to fight off those outside the city.”[19] And writing almost a century after Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche defined a “state” as “a herd of blonde beasts of prey, a master race, a race of conquerors which, aggressive, powerful and organized, pounces with its most horrid claws on an unsuspecting population, one which in numbers may be tremendously superior, but is still undisciplined and nomadic. Such is the origin of the ‘state’ (I think we have disposed of the notion, one held enthusiastically by many, according to which the ‘state’ originates with a sort of contract).”[20]  

Sadly, establishing and maintaining governments through violence doesn’t just happen on the pages of philosophy books. It also happens in reality. As the Chinese Empire expanded, groups uninterested in assimilating repeatedly migrated beyond its reach. Initially, settling away from navigable rivers and passable roads leading to centers of state power proved sufficient, but eventually, maintaining self-rule required moving upwards into the mountains, since altitude can allow autonomy. These various groups, collectively referred to as the Miao by the Chinese, were finally forced to accept the peaks of the southern mountains as the only remaining way to evade state control.

The Miao who assimilated were called “cooked,” while those who insisted on going to the mountains to govern themselves were referred to as “raw.” When the “raw” Miao rebelled against further attempts at forced assimilation in 1795, the Chinese waged a war. The Qianlong Emperor, who was also responsible for the Dzungar genocide in the north, wrote a poem celebrating his victory against the Miao in the south, stating that “The mountains of the conquered countries, full of dangerous rocks and frightful precipices, are all levelled,” and “The news, which formerly was ten days arriving through the difficult passes, is now brought in eight.”[21] Sometimes, obliterating the safety of altitude is the only way to bring the unwilling under control.

More than a century and a half later, descendants of these same Miao found themselves no longer living in communal villages on the periphery of the Chinese Empire, but in communal villages on the periphery of the Thai state. Borders, being arbitrary, tend to move around. In 1967, Thai officials attempted to tax poppy cultivation, which the mountain dwellers rejected. The Royal Thai Army used napalm and artillery against them, treating an unwillingness to assimilate like a full-scale insurgency. Once again, it became clear that the best way to make or expand a state is to beat the unwilling into submission. 

Such attacks on smaller, usually more egalitarian, groups are not the only way centralized governments appear or expand. In some of the earliest cities, such as Uruk in Mesopotamia, archeological evidence suggests that several centuries passed without kings, palaces, or certain people getting buried in special ways. This points to a high level of equality that lasted for many centuries, which means that many generations lived and died in Uruk free from the hierarchical control of a ruling clique. At some point, certain person or persons took authority away from the group and turned it against them, just like Plato’s guardians or Nietzsche’s blonde beasts of prey. Oligarchy or monarchy didn’t make Uruk possible. It was the other way around.

Centralized governments take the power that people generate collectively, and then use that power to control the people that initially generated the power the governments appropriate. It is not, as Hobbes and Rousseau assumed, that governments are created to bring people together in order to then generate collective capacities and accomplish goals. Our collective capacities don’t just pre-exist any kind of formal government, but make governments possible in the first place. The people united can get by on their own. The same can’t be said for rulers and oligarchs.

[1] Harlan Lane, The Wild Boy of Aveyron (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976), 10.

[2] Ibid., 100.

[3] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men,” in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 127.

[4] Ibid., 149.

[5] Ibid., 148.

[6] Ibid., 176.

[7] Ibid., 177.

[8] Ibid., 178.

[9] Ibid., 181.

[10] Ibid., 184.

[11] David Hume, “Of the Original Contract,” in Political Writings, eds. Stuart Warner and Donald Livingston (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1994), 168.

[12] Ibid., 172.

[13] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 115.

[14] Ibid., 84.

[15] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education (1763: New York: Basic Books, 1979), 184.

[16] Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719: New York: Penguin Classics, 2001), 39.

[17] Ibid., 190.

[18] Rousseau, Emile, 185.

[19] Plato, Republic (c. 380 BCE: New York: Penguin Classics, 2012), 119.

[20] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887: New York: Penguin Classics, 2013), 72.

[21] The Conquest of the Miao-Tse: An Imperial Poem by Kien-lung (London: C & R Baldwin, 1810), 34.

The inspiration for this essay occurred in Denver. I had driven all day from Durango, Colorado, through two national forests and around more tight turns on cliffs in the rain than I’d care to count. We pulled into a gas station on the western edge of Denver, fueled up, and did a quick web search for food. There was a Japanese restaurant near the Colorado Rockies’ stadium and the prices were surprisingly cheap. Turns out, that’s because it’s a small plate restaurant, and that ten-dollar tofu dish that sounded so good is two bites for ten dollars, and we were about to embark on one of the most expensive meals of our marriage. Delicious. But not cheap.

We got off the highway and drove past the stadium, and then through a block-long homeless camp. Tents and people lined the street. We turned a corner, and with the tents still in the rearview mirror, the voice on the telephone informed us we had arrived at our destination. The extreme polarities of wealth coexisting within a few blocks were astounding. As we waited for our table, absurdly well-dressed people stepped out of cars worth more than our house and were swept inside by staff who knew their names and took their drink orders on the sidewalk, while just around the corner sat people with only a tent and some clothes, all of which the police might choose to put in a dumpster tomorrow. A few weeks later, as we left LAX in a rental car, we sat in traffic jams alongside underpasses filled with tents packed full of our fellow citizens who we try hard to forget are even there.  

The number of homeless persons in the USA really started expanding in the 1970s and has increased steadily ever since. This is not at all coincidentally also the era of neoliberal economics. The rust belt rusted, the pensioned and secure jobs of the postwar era steadily disappeared, corporate profits and wages stopped increasing in unison, and the social safety net that really got going during LBJ’s “War on Poverty” was almost completely dismantled. (In Johnson’s war in Vietnam and his war on poverty, both the Viet Cong and poverty prevailed. Not a great track record, Lyndon.) In recent years, rent has risen way beyond wages while work has become increasingly insecure and temporary. We have abandoned our fellow citizens and now casually drive past them on our way to a fine dining experience or a wedding in Pasadena. None of this is good and all of it has its roots in policy decisions that place generating shareholder value over taking care of other human beings.

On our trip to Colorado, I reread Marx’s 1844 Paris Manuscripts for the first time since college. When he wrote these, many of the insights we consider quintessentially “Marxist” did not exist yet. The emphasis in this earlier work is on the alienation of individuals rather than how a totalized system generates surplus value. A lot of his economics in these early writings are lifted straight from Adam Smith. Marx was still in the process of becoming Marx. I was particularly struck by this passage: “The demand for men necessarily governs the production of men, as of every other commodity. Should supply greatly exceed demand, a section of the workers sink into beggary or starvation.” Here Marx attributes homelessness to a seemingly inadvertent oversupply of humans, but in the first volume of Capital some twenty-three years later, he argues that those who have “sunk into beggary or starvation” are a structurally necessary industrial reserve army who need to exist for capitalist expansion to occur. Without desperate people begging and starving, capitalism can’t get going. You need to push the serfs off their land and set them on the streets of London before things get all Dickensian.

Full employment would make capitalist expansion impossible. If everyone is employed when new industries emerge, there will be no one to staff them. And since capital must expand every quarter without ceasing, there always need to be unemployed people ready to go at every instant. If capitalism is going to work, there always need to be quite a few people for whom it isn’t working, but could work if we need them. Luckily for the capitalists, there are “somehow” always unemployed people ready to go when they build a new factory or expand production. As Marx writes in Capital:

The question why this free laborer confronts him in the market, has no interest for the owner of money, who regards the labor-market as a branch of the general market for commodities. And for the present it interests us just as little. We cling to the fact theoretically, as he does practically. One thing, however, is clear—Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labor-power. This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older forms of social production.

Part of how capitalism, this new form of social production he was writing about, puts laborers on the streets goes something like this: When some new machine emerges that does the work of ten people, nine of them are laid off while one of them tends that new machine. This is usually not a problem for long. If businesses are expanding fast enough, new factories and stores are appearing all the time, selling more things to more people. Or a new invention comes along. No one made DVD players in the 1960s, but plenty of people do today. We create new needs and suddenly there are new professions. An expanding economy can reappropriate the people it casts off. Having people ready and waiting is necessary for this to work.

Homelessness is on the rise and that is a powerful sign that American capital has stalled. In Capital, Marx argues that some level of destitute and available persons are required for capitalism to function. But, harkening back to the Paris Manuscripts, the supply is getting out of control. More people have been kicked out of the economy than the economy can reappropriate in new ways.

Any number of homeless humans is unacceptable, but we have gone way beyond even what capital demands for an industrial reserve army. With no new industries or jobs, more and more people end up on the streets. Meaningful aid or work is unavailable. Production doesn’t expand and so they stay there, joined each day by more and more of their fellow forgotten citizens. The post-WWII boom that made the USA an economic behemoth of previously unseen proportions is drawing to a close, and the proof sleeps restlessly on our streets every night.

It was my understanding that in that moment, we all collectively decided that we would no longer tolerate men strumming acoustic guitars and singing. Sadly, I was wrong. They are still at it. Strumming. Singing. Just daring me to put on a toga and put a stop to their shenanigans.

A lot of digital ink has spilled lately about David Rovics. A good summary is here. One of his several defenses are probably also worth reading. The short version is that Mr. Rovics has written and performed politically leftist acoustic guitar music and appeared at rallies, protests, and fundraisers for decades. He has also platformed holocaust deniers on his podcast, frequently recommended Gilad Atzmon’s antisemitic book The Wandering Who, and lobbed softball interview questions at Unite the Right organizer Matthew Heimbach. Since the documentation of this grew, Rovic has been literally cancelled from performances, and then started complaining about cancel culture. That’s a summary. I don’t really move in these circles enough to bring this to some sort of conclusion and tell you how I think you should feel about it. I’m solidly against antisemitism, but I actually have a different complaint about Rovics.

I’d like to return to John Belushi smashing that guitar and how unfortunate it is that we did not take that scene from Animal House as the important wake-up call it was. If we had, we probably wouldn’t be dealing with this. When all this news around Rovics started hitting my listservs and social media feeds, my first thought wasn’t “Is he being treated unfairly or is this actually deserved?” Rather, it was “Why are we still having the same sort of music at protests in 2022 as we had in 1915?” I immediately felt like Andy Rooney or something: ranting and out of touch and annoyed about something that doesn’t seem all that annoying. I recognize that. Yet everyone who sings and plays at protests almost invariably channels Joe Hill or a young Bob Dylan—strumming cowboy chords and telling tales of bad bosses and the people uniting. When Tom Morello showed up in Madison, Wisconsin to join the protest against Scott Walker’s union-busting bill, he brought an acoustic guitar and covered Woody Guthrie and Bob Marley. Everyone just instinctively knows their set list even if they made their name making weird noises through effect pedals.

But there’s something below my surface level annoyance that gets at the practice of protest and why singing the same types of songs in the same ways is more than just tiresome, but part of a whole set of counterproductive practices. Acoustic protest music is part of the pageantry of public dissent that makes so many gatherings a predictable sequence of events we can easily enact and the state can just as easily ignore.

Marx opens The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte with the bulk of his most famous quotations. I’m not sure if he planned that, but such is life. The first paragraph contains the line “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” The second paragraph starts with, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.” Then it gets slightly less constantly quoted, but still fairly regularly excerpted. “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”

He points out that Martin Luther looked back to the Apostle Paul as a model, while the French Revolutionists looked back to the Roman Republic. Following Marx, the Bolsheviks constantly measured their Russian Revolution against the earlier French one, arguing about whether they’d passed their Thermidorian moment or not—in reference to the coup that got Robespierre’s head detached—or fearing a Brumaire, when a Napoleon might seize power. That time it was a tragedy, with his nephew it was a farce, but if it happened a third time, who even knows how tragically farcical it might get?

We operate in paradigms we know. This certainly helps us make sense of the tumult of living our lives with no idea of what happens next, but it also gets us stuck in patterns. Protests now often involve Gandhian civil disobedience—frequently enacted in cooperation with the police, who are warned about how many people have volunteered for a symbolic arrest so they know how many vehicles to bring to haul them all away. Meanwhile, RevComs hand out literature, and because Bob Dylan opened for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, we had better find a folk singer. It’s a set of motions we feel the urge to follow. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

Sure, “[We] make [our] own history, but [we] do not make it as [we] please.” We can only work with what we’ve been given through methods we know. But we should focus more on that first part about making our own history. Leave what’s dead in the soil and grow something new with it. We inherit materials and practices, but our focus should be on reimagining them rather than just inheriting them. (The irony of how I structured this section about moving away from old ideas and practices around Karl Marx quotes—a guy who died in 1883—is not lost on me.)

I have long held, to the annoyance of many, that the social relationships embedded in how we present art and music are more politically important than what that art or music is ostensibly “about.” I’ve learned more about how to live as a political animal at noise shows with a potluck dinner where the only discernible lyrics are indiscernible screams than I have listening to some dude sing about the Spanish Civil War while I wait for a march to start. A performance or a gallery show is a social event. How are people meant to navigate it? Do they navigate it as equals? How much agency do we give each other? What can we learn and teach by presenting work in experientially instructive ways?

In my book Art as Politics I quoted John Cage as saying:

I think one of the things that distinguishes music from the other arts is that music often requires other people. The performance of a piece of music is a public occasion or a social occasion. This brings it about that the performance of a piece of music can be a metaphor of society, of how we want society to be. Though we are not now living in a society which we consider good, we could make a piece of music in which we would be willing to live.

Later on, in prose it pains me to paste, I wrote,

Cage’s music has none of the sloganeering or heavy-handed didacticism one might expect from politically-motivated art. He does not offer music arguing for a political message to be accepted or rejected, but rather offers alternate modes of human interaction existing in actual space and time. He thus attempts to create an oasis in the midst of consumer-driven capitalist society, presenting a society governed by a set of rules entirely different from the dominant culture’s. As he noted in a 1991 interview, “If we can have a group in which the individuals are autonomous, then we have a model for society which is free of the need for government, and which could enjoy life.”

Politics is about relationships and how we live our lives. So are art and music. But this doesn’t mean we can exchange them for each other. Each realm involves different sets of practices. There’s a famous quote about how writing about music is like dancing about architecture. (Laurie Anderson, Steve Martin, Frank Zappa, Martin Mull, Elvis Costello, Thelonius Monk, Clara Schumann, Miles Davis, George Carlin and several others have received credit for it.) Different disciplines have different functions. Music can be political, but it does that best when it’s primarily operating as music, rather than as an auxiliary element of a political action. Squished into protests, music in particular becomes part of a predictable pageant that keeps us repeating patterns from the past—this is especially true when it’s the same type of music performed in the same ways. It’s the tradition of all dead generations weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living, and why, when I heard about the controversy around David Rovics, all I could think about was John Belushi.

In “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology,” a 2004 essay that is a true joy to read, David Graeber discusses a common critique of anarchism—horizontal and voluntary forms of social organization could never scale up and replace the modern nation state. After an imagined skeptic asks, “Can you name me a single viable example of a society which has existed without a government?” Graeber writes:

The dice are loaded. You can’t win. Because when the skeptic says “society,” what he really means is “state,” even “nation-state.” Since no one is going to produce an example of an anarchist state—that would be a contradiction in terms—what we’re really being asked for is an example of a modern nation-state with the government somehow plucked away: a situation in which the government of Canada, to take a random example, has been overthrown, or for some reason abolished itself, and no new one has taken its place but instead all former Canadian citizens begin to organize themselves into libertarian collectives. Obviously this would never be allowed to happen. In the past, whenever it even looked like it might—here, the Paris commune and Spanish civil war are excellent examples—the politicians running pretty much every state in the vicinity have been willing to put their differences on hold until those trying to bring such a situation about had been rounded up and shot.

Exempting examples like Rojava, which is surviving over a vast region with non-state governance, it’s true that anarchist organizations rarely scale up to the level of a state. But maybe that’s part of the beauty. Maybe state-sized systems that operate at such a huge remove from our daily concerns are part of the problem, and creating something to replace them that operates at that same scale would inevitably replicate many of the problems that make us want to replace them in the first place. And maybe looking for a single something to replace it could get swapped out for a search for many things. Graeber continues:

There is a way out, which is to accept that anarchist forms of organization would not look anything like a state. That they would involve an endless variety of communities, associations, networks, projects, on every conceivable scale, overlapping and intersecting in any way we could imagine, and possibly many that we can’t. Some would be quite local, others global. Perhaps all they would have in common is that none would involve anyone showing up with weapons and telling everyone else to shut up and do what they were told.

The composer John Cage, in addition to revolutionizing experimental music in the twentieth century, was also an anarchist and a mushroom expert. (One of the first large sums of money he and his personal and creative partner Merce Cunningham used to fund their artistic activities came from Cage’s winnings on an Italian game show where the contestants could choose their topic and answer questions in their area of expertise. Cage chose mushrooms and won the grand prize. They bought a van for tours. Later, Cage and Cunningham made extra money on the side supplying fancy mushrooms to Michelin starred restaurants in Manhattan.) When Cage founded the New York Mycological Society with a number of other mushroom enthusiasts (who were presumably not also anarchist composers), he made sure that the bylaws stipulated that there would be no president and all members would have equal power and an equal say. (NB, I have checked, and Cage’s bylaws have long-since been scrapped.)

The social anarchist vision of a society composed of a commune of communes can be envisioned as “an endless variety of communities, associations, networks, projects, on every conceivable scale, overlapping and intersecting in any way we could imagine, and possibly many that we can’t,” to quote Graeber again. Any organization or association where we can control the terms of how we interact can and should be organized without coercive figures demanding what anyone else can or cannot do. Maybe it’s a mycological society, a bowling league, or a city, but anywhere we can create forms of freedom, we can and should.

One of the best early proponents of anarchism—and one of the most enduringly readable—is Errico Malatesta. When I first encountered that passage from Graeber quoted above, it immediately reminded me of Malatesta’s 1899 essay “Toward Anarchy.” He begins, “It is a general opinion that we, because we call ourselves revolutionists, expect anarchy to come with one stroke—as the immediate result of an insurrection which violently attacks all that which exists and which replaces it with institutions that are really new.” But, Malatesta points out, it would be rather problematic to coerce a world accustomed to coercion into non-coercive social forms. Anarchy will not succeed if we follow Rousseau’s notion that some people will have to be “forced to be free.” As Malatesta writes, anarchy will not succeed until everyone “will not only not want to be commanded but will not want to command; nor will anarchy have succeeded unless they will have understood the advantages of solidarity and know how to organize a plan of social life wherein there will no longer be traces of violence and imposition.”

This brings Malatesta to the pivotal statement in “Toward Anarchy.” He writes, “Therefore, the subject is not whether we accomplish anarchy today, tomorrow, or within ten centuries, but that we walk toward anarchy today, tomorrow, and always.” The revolution is already underway, as long as we realize and remember, along with Malatesta, that we want a “society based on free and voluntary accord—a society in which no one can force his wishes on another and in which everyone can do as he pleases and together all will voluntarily contribute to the well-being of the community,” and then organize everything we can control with that aim in mind, and then seek to take control of more and more. Take care of each other without turning it into a business. Practice mutual aid so that we won’t require the largesse of billionaires or states. Provide for each other without asking if someone has deserved or earned it. We all, by virtue of being alive, deserve what it takes to stay that way. And maybe, like John Cage writing the bylaws for the New York Mycological society, we can recognize that our hobbies don’t really need a president.

Various experiments in social transformation can overlap and coexist or never have anything to do with each other and all still contribute to changing our understanding of what’s possible and how we can live. They can be vast in scope or very small. We can rethink a whole city or our book club with a half dozen friends. Every attempt to do anything without coercion or hierarchy is part of the whole process of building the new society in the shell of the old.

This brings me to a few notes on Murray Bookchin’s 1995 book Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm. Bookchin calls the sort of performative, politically impotent anarchism of crusty punks and other subcultural groups “lifestyle anarchism.” Lifestylists tend to be dropout artists who act as the first stage of gentrification rather than actually improving the lives of the marginalized groups in the neighborhoods they move to. By rejecting society and living on the margins, lifestylists don’t challenge the existing order, but let it be. The world grinds on, crushing the poor and what remains of the natural world, but the lifestylists settle into a small oasis where they can live their transgressive little lifestyles in peace. Bookchin contrasts this with social anarchism. Social anarchists are interested in confronting power for a total transformation of the social order. They seek to build the new society by directly confronting the current one. Powerful people won’t stop crushing the poor and the natural world until we put a stop to it. Dropping out of society won’t help.

Before I get too far into what an incredible oversimplification this is, I should note that few thinkers have had a larger impact on me than Murray Bookchin. Most of the good ideas I’ve ever had, I later found he had written about much more cogently decades before they ever crossed my mind. The rest of my good ideas I stole from him. That’s something of an exaggeration, but the point is this: I’m not one of those people who loves getting on the Internet to talk shit about Murray Bookchin. They are legion. They are annoying. And I’d hate to join their chorus.

But here I go. As overblown caricatures of certain tendencies, the distinction between lifestyle anarchism and social anarchism can be useful. But very few people are entirely one or the other. There is no chasm, so we don’t need to worry about whether we can build a bridge or not. The space between these tendencies is more like a crack in a sidewalk than a chasm, and most people will cross from one side to the other without even realizing it’s there. I have known a lot of “white anarchist punk kids” (and maybe even been one), living on the margins and going to basement shows. But in addition to this “lifestyle,” so many of the people I knew in that world were on the frontlines of organizing protests and taking the teargas, as well as building community gardens, mutual aid organizations, info shops, free teach-ins with street medics, and on and on, successfully combining a dropout lifestyle and more overtly social anarchist activities. You can help shut down the streets at a G8 conference and then come home and host a noise show in your attic. Lifestylist activities are easily combined with more obviously political tactics. We all contain multitudes and can do an incredible variety of things with our time.

Moreover, given what I quoted from Graeber and Malatesta above, there is value in viewing purely lifestylist activities as also worthwhile, rather than some cowardly retreat from what really needs to get done. I said revolutionizing your book club and your municipality were both part of the same process. We won’t transform our social order until we start transforming how we think about what’s possible, but it’s hard to get people to start thinking differently about the world until we start changing it. Both the personal and the political need to change, and neither set of changes will get very far without the other. In my example above about shutting down a G8 conference and then having a few dozen people over to watch a performance only a few dozen people might enjoy, it’s best not to think of the music as a break from the “real” work of fighting imperialism, but more as another activity that can contribute to a world where we all have the resources to do what makes us happy and no one is bossing anyone around.

My own radicalization happened through punk rock. When I first encountered loud, fast, aggressive music, I found it very thrilling, just on a purely musical level. My older brother’s classmate was the drummer and vocalist in one of Wisconsin’s all-time great punk bands. He started giving my brother his old issues of Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll back in its golden age, and I read the columns and encountered all sorts of leftist ideas tied to this loud lifestyle I loved. And then I really started to think new thoughts. I was so inspired by all the references to anarchism that I read the encyclopedia entry on the subject some nine or ten million times, and then put myself on high alert for books by this Kropotkin guy. This was before the Internet or ordering books on it, and I had no idea what interlibrary loan was, so my mission remained a failure for several years. Despite my inability to get my hands on any anarchist theory, I unwittingly got some practice. By attending and playing underground punk shows, I experienced a DIY world that existed without the permission or blessing of the mainstream culture industry. And I experienced it on a very visceral and practical level. Kids just like me booked the shows, put them on in any available space (the show linked in this paragraph was in a bowling alley), recorded each other, and then promoted those records in each other’s self-published zines.

At extended family gatherings, someone inevitably asks me something like, ‘How long do you plan to do this music stuff if you probably aren’t going to be successful?’ To outsiders of this subcultural milieu, it seems like if you’re playing in bands and you’re not in the running for a Grammy, you obviously aren’t successful, so you might as well turn it into some avocational hobby where you maybe play some Eagles covers in the basement with your buddies every once in a while and talk about what coulda been. But there is a whole world of cultural creation out there where people just like us take matters into our own hands and make things that means something to us, and then disseminate it in ways that make everyone involved feel welcome and included. Ideally, anyways. When I first started playing music, I did it because I enjoyed playing music with my friends and in front of people. That was my goal. So the first time I went to band practice, I was already successful. I had set out to play music, and then I had. There is a lesson in doing this that no amount of political theory can teach. How do you find your people and do your thing? How do you work together to realize one another’s visions? If it’s just us, and no one is making us do this, what will we do, and how will we do it? We’ve given ourselves total freedom, so now what?

It's easy to critique the political efficacy of all this in the same terms Bookchin used in Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm. The world of punk and experimental music is more of a subculture than a counterculture. It’s doesn’t confront the existing order as much as it acts as the minor leagues for the mainstream. Bands produce cultural commodities and try to sell them. It’s the same process, just small scale. It’s still all about the creation and sale of commodities. A touring musician is like some unholy combination of a medieval troubadour and a traveling salesperson. Sing a song and then peddle your wares. And drive your gas guzzling van on the interstate to get there. It’s the same business model as the mainstream culture industry, just with way lower stakes. But at the same time, taking control over every aspect of the creation and distribution of your work is a worthwhile exercise in refusing the given. As a political act, it certainly “isn’t enough.” And it could easily get dismissed as lifestylist. But experiencing that world has changed more hearts and minds than just mine, and put many, many people on the path to real political opposition.

There is no chasm to bridge, just a world to transform. There are as many ways and scales to work toward that goal as there are human activities. We can realize our goals right now in any way we can. The revolution is already underway.

I’ll close by returning to Graeber and Malatesta. Near the end of the section of  “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology” I’ve been quoting from, Graeber writes that change “will necessarily be gradual, the creation of alternative forms of organization on a world scale, new forms of communication, new, less alienated ways of organizing life, which will, eventually, make currently existing forms of power seem stupid and beside the point. That in turn would mean that there are endless examples of viable anarchism: pretty much any form of organization would count as one, so long as it was not imposed by some higher authority, from a klezmer band to the international postal service.” Almost as a temporally reversed response, Malatesta writes, “Therefore, the subject is not whether we accomplish anarchy today, tomorrow, or within ten centuries, but that we walk toward anarchy today, tomorrow, and always.”

There were more serial killers in the 1990s than any decade we have data for, with 991 documented cases worldwide. There was then a noticeable and perhaps-ominous decline to 666 in the 2000s. And although statistics are still coming in, the 2010s were on pace for less than 500. Serial killers are becoming increasingly rare.

But the news is not all good. As serial killing declined, mass shootings increased. In the 1990s, while those 991 serial killers slowly meandered from murder scene to murder scene, mass shooters killed about 21 people per year. Yet by 2019, there were more mass shootings than days in the year.

Plug these two trends into a graph, and it makes the letter X. We have swapped one form of murdering multiple people for another. Serial killers do their killing at a series of separate events. They kill. They wait. They kill again. Mass shooters also kill multiple people, but compress time and space as much as possible. There is no longer a series of events. There is only one event, and it usually takes minutes, not years.

Consider that between 1954 and 1957, Ed Gein murdered two people and exhumed nine. Over the course of six years, John Wayne Gacy killed thirty-three people. But in just six minutes on August 6, 2019, Patrick Crusius murdered twenty-three people. In fourteen minutes on October 27, 2018, Robert Bowers killed eleven. The United States’ brief foray into COVID related lockdowns slowed the incidence of mass shootings, but as public gatherings have returned, so has mass murder. Preliminary data shows a 0.78% daily increase in mass shootings over the mean since April 2020. A less-than-one-percent-increase may not sound like much, but I’m still against it.

Mass murder isn’t the only thing that’s accelerating. The economy is as well. The global economy doubles every quarter century or so. This is actually quite alarming. Think about those math problems that go something like, ‘Would you rather have 1 million dollars in a lump sum today, or one dollar today, two tomorrow, four the next, and have it keep doubling like that for thirty days?’ If you like large sums of money, there is a correct answer, because if you choose the daily double, by day twenty you could expect $1,048,576, with $2,097,152 coming the next day, and another nine days of doubling after that. These kinds of increases start slowly, but quickly get out of control.

To continue doubling the economy every twenty-five years will require accelerating our cycles of production, consumption, and obsolescence far beyond the fathomable. At the onset of the industrial era, goods were moved by waterways, then trains, then planes, and are now available for immediate download or same-day delivery. Any amount of time a commodity spends in an unsold state slows down an economy we expect to speed up. Capital seeks to destroy every spatial barrier and just get it there now, whatever it is, or wherever there happens to be. Space and time must be obliterated.

At the time of this writing, about 3000 people die from COVID-19 in the United States each day. But the political will to shut down schools or businesses isn’t there. The economy can’t stop moving and growing. Stasis is death for capital, and the choice has been made that this abstraction we call “the economy” gets to live while people die. When a container ship called the Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal, it seemed like global commerce was about to collapse. Just one shortcut for ships gets closed off and the stock market goes into a tailspin and your 401K collapses. Stuff needs to move around. We need to make it, ship it, and sell it, more of it every day than the last, doesn’t matter what it is, but please, get it there faster than ever before.

In high-frequency trading (HFT), computers run algorithms to buy and sell stocks, usually making a fraction of a cent per trade, but making up for the low margins through sheer volume. Machines race other machines to make advantageous trades, exchange trillions of bytes of information every day, and process transactions in a few hundredths of a second, every second. Truly accurate numbers don’t exist, but HFT likely makes up 50-60% of the trades on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Traders pay a premium to put their computers near or within a market’s headquarters, because a shorter cable can give a crucial nanosecond of advantage. At the NYSE’s data center in Mahwah, New Jersey, everyone gets the same length cable so no one has the advantage of being physically closer to the central computer. Between buildings and across borders, HFT often uses microwave transmission systems because light travels slightly faster through air than through cables. A competitive edge is measured in microseconds. Computers are trading with other computers at a rate beyond human comprehension, and this now constitutes about half of all stock market activity.

Money is in constant motion, always moving faster and faster. And when it seems to have reached maximum velocity, it somehow goes even faster. The always-open shopping mall we call Earth appears to have reached the point where any further increase in the velocity, volume, or ubiquity of commerce should be impossible. Yet it just keeps getting larger and faster. The market may end up being like a piano falling off a building—we can’t figure out why or how it keeps getting bigger and bigger, but then it hits us.

Serial killings, that is, multiple homicides spread out over space and time, have been on the decline since the 1990s. On the rise, and in their place, are multiple homicides accomplished in a single location within a span of minutes. Serial killers will slowly murder over the course of years, perhaps get caught, have a trial, and maybe even an execution. Mass shooters do it all at once, often dying at the scene, cramming all the murders and an execution into a matter of minutes. The contemporary demand for more speed and growth has been fully internalized. Even an avocational act with little-to-no chance for profit, such as senseless murder, is subject to the overall societal speedup. It’s sort of like same day delivery for a pair of pants, only deadlier.

Serial killing is an artisanal cottage industry compared to mass shooting, but there’s really no need to get sentimental about some lost golden age of slow murder than there are reasons to lament the end of feudalism. What’s lost to the past was not necessarily better. Yet it’s remarkable just how much the world has changed in a few decades. We are accelerating headlong into an increasingly catastrophic future. The incredibly wealthy amass amounts of wealth so staggeringly huge as to be meaningless, while the rest of us watch our social safety net and the natural world turn to dust. Before the eerie respite from mass shootings brought on by the massive daily death toll of a global pandemic, on almost any given day, angry young men would shoot large numbers of people in short spans of time for no reason at all, and now they’re coming back, probably more unhinged than ever. We buy and sell faster and faster. The economy grows and grows. The troubled men kill quicker and quicker. The catastrophe looks bigger and bigger. Then it hits us.