Rights. We are all familiar with the term. You have heard the topic of rights come up in political discourse, campaign ads, even primetime cop shows on television: “You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney.” What exactly constitutes a right? Do we have a right to healthcare? To housing? Dictionaries define rights as a just claim, or a legally enforceable claim against another that the other will or will not do a particular act against the other. Basically, the term right is thereby defined as an entitlement that generates a corresponding obligation in others. Philosophers have poured a lot of thought into rights throughout the ages. In the realm of metaphysics, a right is a moral claim grounded in the nature of man and in the order of justice. It isn’t simply a preference or interest, but a claim that others are bound to respect due to how we value our fellow man.

The Western tradition did not invent the concept of rights out of whole cloth in the Enlightenment era. Its roots run through Scripture, through the late-classical and medieval periods, into the modern era. The Decalogue supplies the foundation for modern theories of rights. Within the Ten Commandments are certain prohibitions, such as “Thou shalt not murder,” or “Thou shalt not steal.” Those prohibitions imply a corresponding protection, which form the basis of Western rights philosophy. The commandment against murder establishes the foundation for the right to life, and the commandment against theft establishes the foundation for property rights. As you can see, these Biblical foundations are already oriented toward non-interference against life, body, and material goods.

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Natural law theory continued to evolve through the medieval period, particularly as expressed by Saint Thomas Aquinas and his Summa Theologiae. According to Saint Thomas, natural law is the rational creature’s participation in eternal law. Human beings, by their nature, are directed toward certain goods, such as life, knowledge, and the ordered use of the external world to achieve his ends. Natural law prohibits certain acts that destroy those goods or the pursuit of them. In this early formulation, the theory is still objective, where the right is not yet expressed as something inherent in the individual. Despite that, the structure of the theory, even in nascence, continues to protect life, limb, and property against aggression, and it grounds the legitimacy of law in a moral order.

It is in the Enlightenment period where the language of rights shifts toward the subjective form familiar to us today, where rights are inherent and belong to the individual. Thomas Hobbes gave the state of nature and the social contract their modern conceptualization through Leviathan. According to Hobbes, when man is in his natural state, there is no common power, no property, and no justice. Rights, in Hobbes’s state of nature, are limited to each man’s ability to use his own power for the preservation of his own life. Men exit the state of nature through the social contract, which authorizes a sovereign authority to secure the peace. John Locke, working within and against Hobbes’s framework in Two Treatises on Government, expanded the theory of natural rights to its most influential and recognizable formulation, in which every man has a property in his own person, and his labor is his own. The law of nature, expressed by Locke, obliges no one to harm another in life, health, liberty, or possessions, and the only purpose of just government is to secure these inherent rights. In the Lockean frame, right exists as a limitation on external force, and government exists to preserve inherent rights, not to supply every condition that facilitates human flourishing.

This Lockean understanding of rights supplied the dominant vocabulary of how Americans viewed rights until only recently. Through most of American history, rights were expressed through the question of what kind of claim is at issue, and what kind of obligation does it generate? Rights can be understood in one of two ways; negative rights and positive rights. A negative right is a non-interference claim. With negative rights, others around the individual, including government, stand under a duty of forbearance, and are obliged to refrain from certain actions, such as the seizure of private property or the taking of life without due process. In contrast, positive rights are claims to goods or services and are conditional. Other individuals, or governments, stand under a duty of providing, and are obliged to either act, supply, or arrange for goods or services such as housing, healthcare, education, or what have you. The distinction between positive and negative rights isn’t simply a philosophical or semantic debate. It determines the nature of political obligations, sets the scope of what power is deemed legitimate, and defines the relationship between the individual and the political community.

The Constitution was structured around negative rights. The language of the Bill of Rights is prohibitive in nature. Just look at the amendments. Congress shall make no law, or shall not be infringed. Even in the Miranda example in the first paragraph. The right to remain silent is prohibitive. The government cannot coerce a confession from you. The right to an attorney may seem like a positive right; the government must provide you with something. But, if you look at the language of the Sixth Amendment, where the right to counsel originates, it is still prohibitive. Why does the accused need the attorney? Why is the government providing (positive) counsel? Again, it is to prohibit a coercive power cannot compel a guilty verdict out of the accused. The positive aspect of the Sixth Amendment still serves a negative function.

In recent decades, however, the political language has shifted away from negative rights to favoring the positive, and has gone so far as to elevate positive rights as foundational. Sometimes, positive rights are even declared as more urgent and necessary. I, myself, hold a conservative worldview, and will make the case, here, that America should return to prioritizing negative rights over positive rights. When positive rights are elevated to the status of fundamental, it invites interference and expands the coercive force of government.

The emphasis on positive rights does not originate from the nefarious. In fact, the rising focus on positive rights comes from the want to relieve the sufferings and ills of our fellow man. The case I am making is not indifferent to those sufferings. Rather, it is meant to serve as a recognition that the first duty of a free society is to restrain aggression and protect the citizenry from aggression, which then preserves the conditions under which the individual may associate, labor to produce, and assist one another through the institutions of the family, the church, mutual aid, and the local community. Returning to the prioritization of negative rights restores clarity about the proper limits of what is to be obligatory and reaffirms the character of ordered liberty as an inheritance, rather than a continuous redistribution project. And, as always, what follows is my interpretation and understanding of the material. Others may not agree with my interpretation. Like all of the essays on the subject, so far, I encourage discussion and debate.

The Character and Function of Negative Rights

As I said before, the ideological foundation of the American understanding of rights originates in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. In it, Locke describes man as a pre-political entity in a state of nature. He writes that the law of nature teaches that “being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” He continues that every man has a property in his own person, and that the labor of his body and hands are his and his alone. Political society is organized around these principles, with the formation of government by the consent of those governed for the express purpose of preserving a man’s property, understood as life, liberty, and estate. Government has no other purpose than that, and when it exceeds that purpose, it becomes tyranny. The Declaration of Independence restates Locke in that men are endowed by God with inalienable rights, or natural rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that just government is established to secure those natural rights. The rights are expressed in the negative, in that they restrain what just government may do, and pre-date the political order. They do not, however, authorize or dictate that the political order must provide the material of human flourishing. Rather, only that it must protect the conditions conducive to human flourishing.

I will use three examples to illustrate the restrictive character of negative rights. The right to life is the right to not be killed or physically harmed by others, and correlates to the universal duty of forbearance from aggression, or security in your person. The right to property is the right to not have your just holdings seized or invaded, and correlates to the duty of forbearance from theft, trespass, or expropriation. Likewise, the right to freedom of speech is the right to not be silenced or punished for expressing opinions, and correlates to the duty of government to not coerce you into silence. In each of these cases, the right is secured through setting a boundary. Negative rights, therefore, are intended to serve as shields. They do not require the provision of goods or services. Instead, they require others, especially those who hold coercive power, to not cross an explicit boundary.

The Character and Function of Positive Rights

A positive right, by contrast, requires that someone, usually the state, act either through taxation, regulation, or some other coercive effort, in order to mobilize resources, rank competing claims, and direct the labor and holdings of others toward satisfying the conditions of the right being claimed. Unlike negative rights, a positive right cannot be satisfied by simply leaving people alone. Positive rights require action. They require material allocation and distribution. And, they require compulsion from certain categories of citizens, such as taxpayers or property owners.

The logic of positive rights introduces several problems, first of which is scarcity. Negative rights can be applied and respected universally. In theory, if everyone refrains from aggression, the rights of all are upheld simultaneously. Positive rights, on the other hand, cannot function the same way, because their fulfillment requires the allocation of finite resources among competing claims. The resources required to fulfill claims to housing, healthcare, or education are finite. Prioritization is unavoidable. The political authority must decide whose right takes precedence or the amount due to each claimant, among others. Those decisions will inevitably leave some claims of right unsatisfied and impose a cost to the rest.

The second problem is positive rights come into conflict with negative rights. Enforcing a positive right requires restricting the liberty or property of those compelled to supply the resource. Take our right to counsel example from earlier. The negative right that protects you from state coercion requires an opposition legal counsel, and that right to an attorney is the positive right. Despite the positive right being in service of the negative right, the positive right to counsel requires the state to direct labor that would otherwise remain under the control of the attorney, even if that labor is compensated. Instead, a choice is made regarding the attorney’s labor—how that labor will be used and for whom. It is through this function that the expansion of positive rights shrinks the sphere of negative protection.

You can even take it a step further with the example of slavery. Slavery illustrates positive right in its most extreme form. Slavery converts the asserted entitlement of the slaver, the slaver having laid claim to the right of the labor, service, and body of another, into a legally enforceable claim. The slaver’s positive claim to the slave’s labor and obedience can only be satisfied by violating the slave’s negative liberty, his own right to life, liberty, and property. What the law recognized as a property right in one party was, in reality, the absolute and tyrannical violation of the other party’s fundamental negative rights.

This structure appears, albeit less extreme, in more ordinary positive-right claims. Let’s consider the right to free housing. The right to free housing requires questions to be answered that negative rights never require. Who, exactly, is eligible? What are the criteria for eligibility? What quality and size satisfies the right? And, most importantly, who is to provide it? There is no satisfactory answer to any of those questions, because the cost ultimately falls on the taxpayer. The “free” house is paid for by the compulsory extraction of labor and property from others. A positive right to housing is, therefore, satisfied only by imposing upon the negative rights of those whose earnings and holdings are taken to fund it. The same is true for the positive right of healthcare. Questions of eligibility, what services are covered, and sources of provision require answers, and whatever those answers may be, the resources required to satisfy the claim are drawn from the labor and property of others through taxation or some other form of mandated contribution. In each instance, whether housing, healthcare, education, or whatever the positive claim is, the claim remains indeterminate until a political authority sorts out the details, and the fulfillment of the claim rests upon an intrusion of the negative liberty and property of someone else. Negative rights, by contrast, simply identify a boundary that others may not cross. Positive rights, no matter the case, are abstract formulas that require continuous political specification and continuous extraction from third parties.

A third problem is the tendency toward unbounded expansion. Once the principle is accepted that fundamental rights include enforceable claims to provisions, the list of such claims has no natural end point. Every felt need, every inequality of condition, every disparity of outcome becomes a candidate for elevation to the status of right. Through this mechanism, the political process transforms into a continuous contest over which new claims will be recognized and at whose expense. The constitutional order, designed to limit government, is gradually converted into an engine of allocation and redistribution.

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Abstraction, Continuity, and the Limits of Reconstruction

A conservative disposition is wary of abstract rights claims that detach themselves from the institutions and historical lessons learned over the course of time. Rights that sustain civil liberty are most secure when they are concrete, refined through reasoning and practical application, and transmitted as part of an institutional inheritance. Abstract claims, however pure in theory, tend toward excess. By claiming a right to everything necessary for a fully realized life—which exceeds the purpose of government—they authorize continuous interference with the settled arrangement of society. It’s not up to the government to provide you with everything necessary to flourish. The purpose of government is to preserve the conditions necessary for your own labor and talents to facilitate and contribute to your own flourishing.

The negative rights of the Anglo-American tradition possess the character of that inheritance. They emerged through struggle against arbitrary power, the assertion of common-law liberties, parliamentary resistance, and the American constitutional settlement that sought to secure those liberties against both concentrated executive power and majority faction. They were tested across generations and adapted to the actual passions and interests of men, rather than to idealized conceptions of human nature. An order that elevates positive claims to equal status begins to treat our inheritance as provisional, subjected to revision whenever opinions determine that new forms of provisions are required.

Political society can best be understood as a partnership that extends across generations, whose ends cannot be achieved in a single lifetime. Or ever, for that matter. The living receive an institutional and moral estate from those that came before them, and are obligated to transmit it, improved if possible but not fundamentally remade according to temporary enthusiasms, to those yet to be born. “To secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” That’s the key. Negative rights protect the continuity of that partnership by restraining interference with settled property, contracts, expectations, and liberties. Positive rights, when treated as fundamental, allow the present to make ever-expansive claims upon the holdings and labor in ways that can disregard both the expectations of the past and the claims of the future.

Property rights illustrate the point. The right to the fruits of one’s labor, the right to the acquisitions of parents, and the right to transmit what one has acquired to offspring are among the concrete protections of the classical tradition. These are negative in effect, meaning they restrain seizures and interference. When positive rights to materials are elevated to the fundamental, they authorize unjust claims upon that property. The present generation’s concept of what is owed becomes justification for taking from one to redistribute to another. The generational partnership is then converted into a vehicle for the preferences of the living, unbound from inheritance or the interests of the unborn.

Prudence, Human Nature, and the Scope of Government

Government exists to provide for human wants through the exercise of wisdom. Among those wants is the restraint of passion and the protection of persons and property. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite is placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within individuals and intermediate associations, the more there must be without. Liberty is a regulated freedom, ordered both by law, and by the moral habits that make law bearable.

This understanding does not authorize unlimited positive rights. What it does authorize is the prudent use of political power to secure the conditions under which liberty can be enjoyed. Concern for the vulnerable, the education of youth, and for the relief of genuine distress is a permanent fixture of any decent society. Yet, the method of addressing these concerns must be balanced. In other words, prudence in governance must be exercised, and must remain attentive to unintended consequences of expanding compulsion. Treating every material need as an enforceable fundamental right converts prudence into a project of provision and places the state in the position of allocation, rather than as a guarantor of liberty.

The nature of man is complex. We are passionate and ambitious creatures. Men are not infinitely malleable materials for social reconstruction. Institutions must account for self-interest, limited knowledge, and the tendency of power to expand beyond its intended purpose. Negative rights align, as best as humanly possible, with that reality. They set boundaries that do not require a continuous and ever-expansive administrative state. They do not require the direction and manipulation of economic and social life. Positive rights, by their nature, demand such administration. They require the knowledge of need, capacities, and certain trade-offs that no authority possesses in sufficient degree. And, they create incentives for the expansion of claims, along with the concentration of power to satisfy them.

It is the intermediate institutions of society—the churches, the volunteer organizations, even, and especially, the family—that are intended to serve as the primary settings in which provision, moral formation, and mutual aid occur. A government organized around negative rights leaves space for these institutions to grow and flourish. By contrast, a government organized around expansive, positive rights tends to crowd them out, substituting the distant and impersonal state for the near and personal bonds of community. When the state becomes the primary provider, the affections and habits that sustain a free society weaken. Attachment to family, friends, neighbors, and the immediate community is the first principle of broader public affection, and when that attachment is displaced by dependence on the central authority, the moral character, and therefore ordered liberty as a whole, suffers.

It is possible, nay, it is necessary for a moral and decent society to acknowledge claims on behalf of the vulnerable. But, it is also possible to do that without converting those claims into fundamental positive rights. Charity, compassion, and mutual aid remain fully open under a government of negative rights. Take the example of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. In an age defined as one of the robber-barons—a misnomer—it was also an age of mostly negative rights, though reforms would come soon. Carnegie and Rockefeller made vast sums of wealth, and no, working conditions weren’t the best in those days. However, Carnegie and Rockefeller are two of the most philanthropic individuals in American history. Carnegie gave away most of his wealth towards funding libraries, schools, and scientific research, while Rockefeller gave away vast sums to the causes of public health and education. Drawing a distinction between moral duty and political right is not an evasion or ignoring of the downtrodden. It is simply a recognition of the dangers inherent in the expansion of compulsory forces.

Conclusion

The distinction is this: negative rights serve as a limitation upon coercive power, while positive rights require the relinquishment of certain negative rights of others. A negative right draws a boundary that power may not cross. It tells the state, and all its deputies, what it must not do. In doing so, it preserves a sphere in which persons remain as ends, rather than means. A positive right, by contrast, authorizes power to cross that boundary. It converts one person’s claim to a good or service into a legally enforceable demand upon the liberty, labor, or property of someone else. A return to prioritizing negative rights does not constitute an indifference to human need. Rather, it is a recognition that the first, and proper, function of government is to restrain itself, as well as to limit its coercive power, thereby preserving the conditions under which free individuals may flourish. The proper role is not to provide for the needs itself.

To preserve negative rights as primary is to preserve the limits on power that makes ordered liberty and human flourishing possible. That preservation remains the more robust foundation for the American experiment.

The Legionnaire-Marine: Peter Ortiz and the Edge of War

In the history of warfare, there is a recurring type of soldier who belongs not to the steady ranks of regular regiments, but to the dangerous, lonely fringes of conflict. These are men who thrive in isolation, whose weapon is sabotage, and whose battlefield is defined by darkness and betrayal. Yet, standard histories often treat them as romantic adventurers, hiding the terrible, grinding stress of their actual existence. To truly understand these shadow warriors, one must look at where his character was forged, and the harsh ground where his illusions were stripped away.

In Ortiz’s War: The Allies’ Secret Weapon Against the Nazis in France, Nicholas Reynolds and Katie S. Sanders give us the remarkable life of Peter J. Ortiz, a man whose military career reads like an epic from an earlier century. Through meticulous research and gripping narrative, the authors show how an American who joined the French Foreign Legion in the 1930s turned those brutal lessons into deadly effectiveness for the OSS in occupied France. But this is no simple tale of wartime derring-do. It is a sobering look at the immense courage required to fight a shadow war, and the shattering cost of open rebellion when hit by the heavy hammer of the regular German army.

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Forging a Warrior

The key to Peter Ortiz lies in the sands of North Africa. Enlisting in the Foreign Legion as a young man, Ortiz was broken down and remade by an institution that treated survival as an art form and fatalism as a religion. Reynolds and Sanders capture this formative period with exceptional grit, showing how the Legion built an absolute reliance on personal initiative. The authors note that “Ortiz grew to love the ethos that grew out of the toughness.” It was an existential hardening that prepared him for a world where no help was coming. Ortiz, himself, remarked “I found in the Legion a spirit you didn’t see in any other fighting force...”

This fighting spirit, coupled with an indifference to physical suffering and a comfort with extreme risk, became his primary asset when he eventually escaped German captivity after the fall of France, joined the U.S. Marine Corps, and was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services.

Dropped into occupied France after undergoing intense training in Britain, Ortiz became a ghost in the machine. The middle chapters of the book move with the speed of a Tom Clancy/Jack Ryan thriller, charting his multi-layered operations. He gathered intelligence, organized escape networks for downed Allied airmen, and even wandered into a nightclub to drink alongside German officers, only to drop his civilian coat and reveal his full Marine uniform before slipping away. Yet his real task was far grimmer. He was tasked with transforming scattered, politically fractured bands of French partisans into a lethal paramilitary force capable of resisting Nazi occupation.

Tragedy on the Massif

The heart of Ortiz’s War is the tragic story of the Vercors campaign in the summer of 1944. Deployed as part of Operation Union, Ortiz was sent to the isolated, alpine Vercors region to arm and train a large contingent of resistance fighters. It is here that the book hits its emotional and narrative peak. Spurred on by a premature call to arms from General Charles de Gaulle and a massive, highly visible Allied supply drop on Bastille Day, the Vercors Maquis openly defied the German occupation. The Nazi response was swift and merciless. Bypassing the natural mountain defenses with gliders and airborne troops, German forces crushed the plateau. Over 600 fighters and civilians were slaughtered.

The authors narrate this disaster with a somber, cinematic tension. It is a devastating reminder of the absolute limits of guerrilla resistance. Lightly armed partisans, no matter how brave, cannot stand in open battle against mechanized regular infantry without direct, heavy military support. Ortiz watched the dream of an alpine fortress evaporate in smoke and blood.

Undeterred, Ortiz returned to the field under Union II, showing an almost superhuman capacity to endure. He gathered the remnants of the Maquis, put them in uniforms to give them status as legal combatants, and continued a relentless campaign of harassment against retreating German columns.

But the climax of his war came in the village of Centron. Surrounded, outnumbered, and running out of ammunition, Ortiz faced the ultimate test of command. Rather than fighting a hopeless, glorious, and romantic last stand that would inevitably cause the Germans to burn the town and murder its inhabitants, Ortiz chose the harder path of moral courage. He walked out into the open and negotiated his own surrender, bargaining his life and that of two fellow Marines to spare the village from reprisals.

Ortiz knew exactly what kind of enemy he was dealing with. His own written reflections at that moment reveal a man who had long since made peace with his own mortality. “There was no reason to hope that we would be treated as ordinary prisoners of war. I had been involved in dangerous activities for many years and was mentally quite prepared to have my number turn up.”

A Warrior Through and Through

What makes Ortiz’s War a standout biography is its absolute commitment to the human dimension of this conflict. It gains incredible emotional weight through a personal connection. Co-author Katie S. Sanders is the granddaughter of Lieutenant Murray Simon, an Allied airman who crossed paths with Ortiz’s operations after his B-24 Liberator was shot down over France a month before Operation Overlord. This personal stake injects the book with a deep seriousness regarding the ordinary citizens who risked the firing squad to hide Allied soldiers and return them to safety.

Furthermore, the authors trace his story into the Nazi stalag POW camps, where he remained entirely unmanageable, attempting multiple escapes and earning the begrudging, unusual respect of his German captor, Johann Kolb. After liberation, his relentless drive for service didn’t stop. He immediately requested to keep fighting, first with the Royal Marines and later in the Pacific theater.

We see his postwar life as a Hollywood military advisor for legends like John Ford, a period where he tried to channel his restless energy into film, all while repeatedly volunteering his life in multiple crises until his death in 1988. The drive that pushed him into the Foreign Legion was not a temporary reaction to a world war, but rather the very fabric of his character, leading to his final honors of two Navy Crosses, two Croix de Guerre awards, the French Legion d’Honneur, and a final resting place in Arlington National Cemetery.

The Verdict

Ortiz’s War is a triumphant, moving, and profoundly human biography. It brings to life an extraordinarily capable, audacious, and morally grounded warrior who relied on his Legion and Marine Corps training to achieve real victories, while never losing his humanity amid the horrors of war. For anyone who wants to understand the true nature of special operations, the psychological toll of war, or the heavy weight of command under extreme risk, this book is essential reading. As a Marine Corps veteran, I highly recommend this excellent book. Available now, by Harper Collins Publishing on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or wherever you get your books.

Ortiz’s War on Amazon

Katie’s Web Page

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The Weekly Signals Brief gathers the most interesting articles that I have read over the past week. Each link below is a piece that piqued my interest (click the titles to go to the full articles).

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Normandy ‘44: The Great Swan (Part 8)

by Ru Johnson

Ru’s latest on his Normandy series takes the reader into the closing stages of the Normandy campaign. I was especially drawn in to how he framed the Bradley’s decision to reign in Patton, and how that one, cautious command allowed experienced enemy troops slip away. You can’t help but be drawn to it because Ru makes the weight of that moment feel personal.

Ru also tackles the balance between speed and supply, and how that translates to success on the ground, and gives you a good overview of how logistics and politics shape battlefield outcomes. As you read, you will find yourself connecting the dots between the Red Ball Express drivers running the supply trains and the last hard fights in the push to drive the Nazis from France. You will come away from Ru’s work with a mental picture of the planning, execution, and logistics decisions during this final phase of the Normandy campaign.

As always, I cannot recommend Ru’s work enough. You will gain an appreciation for the command decisions made under stress and the effort of the men on the ground that kept the tanks, and the trucks, rolling through Western Europe. Give it a read. Guaranteed you will enjoy it.

How I read for Research

by Rebellio

I wanted to cover Rebellio’s guide on reading for research because a few things stood out to me and align with my own methods when conducting research, with a few differences that I find interesting. I particularly appreciated his insistence on understanding the author before doing a critique.

I especially appreciated his insight of treating different works as competing interpretations rather than final authorities, and how that helps protect independent judgment rather than just absorbing one strong argument and working from there. Working in such a way improves not only the picture you will develop, but what your readers will gain from your work by putting that into practice. Doing things this way allows you to test once source against others and then that disagreement becomes a tool of understanding, rather than a problem. His examples of moving from secondary to primary sources demonstrate a practical way to keep control of the original idea (though, my own method is reversed. I start from the primary and work outward to secondary, which I learned from Patrick Rael’s Reading, Writing, and Researching History).

As writers, whether amateur or professional, the job comes with a lot of reading. Whether that is books or the works of others. I recommend Rebellio’s work, here, because he provides an excellent foundational method for handling the piles of books that come with that task. Once you develop these research techniques into habits, it becomes easier to extract what is useful without losing your own direction. Take a read of this one, bookmark it, and come back to it the next time a big research question enters the space between your ears!

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The Marine Corps Mount Rushmore

by Centrist Libertarian Patriot

As a Marine veteran, I had to do this one by the Centrist Libertarian Patriot on the Marine Corps Mount Rushmore. In the piece, he draws a sharp line between the men who built my beloved Corps and the ones who saved it. Rather than the usual examination of famous names, he takes a deeper look at the Corps through different eras.

As Centrist Libertarian Patriot takes the reader through the process of selecting the faces for the Marine Corps Rushmore, he also walks you through the process by which institutions survive political threats and reinvent themselves under pressure. That concept is fairly universal, and not unique to the Corps. Every lasting organization faces moments when survival depends on different sets of talents than the ones that created it. With the Corps, specifically, the piece demonstrates how the quieter foundational work of the nineteenth-century set the stage for the dramatic victories of the twentieth-century that everybody knows about.

I recommend this one, not just for lovers of the Marine Corps, but for anyone interested in military history or institutional leadership. I am not going to offer any spoilers here, because I want you all to read the piece for yourselves. But, I will say, I agree with his list of four that made the ‘Mount Rushmore’ of the Marine Corps. Take a read and see if you do, too.

Book Review: Reds, Revolutions, and Rebellions: How China, Cuba, and Vietnam Transformed Guerrilla Warfare

by The Lens of History

I wanted to cover this book review by The Lens of History. I am always on the lookout for new reading material and this one drew me in, especially how geography shaped the revolutionary ideas of figures like Mao and Vo Nguyen Giap. I became curious, in particular, because of how the Lens of History compares strengths in original research against segments he considers flat.

I was especially drawn to the focus on the question of whether ideologies can easily transfer or if it gets reshaped by local conditions. It seems this book moves beyond simple success or failure narratives on guerrilla warfare and focuses more on the ideological machinery behind the movements, and I find that interesting.

As someone who is always on the lookout for new books, this review did its job. I will certainly be picking up a copy of Revolutions for myself. Take a moment to read this review by The Lens of History. You will get a good idea of where the book shines, and where it might leave you wanting more, which is what a good book review should deliver. Maybe you, too, will get the itch to pick up a copy for yourself!

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This essay continues observations made in Reflection, Choice, and Ambition and Vices of the Political System of the Democratic Socialists of America. In them, we compared the DSA national platform against the Lockean ideology embedded in the American founding, as well as the institutional architecture established by the Constitution, and the reasoning of the Framers in The Federalist Papers. The previous essays also established that the DSA’s call to “win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic” treats the existing Constitution as an obstacle to be removed after the class victory described in the text.

The Progressive movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries occupies a different position in relation to the constitutional order. Much like the DSA proposals, which share some overlap with progressivisim, the progressives sought, and in certain instances, achieved a dramatic expansion of federal power, including a more energetic and reactive executive, the growth of the administrative state, and a series of constitutional amendments that significantly altered the public’s relationship with its government. The Sixteenth Amendment authorized a federal income tax without apportionment among the states, and the Seventeenth Amendment provided for the direct election of senators by the people rather than state legislatures. Progressive initiatives, such as the New Deal and the Great Society, extended federal authority deep into economic and social life. These were not small, incremental overhauls, but represented a sustained effort to adapt American institutions to the emergence of industrial society, and to overcome what the progressives regarded as excessive restraints.

Yet, it is the difference in method that makes the contrast so stark. Progressives, regardless of how radical their ideology or expansive their ambitions, pursued their ends through the amendment process as laid out in Article V of the Constitution. Initiatives were codified through the standard legislative process and judicial review (regardless of what one may think of those interpretations, such as in the case of Wickard v. Filburn). The progressive vision for America was enacted while remaining within the structure and purpose of the Constitution, and that structure continued to function as a set of procedures and restraints that bound the progressive generation, as well as future generations, and could only be altered under rules designed to force deliberation and broad consent. Unlike the progressives, the DSA platform treats the structure, itself, as an “anti-democratic” barrier that must be torn down and replaced altogether. Complete victory, in the platform’s own words, will require “building a new society from the ground up.”

This is not a defense of progressivism in America. Progressive ideology and the ideology of the DSA both share a deep dissatisfaction with the Constitution. They both reject the principle of natural rights as the foundation of political authority. And, they both share a willingness to subordinate institutional norms in pursuance of social transformation. And, importantly, they both treat the Constitution as an obstacle on the road to transformation. Yet, the key difference between the two is that the progressives still made their reforms within the inherited framework, and argued that future generations should pursue reform within the same framework, while the DSA seeks to destroy that frame outright once the working class has consolidated power. The progressive path, even at its most tranformative, still acknowledged a continuous, constitutional order that binds all subsequent generations, whereas the DSA aims to relocate the source of constitutional authority to the success of the class project.

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Ideological Similarities

The comparison begins by examining the ideology as articulated by its most influential leaders in order to demonstrate the overlap with the current DSA project. The progressives confronted a genuine transformation in American social and economic life, such as the rise of large-scale industrial corporations, the concentration of capital, and the sprawl of burgeoning urban populations. Progressives believed that the limited and decentralized federal government of the Founding-era was ill-equipped to address the problems of the modern era. They viewed state governments as corrupt—in the pockets of railroad and corporate interests—and unable to regulate interstate commerce effectively. Add to that the belief that property and economic rights favored the economically powerful and left workers without recourse, and you begin to understand the progressive demand for a more energetic national authority.

The progressive response was a programmatic and philosophical rejection of the Founders’ conception of the individual as a pre-political entity and bearer of natural rights, as well as the Constitution as a fixed, mechanical check on power. Within this rejection, there is immense overlap with the DSA. Both movements treat the constitutional order as an obstacle to a more just and powerful collective purpose, both subordinate the rights of the individual to the rights of the community at large, and both are willing to concentrate national authority in order to overcome the built-in restraints of the inherited order.

The Rejection of Natural Rights

Frank Johnson Goodnow, the first president of the American Political Science Association, stated the progressive critique of the Founders’ natural law philosophy without reservation. In The American Conception of Liberty, published in 1916, he dismissed Enlightenment social contract theory and the doctrine of natural rights as baseless:

Such a theory, of course, had no historical justification. There was no record of the making of any such contract as was postulated. It was impossible to assert, as a matter of fact even, that man existed first as an individual and that later he became, as the result of any act of volition on his part, a member of human society. … Man is regarded now throughout Europe, contrary to the view expressed by Rousseau, as primarily a member of society and secondarily as an individual. The rights which he possesses are, it is believed, conferred upon him, not by his Creator, but rather by the society to which he belongs. What they are is to be determined by the legislative authority in view of the needs of that society. Social expediency, rather than natural right, is thus to determine the sphere of individual freedom of action.

Goodnow argued that the natural rights doctrine presupposed a static society. Once evolutionary development (you can see the influence of Social Darwinism on the progressives, not only in Frank Goodnow, but in others, as well) and industrial concentration were accepted as fact, rights could no longer be treated as immutable. Goodnow makes no effort to disguise his radical beliefs. He argues that, under modern, industrial conditions, insistence on individual rights could even go so far as to become a menace to society as a whole. According to Goodnow, the emphasis must shift from inherent rights to civic duty, and man must be viewed primarily as one part of the organism as a whole (society), and only through recognition of those societal duties can he secure the greatest opportunities as an individual.

John Dewey carried the same critique further in Liberalism and Social Action, published in 1935. Early liberalism, he argued, had performed a necessary function in history by liberating individuals from the restrictions of the old, European order. But, according to Dewey, the Enlightenment liberals’ conception of natural rights and individual liberty as the absence of government interference had morphed into a justification of the status quo of the new order. Natural rights, Dewey wrote, “exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology.” Men obey laws because of the consequences due to failure of obeisance, not because the laws are based on natural law or inherent rights. The crisis of liberalism, therefore, arose because early liberals lacked the intellectual resources for the new problem of social organization. The solution, in Dewey’s view, required a reversal of means:

Organized social planning, put into effect for the creation of an order in which industry and finance are socially directed in behalf of institutions that provide the material basis for the cultural liberation and growth of individuals, is now the sole method of social action by which liberalism can realize its professed aims.

Effective liberty, for Dewey, is a function of existing social conditions. Once economic relations become the dominant pattern of human relations, the liberty that Enlightenment ideology proclaimed can only be realized through control of the economy in the interest of society as a whole. Formal or legal liberty is deemed insufficient. What is required, therefore, is the use of power to establish the conditions under which true liberty can be attained.

The DSA platform proceeds from a similar premise. It treats the existing constitutional order as an “anti-democratic structure” that protects private ownership, and thus stands in the way of genuine democracy. The inherent rights of the individual secured by the current order are, in this view, there to protect a privileged class at the expense of everyone else. Both the progressives and the DSA, through this framework, begin by denying that the foundational natural rights philosophy supplies a binding limit on collective power. To both organizations, rights are historical, social, and functional, and are not inherent and pre-political.

Community Over the Individual

Woodrow Wilson, before he became America’s twenty-eighth president, took the critique a step further and merged progressivism to socialism, made explicit in his essay Socialism and Democracy, published in 1887. He wrote:

In fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals. Limits of wisdom and convenience to the public control there may be: limits of principle there are, upon strict analysis, none.

In Wilson’s view, democracy is not bound by any limiting factor. Once the community’s right to self-determination is accepted as absolute, the only remaining questions are centered on administrative capacity and political will. Wilson’s formulation constitutes one of the more candid statements of the progressive ideology and end goals, and doesn’t shrink from the implication that the community, rather than the individual, is endowed with unlimited authority.

The DSA ideology rests on a similar foundational claim, only, instead of expressed through the community at large, it is expressed in the language of class antagonism. The working class, having won the battle for democracy, is to draft a new constitution and establish a democratic socialist republic. The absolute right of community (or of the class that claims to speak for it) to determine its own destiny and that of its members is the shared premise. Limits of principle are set aside, and are replaced by questions of power and organization. Both progressivism and the DSA treat the supremacy of the collective over the individual as the starting point of legitimate politics.

Contempt for the Constitution

Wilson’s theories of government led to his most influential contribution, which consisted of a living, organic Constitution. In Constitutional Government in the United States, and in his campaign speeches, collected and distributed as The New Freedom, he rejected the Founders’ conception of checks, balances, and separated powers:

The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. … Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop. All that progressives ask or desire is permission—in an era when “development,” “evolution,” is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle.

The Framers, Wilson argued, constructed a system of checks and balances meant to limit every part, which, in turn, allowed no single organ to be a dominant force. But, according to Wilson, “no government can be successfully conducted upon so mechanical a theory.” Wilson insisted that leadership and control must be lodged somewhere, and that the art of statesmanship is the art of bringing the separate parts of government into cooperation, functioning in the same way the liver cooperates with the kidneys and lungs to support the body as a whole. Wilson theorized that the Constitution, though conceived in a ‘Newtonian spirit,’ was elastic enough, despite its structure of limitation, to allow for the changes necessary.

Theodore Roosevelt supplied the pragmatism of progressive theory. In his autobiography, he articulated the stewardship theory that became a hallmark of progressivism and its philosophy of governance:

My belief was that it was not only his right but his duty to do anything that the needs of the Nation demanded unless such action was forbidden by the Constitution or by the laws. Under this interpretation of executive power I did and caused to be done many things not previously done by the President and the heads of the departments. I did not usurp power, but I did greatly broaden the use of executive power. … I believed that the Constitution should be treated as the greatest document ever devised by the wit of man to aid a people in exercising every power necessary for its own betterment, and not as a straitjacket cunningly fashioned to strangle growth.

Herbert Croly completes the progressive argument. In Progressive Democracy, published in 1915, he argued that the changing conditions of the world made pure democracy not only possible, but a natural evolution of the current order:

A negative individualistic social policy implies a weak and irresponsible government. A positive comprehensive social policy implies a strong, efficient and responsible government. … A social policy is concerned in the most intimate and comprehensive way with the lives of the people. In order to be successful, it must rest on the basis of abundant and cordial popular support.

The mechanism of direct government has, consequently, an essential function to perform in the organization of a social democracy. … A strong government with an affirmative policy and effective popular control are supplementary rather than hostile one to another.

He argued that a comprehensive social policy required a strong, efficient, and responsible government that kept in touch with public opinion through direct, popular instruments. This view inverted the Founders’ fears of majority tyranny, and instead placed the true danger in minority obstruction of the popular will.

This hostility toward a mechanical constitution is shared by the DSA. The key difference being, unlike the progressives, who interpreted the existing Constitution more flexibly, the DSA proposes to abolish certain features of the Constitution deemed hostile to their aims. Where progressives treated the Constitution as a living organism that must evolve with the changing times, the DSA treats it as a cancer that must be excised in order for society to flourish. Despite the interpretive differences between the progressives and the DSA, the ideological through-line is continuous. The original system of separated power, checks and balances, and internal friction serves as an impediment to the realization of a collective, or societal, effort. Both movements begin from a shared contempt for the restraints deliberately built into the structure.

Through their writings, these progressive thinkers offer a coherent case. They reject the dualism between the founding-era’s pre-political individual and limited government, treat natural rights as contingent upon history, and reconceive the Constitution as a living organism that must evolve like other living organisms. They further elevate national purpose and administrative capacity, and equate the democratic principle with the socialist principle that society at large takes precedence over the individual. The DSA operates from the same premises. The similarities run deep between the two. What remains is to examine where the two movements diverge. Does this shared radicalism operate within the constitutional framework, or is it to be discarded altogether once majority has been secured?

Working from Within: The Progressives

The historical record of the progressive movement, despite its expansiveness, its radicalism, and contempt for the Constitution, remained an effort to reform the system from within the constraints of the existing constitutional order. The evidence rests in the amendment process, itself, and in the changes that were secured through progressive administrations. Even the most radical progressive theorists treated the Constitution as the foundational framework through which change must be achieved, rather than as a temporary barrier to be discarded once power had been won. The amendment process served as a limitation on the progressive desires, requiring those who seek change to secure the concurrence of extraordinary majorities (known as super-majorities) under a procedure designed to force deliberation and to protect the structure of the republic. Despite the rhetoric of the progressive theorists, that requirement served as the main obstacle for radical change, and the progressives chose to operate within the framework, rather than discard it.

Article V and the Amendment Process

Article V of the Constitution establishes the only legitimate means of constitutional change:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

The process is intentionally difficult. Proposed amendments require a two-thirds majority in both chambers of Congress (or a convention of states called by two-thirds of state legislatures), and ratification requires three-fourths of state legislatures. Article V is the Constitution’s answer to the question posed by Hamilton in Federalist 1, in that it provides a means of reflection and choice that remains binding after any particular majority has dispersed. Change is possible within the structure of the Constitution itself, but only through procedures that force broad deliberation and preserve the federal nature of the republic. Those procedures act as a restraint, preventing any temporary majority from drastically altering the nature of the republic without broad, popular support.

The progressives, despite hostility to the constitutional order, operated from within the existing framework. They did not claim, unlike the DSA, that a preferred majority or class, having won electoral power, could simply rewrite and impose a new constitution. Instead, they worked inside the very procedures the Constitution prescribed for its own emendation. The willingness to work under the rules that outlast any particular coalition, no matter how its members may feel about those rules, is a recognition that the constitutional order is an inheritance rather than an instrument to protect the powerful, as the DSA suggests.

A Federal Income Tax

The Sixteenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, provides “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration,” overturning the Supreme Court decision in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co. in 1895. The amendment was proposed and ratified through the ordinary process under Article V, requiring two-thirds majorities in both chambers, followed by ratification by three-fourths of the states (no constitutional amendment has been proposed or adopted through a convention of states). The Sixteenth Amendment drastically expanded the capacity of the federal government to levy taxes, which enabled the later growth and funding of the administrative and welfare-state initiatives, such as The New Deal and The Great Society. Despite this profound change, it remained a formal amendment to the existing Constitution rather than a replacement of the Constitution through a new instrument.

The Original Design and Purpose of the Senate

To fully understand the significance of the Seventeenth Amendment, one must first understand the original purpose and function of the Senate. The Senate was intended to be more than second legislative chamber. The Senate was intended to be the institutional embodiment of the federal principal and one of the devices by which the Constitution sought to secure state sovereignty, through the states themselves, regardless of size, having equal representation and influence on the passage of laws. The Senate was also intended to serve as a check against popular passion, as represented in the House.

Prior to the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, senators were chosen by the legislatures of the several states. Each state, regardless of population, received two senators. This arrangement was the product of the Great Compromise at the Constitutional Convention, and aimed to protect the smaller states from being dominated by the larger ones, as well as preserve the federal character of the Union. James Madison explained the rationale in Federalist 62:

The equality of representation in the Senate is another advantage…. The equal vote allowed to each State is at once a constitutional recognition of the portion of sovereignty remaining in the individual States, and an instrument for preserving that residuary sovereignty…. Another advantage accruing from this ingredient in the constitution of the Senate is, the additional impediment it must prove against improper acts of legislation. No law or resolution can now be passed without the concurrence, first, of a majority of the people, and then, of a majority of the States.

According to Madison, the Senate served several related functions. First, it represented the states as political entities with limited sovereignty, rather than the populations living within them. Second, because senators were chosen by the legislatures of their respective states, they were accountable to the legislatures, and therefore represented the interests of their respective states at the federal level. Third, the longer terms and staggered elections of the Senate, compared to the House of Representatives, were designed to promote stability, deliberation, and to function as a limiting measure against popular passions. Finally, the equal representation outside of the census created a check against legislation that might favor larger states at the expense of the smaller ones, and the requirement that certain appointments and treaties receive advice and consent of the Senate further embedded the federal principle in the conduct of foreign policy and the staffing of the federal government.

Furthermore, in Federalist 63, Madison emphasized the Senate’s role as a source of “cool and deliberate sense” against the more immediate, and potentially turbulent, judgments of the House. The compound republic, which Madison describes as partly federal and partly national, depended on this arrangement. The House represented the populace, while the Senate represented the states as equal members of the Union. Together, they forced legislation to secure the concurrence of both the popular will and the will of the several states. This particular design was an attempt to institutionalize a recognition that a free society is comprised of more than a simple majority.

The Seventeenth Amendment and Its Effects

The Seventeenth Amendment provides that “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote.” It transferred the election of senators from the state legislatures to the people living within those states, fundamentally altering the constituency of the Senate without altering the number of senators per state.

To make the case for the amendment, progressives argued that state legislatures had become corrupted by corporate and special interest groups (particularly, at the time, railroads), and that deadlocks within the state legislative process had left critical senate seats vacant. Progressives also argued that the indirect method of elections had insulated senators from accountability (a fundamental misreading of the original structure. The senators were accountable, just to the states. The people elect their delegates to represent them at the state level, then those delegates select the federal senators). According to the progressive theorists, direct election of senators would purify the process, make senators more responsive to the people of their states, and eliminate a source of corruption. The amendment was adopted through the Article V process, and the rationale was coherent on its own terms. The rationale was that if the people are the ultimate authority, why should the selection of senators be shielded from the people through a process subjected to potential capture by private interests.

Yet, the amendment had consequences that were not fully appreciated at the time. By making senators elected through direct democratic procedure, it weakened the connection between the states and the senators representing the state interests. Senators no longer needed to attend to the interests of the legislatures that had chosen them. The electoral incentives now ran through similar popular constituencies as the House. The only difference was the House was based on congressional districts, whereas senators are statewide. Over the course of time, this change has had the result of the Senate becoming more nationalized as an institution, rather than a guardian of state sovereignty. From the perspective of the original design, the Seventeenth Amendment reduced one of the principal checks against the legislative power and majority faction.

The New Deal and the Great Society

The New Deal and Great Society extended the progressive project into the mid and late twentieth-century. Through statutory and administrative fiat, the federal government assumed vast responsibilities for regulating the economy, social insurances, and public goods. The Supreme Courts eventual acceptance of the expanded interpretation of the Commerce Clause and congressional spending power enabled much of this growth. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s threats to pack the Supreme Court demonstrate both the ambition of the progressive reformers, as well as the resilience of the constitutional structure. Despite the threats, the Court remained as it had been since 1869, though its jurisprudence shifted to favor the progressive agenda. The transformations of the progressives were profound and far-reaching, altering the relationship between the federal government and the states, the economy, and the relationship between the branches of government. Yet, unlike what the DSA proposes, the progressive changes developed and took place within the existing structure and limitations of the Constitution. No new constitution was drafted after progressive victory. The forms of the first three Articles remained mostly intact (with certain aspects expanded). Amendments were proposed, adopted, and ratified through the Article V process. Even the most expansive progressive reforms operated under claims of authority derived from the existing Constitution, however broadly interpreted, and that continuity is the target of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Class Victory and Constitutional Replacement

The DSA national platform states, without any ambiguity, its intentions:

We are workers fighting to transform society: to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.

The platform acknowledges that some demands may be advanced under the current system, but insists that “complete victory will require building a new society from the ground up.” The existing Constitution is characterized as anti-democratic, and serves to protect private ownership at the expense of the working-class and must, therefore, be replaced. Unlike the progressive movement, the language is not that of reinterpretation, but of wholesale replacement once the working-class has achieved power.

The proposals that follow are consistent with the platform’s diagnosis, and calls for the abolition of the Senate and Electoral College, the replacement of the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary “chosen by and subordinate to Congress,” an expansion of the House of Representatives via a nationalized ranked-choice voting system, and the establishment of “public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people.”

Unlike the progressives, the DSA does not seek to adapt to the existing framework. Instead, the end goal is to dissolve the checks and balances by which ambition is made to counteract ambition. The abolition of the Senate altogether eliminates the representation of the states as sovereign entities. The subordination of the executive and judiciary to Congress collapses the separation of powers into legislative supremacy. Public ownership of the largest corporations places the material basis of economic life under the same political center that would exercise concentrated authority.

Going further, the DSA platform relocates the source of Constitutional authority. Where the Constitution derives its power from the people, the DSA’s constitution would be drafted by the working class after the seizure of power, and would derive its legitimacy from the success of that class project. It is reactionary, rather than deliberative. Subsequent generations, or even dissenters within the new class structure, are left without institutional means of revision once the class project has been realized.

Where progressives, for all their radical reforms, operated within the Constitutional structure, the DSA treats the Constitution as the chief obstacle to be overcome by the working-class in order to realize a working-class democracy. The DSA proposes to remove this perceived obstacle entirely once power is obtained. The difference is not one of degree, but is the difference between working within the existing order and discarding that order once a preferred constituency has been mobilized.

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This essay continues the examination established in Reflection, Choice, and Ambition, in which I undertook a philosophical examination of the Democratic Socialists of America’s national program, and conducted a comparative analysis between their aspirations for governance, and how those aspirations stand at odds with the fundamental principles of American republicanism. This essay will build upon those observations, particularly the legislative supremacy aspect of the DSA’s proposals.

Though it has been previously established, and is linked at the end of this essay, I will refresh the main proposals of the DSA. The platform declares:

We are workers fighting to transform society: to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.” It continues: “For the working class to govern, we need a new political system. ... Abolish the Electoral College. Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” It further demands: “Replace the two-party system with a multi-party democracy. Expand the House of Representatives, implement proportional representation and ranked choice voting in all elections, and abolish the Senate.” These structural changes are joined to the call for “public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people. [truncated for the sake of brevity]

The core of this proposal rests in a unicameral, multi-party parliamentary body. National authority is concentrated into this legislative body, with the executive and judiciary branches, as we know them today, dissolved and made subordinate to it. As stated in the previous essay, there is nothing inherently wrong with a dominant legislature, and many nations function under a multi-party legislative authority without devolving into tyranny. I pointed to the Netherlands as a close analog of what the DSA proposes, but there are other examples as well, including Israel and New Zealand. It would be nothing more than polemical demagoguery to refer to those nations’ governing bodies as tyrannical. The case made in the previous essay was that other proposed removals of certain institutional checks, coupled with this consolidation of the legislature, don’t necessarily mean that it will devolve tyranny. The argument was made, through the wisdom and understanding of human nature between Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (sorry, John Jay), that a tyranny of the majority was more probable in such a system. This essay approaches the subject of legislative majority from a different perspective: it has already been tried, and failed, in the early days of the American Republic.

Between 1781 and 1789, the United States was governed under the Articles of Confederation, which was a system whose defining feature was legislative supremacy, exercised through a unicameral Congress. The Constitution of the United States, deliberated and debated from 25 May to 17 September 1787 and ratified on 21 June 1788 (it did not go into effect until 1789), was the direct response to that failure. The DSA platform revives the legislative supremacy that the Articles embodied while rejecting both the property rights, central to American liberty, and the corrective institutions the Founders constituted after the collapse of the Articles.

As I have done with the previous essay, I will make every attempt to treat this analysis in the spirit of fairness. In order to do so, I must first point out that, while certain aspects of the DSA platform overlap with the structure of the Articles, there are also significant differences between them, which will be explored further in the subsequent sections. The primary analysis of this essay will rest on the fundamental misunderstanding of American history and the principles that shaped the American constitutional order by the DSA.

A Shared Preference for Legislative Dominance

Both the Articles of Confederation and the DSA platform place primary national authority in the legislature and remove judicial and executive power. The main distinction between the two is that the Articles lacked an executive altogether, with the title of President of the United States in Congress Assembled acting as a presiding legislative officer, equivalent to the Speaker of the House of Representatives today, whereas the DSA proposes an executive officer subordinate to the legislature. Another key distinction is that the DSA contains a judiciary that, like the executive, is subordinate to the legislature, whereas in the Articles, Congress acted as a judicial authority (which functioned as a judiciary subordinate to Congress). We will explore these differences soon, but for now the focus will be on the supremacy of the legislative body.

The resemblance between the function of the Articles and what the DSA proposes is not a superficial comparison. Under the Articles, Congress stood alone as the central authority. This was expressed under Article V, which provided that delegates “shall be annually appointed in such manner as the legislature of each state shall direct,” with power of recall reserved to each state. “In determining questions in the united states, in Congress assembled, each state shall have one vote.” There was no independent authority to enforce resolutions. A committee of the states was allowed to operate during recess, but only through the express authority of Congress. The Articles lacked judicial review, and disputes between the states were resolved by temporary courts established by the legislature. This absence of a legislative and executive by design, considering independence had just been won from what was regarded as executive and judicial overreach by the king (see the list of grievances in the Declaration of Independence, cited below), and the new nation was determined not to recreate like circumstances.

The DSA national platform produces a similar effect through different means and for different purposes. It calls for the abolition of the Electoral College and the replacement of “the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” Taking it a step further, it also calls for the abolition of the Senate, thereby making the unicameral legislature the ultimate federal authority, with the other independent branches now serving as its instruments. While proportional representation and an expanded House are offered as the means of making the legislature more reflective of the population, the structural effect remains the centralization of authority in a unicameral legislature. The Articles arrived at legislative supremacy through the personal experience of executive power and a commitment to state sovereignty, while the DSA arrives there through grievance and a conviction that the existing constitutional structure protects who it deems the powerful at the expense of the working class, and therefore constitutes an “anti-democratic structure.”

Both designs reject a balanced separation of authority, and in both cases, the preference for legislative dominance reflects a judgment that other institutional forms are more dangerous than the concentration of authority in an elected assembly. That judgment was tested under the Articles. It failed. And now the DSA platform aims to revive it, to a certain degree, without consideration of the original results.

Relationship with Property

The Articles of Confederation tested legislative supremacy inside the framework of retained state sovereignty with emphasis on private property rights, and this context is important, because the failure of the Articles cannot be understood from outside this framework.

Article II emphasized that “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.” National power was a limited delegation, while the several states functioned as the primary political entities. This was the baseline operational element of the early Republic. Article VIII required that expenses “shall be defrayed out of a common treasury, which shall be supplied by the several states, in proportion to the value of all land within each state,” with taxes “laid and levied by the authority and direction of the legislatures of the several states.” Under this framework, Congress could make requests of the states for federal tax levies, but could not enforce the collection, as the power of the purse, under the Articles, remained with the state legislatures. Article IV protected the citizens in their privileges of trade and commerce, as well as in the transfer of their property from one state to another. In contrast with the DSA proposals, the Articles protected private ownership of land, capital, or inheritance.

Property rights were fundamental to the new republic, rooted in the ideology expressed in the Declaration of Independence, which had grounded legitimate government in the protection of rights deemed inalienable, which included life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (understood to include security of private ownership of property). Legislative supremacy was attempted within the limits of state sovereignty and property rights. However, those limits did not prevent failure, and, in fact, were part of the reason Congress could not compel obedience. The system could not act effectively, and also could not reach into the private economic functions of the states or override the authority of the states.

Madison’s Vices and the DSA Platform

In April of 1787, James Madison composed a memorandum titled Vices of the Political System of the United States, which served as a diagnostic of the failures of the Articles of Confederation. We will now compare the language contained in the DSA platform against Madison’s catalog of defects. The points that overlap reveal how the DSA proposal recycles the same institutional forms that had already produced failure in 1787, while discarding the residual limits that still constrained those forms under the Articles.

Vices 1 and 7: Failure of Compliance and Want of Sanction

Madison’s first vice is the “Failure of the States to comply with the Constitutional requisitions.” He writes that this evil “has been so fully experienced both during the war and since the peace, results so naturally from the number and independent authority of the States, and has been so uniformly exemplified in every similar Confederacy, that it may be considered as not less radically and permanently inherent in, than it is fatal to the object of, the present System.” His seventh vice serves to refine the point. “...want of sanction to the laws, and of coercion in the Government of the Confederacy. A sanction is essential to the idea of law, as coercion is to that of Government. The federal system being destitute of both, wants the great vital principles of a Political Constitution.”

Madison’s diagnosis of the failure of compliance is structural. The national legislature lacked the means of compelling the states to obey ordinances passed by Congress, as federal legislation directed against sovereign entities could not function as law.

Coincidentally, Alexander Hamilton made a similar observation in Federalist 15:

The great and radical vice in the construction of the existing Confederation is in the principle of LEGISLATION for STATES or GOVERNMENTS, in their CORPORATE or COLLECTIVE CAPACITIES, and as contradistinguished from the INDIVIDUALS of which they consist.”

In Federalist No. 21 he added that the Confederation presented “the extraordinary spectacle of a government destitute even of the shadow of constitutional power to enforce the execution of its own laws.”

In continuing the spirit of fairness, as in the prior essays, the DSA platform does not face the exact same problems that Madison and Hamilton detail, because, unlike the function of the Articles, the DSA proposes a national, central legislative body with an internal, subordinate executive and judiciary. Despite this structural difference, the underlying logic remains, and in certain aspects, intensified. By making the executive and judiciary “chosen by and subordinate to Congress,” the platform removes the institutions that, after 1787, supplied the missing sanction and coercion the Articles lacked. The independent executive became the enforcement mechanism, while the independent judiciary served as the adjudication mechanism. Though different, in many ways beyond this specific instance, the DSA revives, to a certain degree, the historical problem of insufficient sanction by concentrating national authority in the legislature.

This section is, admittedly, difficult to draw a direct, historical or real world comparison, beyond the Articles of Confederation, because the examples are scarce, which is itself revealing. Earlier, I mentioned the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Israel as close analogs to the DSA proposals. However, these are only close analogs insofar as the legislative operation is concerned. Yet, none of these systems combine legislative supremacy with federalism, because federalism requires constitutionally protected divisions of authority that legislative supremacy can eventually override. Most democratic federal systems have deliberately rejected pure legislative supremacy, opting instead for independent executives (whether a monarch, president, or some variation) and bicameral parliaments with the second chamber representing the constituent parts. This near-absence of working models helps explain a feature of the DSA platform, and that is its almost total silence on residual state authority and how the new government will either interact with, or dissolve the federal structure of the United States. That question remains unanswered and unexplored.

Vice 2: Encroachments by the States on Federal Authority

Madison’s second vice records “Encroachments by the states on the federal authority,” noting that “examples are numerous and repetitions may be foreseen in almost every case where any favorite object of a State shall present a temptation.”

I do not see these exact circumstances being probable in the DSA model. The major change is the platform’s reduction of the capacity of the states to obstruct or resist the federal legislature by abolishing the Senate. Yet, as stated in the previous section, it doesn’t go on to explain the status of the states once that reduction is complete and federal authority is vested in a single legislative body. Under the present Constitution—a direct result of the Articles’ failures—the states retain limited sovereignty, protected by Articles I and V, as well as the Tenth Amendment. These include, but are not limited to equal representation in the Senate, a considerable role in the amendment process, as well as enjoyment of status as distinct political entities with state and local governance. In fact, as part of the considerable role in the amendment process, part of that role is the very politically powerful option of calling for a convention of states to propose amendments to the Constitution under Article V, once two-thirds of the state legislatures vote in support. Though this option has not yet been exercised in American history, the states retain the power to directly participate, and force the issue of amending the Constitution. The DSA platform contains no language of what the relationship between the states and federal government will be, or what powers the states will retain, if any, if the DSA achieves its aims. Careful reading of the platform language leads me to believe that the intention is to drastically reduce the sovereignty of the states. However, that is an inference based solely on a reading of the provided platform text. Madison’s concern was that the independent state legislatures would invade federal authority. The DSA design, with a dominant legislature, and the question of state authority an open question, risks the inverse.

Vice 4: Trespasses of the States on the Rights of Each Other

Madison’s fourth vice addresses the states’ abilities to violate the rights of their neighbor states. He includes paper-money laws, installment laws, occlusion of courts, and making property legal tender as aggressions that harmed creditors in other states.

As the citizens of every State, aggregately taken, stand more or less in the relation of creditors or debtors to the citizens of every other State, acts of the debtor State in favor of debtors affect the creditor State in the same manner as they do its own citizens who are relatively creditors towards other citizens.

In this section, the overlap becomes sharper. Madison’s examples are instances of legislative majorities using their power to transfer property and alter contractual obligations for the benefit of one interest against another. The DSA platform organizes politics around class majority, specifically, what they call the working class, and proposes that this majority, through legislative superiority, take public ownership of corporations and essential industries. This proposal runs parallel to the form of trespass Madison condemned (legislative majorities altering property relations to favor one group) and is nationalized. Where Madison saw state legislative majorities aggressing against property rights across state lines, the DSA envisions a national legislative majority that reorders the relationship to property itself.

Vice 11: Injustice of the Laws of the States

Madison’s eleventh vice shares the most overlap with the platform. He writes that the injustice of state laws:

…brings more into question the fundamental principle of republican government, that the majority who rule such governments are the safest Guardians both of public Good and private rights.
All civilized societies are divided into different interests and factions, as they happen to be creditors or debtors—rich or poor—husbandmen, merchants or manufacturers—members of different religious sects—followers of different political leaders—inhabitants of different districts—owners of different kinds of property &c &c. In republican Government the majority however composed, ultimately give the law. Whenever therefore an apparent interest or common passion unites a majority what is to restrain them from unjust violations of the rights and interests of the minority, or of individuals?

The problem Madison identifies in the eleventh vice is the exact problem the DSA nationalizes. The platform organizes politics around the passion of a working-class struggle against private ownership, and then places that class in control of the laws governing the nation, while placing the largest corporations under public ownership and controlled by that same power center.

Madison’s further observations are equally relevant. He states:

If an enlargement of the sphere is found to lessen the insecurity of private rights, it is not because the impulse of a common interest or passion is less predominant in this case with the majority; but because a common interest or passion is less apt to be felt and the requisite combinations less easy to be formed by a great than by a small number.

The DSA proposes the opposite. It organizes politics around class antagonism, making passions easier to form and be acted upon through a central legislative body. The diversity of interests that Madison considered to be protections would deliberately be reduced to a binary between those considered working class and those not, inverting Madison’s precaution into the primary function.

The DSA Platform and Its Rationale

In the fairest reading of the text, the DSA plan is an effort to make government more accountable to the citizenry, that proportional representation and ranked-choice voting would more closely reflect the distribution of votes, and an expanded House of Representatives would bring representation closer to the people. The rationale behind public financing of elections is that it would reduce the influence of concentrated private wealth on the legislative process. Subordinating the executive and judiciary to Congress is necessary to prevent the obstruction of the will of the majority once formed, while abolishing the Senate would eliminate a body that gives equal weight to unequal populations. On this reading, the design seeks responsiveness, and treats the existing structure as a barrier that protects private ownership and, therefore, is considered illegitimate.

The strongest arguments for democratic accountability do not erase the institutional logic. The platform proposes to relocate the primary authority into a single legislative body and to strip the independence of the other branches. That is the form, though not an exact parallel, that the Articles already tested, and it is the form whose dangers Madison listed in Vices. The platform assumes that an expansion of representation will be more just than the current system. Vice eleven contests such an assumption. A majority formed around passion is not restrained from unjust action, but is, rather, better equipped to carry it out. The DSA multiplies class antagonism into a majority while removing institutional safeguards meant to stand between a passionate majority and the object of its political will.

Not a Charter

To be completely fair, as I have said before, the DSA platform does not serve, nor claim to serve, as a charter. Rather, it is a political program that outlines the goals and aims of the DSA. It does not go beyond generalized statements about what it plans to do when its members achieve power. Yet, this absence is revealing, and creates a difficulty that goes beyond the historical comparisons made here. The platform calls for the working class to draft a new constitution that establishes a democratic socialist republic, but never explains the process by which the drafting would occur or under what authority the new constitution would be ratified. It demands the abolition of the Senate, the Electoral College, and the subordination of the executive and legislation to Congress, but remains silent on how this would operate once implemented. There’s no explanation offered of how laws would be administered, how disputes would be resolved, or how the new legislative body would be held accountable once the checks and balances offered by the other branches are subordinated to it.

The same absence appears with regard to the treatment of the states under the new authority. The platform calls to abolish the Senate, but never explains what relationship the states would have with the new government. Do the states retain limited sovereignty, with their own constitutions and state governments? The platform doesn’t say. Instead, all it offers is a list of institutional targets.

The economic program contains similar silence. The platform calls for the public ownership of large corporations and essential services to ensure accountability, but does not explain what public ownership of the largest corporations entails. Is it at the federal level? Do the states in which the industries are located own them? Or is ownership vested in city governments? Again, the text does not say. It offers no explanation of its plans for expropriating those industries or how democratic control of those enterprises would operate in practice. It does not address how investment decisions, pricing, labor, or innovation would be managed once private ownership has been eliminated. Nor does it explain, beyond assertion, how these changes will improve the economy compared to the current system. At no point does it move from dissatisfaction with the current system to how these proposals would produce better manufacture, production, distribution, innovation, or living standards.

This is understandable, it being a political platform, where the Articles were a function of government. Yet, you would expect at least some explanation as to how this was intended to be implemented once the working-class consolidates political power, along with how the new government would function. And, where the aims of the Articles were limited, the goals of the DSA are transformational. The Articles paired legislative supremacy inside a property-based confederation of states, while the DSA plan pairs legislative supremacy inside the socialization of the economic order. The government under the Articles functioned under constraints that the DSA proposal deliberately discards.

Great Power and Great Risk

The Articles failed due to weaknesses within the structure. Private property and state sovereignty continued to constrain the reach of the legislature even as that legislature proved incapable of enforcing its resolutions. The Articles produced paralysis at the federal level and, as Madison documented, unjust majoritarian legislation at the state level. The eleventh vice remains the most relevant. When a common passion unites a majority, “what is to restrain them from unjust violations of the rights and interests of the minority, or of individuals?”

The DSA revives the preference for reliance on a single legislative body while removing the limits that had constrained the original Articles. By subordinating the executive and judicial, it eliminates the independent institutions the Founders later created to enforce and adjudicate the law. By abolishing the Senate, it eliminates the interests of the several states from decisions. By placing certain corporations and industries under public ownership, it places economic interests under the authority of a centralized legislative power. The risk of such an arrangement shifts from paralysis to the inverse.

The early American founding rested on private property rights and limitations of the government. It tested a purely legislative authority within that framework. It failed. Madison’s Vices mapped the ways the failures manifested including the danger of unrestrained majority passions. The Constitution that followed the Articles answered the failure by creating a government that could act directly and more vigorously while embedding multiple restraints, including an independent and co-equal executive and judiciary, and a Senate that represented the interests of the several states. The DSA platform ignores both the history and the lessons learned. It recycles the legislative supremacy model that the Founders deemed inadequate for the American republic, while expanding the power of the legislature beyond anything the Founders imagined. That does not constitute a refinement of the American tradition, but rather represents a refusal to learn from the mistakes of the past and the deliberate measures taken to correct those mistakes.

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See Also

Further Reading

Democratic Socialists of America. Workers Deserve More: DSA Program. 2024.

https://program.dsausa.org/

.Hamilton, Alexander. “Federalist No. 15.” In The Federalist Papers, 1787–1788. Available at the Avalon Project, Yale Law School. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed15.asp.

Hamilton, Alexander. “Federalist No. 21.” In The Federalist Papers, 1787–1788. Available at the Avalon Project, Yale Law School. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed21.asp.

Madison, James. “Vices of the Political System of the United States.” April 1787. The James Madison Papers, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/mjm012727/.

United States. Articles of Confederation. 1781. National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/articles-of-confederation.

The Weekly Signals Brief gathers the most interesting articles that I have read over the past week. Each link below is a piece that piqued my interest (click the titles to go to the full articles).

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Refuting Holocaust Denial: Part 1—An Overview

by The History Stache

As I was reading this piece by The History Stache, which tackles confronting the rising popularity of holocaust denial with evidence by the very people that carried it out, I was taken aback by how simple the observation is that so much of what we know about the holocaust comes from the Nazis themselves, being scrupulous, almost obsessive record keepers. As William Shirer remarked in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the vast amounts of documents available to journalists and historians after the war constituted the largest cache of wartime documents available to the victors in history, even after the Nazis hasty attempts to destroy as much of it as possible before the end of the war. What the documents reveal cuts through so much of the current online discourse that has polluted certain, growing online circles, taking the air from the sails of the holocaust denial crowd. This vast amount of evidence constitutes “the elephant in the room” that this essay examines.

The essay makes you sit and think about how fragile our understanding on the past becomes once people start treating the history of well-documented events as a negotiation. I understand the need for nuance, to examine primary source material for inherent bias, to weight the circumstances in which event occurred (war, famine, revolution, etc). However, sometimes evidence is so plain, the facts stare so deeply into your face that it’s okay to just call it the way you see it and leave the finer points for further examination. The essay also makes you consider the danger of nihilism that follows when large numbers of people decide that evidence no longer matters when the evidence stands in stark opposition to their preferred narrative. As I was reading, I had no choice but to conclude protecting the integrity of history is equivalent to preserving the possibility of a shared reality for those that follow in our footsteps.

I sincerely hope you all will take the time to read this one, as it clarifies how we know what we know surrounding the holocaust. You’ll come away with a sharper sense of why certain claims dissolve the moment you look at the primary sources and records rather than the commentary surrounding an event. Well worth the read, and I think you will enjoy it.

Who Represented the True French Revolution?

by Georgi V. Georgiev

This next piece, by my good friend Georgi, examines the French Revolution through the clever metaphor of a house under construction, yet the carpenters cannot agree on a floor plan. He paints the reader a portrait of 1793 France as a country so fractured that no single vision of the Revolution could be claimed by a true majority faction. He describes how the internal chaos of the various factions evaporates absolutist claims, such as the common “Well, the Revolution was between patriots and monarchists.” I found that interesting. It demonstrates that the French Revolution was tearing itself apart from the inside out.

As I was reading, I started thinking about the deeper problem of unity in moments of revolutionary upheaval. Georgi’s account raised some internal questions for me about what happens when every group insists it is the standard-bearer for the true cause, and reflecting on how quickly shared purpose can dissolve once the old power structures are gone (similar to the Federalists and Anti-Federalist during the Constitutional debates of 1787. Both believed they represented the spirit of 1776. Hamilton, Jay, and Madison made their arguments under ‘Publius,’ or of the people, while the Anti-Federalists use names like Brutus, and Cato, the enemies of Caeser, implying the Federalists were actually tyrants).

If you enjoy reading about how power shapes authority, the relationship between authority, power, and the subjects under it. Well, Georgi will never leave you disappointed, and this work is no different. If you’re unfamiliar with the inner drivers of the French Revolution, as I am, you will gain a deeper understanding of the human and political costs of the disunity during the struggle, and for why the Committee of Public Safety emerged. Definitely worth a read.

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Neil Armstrong is Born

by Dennis Bodzash

We now turn to Dennis Bodzash’s latest Way Back Wednesday publication focusing on Neil Armstrong. He traces Armstrong’s fascination with flight which arose as a young child, wartime service in the US Navy and aviator during the Korean War, and the early years with NACA (not a typo!) before it was reorganized into NASA, where he would become famous. Yet, what stood out to me was Armstrong’s deliberate choice to step away from fame after becoming the first man on the moon, and the way Bodzash traces that decision through the later years makes it feel fuller and more human. It caught my attention because so few public figures demonstrate such magnitude of humility.

As I pondered that, I kept thinking about how rare that attribute truly is. Bodzash’s short piece on Neil Armstrong morphed into a question about what we lose when celebrity, itself, becomes the ultimate measure of life’s value, and the difference between true achievement and renown, compared to superficial recognition. Essentially, his piece, for me anyway, was not so much about Neil Armstrong, but about what the true measure of a man is.

The story of Apollo 11 is wholly incomplete without the man behind that giant leap for mankind, and Dennis pulls back that curtain. You gain an understanding of the kind of character that made the achievement possible. Give it a read, and see if Armstrong’s choice leaves you reflecting on the same thing I did.

America First Does Not Require the Oldest Blood Libel

by Cpl Dan, USMC (Ret)

Corporal Dan’s essay draws a sharp distinction between a policy fight over foreign wars and the dual loyalty charge that turns every American decision into a shadowy foreign lobby, specifically, (you guessed it) the Jews. He names that structure as the oldest blood libel against the Jewish people, and his arguments refuse to let legitimate America First instincts become hijacked by a tired and boring trope.

Reading it tied directly back to The History Stache’s holocaust denial essay. Both writers confront the same template that explains events by inventing hidden Jewish power instead of facing the facts or confronting the actual adversary. That connection makes you think about how easily that trope erodes moral and historical clarity once it is allowed into the discussion. Guarding the distinction between honest debate and libel is not some side issue on the fringes, but is part of the same defense of truth.

Read this one alongside The History Stache’s essay. Don’t let pestilence spread.

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Disclaimer: The quoted text, and block quotations, are taken, verbatim, from the texts in the “Further Reading” section. However, spelling has been adjusted to reflect contemporary American English.

Workers of the world unite! Almost everyone has heard this phrase at some point. It is a revolutionary call to action at the end of Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, and the final paragraph doesn’t just whisper it.

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Workers of the world, unite!

That declaration is where we will begin. The Communist Manifesto is not presented as a reform tract or an exercise in theory. It boldly declares that its aims can only be achieved through the forcible overthrow of existing civilization in order to make the ruling class tremble. That same text that calls for revolution, like most revolutionary treatises, is sprinkled with emancipatory and liberating language, such as the vision of an association “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development for all.” Between the language of universal emancipation and revolution exists an internal tension, and serves as the structural failure point of every regime that has attempted to implement Marx’s vision. It is at this stage I would like to point out that the end is an issue in and of itself. It aspires for something unobtainable. The worker’s paradise. A utopia. Yet, the flawed nature of man makes earthly utopia an impossibility, no matter how high we aim, or how many mass graves we fill in pursuit of it. It is these repressive mechanisms, which serve as the operating system of this philosophy’s pursuit of utopia that we will examine. This analysis aims to follow both elements, the liberating language and the built-in repression mechanism through a close reading of the text of The Communist Manifesto, and a few other writings. It will also contrast the ideology with the attempts at internal safeguards present in classical liberal thought, particularly John Locke and Baron Montesquieu. This analysis does not argue that the liberal tradition has produced perfect results. Though I hold a conservative worldview, if I were to make the claim that the liberal tradition has not produced a single instance of repression, the historical record would stand in conflict with that claim, whether it be human bondage, revolutionary terror, religious repression ranging from the Inquisition to the Salem and Andover Witch Trials, or any one of a handful of instances in which the nature of man has overridden his own logos. Rather, this analysis aims to serve as a comparison between ideology that attempts to temper man’s most base instincts, versus one that contains no such safeguards.

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The Liberating Language and the Road to Flourishing

A close reading of the Manifesto will note that it does not present itself as a treatise of total and permanent domination. The ultimate vision of communist society is the dissolution of class distinctions. Following the rule of the proletariat, and a restructuring of the means of production, “it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.” In place of the old order, there will stand “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Political power, defined as power organized as one class for the oppression of another, will shed that characteristic once class distinctions have evaporated and production is concentrated in service of human flourishing. The horizon line is as old as time immemorial: the liberation of man. The individual will no longer be subordinate to the requirements of capital or to being defined by a social class.

Later texts reinforce this language. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx distinguishes a lower phase of communist society, dubbed socialism (note: this is the definition of socialism that I have previously established). The socialist society, according to Marx, is distinguished from the higher phase, in which the subordination of the individual to the division of labor has vanished, labor has become the primary want, and the productive forces have increased through the overall development of the individual. The distinguishing feature of the socialist society is the retention of hallmarks of the old order. Once past this transitional phase, only then does the banner read “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Engels, in subsequent writings, supplies the complementary image of the state, in its usual definition, fading away to non-existence. (Note: this suggests Marxism is not a nationalist philosophy, unlike fascism, or certain other philosophies of nationhood. Rather, it suggests Marxism is a community of mankind as a whole.) On its face, the nature of Marxism contains a strikingly powerful claim of liberation, that human beings should strive to transcend themselves as instruments of class or state, and that the end goal is an association ordered by the development of each.

Reduction to Potential

Yet, the same text that theorizes this path to transcendent society begins by reconstituting the human being through an entirely different logic. The Manifesto, unlike philosophical works produced during the Enlightenment, doesn’t start with the individual as a pre-political subject of natural law. Rather, it goes beyond even Hobbes—who has a somewhat more cynical view than, say, Locke—still starts with the premise that the individual is the basic unit of society and contracts himself into sovereignty for his own security. The Manifesto, instead organizes society around the friction between an oppressive ruling class and an oppressed working class. The antagonism is simplified as two “great hostile camps.” Within this framework, the individual appears only as a bearer of social standing. The proletarian is described no different than a carton of eggs or a loaf of bread. Laborers “must sell themselves piecemeal” and are therefore “a commodity, like every other article of commerce,” exposed to the forces that govern the marketplace. Law, morality, religion, and other things considered the pillars of a flourishing society are treated as nothing more than “bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.” National character, itself, is stripped away by the uniform conditions of modern industrial society.

This does not serve as a neutral description of society, but rather a reclassification. Once an individual is understood primarily through his relationship with the means of production, the attributes that other philosophical traditions treat as intrinsic, such as dignity independent of social function, natural rights from the point of birth, and individuality that transcends class utility, become secondary or derivative. The Manifesto doesn’t disguise the charge.

In bourgeois society, capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality. And the abolition of this stage of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.

Despite this being a direct challenge to ‘bourgeois’ objections, the strongest reading of this passage does not treat it as a simple desire to erase persons. Instead, Marx and Engels argue that the individuality celebrated by Western traditions is itself already unfree and parasitic. It is the individuality of the property owner whose freedom rests on the dependence of the laborer, and the freedom of capital, or the free market, rather than the freedom of the individual. In this view, the abolition of individuality is not the destruction of an abstract, pre-political right, but the removal of an exclusionary form of it. The purpose of such is to make way for a fuller, non-parasitic individuality available to the vast majority of man. The text presents the loss of bourgeois individuality as liberating.

Even when this specific interpretation is granted, a residual problem remains. The Manifesto supplies no conception of the human being that survives the reassignment by class. The individual is acknowledged only to the extent that he is either bourgeois (and therefore to be abolished), or proletarian (and therefore to be realized through revolutionary process). There is no moral establishment of the human being that stands prior to, and therefore constrains, the assignment of class potential. There is no Lockean sense of natural right, or Kantian individual as an end themselves. Once man is defined by his relationship to the means of production, the moral barrier that would otherwise restrain action to those assigned to the wrong category is lowered. The person is reduced to potential, whether that be potential for exploitation, or potential for revolutionary transformation. In sum, the individual’s moral status is derived from class position rather than held independent of it.

Political Power and the Justification for Despotic Measures

The implications of the ideology are consistent. Without qualification, the Manifesto states that political power “is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another.” The immediate goal of the communist is the formation of the worker into a class, followed by the conquest of the capital class, or the bourgeoisie. Once obtained, the proletariat “will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class.” These steps begin with “despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production.” Immediately, you see an attack on rights, again, without the qualification of property being a ‘bourgeois’ right.

The ten measures proposed for the most advanced countries convert this abstract justification into concrete institutional design. These measures include the abolition of property in land and rents to public purposes, a heavy taxation levy, the abolition of inheritance, the confiscation of property, the centralization of credit via a monopolized national bank, the centralization of services such as communications and transportation, the extension of factories owned by the state, and the collectivization of agriculture. Along with these include the abolition of distinction between town and country, as well as free education in conjunction with industrial production.

A careful reading must grant that these measures are aimed, as written, at relations of production and property forms, rather than at specific individuals. In fact, the text never mentions a program for punishment against individuals—bourgeois or otherwise. Rather, it describes the transformation of the conditions under which capital and labor are to exist. The confiscation of property, the abolition of inheritance, and the centralization of credit are presented as necessary steps in the transformation of society as a whole, not as acts of vengeance.

Yet, the ideology established by Marx and Engels renders that distinction unstable. Since persons have already been defined by their relationship to those forms of property, the attack on relationship becomes, in practical and moral effect, an attack on the categories of persons that embody them.

The landowner and the inheritor are not treated as subjects, holding inherent rights, who happen to hold a certain economic standing. Instead, they are treated as the personification of the very property and capital relations that must be swept away. Once the individual is reduced to class potential, the distinction made between striking at a relationship and striking at the human beings who characterize that relationship blurs to the point that removes any protective force. The text supplies no constraints that would preserve personal liberty independent of the revolutionary apparatus that reorganizes production. There is no enumeration of right, individual or otherwise, that the new ruling class is forbidden to suspend, no institutional barrier, and no residual moral foundation for the person that survives the despotic phase of transition.

The ‘Temporary’ Dictatorship

The established theory insists that the dictatorship of the proletariat is a transitional phase that will abolish itself once equilibrium is achieved, rather than an end-state. By concentrating power, the central planning of production, and abolishing the existing relationship to property, the working class creates the conditions for a classless society in which political power itself loses what is described as its inherent oppressive nature. This reading justifies the dictatorship as it is the instrument of its own replacement. The free development of each remains the desired goal, while the concentration of power is merely the means to the end.

Even when this claim is evaluated in good faith, the institutional void cannot escape scrutiny. The Manifesto asserts that the dictatorship will abolish the conditions of its own existence once the class antagonisms have evaporated. However, this is left almost exclusively in the abstract. There is no mechanism designed, or theorized, for that matter, that would compel the holders of power to relinquish said power, just as there are no safeguards that would protect individuals against the dictatorship while the process remains in its socialist phase. Political power is defined as the organization of the working class to rule over the old order, without internal division. The measures concentrate property, credit, services, and production in one, homogeneous center without meaningful institutional checks or constitutional barriers that the new ruling class is forbidden to cross, other than the abstract dissolution of class antagonisms. The self-abolishing character of the dictatorship is, therefore, an article of faith rather than fiat. The text provides justification for the concentration of power, alone. It does not contain a safety feature that respects the dignity of the governed.

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Alexander Hamilton opens the Federalist Papers with a claim of historic significance. He states, “It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country to decide, by their conduct and example, the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.” The convention, and subsequent debates, were an attempt to answer that question in the affirmative. The Constitution that emerged was not the product of historical necessity or class destiny. Rather, it was a product of deliberation, reason, and an understanding of human nature and of the conditions under which political power can exist in tension between effectiveness and restraint.

The national program of the Democratic Socialists of America advances a different answer to that question. It calls for the working class to “win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.” The DSA frames the existing constitutional order as an “anti-democratic structure” that protects private ownership, and therefore must be replaced and rebuilt from the ground up. In place of the current system, the DSA proposes the public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries, the abolition of both the Senate and Electoral College, and the subordination of the executive and judiciary to the legislature. These are not moderate policy adjustments centered on welfare reform or bureaucratic regulations. They serve as proposals to alter, or abolish, the foundations of American government.

This treatise serves to examine the DSA program against the foundational principles of the United States. The comparison is drawn largely from the Lockean tradition as it appears in the Declaration of Independence, along with the structure of American government established in the Constitution, and alongside the Federalist Papers’ observations on human nature, faction, and the absolute necessity of institutional restraint. The inquiry is not whether the DSA program is well-intentioned. The inquiry, instead, is whether the institutional logic of the DSA program is compatible with the commitment to government by reflection and choice, to the control of passion by reason, and to the permanent necessity of ambition counteracting ambition.

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Inherent Rights

The Declaration of Independence, which serves as the founding document, as well as philosophy, for what would become the United States of America, starts with a fundamental claim about the nature of persons by stating “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It goes on to state that the purpose of government is not to grant rights through authority and fiat, but to secure the fundamental rights that predate political society, and that a just government is constituted through the consent of those it governs. It further justifies revolutionary action only when government has not met, or has exceeded its specific authority.

This is the core of the American founding. The underlying Lockean philosophy can be summarized as every man has property in his own person, and that his labor, his work, is his and his alone. The state of nature is governed by an immutable law of nature that obliges everyone, being free and equal, to not harm another in their health, liberty, or property. Political society is formed by consent of the individual for the limited purpose of protecting these inherent rights, and that government has no other end or purpose beyond the preservation of property, understood as life, liberty, and estate, and when it deviates from these ends it is defined as tyranny.

By comparison, the DSA program is established upon a different foundation. While the text serves a more diagnostic purpose than an ideological one, there is a fundamental political philosophy embedded within the text. The diagnosis begins with the claim that the current American political and economic system is “built upon private ownership and profit at all costs.” Within the framework, the individual first appears not as an individual at all, but a member of class, either as a bearer of capital or the working class, whose rule will dissolve the relations of private ownership. Rights are not treated as constraints, but as the eventual end-state of a successful class project. Everything from housing, to healthcare, to transportation are declared as human rights to be secured through the public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries, and by the construction of a new constitutional order. Through this formulation, rights are not pre-existent of the political order, but dependent upon and determined by it.

Though limited, there is a clear overlap with Marxist philosophy. Marxist ideology treats the individual as a bearer of class relations rather than a pre-political being with fundamental rights. Persons are reconstituted according to position within their relationship to production, and moral status is derived through that relationship, rather than held independent of it. While the DSA does not fully reproduce the full apparatus of Marxist theory line for line, it shares this reduction of an individual to their class status. Once that reduction is accepted, the moral barrier that would otherwise restrain action, or cause consternation should any action be taken, is lowered, if not evaporated entirely. The Lockean, and Declaratory tradition that followed, rejects such a reduction. The person is the bearer of rights that limit what any majority, including a working-class majority, may do. The free development of the individual cannot be purchased by dissolving the constraints that protect the individual.

Reflection and Choice

Hamilton’s opening claim in Federalist 1 frames the American Republic as a test of constituting good government through deliberation, or whether governance is reactionary and revolutionary. This appears to be a reference to the British Constitution, which is not so much a constitution as it is a series of laws passed by parliament that make up the text of the British Constitution following successive civil unrest, as in the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution (the premise of constitution through both accident and force in that context). The American Constitution was offered as an act of reflection and choice. It was debated, amended, and ratified through a process that assumed the capacity of a people to deliberate about the permanent conditions of their political existence.

The DSA asks a completely different constitutional question. To it, the existing constitutional order is not an imperfect, but amendable, product of deliberation. Rather, it is deemed an “anti-democratic structure” that protects the global system of capital. Complete victory, therefore, requires “building a new society from the ground up.” The new constitution is to be drafted by the working class once it has won the ultimate victory for total democracy. This language rests closer to the accident and force side of the ledger than to reflection and choice. It is worth noting here that force doesn’t immediately or necessarily mean armed insurrection, nor does it always serve as a revolutionary call to arms. The aims of the DSA are to be achieved through the existing system, and, once power is consolidated, the new framework is to be enacted. This traces back to John Locke, the Declaration, and the principle of consent of the governed. The language of deliberation can be traced to the principle of consent, whereas the lack of deliberation, or reaction, can connect to force. Winning power to govern under existing rules is different in kind to winning power to alter or abolish the existing rules, and the DSA treats the present constitutional order as an obstacle that must be cleared instead of a set of procedures that govern conduct once power is established.

A constitution that is the product of reflection and choice is, in principle, open to further reflection and choice (such as the amendment process and the seventeen additional amendments beyond the original ten in the Bill of Rights). Its authority rests on the capacity of a people to debate and deliberate about the terms of their conducting of relations with one another. A constitution that is the product of a class project, drafted after the working class has achieved governing power, and after the principle means of production have been brought under public ownership, is built on a different foundation. The program supplies no method of how subsequent generations, or dissenters within the working class, would retain the capacity to revise that constitution once the class project has been institutionalized. (Important to note at this point, in the spirit of fairness, that the DSA platform does not claim to be a governing document, held to the standards of outlining specific articles or amendments, when that is not what the platform serves as. It is an outline of the aims of the DSA as a whole. Any fair reader of this analysis should keep that in mind, though I do not believe it detracts from the fundamental philosophical observations I am making here). Reflection and choice are relocated to the moment of founding the new order and are not preserved as permanent features of the political system. This is the first point at which the program’s institutional logic diverges from the republican answer to Hamilton’s question.

Reason, Passion, and Self-Control

Our attention now turns to Federalist 49, attributed to James Madison. In it, he writes “It is the reason of the public alone, that ought to control and regulate the government. The passions ought to be controlled and regulated by the government.” The passage occurs in the context of frequent appeals to the people for constitutional revision. Madison warns such appeals risk placing the passions of the moment in the position of final authority over the permanent structure of government (Note: we will broach the subject of structure further, as it relates to the Constitution and the proposed reforms to that structure by the DSA). The profundity of the statement is that government exists, in part, to subdue, or temper, the passions of the citizenry. If passion is regularly invited to reconstruct government, the regulatory function of government becomes inverted.

The DSA program’s call for a new democratic socialist republic, with a constitution drafted by the working class, after electoral aims have been achieved is precisely the kind of appeal that Madison is warning of. The DSA proposes the replacement of the current constitutional order by a new one whose legitimacy is defined by its capacity to realize a democracy of the working class. The passions that accompany a successful class mobilization, such as the included language that resents private ownership, the desire for material redistribution, and the identification of existing institutions as enemy structures, are given constitutive authority over the form of government itself. It is important to observe that reason is not eliminated, as the DSA platform uses reason to explain its position. However, reason is subordinate to the class project. The emergent government, as outlined by the DSA, is not one that regulates passion, but an instrument of passion that has been elevated to necessity.

This is contrary to the relationship of government to the people it serves. For Madison, the danger is not that the people will never be consulted. The danger is that they will be consulted so frequently, or under such conditions of collective excitement or unrest, that the reason of the public will be displaced by the temporary passions of majority. The DSA platform institutionalizes that displacement at the level of constitutional redesign. The new constitution is to be a product of class victory in which passion is most likely to predominate.

Faction and Majority Tyranny

The DSA presents its proposals for a multi-party system, proportional representation, and ranked-choice voting as a means of checks on government. Under the heading of a democratic congress, it calls for the replacement of the two-party system with a multi-party democracy, an expansion of the current 435-member House of Representatives, the federalization of rank-choice voting, and the abolition of the Senate. These mechanisms are offered as the means by which the working class can govern without the risks of a concentration of power. The central claim is that a more proportional and coalitional legislature would prevent any single faction from consolidation of legislative supremacy, thereby supplying the internal restraint that other proposed institutional changes might appear to remove. To give the fairest reading of intentions to the DSA, I will use the Netherlands as an example. The parliamentary system of the Netherlands, as I understand it, functions as a close analog of what the DSA is proposing. It is a highly multi-party, proportionate parliamentary system, and its constitution prohibits courts from challenging the constitutionality of legislative acts, thereby granting legislative supremacy. The Netherlands are not an authoritarian regime. It cannot, in good faith, be defined as a legislative tyranny. However, the Framers, when embedding the checks and balances system into the structure of the Constitution, did not argue that lack of such features are guaranteed to devolve into tyranny, but that the potential for the concentration of power via faction increases as internal frictions are removed or non-existent.

In Federalist 10, Madison defines faction as “...I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” The danger is not in the system outlined by the DSA itself, but in a majority united by a common interest adverse to the rights of others, fueled by the impulse of passion (tying back to Federalist 49).

Madison then turns to the deeper origin of the problem:

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.

There is a lot to process here, before continuing. First, through this reading, the unequal distribution of property is not an accidental or temporary distortion. Instead, it is the most common and durable source of faction, among a list of others, rooted in the nature of man and in the conditions of civil society. The DSA treats the unequal distribution of property as the central injustice to be overcome through public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries. Yet, in Madison’s analysis of faction, the attempt to eliminate the diversity of property does not eliminate faction, but risks concentrating the interests and passions expressed by that faction. When the political project is defined as the democratic rule of those without property over the relations of property itself, the majority that emerges is organized by the most durable source of faction Madison identifies.

Tying back to the beginning of this section, Madison distinguishes pure democracy from the republican form:

From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

The error Madison attributes to theoretic politicians is directly relevant to the DSA’s institutional vision. The program seeks to establish greater political equality through multi-party competition, proportional representation, and ranked-choice voting, while simultaneously pursuing the equalization of property through the means already mentioned. Madison’s warning is that equal political rights do not produce equal possessions, equal outcomes, opinions, or even passions, for that matter. The attempt to force such equalization via government removes the checks that protect the minority. Pure democracy admits of no cure for the ambitions of faction precisely because a common interest will be felt by a majority and there is nothing institutional to check the potential of the authoritative body to remove those who stand in the way. Worth note that Madison, as I understand the text, seems to reference Athens, or the other Greek city-states, here in his definition of democracy, where the entire citizenry participates in governance. By contrast, the DSA platform still advocates for representative government, like the Netherlands example mentioned prior. However, this does not escape the error that Madison names, in that equal representation does not constitute a check against centralization once a majority forms around eliminating property, or class, distinctions.

This potential for tyranny of the majority is what Madison continues to argue. He posits that the republican remedy lies in the extended republic and in the delegation of government to a small number of citizens elected by the rest. “The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.” The larger the republic, the greater the variety of interests, and the less likely that a majority will have a common motive to impose on the rights of other citizens. Should such a common motive exist, such as the property reforms put forward by the DSA, the more difficult it becomes for those driven by such interests to discover their own strength and act in unison. “Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.”

The DSA’s multi-party proposals, while falling outside the pure democracy as defined by Madison, still addresses only one dimension of the problem identified. They may multiply the number of parties, make the composition of the monocameral legislature more reflective of the distribution of votes, and institute ranked-choice voting federally in order to reduce spoiler effects of minor candidates. Yet, these mechanisms operate entirely within the legislative system. They do not restore the institutional barriers that the program simultaneously proposes to abolish, such as the Senate as a check by the states against the federal, the independent executive and judiciary, or the requirement that a national executive assemble support across diverse states. More importantly, it does not address the deeper source of majority faction that the program cultivates through the organization of political life around a single, overarching class antagonism in which the working class will dissolve the relations of private ownership. A political system that coalesces around one source of friction, works against the tempering mechanism described by Madison from the outset, regardless of how proportionate or representative the legislative body may be. When that project is combined with the abolition of institutional checks, the result is a close approximation of the purely democratic conditions Madison warns of, in which a common passion or interest is felt by the majority and there is little left to stop the potential domination of the minority.

Ambition Countering Ambition

One of the most profound statements of the American constitutional design appears in Federalist 51, in which Madison writes:

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

The entire structure of the Constitution follows from this. Because men are not perfect beings, and because those who hold power are apt to abuse it, the only reliable security lies in giving each mechanism of government both the constitutional means and the personal motivations to resist the encroachment of others. The separation of the legislative, executive, and judicial powers, and the legislative being further separated into two chambers, judicial appointments having life tenure, an independently elected executive authority, and the federal division of authority between the central and the states are all devices for making ambition counteract ambition. This isn’t just one philosophy of governance being implemented on a whim. Rather, it demonstrates a unique understanding of the nature of man by the Framers—Madison, in particular—and a fundamental and revolutionary attempt to restrain the nature of man.

The DSA proposes the systematic dismantling of these restraints. The Senate is to be abolished, removing state interests from federal deliberation altogether (Note: States have already been severely restricted via the progressive 17^th Amendment. Also of note, progressive is not used disparagingly toward one party over another here, as several early progressives were considered conservative, such as Herbert Croly, an early thought leader of the progressive movement). The Electoral College is also to be abolished, essentially disenfranchising the smaller states, which ties into the executive, along with the judiciary, being “chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” The result is a single legislative center that selects its own executive and court that would also, under the program’s economic platform, control the largest corporations and essential industries. The institutional means by which ambition might counteract ambition are dissolved. The personal motives that attach officeholders to the constitutional rights of their offices are thereby eliminated because those places, themselves, are either redefined, or abolished entirely. (It is of note that a subordinate executive and judiciary resemble the failed Articles of Confederation, which we will examine in another essay on those specific points. The main point is that the Constitution was framed and ratified because the lessons were already learned from the failures of a system that shares an overlap with the DSA’s proposals.)

The assumption underlying this redesign stands in conflict with Madison. The program assumes that once the working class holds power through democratic procedures, the problem of abuse is largely solved by the class character of the governing body.

Deliberate Structure

The Articles of the Constitution remove the philosophical principles of the founding from the realm of the abstract and into the concrete. Article I establishes a bicameral legislative body with different modes of election, different term lengths, and different constituents, with the House representing the total population and the Senate representing the interests of the several states. Article II establishes the independent office of President of the United States, with the Electoral College serving as its constituency. Article III establishes an independent body of jurists, appointed by the executive, on the advice and consent of the Senate, with life tenure for good behavior. The amendment process in Article V is made deliberately difficult, requiring a majority of two-thirds of both houses of Congress to pass, and ratification by three-fourths of the several states to enact. These arrangements are not arbitrary administrative procedures, but serve as the expression of the commitment to government by reflection and choice, to the control of passion by reason, and to the permanent necessity of ambition made to counteract ambition, as well as the commitment to government through the consent of the governed.

Against this framework, the DSA’s proposals are wholly incompatible at every critical juncture. The abolition of the Senate eliminates a key check of the states against the federal. The abolition of the Electoral College eliminates the requirement that the federal executive assemble support across diverse states (another removal of the governed from the process of consent). The subordination of the executive and judiciary to Congress collapses the separation of powers into legislative supremacy. The call for a new constitution drafted after the working class has achieved its stated ambitions bypasses the process of amendment established in Article V. The public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries places the material basis of independent economic life under the same political center that would exercise concentrated constitutional authority.

A constitution that can be replaced once a particular class has achieved power is not a constitution in the American sense. The Constitution of the United States was designed to be a permanent fixture precisely because the Founders did not trust any temporary majority, even if wholly virtuous, to restrain itself. That trust is the point at which the overlap with Marxist political theory becomes incompatible with American republicanism, because both treat the accumulation of power in the appropriate class as an end, rather than something requiring restraint.

Ideological Incompatibility

The DSA platform is coherent on its own terms. It offers a vision of material security and collective self-governance, and it insists that this vision can be pursued through the current institutional means. Yet, its logic is incompatible with the philosophical foundations of the American republicanism. Where the Declaration determines rights as prior to politics, the program treats rights as the eventual product of a successful class reorientation. Where Federalist 1 frames the American experiment as a test of government by reflection and choice, the DSA frames constitutional reordering as the task of a class that has won the battle for democracy against its ideological enemies. Where Federalist 49 insists that the reason of the public should temper government, and a public passions should be regulated by the government, the DSA places the passions of a successful class mobilization in the position of authority over the form of government itself. Where Federalist 10 identifies the unequal distribution of property as the most common and durable source of faction and warns that pure democracy admits of no cure for the interests of faction, the program organizes politics around that common and durable source via public ownership and then offers multi-party proportionality as a sufficient institutional restraint. Where Federalist 51 insists that ambition be made to counteract ambition because men are imperfect, the DSA assumes that the class character of the governing force largely solves the question of the nature of man and therefore dismantles the institutional devices designed specifically to temper and restrain man tendency toward iniquity.

Where the DSA platform overlaps with Marxist ideology, via a reduction of the citizenry to class potential, the concentration and accumulation of power as a precondition for political transformation, and the assumption that the working class does not require the same restraints as earlier forms of rule, serve to clarify why the DSA’s institutional proposals cannot be reconciled with American foundational principles. American republicanism answers the question posed by Hamilton by constructing a system in which reflection and choice are defining characteristics, passion is regulated by reason, factions are diluted by federalism, and ambition introduces friction against ambition. The DSA answers the same question by proposing the construction of a democratic socialist state where a successful class reordering becomes the source of constitutional authority and in which devices of restraint are treated as contrary to the collective good.

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Further Reading

Democratic Socialists of America. “Workers Deserve More.” National Program. https://program.dsausa.org/

Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay. The Federalist Papers.

Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. 1689.

United States. Declaration of Independence. 1776.

United States. Constitution of the United States. 1787.

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Context and acknowledgement: This essay is in response to an essay provided by Georgi V. Georgiev, in which he provides a rebuttal to my podcast episode A Warning From History: The Red Terror. I have provided his essay, and encourage my readers to not only read his excellent rebuttal essay, but also to subscribe to his Substack, Powers Old and New. I wish to add my thanks and gratitude to Georgi for engaging in this meaningful discussion. Too often, especially in today’s political climate, it is easy to dismiss opposing viewpoints and slip into an echo chamber that only reinforces, rather than tests, your own views. My most sincere appreciation goes to Georgi for not only testing, but challenging, my own viewpoints in the hopes of discovering a deeper truth.

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Debating the Warnings from History

Before reading this, I would encourage everyone to listen to Branden Rapp’s podcast episode first, as this is a polemical response to his reading of the history and cannot stand without the foundation Branden has provided…

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a month ago · 13 likes · 32 comments · Georgi V. Georgiev

When I began the Warning From History podcast series, I started with a narrow and deliberate purpose, setting aside the normal military campaigns and operational history, in order to examine what happens when a specific ideology seizes state power, and builds its core institutions according to that ideology. The first episode dealt with the early Soviet Union under Lenin, and the subsequent Red Terror. The episode explores how the machinery of the Cheka was not a radical improvisation brought about by civil war, but was constituted, from the October Revolution onward, as a mechanism of ideological enforcement. The Cheka had one, explicit instruction: that the individual was secondary to social class. The Cheka operated with extrajudicial authority on that principle. The Warning From History series exists because, unlike other repressive ideologies, such as Nazism or fascism, socialism did not die in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Instead, socialism survived “the end of history” and has persisted beyond the twentieth-century into the present day, and is gaining support. The Marxist ideology that fuels the reduction of human beings to potential, frames property ownership as a form of class repression, and embraces destructive institutional reforms in favor of rebuilding society and (the unrealistic) re-engineering human nature remains culturally available.

Georgi Georgiev’s essay Debating the Warnings From History is the most serious public response the series has received. To summarize his key points, he does not dispute the historical record of atrocity. His pushback is against the fundamental ideologies of institutions of power and how ambition interacts to ideology. His argument is that ideology is downstream of power, and that ambitious men reach for whatever existing language provides legitimacy to their intentions. He further argues that cruelty exists across time, and the excesses of the twentieth-century were due to enormous industrial and bureaucratic capacity rather than any ideological underpinnings. Marxism, then, stands as just one ideology among the many available to those in pursuit of power, and that its force has mostly been blunted since the end of the Cold War. This is an excellent counterargument, which is why I am publishing this direct rebuttal.

While true that corruption, repression, and the suspension of certain liberties are not unique to Marxism, those arguments are not in dispute. The historical record supplies numerous examples that demonstrate Georgi’s case. The Egyptians enslaved the very Hebrews that had saved their civilization generations before (Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph) and the Seleucids attempted to stamp out their religious practice by force. The Nazis industrialized race-based slavery and murder on a scale never seen before in human history. And Napoleon shows us that Western, liberal ideologies, rooted in liberty, equality, and brotherhood can be corrupted into conquest. Even Christianity, which stands as the foundation of Western civilization, produced its own body counts through the crusades and the Inquisition. If the claim were that Marxist regimes are uniquely evil in the annals of history, that claim would be false on its face. However, that is not the claim being made, nor the reason for the Warning From History series. My focus on Marxism is intentional. Nazism was defeated in 1945. Bonapartism did not outlive its emperor. By contrast, socialism did not subsequently collapse with the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc satellites in 1991. Rather, the ideology that gave the world engineered famines through collectivization, scarcity through economic centralization, and political and class repression survived the twentieth-century and Cold War, and is gaining popularity in the West, and its revolutionary force is far from exhausted. That persistence is the reason the focus narrowed. It is not an argument that every other ideology is historically insulated.

The core of Georgi’s argument between instrumental adoption and institutional design is an important one, as in the case of secondary, or satellite states, power did often reach for the ideology out of usefulness. His example of Ho Chi Minh’s path from Woodrow Wilson to Karl Marx is a clear illustration of that fact. However, in the founding of the most powerful, and even some satellite states, the sequence runs in the opposite direction. The ideology, not the ambition, was the driver. Lenin wrote his April theses, which outlined the Marxist system that Russia would adopt once in power, more than a year before the Bolshevik revolution. That is not simply an institutional power adopting an ideology. The Cheka, the ideological enforcement arm of the ideology, under Felix Dzerzhinsky, was not the Okhrana that simply adopted Marx as its new governing ordinance. It was purpose-built from the earliest days of the October Revolution to enforce the perpetual revolution of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Red Terror and Great Terror that followed, reorganized and rebranded into the GPU, and escalated as the NKVD, were guided by the ideology that supplied them with the moral cover to enact the horrors of Leninism and Stalinism. This is evident in Martin Latsiz’s directive to not focus on whether or not a person was guilty of an actual crime, but to instead focus on which class that person belongs. The organism put the ideology into execution as a foundational principle.

Georgi’s emphasis on agency is also not in dispute. Human beings act with agency, and use that agency to guide their personal ambitions. I think the earlier example of Ho Chi Minh is one of the most straightforward examples of that premise. My contention, though, is that people are not born radicals. Lenin was not born a Marxist, just as Hitler was not born a Nazi. Their worldviews were formed and shaped over the course of their lives through personal experience, reading, crisis, and the gradual internalization of particular concepts. Ideology, therefore, is not passive. It is not a mask that a man puts on in pursuit of his goals. It is acquired and internalized until it is inseparable from the individual himself. A framework that redefines individuals according to their utility reshapes what an ambitious agent is willing to consider necessary, permissible, or even virtuous, for that matter. The ideology doesn’t simply redecorate pre-existing apparati. As I have stated, it helps constitute the institutions and the moral logic those institutions enforce.

The core tenets of socialism; the abolition of private property, state seizure of the principle means of production, centralization of markets, and the reduction of individuals into class groups, produced a recurring pattern of results across different cultures, economies, whether agrarian or industrial, and varying degrees of external influence. Prolonged scarcity, prolonged economic stagnation, police states, labor camps, and category-based repression became hallmarks of socialist states. When the core ideology was relaxed, recovery followed, with Deng’s reforms in China and Doi Moi in Vietnam providing the clearest examples. It is this core ideological design that remains the primary variable of the pattern.

I do not argue that socialist regimes are constant terror at every step. Under these systems, people raised families, pursued education, lived in relative peace and harmony, and material development occurred. In certain circumstances, major achievements were made by these systems. The Soviet Union became a global superpower, put the first artificial satellite into orbit, and launched the first man, Yuri Gagarin, beyond the confines of the Earth. China aims to become the same (keep in mind they are no longer a purely Marxist state like they were under Mao). None of that, however, erases the fundamental principles in which these regimes operated. Individual liberty is subordinate to the collective good, which can be read as whatever the state determines the collective good to be. That remains true whether restrictions were relaxed or Glasnost was introduced. Those two categories do not rest in contention. The system could modernize and still treat persons as potential for the state, and the coexistence of the two does not stand as evidence against my argument.

Liberal and certain Judeo-Christian traditions have been repressive. There’s no argument there. However, this argument is about ideological foundations. The key difference is that liberal and Judeo-Christian philosophies have a tendency to force humanity upward. To elevate. Christianity outgrew the Inquisition, outgrew subjugation, slavery, segregation, and apartheid. The ideological foundations made the coexistence of equality, intrinsic value, and repression untenable. The ideological foundations of the West contain resources that treat humans as possessing inherent worth that precludes the state. Rights and intrinsic value predate the state itself. Marxist theory does not include that ideology. Where liberal foundations move upward, Marxism does not. Instead, it lowers man. Once human beings are sorted into categories, framed as necessary for the common good, the moral barrier dissolves. Does this mean every socialist state will build their own version of the Lubyanka? Of course not, and I have never made that claim. My specific, narrow claim is that the ideology itself makes institutional terror more likely. I do claim, however, that repression is baked into the socialist system, due to the very fact that individual liberty is incompatible with Marxism, and the reduction of liberty and human worth, by definition, is repression.

The claim that Marxist language is a spent force does not hold water in the face of present political movements. The national platform of the Democratic Socialists of America still speaks it, and uses the same egalitarian cover to justify it. It invites readers to imagine a day without capitalism in which work is performed according to ability and need (I’m certain I have heard that specific phrase prior to the 2020s), and which housing, food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation exist as collective goods rather than commodities. It frames the current system as organized by bosses and the billionaire class. It states that complete victory will require a revolutionary and fundamental transformation, including the drafting of a new constitution and the creation of a democratic socialist republic, as well as the abolition of the senate, and the replacement of the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary subordinate to a monocameral legislative body. These proposals are far removed from other institutions labeled as ‘socialist,’ such as the Nordic model, which retains private capital, private industry, and private propery. LEGO and Ikea are not state-controlled. What the DSA proposes is a structural redesign that concentrates authority and places the principle means of production under political control. While it may not hold the majority now, that doesn’t equate to the movement being spent. The DSA is gaining in popularity and has multiple chapters across forty-seven states. Recall that Lenin and his acolytes were the minority at one point, too. The fact that the language and design remain embedded in political discourse, and that it finds an audience, is why the warning has not expired.

Cruelty is older than Marx. Concentrated power is dangerous under any banner. All true. The narrower claim is that when a theory that reduces humans to potential gains the levers of power, and constructs its institutions under that premise, the results are disastrous. Marxist ideology doesn’t simply exploit individuals after the fact. The underlying ideology shapes the institutions, which go on to shape the human beings that serve those institutions. That is the mechanism the Warning From History series is tracking. It is why I contend the Red Terror was not an improvisation, but a predictable, if radical, outcome of that ideology. It explains why, once you run out of billionaires, the millionaires are the next logical target, then those with hundreds of thousands, on down the line. Not every Marxist state produces the NKVD, but there is a clear through-line of repression, systematic starvation, and human misery that traverses decades and hemispheres. The moral and institutional language that survived its Cold War defeat continues to matter.

Thank you.

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The Weekly Signals Brief gathers the most interesting articles that I have read over the past week. Each link below is a piece that piqued my interest (click the titles to go to the full articles).

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Breaking Down the Communist DSA Platform

by New Discourses/James Lindsay

As you all know, I have set my sights against the rising popularity of socialism in the West, particularly in the United States. Specifically, I am talking about the Democratic Socialists of America, who are gaining in popularity, especially among American youth. When I say socialism, I am not talking about the Nordic model of large welfare systems, as those welfare systems are free-market economies with private property rights, legal rights for private enterprise, with no central planning. I define socialism as centralized planning, market and price controls, and severe limitations on property rights. One of the larger figures in the fight against socialism, or communism, to be more precise with definitions (socialism is a transitory phase before the full communist utopia is reached, according to Marxist theory), is James Lindsay. In this essay, James traces everyday progressive, socialist language back to its foundations in Marx own words. In the opening of the Democratic Socialist’s platform, found HERE, he highlights how the fantasy of a workday without bills or bosses is not a utopian sketch, but rather an echo of the Critique of the Gotha Programme and The German Ideology by Marx.

He goes through the entire platform, section by ugly and frightening section, and demonstrates the pattern repetition through every step, whether it’s the calls for housing and healthcare for all, the demands to tear down American society and rewrite the Constitution in order to build a Democratic Socialist Republic, or the plan to abolish the Senate, as well as have the new mono-cameral representative body appoint (not elect) the executive and judiciary, and then subordinate both of them to the legislature. These measures, despite being less democratic and more centralized, are framed as an expansion of democracy, yet operate on the same logic Lenin spelled out when he insisted true democracy requires the silencing and disenfranchising of people labeled as class enemies and exploiters. “All power to the soviets!” James’s breakdown rightly shows that these are not isolated policy choices that have their roots in Western European social democracies, but are a program for replacing the existing order with something that has never produced the classless utopia it promises. Socialism, despite every effort, never moves beyond that transitional phase into the utopia. What it does do, however, is reliably produce scarcity, coercion, and the systematic repression of dissenters. This matters more than anything, especially today, because the language in the DSA platform is circulating in ordinary political conversation and the people using it rarely pause (or intentionally obfuscate) the historical record.

Anyone who cares about how power actually works should give this a read. It is long, but it is well worth it, and important. Lindsay digs in deep to measure the tenets of the DSA platform against the manifestos and regimes that implemented similar policies. The result is clear. You come away from his article less able to dismiss the rhetoric as mere idealism and more able to evaluate the costs it has carried everywhere it has been tried.

Debating the Warnings from History

by Georgi V. Georgiev

As I said, I have set my sights on socialism and have taken a prosecutorial stance against its underlying ideology, and have shared multiple anti-communist essays from other authors since taking this turn. However, I do not want this tack to devolve into yet another social media echo-chamber separating the left from the right in exclusion. The whole point of democratic institutions, and my ardent defense of the American Republic, in particular, is based in the free exchange of ideas, and debating the merits of those ideas in a civilized manner. Despite my rhetorical emphasis in my recent podcast episodes, I do encourage debate, as I view debate as a way to test ideas, in the Socratic manner, in order to arrive at a deeper truth. In that spirit, Georgi Georgiev has opened his own line of debate on my podcast series, through the lens that, unlike my thesis that the seizure of power is baked into the socialist system, argues that ideas do not seize power. Rather, ambitious human beings reach for whatever ideology will advance their political aims.

He makes a convincing argument, raising deep questions about the nature of man and how cruelty is not specific to socialism, but finds roots no matter what century or ideology lies underneath the power in question, whether under the banner of religion, nationalism, or even liberalism. My own arguments target socialism in particular because, unlike examples Georgi uses, socialism did not die off in the collapse of the Soviet Union or the Eastern Bloc. Unlike Nazism, it has survived the twentieth-century and continues to grow in popular support.

Georgi’s rebuttal to my series provides a deeply-pondered and well-constructed counter-argument to my own, rather than the dismissals typical of the social media forum, and I encourage anyone who is interested to join in the discussion and debate. I think you will come away with a stronger sense and clearer view, in these debates, of the points where our diagnostics diverge. If you value testing ideas, rather than just confirming or hand-waving them, this is the kind of exchange worth joining, and I am glad to be a part of this discussion. I think the rest of you will, too.

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No, a Person Working at McDonald’s Shouldn’t Be Able to Afford a Home with Their Wages

by John Hawkins

I chose this article by John Hawkins because it is not just another right-wing economic talking point, though I have heard this argument before, going back to the Tea Party era of the early 2000s. The point John is making is that claims like the one he highlights are not harmless opinions floating around the aether, detached from reality. Despite the appeal to emotion and egalitarianism of the claim that someone working at McDonald’s should be able to afford a house, claims like that are not new, have been tried before, and have real-world effects on real human beings.

As I said, the broader point is that choosing a socialist framework over one that demands personal growth and self-discipline has a lineage of results that we can trace. Long waits for availability in subsidized housing projects and a continuous cycle of ever-increasing mandates come to mind as historical examples of the equity framework that the statement under examination invokes. The rejection or implementation of such ideas determine whether a society will encourage people to aim for something greater, or will lock them in to dependency on an increasingly centralized system.

John’s article is worth the read because it offers a challenge to a popular sentiment. It is one of many examples of identifying when good intentions start demanding unrealistic expectations both from the market and from the working class.

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Overview

This episode examines the argument that foreign Western intervention is the primary driver of socialist state collapse. Through an analytical evaluation of twentieth-century economies and Cold War geopolitics, the episode explores whether centralized economic planning fails due to external pressure or internal failures. By contrasting the external-intervention thesis against historical case studies the episode demonstrates that political repression, market destruction, and economic stagnation are inherent outcomes of socialist governments rather than products of foreign containment.

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Key Topics

• The Fallacy of Unfalsifiability and Asymmetric Intervention: An analysis of the logical flaws within the Western-sabotage thesis, highlighting how it selectively ignores massive communist military interventions, such as the invasion of Afghanistan, the Brezhnev Doctrine in Eastern Europe, and regional proxy wars, while establishing an unfalsifiable framework that reassigns all internal economic decay to foreign pressure.

• Capitalist Aid and Systemic Economic Weakness: An examination of early Soviet history, specifically the 1921 Volga famine and World War II Lend-Lease operations, demonstrating that the United States repeatedly provided critical material and logistical support to sustain the Soviet state during existential crises, directly contradicting the premise of continuous Western economic blockade in nascence.

• Structural Failure Across Varied Geopolitical Environments: A comparative study of socialist regimes operating under divergent levels of external pressure, ranging from the total isolation of Hoxhaist Albania and the internal horrors of the Maoist Great Leap Forward, to the comparative post-war divergence of East and West Germany, illustrating that central planning consistently yields supply collapse and authoritarian control regardless of Western involvement.

• Within-Country Reform Mechanisms: An evaluation of post-1978 China and post-1986 Vietnam, proving that economic recovery occurred precisely when state-managed allocation and collectivization were dismantled, even while Western trade embargoes and diplomatic sanctions remained fully active or were actively tightening.

Summary

Ultimately, the historical record demonstrates that while Cold War containment strategies exerted real diplomatic and economic pressure on socialist states, external hostility was secondary to internal institutional failures. The abolition of private property, the suppression of price signals, and the centralized allocation of production inherently produce supply dislocation, economic stagnation, and political coercion. Foreign intervention neither created the structural flaws of central planning, nor does it explain why market-oriented shifts consistently produced growth under sustained diplomatic isolation. The collapse of twentieth-century socialist experiments stems from the economic and political unsustainability of the institutional model itself.

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The Weekly Signals Brief gathers the most interesting articles that I have read over the past week. Each link below is a piece that piqued my interest (click the titles to go to the full articles).

The Weekly Signals Brief is part of a three-post weekly cadence—two original analyses and one curated intelligence sweep. Subscribe to receive it each Thursday.

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Normandy ‘44: Falaise – Sword and Shield (Part 7)

by Ru Johnson

Once again, Ru has delivered an excellent blend of humor and history. His latest piece on the Normandy campaign shines a spotlight on the ingenuity and chaos that defined the summer actions in France in 1944. His narrative weaves together wildly different military approaches, from Patton's fast and aggressive blitz across France to the gruelling, heroic defense of a single hill by Polish tank crews. Seeing how rapidly Allied strategy evolved under immense pressure gives the reader a fresh perspective on a chapter of history that often gets flattened into timelines and survey generalities.

Those familiar with my own military history works know that one of the main points I like to cover is the inherent friction when plans meet real-world, battlefield resistance. Ru does an outstanding job of showing how the Allies coped with real-world messiness during the summer break-out. Beyond the dramatic tank charges and high-stakes maneuvers, his piece demonstrates how innovation often stems from pure necessity, whether that means welding custom armor onto tank or tank destoryer chassis to create improvised armored personnel carriers or firing medical supplies out of artillery barrels when airdrops were impossible due to Ack-Ack artillery. His article serves as a reminder of the staggering cost of war and the incredible adaptability required when every plan falls apart the moment it meets reality.

If you appreciate historical writing that balances big picture strategy with visceral human details, and a little humor sprinkled in as a garnish, you will get a lot out of this piece. It avoids heavy jargon and instead delivers a gripping narrative that brings the clay-choked dust, Mediterranean heat, and desperation of Normandy right off the page. Give it a read, as it is a brilliant reminder that history is ultimately shaped by split-second decisions and human resilience.

Apollo 11 Makes the First Moon Landing

by Dennis Bodzash

Monday marked the fifty-seventh anniversary of humanity's first steps on the lunar surface, and Dennis Bodzash’s retrospective serves as a fantastic vehicle for revisiting that monumental leap. What I like about Dennis’s piece is he didn’t only focus on the triumph of the landing, instead emphasizing the Space Race as a series of high-stakes, seat-of-the-pants decisions unfolding under immense geopolitical pressure. His narrative really shines when highlighting the quirky realities of the mission, such as how Neil Armstrong ended up taking almost all the photos simply because nobody thought to pass the camera back and forth, and includes an interesting anecdote about a similar situation on our celestial body’s highest peak. Dennis gives the reader a remarkably grounded perspective on this incredible human achievement.

Space exploration is perhaps the ultimate test of how humans adapt when carefully engineered plans collide with harsh physical reality. Dennis captures this friction brilliantly, whether he is describing Armstrong manually guiding the lunar module down over boulder fields with barely twenty-five seconds of fuel left or or NASA completely overhauling the spacecraft after the tragic Apollo 1 fire. Beyond the dramatic landing sequence, his reflection on the long aftermath for Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins drives home a deeper truth about human endeavor. It forces us to consider the staggering personal cost of reaching such peaks, showing how three vastly different men had to figure out how to spend the rest of their lives after doing the most extraordinary thing a human being could possibly do.

Worth a read if you want a fresh, engaging take on a story you thought you already knew inside and out. Dennis manages to capture the awe of the achievement while keeping the storytelling wonderfully down to earth. Give it a read today for a great reminder of what can happen when human nerve, brilliant engineering, and sheer ambition all pull in the same direction.

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Our Generals Are Not Even Good at Tactics: A Hard-Hitting Reply to Gary Anderson

by Major Donald Vandergriff

Major Vandergriff's blunt rebuttal to Gary Anderson tackles the military's promotion machine with a level of raw candor that immediately grabbed my attention. Rather than letting leadership off the hook with the usual line that our military brass consists of brilliant tacticians hamstrung by politics, Major Vandergriff argues that the system itself actively breeds risk-averse officers who excel at career advancement rather than actual warfare. What I find compelling is how he dismantles the myth of top-down meritocracy, pointing out that our officer corps is trapped in an industrial-age framework that rewards conformity over genuine battlefield adaptability.

What really resonates in this critique is the deep conflict between administrative self-preservation and authentic leadership. Vandergriff highlights a toxic cultural flaw where telling hard truths or taking calculated risks actively harms an officer's career, while blind compliance guarantees promotion (this mindset goes back at least as far as the days of John Boyd, as his experience was similar to what Major Vandergriff lays out here). Major Vandergriff highlights a proposal put forward by Lieutenant Colonel Assad “Ghengis” Kahn to break the officer corps into three specialized tracks of command, staff, and technical. It raises uncomfortable but necessary questions about why we continue to run a high-stakes institution using an outdated corporate ladder, rather than actively cultivating independent thinkers who possess the strength of character to lead when everything goes wrong.

If you are looking for a no-punches-pulled critique of the current American military, this is an absolute must-read. Major Vandergriff writes with the urgency and authority of someone who not only has led Marines and soldiers himself, but has spent decades pushing for meaningful change, offering a bold vision for how we ought to train and select the people we trust with national defense. Give it a read and see if it doesn't completely reshape how you look at the institution and the leaders tasked with running it.

The DSA Is Not New — It’s a Century-Old Socialist Project Rebranded

by Corporal Dan, USMC (Ret)

While much of my work, up to this point, has focused on military history and the clash of armies, I have increasingly felt compelled to shift my lens toward the ideological battlefield and the rising, often romanticized popularity of Marxism across the West. Corporal Dan’s latest commentary on the Democratic Socialists of America provides a sharp backdrop for this transition. What immediately struck me about his analysis was his refusal to accept the DSA's modern, polished self-branding, instead tracing its lineage straight back through a century of American socialist movements. His breakdown of how radical ideas adapt to their era, moving from early twentieth-century labor halls into today's universities, school boards, and cultural institutions, presents a clear-eyed look at a long-term transformation strategy that far too many observers naively dismiss as a novel phenomenon.

Corporal Dan connects the tactics of the DSA to fifth-generation warfare, where the primary battleground is no longer physical terrain, but narrative control and institutional capture. He further highlights a dangerous dynamic. While early radical movements relied on overt confrontation, today’s iteration operates under a softer, moralized lexicon like "equity" and "progressive reform," making legitimate critique far easier to neutralize or brand as paranoia. It brings into focus the immense difficulty of steering a massive cultural apparatus back on course once its underlying ideals have been quietly swapped out. Watching this slow, deliberate march through society serves as a sobering reminder that ideological shifts, if left unexamined, can erode a nation's foundational order just as effectively as any conventional threat.

Dan writes with the conviction and straightforward clarity of someone who cares deeply about calling things by their real names, offering a perspective that challenges readers to look past current slogans and examine the long-term historical currents at play. Well worth a read.

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This episode explores the foundational mechanics of the early Soviet state, examining how the initial architecture of the Red Terror was systematically engineered following the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. Challenging the traditional historical narrative that views early Soviet political violence as a spontaneous, defensive reaction to the chaos of the Russian Civil War, the analysis demonstrates that state-sanctioned terror was a deliberate ideological directive. The episode investigates how Vladimir Lenin, Felix Dzerzhinsky, and the Cheka institutionalized extrajudicial violence, state security organs, and class-based liquidation to consolidate power. Understanding this operational blueprint is historically vital, as it established the institutional framework, legal precedents, and repressive methodologies that characterize socialist revolution to this very day.

Key Topics Covered

• Institutionalizing Extrajudicial Violence: The Bolshevik regime established the Cheka in December 1917 as an unchecked security apparatus designed specifically to conduct class warfare outside existing legal frameworks. By granting broad authority to figures like Felix Dzerzhinsky, the state deliberately eliminated concepts of individual guilt and judicial due process, replacing them with institutionalized summary executions, torture, and arbitrary tribunals to enforce absolute political submission.

• Ideological Targeting over Civil War Pragmatism: Rather than serving as a temporary military expedient dictated by civil conflict, early Soviet state violence operated primarily on ideological mandates targeting entire social categories. Historical documentation reveals that the machinery of repression—including class-based quotas, hostage-taking, and systematic executions—was conceptualized and deployed prior to major civil war engagements, establishing a primary doctrine of social engineering.

• The Pacification of Proletarian Resistance: Despite official state propaganda emphasizing the liberation of the working class, the repressive apparatus was directed against rural peasants and urban industrial workers who resisted state centralization. Through military punitive expeditions, the suppression of striking labor unions, and severe agrarian requisitions, the regime utilized mass starvation, village shelling, and collective punishment to destroy independent socio-economic institutions.

• Proto-Gulag Infrastructure and Systemic Incentives: The early Soviet state pioneered a vast network of penal camps, forced-labor battalions, and remote Arctic exile sites that served as the structural precursor to the modern Gulag system. This physical infrastructure relied on deliberate deprivation, disease, and high mortality rates, while internal administrative corruption, economic looting, and the institutional integration of criminal elements created self-sustaining incentives for perpetual state security expansion.

Closing Summary

Ultimately, the early Soviet period demonstrates that the deployment of state violence was not an accidental deviation from Marxist-Leninist theory, but its logical operational expression in power. By reducing individual human value to abstract classifications, the Bolshevik regime created a permanent machinery of repression that required continuous target identification to sustain its political legitimacy. The structural integration of secret police authority, extrajudicial execution, and forced-labor infrastructure during the Red Terror established the functional template for subsequent totalitarian expansions. Consequently, the initial years of Bolshevik governance remain historically significant as the foundational moment when state-directed terror was successfully transformed from revolutionary theory into an enduring instrument of authoritarian rule.

The Weekly Signals Brief gathers the most interesting articles that I have read over the past week. Each link below is a piece that piqued my interest (click the titles to go to the full articles).

The Weekly Signals Brief is part of a three-post weekly cadence—two original analyses and one curated intelligence sweep. Subscribe to receive it each Thursday.

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The normal Signals Briefs usually focus on the best articles I have read from other Substackers. This week’s Signals Brief will be a little different. In the world of military history content, I am but a small fish in a big pond, even here in the Substack world. There are many renowned experts here, including, but not limited to, , , and , and their works make my own amateur contributions look, well, amateur. This week, I wanted to add some video content, or at least links, to the Signals Brief. I happened upon these three particular channels a year or two ago, and was inspired by the way they present the history they cover. These guys are also giants. Please take a look at their channels. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.

Vlogging Through History

Chris Mowery

Having just wrapped up my review of his book, Trumbull County Boys, I wanted to take a moment to introduce you to Chris's exceptional digital work over on YouTube. If you have spent any time watching network television recently, you might have already spotted him on The History Channel during his appearances on The Unbelievable with Dan Aykroyd. What initially caught my attention about his main channel, Vlogging Through History, was actually video games. I had purchased Ultimate General: Civil War, and came across his channel before viewing his history content, from the Iron Harvest on the Western Front to Civil War battlefields. From my understanding, when global travel restrictions forced him to pivot from on-location vlogs to commentary on other history videos, his channel actually exploded, evolving into his renowned “Historian Reacts” videos.

It is incredibly easy for historical study to become clinical and detached when it is reduced to troop movements on a map or macro-level political statistics, but history truly breathes when it is anchored to individual human experiences. He does this, and does it well, in both his videos, and his Stories of the Great War and Stories of the Civil War podcasts, which is why I am recommending to you all today. That kind of focus on the human terrain forces us to look past simple timelines and appreciate the actual lived realities of the soldiers and citizens who navigated these eras.

For those of you looking to add a truly substantial channel to your regular rotation, this content is absolutely worth watching. The channel covers eras like the American Civil War and the First World War, yet the delivery always maintains a thoughtful, community-focused tone that skips the sensationalism common on the interwebs. Despite his expertise and renown, you never feel like you are being talked at. It is much more like having a solid conversation with a knowledgeable peer who respects the integrity of the craft. Give his videos a look when you get a chance and see how this human-centric perspective alters your view of the campaigns we love to study.

The History Underground

JD Huitt

After discovering Chris’s channel, I started getting recommendations for this one from JD Huitt, and I’m glad I clicked on those recommendations. JD is a high school social studies teacher who is also on the board of the Gettysburg Museum of History Foundation, and that dual perspective shapes everything he does. What I enjoy most about his channel is how he takes history out of the abstract and puts it directly into the physical world through his on-location battlefield visits and deep dives into historical artifacts. He approaches the past with an infectious enthusiasm that makes every stop feel like a genuine discovery.

There is an immense value in looking at history through the lens of tangible exploration and personal human stories. Everything changes when someone takes you right into the terrain, the old World War II bunkers, or the places where major decisions were made. The channel frequently reminds us that the past is not a distant, sterile concept, but something deeply connected to our present. That kind of lived empathy and dedication to preserving the physical record serves as a strong reminder of why we study these eras in the first place.

If you want to add a channel to your lineup that makes the past feel completely alive and accessible, this is one you should definitely check out. The content offers an incredible mix of immersive battlefield travel and fascinating artifact spotlights that will appeal to anyone who appreciates historical details. Take a look at the channel and see how the physical connection to these sites changes your perspective on the history we love to discuss.

History With Waffles

Charles Watts

From Chris and JD, a third recommendation popped up. What immediately drew me to History with Waffles is how the host, Charles Watts, a Navy veteran, takes a completely unvarnished, boots-on-the-ground approach to American Civil War battlefield tours. Instead of relying on slick studio production or broad generalizations, he takes you right out into the woodlots, fields, and ridgelines to trace troop movements exactly as they unfolded. What makes it even better is that the channel operates on a collaborative model, actively letting the audience suggest the next locations to explore, which turns the entire project into a shared journey through the terrain.

For anyone who studies military history, the immense value of this kind of tactical, physical exploration cannot be overstated. Viewing the elevation, the sightlines, and defilades that dictated the decisions made by commanders and infantrymen alike helps put things into perspective. By focusing heavily on the ground-level reality of these engagements, the content forces a confrontation with the brutal tactical realities faced by the men in the ranks. That commitment to terrain analysis and the deeper emotional narratives of the conflict provides the exact kind of perspective that I enjoy, and I think you will, too.

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When studying war, it is easy to be drawn toward the grand strategies of general staffs, the sweeping lines of maneuver, and the high political dramas that dictate the mobilization of entire armies. Yet, as any man who has ever carried a rifle knows, war is not experienced in the abstract of a map room. It is lived, suffered, and survived in a space no larger than a few hundred square yards, bounded by the immediate presence of one’s comrades. It is the company, the section, the platoon that forms the true atom of military effectiveness.

In Trumbull County Boys: Company H, 20th Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War, Chris Mowery has given us an extraordinary glimpse into this atomic structure of combat during the American Civil War. By tracing the complete wartime odyssey of a single company raised from the soil of Ohio’s Western Reserve, Mowery doesn’t just recount their engagements, but dissects the very chemistry of their cohesion. His core thesis is that ordinary neighbors, bound by kinship, a distinct regional culture, and an unyielding anti-slavery conviction, were forged by the fires of combat, camp life, and disease into the ultimate of camaraderie. In doing so, he has produced a work that belongs on the shelf alongside the finest literature of the American Civil War.

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The Western Reserve and a Call to Arms

Mowery begins his study not on the battlefield, but on the soil from which Company H grew. Following Abraham Lincoln’s call for 500,000 three-year volunteers after the disaster of First Bull Run in the summer of 1861, the response within Ohio’s Western Reserve was marked by patriotic fervor. Mowery identifies the source of this enthusiasm in the region’s distinct New England heritage. This was a landscape defined by an intense culture of education, deep-seated religious piety, and an uncompromising loyalty to one another, and the Union as a whole.

The men who gathered in Trumbull County in 1861 were not the rootless mercenaries or urban laborers who frequently populated the ranks of European armies of the period. They were farm boys, local craftsmen, and lifelong neighbors. They enlisted not merely as individuals, but as brothers, cousins, and friends. Mowery demonstrates with impressive clarity how this local identity was not shed when they donned the blue wool of the Union. The company was quite literally a community under arms, carrying the expectations, the morals, and the watchful eyes of Trumbull County across thousands of miles of hostile southern territory.

From Donelson to the Sea

The narrative arc of the book is sweeping, tracking the 20th Ohio through the vast, muddy, and often neglected geography of the Western Theater. Unlike the concentrated bloodletting of the Army of the Potomac in Virginia, the Army of the Tennessee operated on a canvas of immense distance and fluid maneuvers. Mowery marches Company H through the entire grim litany of these western campaigns, from the freezing, slippery trenches of Fort Donelson and the chaotic, terrifying bloodbath in the peach orchards of Shiloh, to the grueling, mud-soaked operations of the Vicksburg Campaign. The narrative lingers with a visceral focus on the desperate clashes at Raymond and Champion Hill, before carrying the reader into the protracted, industrial-scale siege warfare around Atlanta, the psychological warfare of Sherman’s March to the Sea, and the subsequent, final campaign through the Carolinas.

Yet, Mowery’s greatest achievement is his refusal to limit his narrative to the action of battle. He understands that for the soldier, war is largely composed of an endless, exhausting prose, interrupted only occasionally by the violent poetry of combat. Trumbull County Boys gives proper weight to the unglamorous realities of garrison duty, the constant labor of fortification, and the terrifying omnipresence of disease. Mowery reminds us that the camp kettle and the polluted well-water were far more lethal than Confederate musketry. The book also dives in to the specialized corners of Civil War soldiering. We are introduced to the dangerous and lonely world of scout and intelligence operations through figures like Lorain Ruggles, whose exploits read with the tension of a Jack Ryan thriller.

An Achievement

Mowery has accomplished a feat that eludes the vast majority of Civil War history. So much of American Civil War literature falls into one of two categories. It either covers the grand overview found in most textbooks, or it becomes romanticized. Mowery avoids both. His prose is vivid and deeply immersive without drifting into the romantic. With the grit of Eugene Sledge in With the Old Breed, he puts the reader directly into the mud with the infantrymen. As you read his chapters on the Vicksburg campaign, you can almost smell the sulfur of the black powder smoke hanging heavy in the humid air, hear the wet squish of brogans in the Mississippi clay, and feel the terrifying rumble of artillery.

This is not achieved solely through creative writing, but through a meticulous, almost forensic exploitation of primary sources. Mowery has combed through diaries, official records, pension files, and pages of the Western Reserve Chronicle to bring the reader onto the field of battle and into the camps alongside the men of Company H. An added layer of intimacy is derived from Mowery’s personal ancestral connection to the unit in Private Samuel Hughes, his fifth great-grandfather. Hughes signed on as a fifty-two-year-old man, well past the prime age for grueling infantry service, which the army fudged to forty-four to secure his enlistment. This remarkable personal link grounds Mowery’s narrative in real, individual stories, lending an undercurrent of deep empathy that runs through the text without ever compromising his objective historical analysis.

The Verdict

In the broader context of military literature, Trumbull County Boys occupies an underrepresented niche. While the popular imagination has been captured by the small-unit histories of the Second World War, most notably Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers or Alex Kershaw’s The Liberator, the American Civil War has lacked such granular, narrative-driven company studies. Mowery’s work fills this void. It is a book that demonstrates exactly how armies function at the point of impact, proving that the ultimate staying power of the volunteer soldier relies not on grand strategic comprehension, but on a deep loyalty to the man standing to his immediate left and right. For those interested in the American Civil War, and for anyone who wishes to understand the true, unvarnished nature of infantry combat in the nineteenth-century, Chris Mowery has delivered a masterful study. It is a work of deep respect, rigorous scholarship, and unforgettable narrative power, reminding us of the price paid among entire communities for the preservation of the American Republic. It is currently available on Amazon, with autographed hardcover editions available from Chris’s web page.

Trumbull County Boys on Amazon

Autographed Hardcover Edition

The Weekly Signals Brief gathers the most interesting articles that I have read over the past week. Each link below is a piece that piqued my interest (click the titles to go to the full articles).

The Weekly Signals Brief is part of a three-post weekly cadence—two original analyses and one curated intelligence sweep. Subscribe to receive it each Thursday.

Subscribe now

A Conversation about Ortiz’s War: The Allies’ Secret Weapon Against the Nazis in France

by Nicholas Reynolds and Katie S. Sanders for The Military Reading Room

Sometimes a piece of history finds you at just the right moment and completely resets your expectations of what a human being can achieve. I want to turn your attention to an interview with the authors of an upcoming biography about Peter Ortiz, a World War II Marine whose life reads like high stakes fiction. They tell you how this lone Marine bypassed the traditional Pacific theater to dive headfirst into the dangerous world of covert operations in occupied France. Ortiz’s incredible story contains stealing Gestapo cars to entering German social gatherings right under the enemy’s nose, makes it hard to believe his story is not already a household name.

Digging into this conversation made me reflect on how history chooses who we remember and how easily extraordinary lives can slip through the cracks of mainstream memory. The authors share fascinating insights into how military history often gets compartmentalized, meaning a Marine fighting alongside the French Resistance simply did not fit into the standard textbooks. It is a powerful reminder that our understanding of the past is shaped by the perspectives of those who record it, and there are still deeply moving human stories waiting to be uncovered. Reading about how Ortiz evolved from a reckless adventurer into a selfless leader who surrendered to save an entire village really underscores the true meaning of moral courage.

I highly recommend taking a few minutes to read this interview because it serves as a wonderful window into a truly remarkable American hero. I was fortunate enough to get an advanced copy of the full book from the authors and will be posting my review to share with you all the week it launches. For now, this dialogue is the perfect introduction to a forgotten chapter of wartime bravery.

Be sure to pre-order your copy of Ortiz’s War on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or wherever you get your books. Available 25 August!

Ep 12: Power, Authority, and Responsibility

by Andrew Young

Next, we come to this one by Andy Young of No Duff Dispatches, about the daily mechanics of leadership. What interested me was how he handled the sometimes uncomfortable reminder that power is an unavoidable reality. We love talking about empathy and collaboration, but we often shrink away from acknowledging the actual muscle of authority. This perspective caught my attention because it forces us to confront the fact that our words and even our silences carry an incredible weight the moment someone looks to us for guidance.

There is a fascinating point about how authority creates an invisible boundary where information gets softened and sanitized before it ever reaches the top. This matters because it means the higher you climb, the harder you have to work just to hear the plain truth.

I recommend finding some time to read this essay for yourself. It serves as a gut check for anyone running a team or aspiring to lead because it moves past superficial management advice. Even if you are not in management or other positions of power, you will come away from this piece with a much deeper appreciation for the ripples your daily actions create. Ultimately, it leaves you with a wonderful question about whether you carry your own influence lightly in your hands but heavily in your conscience.

Samurai Rule to Imperial Power - Meiji Japan

by Rebellio

Now I would like to turn your attention to this fascinating piece by Rebellio on the Meiji Restoration. He first focuses on the hidden economic ledger behind what textbooks always call a modernization miracle, and focuses on the calculated destruction of a seven-hundred-year-old feudal order in a single generation. Seeing that massive shift treated as a story of structural ruthlessness rather than magic was intriguing.

The author brings up some heavy implications about how Japan survived by doing the exact opposite of what modern economic orthodoxy preaches, using intense state direction to survive in a world run by predators. It made me think about the timeless, tragic irony where everyday farmers foot the bill for progress while politically connected insiders inherit the empires. These ideas matter because they show that back then, the only way to escape the jaws of colonization was to build an army and join the colonizers yourself.

I recommend this essay because it strips the pageantry away from history to see the actual mechanics of power. It moves past standard timelines to give you a genuine, gritty understanding of the trade-offs required to rebuild a civilization under pressure. Anyone who loves dissecting how institutions adapt and who carries the true burden of progress will enjoy this piece.

So You Want to Call a Ghost

by The Odd Historian

And, now, we come to this piece by The Odd Historian. What I found interesting was the core idea that humanity has never been content to simply wonder about the afterlife or alien worlds, because we have spent thousands of years trying to build actual hardware to reach them. It is highly compelling to look at our relationship with the unknown through the lens of engineering, tracing a direct line from ancient kings cracking turtle shells with hot metal, to Thomas Edison secretly designing a telephone to catch stray spirits. There is a great moral to the piece, too, as it shows that beneath all our ghost stories lies a very deep and very human urge to tinker, build, and troubleshoot our way across the ultimate frontier.

As I was reading about these strange inventions, I found myself thinking about the consistency of human nature across different eras, and how it reveals a peculiar kind of stubborn optimism that unifies us, showing that we rarely respond to the mysteries of the universe with quiet resignation. Instead, whether we are talking about an aeronautical engineer building a massive wooden dome in the Mojave Desert or an ancient court scribe logging divine correspondence, we treat the veil between worlds as just another technical barrier waiting to be broken. It seems our historical drive to invent things is completely inseparable from our need to feel connected to something larger than ourselves.

I highly recommend this one. I think you will come away with a great appreciation for the eccentric visionaries who refused to let the ultimate obstacle hinder their imagination, gaining an outlook on how deeply intertwined our technological progress is with our wildest mind’s-eye visions. It is a quick and thoughtful read that will make you smile while making you think about the bizarre projects hidden in our collective past. It leaves us with a lingering curiosity about whatever machine is being built right now by someone who is entirely certain that this time the device will actually work.

This episode of The Command Post Radio Room examines the December 1914 Battle of the Falkland Islands, analyzing it not merely as a dramatic British tactical victory, but as the decisive operational turning point that dismantled Germany’s surface commerce-raiding capabilities in the South Atlantic. The analysis explores how overwhelming material advantages in speed and gunnery interact with logistical constraints, environmental friction, and the human elements of command decision-making under stress. By investigating the strategic mobilization of British battlecruisers and the subsequent hunts for the scattered German light cruisers, this episode isolates the structural realities of early twentieth-century naval warfare, demonstrating how fuel endurance, communications, and intelligence networks ultimately dictated the limits of global sea power.

Key Topics Covered

• Logistical Constraints and Strategic Miscalculation: The analysis details how Vice Admiral Maximilian von Spee’s East Asia Squadron was critically undermined by supply isolation following the Battle of Coronel. Starved of reliable coaling alternatives and operating on faulty intelligence, the German command was lured into a fatal raid on the Port Stanley wireless station, demonstrating how absolute dependence on coal dictated operational vulnerability in coal-fired navies.

• Technical Superiority and Environmental Friction: The episode explores the tactical execution of the engagement, focusing on the deployment of First Sea Lord John Fisher's battlecruiser design concept. The narrative demonstrates that while the 12-inch ordnance of Invincible and Inflexible provided a crushing advantage in weight of metal, tactical execution was heavily impeded by self-blindness from funnel smoke and cordite gas, exposing severe gaps in pre-war long-range gunnery doctrine.

• The Mechanics of the Pursuit: The tactical breakdown isolates the separate, fragmented chases of the German light cruisers Leipzig and Nürnberg by British units including Glasgow, Cornwall, and Kent. This section analyzes the extreme physical demands of steam-era pursuits, highlighted by the crew of the Kent burning internal wooden fixtures to exceed her rated speed, as well as the lethal communication failures surrounding Leipzig’s burning battle ensign.

• Global Clearance and Institutional Legacy: The final segment evaluates the three-month hunt for the fugitive cruiser Dresden through the Chilean fjords and the simultaneous collapse of Germany's auxiliary cruiser infrastructure. The analysis explains how the systematic elimination of these raiders vindicated British strategic redeployment while leaving a complex institutional legacy regarding smoke mitigation, gunnery practice, and the friction of maritime command.

Closing Summary

The engagement at the Falkland Islands exposed the unyielding structural parameters governing early dreadnought-era warfare, where victory depended as much on ammunition reserves and coal endurance as it did on broadside weight. By synthesizing the strategic gamble of the Admiralty with the localized tactical decisions of squadron commanders, the episode illustrates that the transition to mechanized fleets did not decouple naval outcomes from the traditional vagaries of weather, intelligence failures, and human agency. The total destruction of Spee’s squadron restored British maritime prestige and secured Allied trade routes, providing historians with a definitive case study in how preparation, logistical sustainability, and technical asymmetry intersect to decide the fate of nations on distant oceans.

The Weekly Signals Brief gathers the most interesting articles that I have read over the past week. Each link below is a piece that piqued my interest (click the titles to go to the full articles).

The Weekly Signals Brief is part of a three-post weekly cadence—two original analyses and one curated intelligence sweep. Subscribe to receive it each Thursday.

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The WWII Recommendation Project: Stephen Harding recommends Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo

by Katie S. Sanders

I watched this interview with military historian Stephen Harding, conducted by Katie Sanders, about his new book on the FBI hunters who tracked down American traitors in Europe, and the central premise completely captivated me. We so often view that era through a lens of total national unity, so learning that a team of investigative agents had to imbed with combat units to find citizens actively collaborating with the Axis powers is a stunning revelation. It is a deeply compelling slice of history because it focuses on a side of the conflict we don’t often hear about. Beyond that little slice of espionage history, Harding also discusses a major classic by recommending Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, which happens to be one of my all-time favorite memoirs. It is a brilliant pairing because both narratives masterfully trace how massive global events reshape the lives of small groups of ordinary people caught in the storm.

Reading about these contrasting wartime experiences made me think about the messy reality of loyalty, courage, and how individuals respond under immense pressure. On one hand, you have the sobering stories of American journalists turning out Nazi propaganda or socialites mixing with senior Gestapo officials. On the other hand, Lawson's memoir captures the ultimate peak of American grit and sacrifice during the famous Doolittle Raid. Exploring these forces us to confront uncomfortable questions about the human condition while simultaneously celebrating the incredible resilience that defines our finest moments.

I encourage you to watch this interview if you love discovering the hidden human dramas that occur in the shadow of massive historical turning points. Hearing Harding talk about Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo gave me a whole new appreciation for the book, especially since he shares a lovely personal memory of meeting Ted Lawson himself as a teenager. It is a quick and thoughtful read that will leave you eager to pick up a classic memoir and look at the complexities of the Greatest Generation with a fresh perspective.

One last point, speaking of espionage; coming up on 25 August, Katie has co-authored a book with Marine Corps infantry officer and historian, Nicholas Reynolds. That book is Ortiz’s War: The Allies’ Secret Weapon Against the Nazis in France. I have been blessed to have been on the advanced copy list. I will be reading this, and publishing a review in the very near future to promote this book, which chronicles the mind-blowing journey of a rare Marine in the European Theater who became one of the most decorated heroes of the war. Peter (Pierre) Ortiz was a former French Foreign Legionnaire and OSS operative who parachuted behind enemy lines, donned his Marine uniform to defy the Gestapo, and led daring missions to supply the French resistance. It is also my understanding that Ortiz rescued Katie’s grandfather after his Liberator was downed on a mission over occupied Europe prior to D-Day. His story is an absolute masterclass in unconventional warfare and decisive leadership, and I am already planning to post a full review and recommendation the moment I finish reading it. Until then, I highly encourage you all to pre-order a copy on Amazon: Ortiz’s War. Not only would it go a long way to support an excellent author and journalist, but it would be supporting one of our very own here in the Substack history/military history community.

There are Holes in Your Conspiracy Theory

by Mark Lacy

I came across this piece by Mark Lacy about why so many modern conspiracy theories fall apart under the slightest scrutiny, and his angle on the subject completely hooked me. Instead of just mocking wild claims like the staged Moon landings, he focuses on the breakdown of what he calls fundamental competencies, like photo and media literacy. What immediately caught my attention was how he used basic science and the mechanics of photography, such as the behavior of sunlight without an atmosphere, to easily poke holes in common myths. It is a refreshing approach because it shows that a lot of what people think is a massive cover-up is actually just a failure to understand basic optics and daylight exposure.

This discussion made me think a lot about his explanation of how the definition of literacy has expanded far beyond just reading words on a page. In an era where artificial intelligence and advanced editing can distort reality, having a working knowledge of history, economics, and science is our best defense against being deceived. His article demonstrates that a solid education is not about memorizing facts for a test, but about building the critical thinking skills needed to navigate a noisy world safely. When people lack these baseline competencies, they become incredibly vulnerable to spreading misinformation, making bad financial decisions, or losing trust in genuine human achievements.

I recommend this article because it acts as a great mental tune-up for anyone who values clear thinking. Lacy shares some fantastic insights from his own career as an educator, and his closing reminder that we need to actively pursue knowledge throughout our entire lives is always good advice. It is a light but impactful read that will leave you feeling a bit sharper and far better equipped to separate genuine mysteries from poorly constructed fiction. After all, the best way to keep from making embarrassing assertions is to never stop learning.

Why I built The Lifelong Learning Compass System for self-education planning

by Sam Rinko

Speaking of never stopping education and book recommendations (are you noticing a theme here?), we now turn to a piece by Sam Rinko about his approach to structured self-education. Rinko shares the introduction of his new e-book, which examines the deep frustration that hits every independent learner who tries to study everything all at once, only to end up feeling spread thin across a dozen different subjects. What stuck was his argument that true intellectual growth requires us to consciously balance deep mastery in a specific craft with broad reading for pure enjoyment. It is a compelling perspective because it replaces the rigid, uninspiring reading lists of traditional schooling with a flexible framework built entirely around personal discipline and genuine curiosity.

This piece made me reflect on how the true challenge of adulthood is learning how to chart our own course once the guardrails of formal education are gone. When we are on our own, we have to become our own administrators, deciding which books merit our undivided attention and which ones we can simply skim. Rinko mentions historical figures like Teddy Roosevelt and Alexander Hamilton as inspirations, reminding us that the most decisive leaders and deepest thinkers were always remarkably broad in their reading habits. Looking into these ideas demonstrates that intentional self-education is not just an academic exercise, but a vital tool for sharpening our focus and building a full life. Eudaemonia, as the Greek philosophers called it.

I highly recommend spending some time with Sam’s work if you want to bring more purpose and structure to your own reading routine. It serves as a great reminder that having wide-ranging interests is a strength rather than a distraction, provided you have a strategy to navigate them. It is a thoughtful and refreshing perspective that will leave you eager to pick up your next physical book with a renewed sense of direction. True literacy takes a lifetime of deliberate effort to build, and this framework provides an excellent map for the journey. You can find his new e-book, The Lifelong Learning Compass, on his website: Knowledge Lust

What Are The Dog Days of Summer?

by Dennis Bodzash

I just finished reading a brief piece by Dennis Bodzash about the history behind the phrase we all use this time of year, and the cosmic origin of the expression was, admittedly, completely unknown to me before. We usually think of the dog days of summer as just a modern shorthand for the brutal months of July and August, without putting much thought into the idiom. I found it fascinating that the expression actually traces back to ancient Egypt and the astronomical alignment of the star Sirius, the Dog Star. It is a compelling bit of trivia because it reveals that our ancestors, who we know were tracking the skies to predict seasonal shifts, genuinely believing that the brilliant light of this distant star combined with the sun to create the peak heat of the year.

This reflection made me think about how deeply connected ancient civilizations were to the natural world and how they used mythology to make sense of the universe around them. Dennis explains that, for the Egyptians, the appearance of Sirius was a welcome signal for the annual flooding of the Nile, an event that brought fertile soil and life rather than destruction. It shows just how much our modern perspective has shifted, as we often view extreme summer heat as an inconvenience to be avoided with air conditioning rather than a vital marker of global cycles. There is a great lesson here about human observation, especially when you consider that the earth's natural wobble has actually shifted the alignment over the centuries, meaning the true astronomical dog days now occur much later than they did in antiquity.

You should definitely spend a few minutes noodling this article if you appreciate quick historical insights that change how you look at everyday language. It is a light, engaging read that ties astronomy, ancient agricultural survival, and classical history into a neat package. Reading it will give you a great story to share the next time someone complains about the July swelter. It is always rewarding to discover that a phrase we use casually at the backyard grill has roots that go back thousands of years to the pharaohs and the stars.

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This episode examines the early commerce-raiding operations and cruiser engagements of the First World War, focusing on the November 1914 Battle of Coronel—the Royal Navy’s first fleet defeat in over a century. It explores how pre-war financial compromises and structural imbalances left British foreign stations populated by obsolete vessels incapable of matching Vice Admiral Maximilian von Spee's modern East Asia Squadron. By analyzing the operational choices of Rear Admiral Christopher Cradock, the episode argues that Coronel demonstrated the lethal obsolescence of traditional offensive zeal when confronted with material and technological deficits in industrialized naval warfare. Ultimately, this disaster served as an institutional catalyst, forcing the Admiralty to abandon defensive fragmentation in favor of absolute force concentration.

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Key Topics Covered

• The Structural Foundations of Cruiser Obsolescence: The Anglo-German naval arms race forced the Admiralty to prioritize the dreadnought revolution, starving the conventional cruiser fleet of modernization funds. This structural deficit left regional commanders with old armored cruisers that lacked both the speed to pursue German raiders and the protection to survive tactical engagements.

• The Logistical Imperatives of Raider Warfare: Operating without secure overseas bases after the loss of Tsingtao, Vice Admiral von Spee transformed his squadron into a self-sustaining floating community reliant on captured prizes and neutral supply networks. This acute logistical strain dictated his strategic withdrawal to the South Atlantic, forcing a concentration of German power that directly threatened British maritime lifelines.

• The Operational and Psychological Dilemma of Command: Rear Admiral Cradock’s fatal decision to divide his forces off the Chilean coast was heavily influenced by institutional pressures and the recent court-martial of Admiral Troubridge. Caught between contradictory Admiralty directives and a naval culture that severely penalized caution, Cradock chose tactical mobility over the protection of a slow, compromised pre-dreadnought battleship.

• The Tactical Geometry of the Pacific Twilight: The engagement off Coronel illustrated how environmental factors and superior fire-control training amplify material disparities. By exploiting his squadron's superior speed, Spee dictated the range and timing of the battle, waiting until sunset to silhouette the British ships against the horizon while obscuring his own forces against the dark South American coastline.

Closing Summary

In conclusion, the Battle of Coronel underscores the uncompromising reality of modern industrialized naval warfare, where doctrinal aggression cannot compensate for severe technological and material imbalances. The destruction of Cradock’s squadron exposed the friction between outdated institutional expectations and the administrative realities of global trade defense. While Spee’s tactical victory highlighted exceptional German gunnery efficiency and operational cohesion, it remained a strategic dead-end due to Germany's lack of secure global infrastructure. The disaster ultimately forced a profound bureaucratic realignment in London, prompting the immediate deployment of modern battlecruisers to the South Atlantic. This rapid mobilization culminated in the annihilation of the German squadron at the Falkland Islands, establishing material dominance over historical reputation.

The Weekly Signals Brief gathers the most interesting articles that I have read over the past week. Each link below is a piece that piqued my interest (click the titles to go to the full articles).

The Weekly Signals Brief is part of a three-post weekly cadence—two original analyses and one curated intelligence sweep. Subscribe to receive it each Thursday.

Subscribe now

The Judge Who Vanished: How a Headline Outlived the Man

by Danamae

My wife, Danamae, wrote this fascinating piece about the 1930 disappearance of New York Judge Joseph Force Crater. While most people remember the story as a simple tale of a corrupt official who fled the law, she shifts the focus away from the typical true-crime speculation. Instead, the real hook is how the sensationalized press of the era essentially locked in a narrative of guilt without a single shred of definitive proof or a legal conviction. It caught my attention because it shows that our obsession with trial by media is not some new invention of the internet age.

Reading about how this man was permanently branded by the court of public opinion made me think deeply about the fragile nature of truth in our own lives. It is easy to look back at the era of ink and newsprint and think we are somehow more sophisticated now, but the underlying machinery of human nature and media incentives has not changed at all. Accusations still travel around the world before the nuance gets noodled out, and we routinely see reputations flattened into one-dimensional caricatures based on the loudest early headlines. This story is a powerful reminder that once a specific narrative hardens into collective memory, the actual facts or the later corrections rarely have the power to change anyone’s mind.

I highly recommend taking a few minutes to dive into this article because it offers far more than a vintage history lesson. It is a quick, sharp look at the psychology of public scandal that will make you pause and question how you consume the news on your own feed every single day. You will come away from it with a much healthier skepticism for the narratives that get pushed our way, especially when a story seems a little too perfectly tailored to feed our assumptions. Give it a look and see if it changes your perspective on how the stories we tell can outlive the actual truth.

So Anyway, That’s How I Died

by The Odd Historian

I read this highly entertaining piece by The Odd Historian that looks at the absolute absurdity of history through the lens of famous final words. We often like to imagine that the great figures of the past met their end with profound, carefully measured statements of dignity. This article completely shatters that illusion by focusing on the bizarre gap between how we think we will go out and the sudden reality of how it actually happens. What immediately caught my eye was the dark humor and irony found in these historical footnotes, especially when immense confidence met an immediate, unexpected twist of fate.

Reflecting on these final moments made me think about the inherent unpredictability of life and how little control we ultimately have over our own demise. As a student of history, I often look at major figures through the lens of their achievements or legacies, but this piece reminds us that they were entirely human, prone to irritation, stubbornness, and flawed judgment just like anyone else. When a decorated commander or a brilliant mind gets cut down in a flash of misplaced certainty, it humbles our perception of historical greatness. It forces us to realize that the line between a legendary exit and a tragic punchline is often incredibly thin, depending entirely on a single second of bad timing.

I highly recommend taking a few minutes to read through these historical vignettes because they offer a refreshing break from the usual heavy analysis. You will find plenty of dark comedy in these short accounts, but you will also get a great reminder not to take your own certainties too seriously. It is a quick and engaging read that balances a light tone with some genuinely striking historical reality. Give it a look and see if it makes you reconsider how you view the final acts of the people who shaped our world.

Reinhard Hardegen: The Soul of “Paukenschlag”

by ACTION STATIONS! and Xavier Tracol

I came across this article in ACTION STATIONS! about the naval exploits of Reinhard Hardegen, and it reminded me why that publication remains one of the absolute best outlets for military and naval history available today. I have always had a deep fascination with Hardegen’s story, which I first discovered years ago through Michael Gannon’s magnificent book, Operation Drumbeat. What immediately grabbed my attention in this piece was how it framed Hardegen not just as a standard combat ace, but as a complex leader operating under severe physical limitations from a prior aircraft crash. It is a compelling look at how sheer individual will and tactical competence can shape the opening salvos of a naval campaign, forcing a massive global power like the United States to quickly learn the brutal realities of anti-submarine warfare.

Reading about the early days of Operation Paukenschlag off the American coast really drives home the broader strategic implications of unreadiness and the terrifying speed of naval warfare. The article paints a vivid picture of merchant ships sailing fully illuminated against the New York skyline while a single Type IXB U-boat prowled the harbor practically unhindered. This stark reality serves as a timeless lesson about complacency and the danger of failing to adapt to a rapidly shifting threat environment. It makes you reflect on how quickly a nation can be humbled when its defensive infrastructure relies on peacetime routines instead of proactive strategy, turning an ocean expanse into a hunting ground through a simple lack of operational foresight.

You should read this essay because it delivers a masterclass in operational naval history without ever getting bogged down in dry technical data. It captures the tense atmosphere inside the conning tower of U-123 during those high-stakes patrols, from frantic escapes in shallow water to chaotic duels with armed merchantmen. You will walk away with an appreciation for the sheer chaos of the Atlantic theater and a deeper understanding of the individual men who drove these historic engagements. Dive into this one and see if it gives you a whole new perspective on the desperate struggle that took place just miles off our own shores.

Lies That Won’t Die: Part 1

by The History Stache

I read this one by The History Stache that tackles the stubborn persistence of historical myths, specifically focusing on the deeply rooted concept of Judeo-Bolshevism. The author does an incredible job of pulling back the curtain on how complex political upheavals get reduced to lazy, dangerous conspiracies when people trade rigorous research for convenient scapegoats. What immediately caught my eye was the sharp use of hard data to utterly dismantle this long-standing narrative. By highlighting the actual demographic reality of the early Bolshevik Party, the piece instantly shifts the conversation from emotionally charged rhetoric to undeniable historical evidence, proving how easily a small minority can be weaponized into a grand conspiracy by those looking to manufacture a villain.

Reflecting on this analysis made me think about the broader dangers of historical illiteracy and how easily old propaganda can be recycled to poison contemporary discourse. As someone deeply invested in tracking the impact of ideas and individual leadership on historical outcomes, I find it incredibly frustrating to see how often ideology is confused with ethnicity to serve a specific agenda. The lessons here extend far beyond the Russian Civil War or the rise of mid-century totalitarianism. They serve as a stark warning about the power of collective group slander and the absolute necessity of maintaining a commitment to objective truth, especially when evaluating turbulent historical periods where nuance is the first casualty.

I highly recommend spending some time with this article because it offers a vital masterclass in how to properly interrogate historical claims rather than blindly accepting inherited prejudices. You will gain a much clearer understanding of how weaponized narratives are constructed, from cherry-picking prominent individuals like Trotsky to completely ignoring the official, militantly atheistic stance of the movement itself. It is a timely and incredibly necessary read for anyone who values integrity in historical research and wants to develop a sharper eye for spotting ideological distortions in the modern world. Give it a look and see if it reinforces your appreciation for the cold, hard facts that keep our understanding of the past grounded in truth.