INTRODUCTION

IDENTITY SOCIALISM


The blue wave is African-American. It’s white, it’s Latino, it’s Asian, Pacific Islander. It is disabled. It is differently abled. It is LGBTQ.… It is comprised of those who are documented and undocumented.1

—STACEY ABRAMS, SPEECH AT DEMOCRATIC FUNDRAISER, 2018

Who are the socialists? Ever since its invention in the nineteenth century, socialism has been a coat of many colors. So what hue of socialism do our American socialists want? They insist that they are a new breed, with a new vision and a new agenda. While history and other countries may supply useful models, American socialists have introduced a unique element—identity politics—that Marx would have repudiated and other socialists assiduously avoided. Consequently, American socialism deserves its own name, and the name I propose is “identity socialism.”

To understand identity socialism, we must begin with socialism itself, socialism in its original or classic sense. Here the most helpful definition does not come from Marx but from economist Joseph Schumpeter. In his classic work Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter defined socialism as a system in which, “as a matter of principle, the economic affairs of society belong to the public and not to the private sphere.”2

This strikes me as an excellent definition because it creates a spectrum. At one end is the free market society, which generates wealth and earnings in the private sphere, requiring little more to function than laws protecting property rights and enforcing contracts. At the other end is the socialist society, in which the wealth and earnings of the citizens are considered a common pool to be harnessed by the state or the public sphere and dispersed according to the government’s objectives and priorities. Schumpeter’s definition allows us to locate every type of socialism along this spectrum.

It also has the virtue of contemporary relevance; it is embraced by virtually all self-described socialists. It is not as precise as classical and historical definitions, but those don’t seem to apply to our American situation. Consider Marx’s definition of socialism—not original with him—as worker ownership of the means of production. In practice, this would mean that in America the workers at Amazon, Apple, Verizon and General Motors fully own their respective companies.

I’m sure we can find some incorrigible Marxist theorists at Bowdoin and Berkeley who are enthusiastic about this sort of thing. The socialist activist Matt Bruenig has proposed gradual worker takeover of companies based on a 1970s Swedish proposal that the Swedes themselves abandoned because they recognized how it would debilitate their economy.3 While Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders seek to give workers a stake in the companies they work for, I don’t know any prominent socialist—certainly in Congress or running for president in the Democratic fold—who advocates a complete worker takeover of companies.

In fact, this type of socialism does not exist anywhere in the world. Never has.

Perhaps the most recognizable historical application of socialism is nationalization of industry. This understanding of socialism has the benefit of operational accuracy. Virtually all self-styled socialist societies have in fact nationalized industries. This is what professed socialist nations do. In full-scale socialist countries, the government owns or controls all major sectors of the economy, not only defense and infrastructure but also food and finance and even recreation. That was true of the old Soviet Union; it’s true of Cuba today where the government controls the sugarcane crop and even the vacation resorts.

In India, a partly socialist country, the government took over some key sectors, such as the airlines and banks and later the coal and oil industries, while leaving others in private hands. Even capitalist societies have socialist domains that form part of their so-called welfare states; thus in England, the government nationalized the healthcare sector in the 1940s and now operates it directly by managing hospitals, paying doctors, and deciding what services to provide and who should get them.

Yet nationalization too has fallen out of favor with today’s socialists. Under Obama, America saw an expansion of government power over healthcare, over banks, over car companies and over the energy sector. Yet this power is exercised through mandates, regulation and guarantees. Even under Obamacare we have private doctors, private hospitals and private insurance companies. The banking and finance industries remain private, though heavily regulated. The energy sector continues, in wildcatter fashion, to seek new places to drill, new markets to sell in and new ways to resist government intervention. While some Obama-era rules persist, the energy industry now has an ally in the Trump administration.

I have not been able to find a single socialist in America who advocates a government takeover of grocery stores, or retirement homes, or urgent care centers, even though all these industries provide the basics of food, shelter and medical care that are sometimes considered rights or entitlements. Nor can I find a single voice calling for the nationalization of, say, mail delivery or the phone companies or even space travel, even though all these sectors were once the exclusive province of the federal government. If someone were to insist today that the government, not the market, should nationalize computer companies and decide how many digital devices should be made next year, such a person would be considered an eccentric, a lunatic or a host on MSNBC.

What, then, is American socialism? Ask American socialists, and one word keeps coming up: democracy. “Stripped down to its essence, and returned to its roots,” says Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of the socialist magazine Jacobin, “socialism is an ideology of radical democracy.” Even in Europe today, this is the preferred understanding. Writing on the occasion of Fidel Castro’s death, Owen Jones put forward his definition: “That’s socialism: the democratization of every aspect of society.” And back in America, Ugo Okere, a self-styled democratic socialist who ran for Chicago City Council in 2019, insists that “democratic socialism … is about democratic control of every single facet of our life.”4

The constitution of the Democratic Socialists of America—a group that counts at least two Democratic congresswomen, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, as members—states, “We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality and non-oppressive relationships.” Taking up this mantra, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a close ally of the group, tweets that “we must build a democratic economy that works for all of us.” Ocasio-Cortez somewhat pithily terms it “putting democracy and society first.”5

Here we have the central moral claim of American socialism: collective ownership. At least in principle, nothing is yours, nothing is mine, everything is ours. The people—that is to say, the democratic majority—control everything. They have final say. They have the right, and the power, to treat the wealth and earnings of the country as a common pool to be tapped by the state and dispersed through the democratic process. The majority also has the right to other forms of control: for example, subsidizing some lifestyles over others, limiting or confiscating guns and restricting citizens from exercising “hate speech.”

Of course, the majority may not choose to exercise its full control. The majority might decide, for instance, that you should pay only a 50 or 70 or 90 percent marginal tax rate. This would, in the third case, allow you to keep 10 percent of your income on your last dollar earned. But the principle remains clear: even this residual portion is permitted to you at the behest of the majority. They could, if they wanted, take it and leave you with nothing.

I stress this because we should not miss the radicalism of the principle involved. As I will show in the next chapter, it seems to be a direct repudiation of the American founding. It transforms, if not overturns, the basic design of our constitutional system. If the socialist principle were adopted in this country, it would be a second American Revolution.

What redeems this vision, according to the socialists, is that it is an expression of the will of the people themselves. This freedom, however, is not exercised directly. What direct control do the people have over any socialist institution? What say do the British people have, for instance, over the National Health Service? What say do Americans have over the U.S. Post Office? None. The control is exercised indirectly, through elected representatives and the elaborate mechanism of government.

But, say the socialists, at least there is popular participation at some level. We can vote for our representatives, but we cannot vote for how private companies like Walmart or Amazon carry out their business. This is an issue I’ll return to later. Here I emphasize that socialists view their program as continuous with the revolutionary principle of the founding. In other words, the founders established democracy, and socialism extends democracy to the sphere of economics and to society more generally.

Thus, to those who object that socialism involves a restraint on economic freedom and on individual freedom in general—meaning you no longer have the right to keep what you earn, or do what you want, or even say what you think—the socialist answer is that, in restricting your freedom, socialism advances a different type of freedom: the freedom of a people to govern themselves through democratic self-rule.

TRUTH IN LABELING

Labeling the socialists is a tricky matter, because many socialists move, amoeba-like, to elude labels. Even though democratic socialism is the name of the game, not all who seem to be in the socialist camp, or pushing a socialist agenda, admit that they are socialists at all. Consider some influential Democrats. Bernie Sanders has long embraced the socialist label. Other high-profile congresswomen like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib also call themselves socialists. There is a defiant honesty in these admissions.

Yet the country’s leading Democrat, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, told a CNN town hall audience, “We’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is.” On another occasion, Pelosi added, “I do reject socialism as an economic system. If people have that view, that’s their view. That is not the view of the Democratic Party.”6

Pelosi has taken steps to distance the House Democrats from the “squad”—the socialist wing identified with Omar, Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez. She calls it a small faction with a big media presence. Yet this dismissal concedes that the socialists are the ones with the powerful media allies providing them with a megaphone to reach the American public. Pelosi also likens her differences with Ocasio-Cortez to differences among members of the same family. “Does your family always agree on everything?” she asked at a news conference when the issue of the squad came up.7 Pelosi’s point seems to be that while socialism has a place within the Democratic Party, it does not define the Democratic Party.

In this same vein, another aspiring presidential candidate, New Jersey senator Cory Booker, denies that he is a socialist. So do Kamala Harris, Democratic senator from California, and Elizabeth Warren, Democratic senator from Massachusetts. These disavowals seem odd because Booker’s, Harris’ and Warren’s policy positions seem remarkably close to those of Sanders. Even so, Warren insists that “I believe in capitalism,” and at one point she even said that she was “a capitalist to my bones.” At the same time, Warren stresses that she does not favor unfettered capitalism; rather, she prefers “markets with rules,” or, one may say, fettered capitalism.8

Meanwhile Joe Biden refuses to go near the socialist label, although he, like Warren and Pelosi, shares a good deal of Sanders’ agenda. One of the minor candidates for the Democratic nomination, John Hickenlooper, warned against his party marching behind a socialist banner—“That’s a tough hill to climb in Ohio, in Michigan, in North Carolina, in Pennsylvania, in Wisconsin”—although he too seemed to consider this prospect a problem of political marketing.9 Hickenlooper doesn’t repudiate socialist policies so much as he worries it will hurt Democrats politically if they allow those policies to be labeled as socialist.

My way of distinguishing these characters is to identify them with three broad types: the hard-core socialists, the quasi-socialists and the socialists lite. The hard-core group includes Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and Omar and their innumerable allies in academia, Hollywood and the media. Among quasi-socialists I count Warren, Beto O’Rourke, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and most of the other Democratic candidates, together with a large constellation of progressives who are largely on the socialist train but whose socialism doesn’t go all the way, and who shrink from the socialist label. Finally, there are Biden and Hickenlooper, and also Tulsi Gabbard, who are socialists lite because they remain circumspect about socialist ideology and would move slower than other Democrats toward socialism.

While I have tried above to distinguish Democrats one from another, notice that they are all pulling in the socialist direction. Even Biden. Even Gabbard. Even Hickenlooper. Not one of them is pulling in the free market direction. When I listen to the Democratic debates, I am struck by the omnipresence of the collectivist pronoun “we.” We must guarantee this, and we must ensure that. We are responsible for giving illegal immigrants free healthcare, or we are better than to allow young people to assume so much higher-education debt.

“We” in this context does not mean “us.” If it did, then we might consider voluntary and private-sector solutions to healthcare and education. This is not what Democrats have in mind at all. “We” for them means the royal “we,” which is to say, the whole society, acting through the coercive instrument of the federal government. Here is that familiar invocation of democracy to justify government confiscation of wealth or government seizure of some aspect of the free economy. Somewhat like the guy who contracted the tapeworm, the socialist’s favorite term is “we.”

Are there any prominent Democrats who resist this collectivist terminology? There are not. Some may term themselves progressive and others socialist, but they are all on the same side. One may say that progressivism differs from socialism as “push” differs from “shove.” The progressives and the socialists are largely unified behind a Democratic Party agenda that can, notwithstanding Nancy Pelosi’s caveat, accurately be termed socialist. It is socialist in that it involves expanded, if not total, government control of various sectors of economic and social life.

So what’s the agenda—the model blueprint—of this socialist camp? The socialists have put forward a flurry of proposals. First, an expansion of Obamacare to a national healthcare system with the government as the single payer. This is being packaged as Medicare for All. This idea is so expansive that all the Democratic candidates, when asked whether it would provide healthcare to illegal aliens, raised their hand to indicate that yes, it would.

Second, an expansion of minimum wage, unemployment insurance and the earned income tax credit to provide all Americans with a Universal Basic Income. Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Yang, one of the more obscure Democrats running for president, wants to give all adult Americans $1,000 a month to spend as they want. There are multiple universal income proposals floating around; some versions propose that all Americans would get a monthly check from the government, others limit the unrestricted money to Americans at or below a certain income level.

Third, free college. Things have moved well past Hillary Clinton’s program to make college more affordable. It started when Bernie Sanders offered his own largely free college scheme. Then Elizabeth Warren sought to top him by adding a plan for the federal government to forgive a large portion of student debt. Bernie struck back by unfurling a plan for free college plus a cancellation of all student debt. No Democrat has yet topped that by offering a plan to pay students to go to college.

Fourth, the Green New Deal. This one comes in apocalyptic packaging—we have a mere 12 years left to reverse global warming and save the planet! The alarmism is absolutely necessary, because otherwise the whole thing would seem like a joke. Even though fracking has proven critical to America’s energy independence, Elizabeth Warren pledges that, if elected, she will on day one sign an executive order banning fracking.10

Joe Biden goes further. “Look into my eyes,” he said recently. “I guarantee you, we are going to end fossil fuel.” Never to be outdone, Bernie Sanders says that America under his administration will stop using both coal and gasoline. If all of this seems like a comic version of can-you-top-this, the humorous element is heightened further by New York mayor Bill de Blasio’s recent boast: “We are going to introduce legislation to ban the glass and steel skyscrapers that have contributed so much to global warming. They have no place in our city or our Earth anymore.”11

New York without skyscrapers? Is this a serious proposal? It was widely reported on television, and I didn’t hear anyone laughing. I said to myself, “Can anyone talk New Yorkers into this? This would be like talking Venetians into getting rid of the canals, or Parisians into outlawing outdoor cafes.” I realized that there is only one way to get the job done: warn that if you don’t go along, the world will come to an end. And sure enough, de Blasio makes it sound like the world is coming to an end, and therefore his fellow New Yorkers must get behind his program to eliminate tall buildings of glass and steel.

The Green New Deal came to public attention when it was flashily proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and an environmental group calling itself the Sunrise Movement. Not surprisingly, it was presented as a “save the earth” imperative. “I currently live in a place called Boston,” says Sunrise cofounder Varshini Prakash, “and that’s a place where, if we don’t take action in the next couple of decades, will cease to exist and be lost to the seas forever.”

No more Boston! This comes on the heels of Ocasio-Cortez’s claim that Miami’s days are numbered: apparently that city is projected to be underwater in “a few years.” And Astra Taylor warns that the flooding of coastal cities and even inland towns and farms may force people to “escape to New Zealand, to the moon, or to Mars.”12

But here’s an anomaly. The Obamas recently acquired property in Martha’s Vineyard for nearly $12 million.13 Very interesting! The property, purchased from the owner of the Boston Celtics, doesn’t merely have ocean views; it sits right on the Atlantic Ocean. The Obamas know about the literature on disappearing coastlines. Obama himself has repeatedly warned of rising sea levels engulfing coastal properties. And presumably everyone who lives on the coasts has access to this literature and has heard these dire warnings.

So if the climate change literature was persuasive, one would expect the price of coastal properties worldwide to plummet. This is called “putting your money where your mouth is.” But, in fact, nothing like this has happened. This, by itself, suggests that sellers don’t believe the climate change hysteria. Buyers don’t believe it. Real estate agents don’t believe it. Nobody believes it, including the Obamas—or else they wouldn’t have put out $12 million for a rapidly depreciating asset.

Ostensibly with planetary preservation in mind, advocates of the Green New Deal unveiled a dizzying array of proposals, from eliminating fossil fuels to retrofitting every commercial building in the country to raising unemployment benefits and providing everyone with free daycare, free healthcare and a guaranteed family wage. “We’re almost out of time,” screeches Nathan Hultman in a Brookings Institution paper. The progressive economist Joseph Stiglitz insists that nothing less is required than “a mobilization of resources—the kind we saw during the New Deal and the Second World War.”14

Much of this seems suspiciously unrelated to climate change. Something else seems to be going on, and something else is. A conversation recently surfaced between Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti—who has since resigned—and the environmental policy advisers of Governor Jay Inslee of the state of Washington. In the meeting, Chakrabarti frankly admitted that from the beginning the Green New Deal was conceived with broader ends. “Do you think of it as a climate thing?” he chuckled. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”15 In short, climate change is the ruse to get the public to go for full socialism.

MONEY IN THE WRONG HANDS

When the socialist camp advances its proposals, the media Left—itself residing in the socialist camp—inevitably goes into an orgy of celebration, moderated only by some ceremonial fretting over how much all this is going to cost. Sure enough, the conservative groups say that socialism will bankrupt the country. Predictably, the progressive think tanks attach absurdly modest price tags, some even insisting that programs like Medicare for All will end up saving the taxpayer money.

I’ll get into some of this later, but addressing it now risks falling for the usual rhetorical ping-pong and missing the larger picture. The larger picture is that the socialist camp wants high, even confiscatory, income tax rates, complemented by additional levies on wealth and, in some cases, even compulsory worker control of large industries—which gets us closer to the classic, never-before-achieved Marxian conception of socialism.

The top marginal rate of federal income tax is currently 37 percent. Few of the leading Democrats have specified precisely how high they want this to go. Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has proposed a rate of 49.99 percent. Economist Joseph Stiglitz calls for a top rate of “around 70 percent.”16

Bernie Sanders never tires of reminding us that the top marginal rate in the late 1940s and early 1950s was over 90 percent, and those rates were accompanied by an era of postwar prosperity. True, but the rates themselves were the legacy of World War II; yet Sanders implies that we need something like those rates now, even though there is no world war going on.

It was a Democrat, John F. Kennedy, who lowered the top marginal rate to 70 percent, and a former Democrat, Ronald Reagan, who brought it down to 28 percent. The rate has crept up slowly to the high thirties since then. What term other than “confiscatory” can we use to describe a tax hike from a 37 percent marginal rate to a rate of 50, 70 or 90 percent?

Moreover, Democrats in the socialist camp also want wealth taxes. Some, like Buttigieg, say they support the concept but won’t say how much. Elizabeth Warren wants wealthy families with a net worth exceeding $50 million to pay 2 percent of that every year to the government. The rate would rise to 6 percent for billionaire households. This “structural change,” as Warren calls it, is necessary to get us out of America’s second Gilded Age.17

Warren and Sanders—once again, separated by labels but working in ideological tandem—have both proposed further schemes for worker ownership of large businesses. Sanders would require large companies to contribute a portion of their stocks to a fund controlled by employees that would pay regular dividends to workers. The idea is to give employees gradual but increasing control of their companies.

Warren seeks an Accountable Capitalism Act that would require the government to charter all companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue. The charter would be revoked if the company doesn’t follow government rules. The government would require companies to include the interests of workers, customers, communities and society as a whole before making major decisions. The government would oversee this process, using the charter as a leash. As part of this deal, workers would elect at least 40 percent of board directors of all companies.18

There’s a revealing mentality here. Part of it is the entitlement mentality, evident in Ocasio-Cortez’s recent claim that “You have a right to a job, a right to an education, a right to a dignified home, a right to a dignified retirement, and a right to healthcare.”19 Since modern socialism travels behind the banner of such entitlements—a right to this, that and the other—it’s worth exploring in this book where such rights come from and what obligations they impose on other people who are compelled to deliver on these putative rights.

Something of the same mentality is evident in Bill de Blasio’s recent declaration: “There’s the truth, brothers and sisters, there’s plenty of money in the world. Plenty of money in this city. It’s just in the wrong hands.” For anyone tempted to dismiss this as idle rhetoric, de Blasio framed it in the context of a plan to seize the buildings of private landlords who mistreated tenants by making their homes “unlivable.” De Blasio pledged, “We will seize the buildings, and we will put them in the hands of a community nonprofit that will treat tenants with the respect they deserve.”

Earlier in 2016, de Blasio spelled out the logic of democratic socialism: “I think people all over this city, of every background, would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be. Look, if I had my druthers, the city government would determine every single plot of land, how development should proceed. And there would be very stringent requirements around income levels and rents.”20

Set aside de Blasio’s flagrant disregard for property rights and his arrogant presumption that the city—he!—should oversee all property development like a landed monarch. Let’s focus on his earlier statement in the context of three New Yorkers: the doorman at a hotel making $30,000 a year, an editor at a publishing house making $85,000 and a hedge fund executive making $750,000. De Blasio is not paying any of these people; who is he to say who is making too much or too little?

One cannot expect de Blasio’s socialist allies at The New York Times to ask him such a question; they wouldn’t want to go there. The blithering nitwits at the New York Daily News are not likely to think of it. But if someone bothered to ask, de Blasio’s answer would likely be: “I get to decide because I am the elected mayor. The people of New York deputized me to make such decisions. In my view, the whole income pie in the city is best allocated not by employers and boards of directors—not even by shareholders who bear the cost of these decisions—but by me.”

That’s democratic socialism in a nutshell! The “people” decide nothing. De Blasio decides.

What we see, unmistakably, in these remarks by Ocasio-Cortez and de Blasio is a deep, almost pathological hostility to free market capitalism. This is the other side of the socialist coin—blissful talk about rights and entitlements and solemn paeans to the public good are inevitably accompanied by vicious assaults on capitalism.

Of course we hear the usual kvetching about how capitalism produces scandalous inequality, how it is motivated by selfishness and greed and how it rewards corpulent, do-nothing bosses while cheating the workers who actually make the products out of their due share of the rewards and profits. Between the 1950s and 1970s, the familiar leftist narrative goes, the tide of capitalism lifted all boats, producing relatively broadly distributed benefits. But since then, capitalism has allocated virtually all its rewards to the very rich, the “top 1 percent.” Consequently, we must cure this market failure and adopt socialist schemes to redistribute the rewards. I’ll address all these issues in subsequent chapters.

Here, however, I want to focus on an issue that has gained an urgent contemporary relevance. Writing three-quarters of a century ago, Schumpeter predicted that capitalism would sow the seeds of its own destruction, and socialism then becomes its “heir apparent.”21 Schumpeter meant that capitalism undermines traditional institutions and fosters values hostile and antithetical to capitalism. If Schumpeter were alive today, he might look at all those Bernie’s boys, waking up at 10:00 a.m. in their moms’ basements and putting on their protester costumes to go fight capitalism, as a vindication of his insight.

But Schumpeter might also prove right in a sense he didn’t intend. We can examine this through a statement made by Ocasio-Cortez at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. There the talk was about how rapid developments in technology and automation, including artificial intelligence, might eliminate 800 million jobs worldwide and tens of millions in the United States.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised the subject of “the end of work.” That happens to be the title of a book written by the socialist-leaning activist Jeremy Rifkin. Rifkin recognized of course that automation is nothing new. Automation on farms displaced millions of farmers. But, Rifkin pointed out, the displaced people moved to the manufacturing sector. When technology invaded that sector, there were still jobs to be had in the service sector. But what happens, Rifkin asked, when technology fully occupies the service sector? A recent article in The Atlantic makes the case that that day is not far off.22

Here’s how Ocasio-Cortez responded to the prospect of the widespread obsolescence of human jobs: “We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work. We should not feel nervous about the tollbooth collector not having to collect tolls. We should be excited by that.” Our only reason to fear, she argued, is because we think we need jobs to survive. But we don’t. “We should be working the least amount we’ve ever worked, if we were paid based on how much wealth we’re producing, but we’re not. We’re paid by how little we’re desperate enough to accept. And the rest is skimmed off and given to a billionaire.”23

I’ll take the liberty of putting AOC’s argument a little differently, which is to say, more coherently. Her point is that we now live in a society where only a handful of creative people are needed to create mass comfort and mass prosperity. AOC doesn’t like to emphasize the creative elite, so she pretends that “we”—the masses themselves—have produced the wealth and the billionaires did nothing more than appropriate it. We’ll explore later whether this is actually so.

But the conclusion remains the same. Most people, in AOC’s vision, no longer need to work. Or, to put it differently, they don’t need to work as producers. They merely need to enjoy their lives, which is to say, to work only as consumers. Their “work” is to shop around and buy things. In doing so, they generate valuable information for markets and for the creative elite to know what to produce. And in exchange for this “work,” AOC believes that people should be entitled to free healthcare, free education, a guaranteed monthly income and a comfortable provision for old age.

I want to emphasize that this isn’t some exhilarating—or depressing—futuristic fantasy. Millions of Americans live like this now. Their only “work” is consumption. They rely on others, and on the state, to provide for them. And even more remarkable, they are convinced that this is a good and right way for them to live. America owes them a living.

Here is the way that I think Schumpeter’s prophecy might come true. Capitalism might sow the seeds of its undoing, not by creating scarcity or inequality but by creating mass abundance that eliminates the need for most people to work. They can now rely on socialist measures—on the government—to redistribute the nation’s wealth and guarantee them a secure and comfortable life. In that case, not Marx but rather the greatest of today’s technologists and entrepreneurs will have fostered the end of American capitalism and the rise of American socialism.

STRANGERS IN OUR OWN LAND

So far we have focused on the economic agenda of the socialists, yet any conversation with them, or visit to a socialist conference, shows that the vision of these activists is not merely economic. They are equally energized, if not more so, by cultural issues. This is especially true of socialists on campus. They are not in the workforce, so economic issues are distant to them. They are young and healthy—what do they care about retirement plans or Medicare for All? But they do care about their moral self-image, and they also care about their race, their gender and their sex organs.

These are the identity socialists. It’s a little hard to figure them out because some of them are genuinely wacky. Asked by an interviewer for the website PragerU to define her brand of socialism, a female student said it would really hard to do because socialism had so many dimensions. For example, “You’re socializing with me right now. Socialism!” If this seems laughable, it’s not. A Gallup survey, released in May 2019, found that 6 percent of respondents defined socialism as “being social, social media, talking to people.”24

A writer for New York magazine attended a socialist confab called Red Party, hosted by the left-wing publishing house Verso, in a handsome loft overlooking the East River. There the young socialists talked about sex, white privilege and open borders. Mindy Isser, a young activist, whined that “socialist men don’t date socialist women and it really bothers me.” Another activist warned that socialists need better slogans. “The beauty of ABOLISH ICE,” he said, was its sheer simplicity. It mirrored right-wing slogans. “BUILD THE WALL. LOCK HER UP. They’re all perfect for shouting.”25

Jarrett Stepman, a writer for the Daily Signal who attended the Socialism 2019 conference, sponsored by Jacobin and Democratic Socialists of America, captured the mood of identity socialism nicely. He went expecting to hear mostly about topics like minimum wage, student debt and the Green New Deal. Instead he found, somewhat to his puzzlement, that “transgenderism, gender nonconformity and abolishing traditional family structures were huge issues.”

Typical of the speakers was Corrie Westing, a self-described “queer socialist feminist activist” based in Chicago who works as a “home birth midwife.” Westing insisted that the traditional family is an instrument of capitalist oppression, and the transgender movement is critical to achieving “reproductive justice.” Economics, she said, is based on “heteronormativity,” and pregnancy is a tool of oppression to remove women from the workforce, thus reinforcing a “gender binary.”

The solution, she said, was to reorganize society around what she termed “queer social reproduction.” The traditional family would have to go. No more parents having and raising their own children. Rather, women and men would seek out one or more partners, of whatever gender, with whom to raise children, and then they might seek out a third party to carry the child. The third party, after giving birth, might or might not be involved in raising the child. Drawing on a term coined by the feminist writer Sophie Lewis, Westing called this “open-sourced, fully collaborative gestation.”26

Yes, there’s a weirdo element here, but the identity socialists are quite serious about seeking a transformation not merely of economic norms but of cultural and moral norms as well. Moreover, leading Democrats are on board with some or much of this agenda. Recently Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced his support for a bill sponsored by Cory Booker and Democratic representative Sheila Jackson Lee to study the issue of reparations for slavery. And Peter Hasson of the Daily Caller points out that all the leading Democrats—Biden, Warren, Harris, Sanders, Booker and Buttigieg—support the Equality Act that would prohibit discrimination based on “gender identity” and thus mandate that biological males who considered themselves females could not be denied participation in women’s sports.27

Marx, I’m sure, would be baffled by all this. Certainly Marx also despised the traditional family and expected it to disappear under communism. Yet Marx insisted that society is divided into just two classes, workers and capitalists—in other words, the exploited and the exploiters. The working class, Marx wrote in his Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” represents “the dissolution of all classes.” It is “a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but a wrong in general.”28

Marx considered other forms of social division—white versus black, men versus women—to be sneaky techniques on the part of the capitalist class to divide and rule the working class. Marx would have opposed reparations because he held that feudal and capitalist arrangements that included slavery were part of the necessary forward march of history. In other words, without feudalism we would not have capitalism, and even capitalism is a required stage on the road to socialism. For Marx, to attempt to repudiate or to “correct for” these inevitabilities is to misunderstand the inexorable development of human history.

Bernie Sanders seems to be the only leading Democrat still holding to this tradition. He indignantly rejects the idea that because he is a white male he should step aside and make room for women and minority candidates. “We’ve got to look at candidates,” he told Vermont Public Radio, “not by the color of their skin, not by their sexual orientation or their gender and not by their age.” Rather, people should be judged “based on their abilities, based on what they stand for.”29

Whoa! This is now heretical talk in the Democratic Party. Bernie, moreover, is skeptical of illegal immigration because he believes, as Marx would, that it is a tool of employers to drive down the wages of native workers. While identity socialists have put Bernie on the defensive for these positions and forced him to retreat in his antipathy to illegal immigration, he has not fully backed down.

In this respect, however, Sanders is not the mainstream—not even among card-carrying socialists. American socialism is now imbued with issues of “intersectionality,” a term that refers to the crosscurrents of race, gender, sexual orientation and class. What Marx considered a divisive ploy is now the avowed strategy of progressives and Democrats: to turn black and brown against white, female against male, gay and lesbian and transgender people against “heteronormativity.” In 2020, Democrats intend to use these multiple lines of division to create the majority coalition that will implement their new form of identity socialism across the economic and cultural landscape.

This broader agenda for identity socialism includes getting rid of ICE and flooding the country with illegals. They want sanctuary cities that shelter illegals and prevent the enforcement of the law. They seek to force citizens to pay for the healthcare of illegals. They support firing and ostracizing Americans for criticizing “Islamic terrorism” and for other forms of alleged Islamophobia. They revel in the digital censorship of views they regard as promoting “hate.” They back lawsuits forcing churches to shut down for refusing to hold a gay wedding, as well as those compelling women in salons to shave the testicles of biological men who claim to be women.

What’s the goal here? It goes beyond economic confiscation; I believe it is nothing less than to make traditional Americans feel like foreigners in their own country. The identity socialists seek an overturning of norms—a redefinition of the American dream—that would convert foreigners into natives, and natives into foreigners. An old Marxist concept, “alienation,” is quite appropriate here. They seek to create a new form of belonging and, in the process, a way to alienate us from our own society.

This is why, for many progressives and socialists, an illegal American is now the model American. Part of their plan is to change the national DNA, and to do this they intend to import illegals who bring—in a quite literal sense—new DNA. They seek a “remaking of America,” to use Obama’s phrase, that would make the country unrecognizable to those who created it and to many of us who love it and call it our own.

And what do these socialists intend to do with dissenters like me who object to their transformation? Some of them, at least, intend to “reeducate us” if necessary, to put us into gulags. I’m not kidding. Project Veritas secretly recorded two Bernie Sanders staffers saying precisely this. “There’s a reason Joseph Stalin had gulags, right?” said Kyle Jurek. Even uncooperative liberals should be forced to undergo this reeducation, Jurek said. Such extremes were required, he added, “because we’re going to have to teach you not to be a f*ck*ng Nazi.” A second Sanders field staffer, Martin Weissgerber, said he’s ready to “guillotine the rich” and “send Republicans to reeducation camps.”30

For me, I confess, a socialist transformation of America along these lines would be traumatic. I left India and came here to “become American,” and I have. Becoming American is not an easy process for an outsider; it is like walking on a tightrope between two buildings, and for much of that time you feel a kind of vertigo. You are in no-man’s land, belonging neither here nor there. But eventually I arrived at my destination, which is to say, I assimilated. Since then I have felt at home in America, and I have inevitably become isolated from India; in other words, I am now a foreigner in my native country.

But now these people want to destroy my American dream and make me an alien in my adopted country. I, for one, am not going to stand for it.

THE SOCIALIST TEMPTATION

My agenda for this book is twofold: first, to make the moral argument against identity socialism, and second, to make the moral argument for free market capitalism. I will debunk the socialist dream and affirm the American dream. These arguments are not a simple matter of ideological refutation. The refutation is dependent on directly confronting the root question: Who owns what? What are we entitled to? I’ll explore these questions toward the middle of the book, after I’ve laid the necessary groundwork.

My refutation also requires me to expose the socialist temptation. After all, if socialism is such a bad idea, why do so many people go for it? Why do powerful figures in culture and politics so aggressively promote it? The socialist temptation is widely described by conservatives as the temptation to live off “free stuff.” But this is not so—the temptation is actually more complex. It is the temptation to annihilate one’s conscience by feeling justified in living off other people’s work.

Think about it this way: most people would not dream of going into their neighbor’s house, eating from his refrigerator and helping themselves to his wallet. It’s just not right. So the only way to involve honest people in a theft scheme is to convince them that their neighbors have been stealing from them. Their neighbor has filled his refrigerator with provisions that belong to you. His wallet is filled with your money. Therefore, you should feel perfectly entitled to raid his refrigerator and his wallet because, in doing so, you are merely recovering stolen goods.

This is the apple that the serpent is offering to Adam and Eve. This is the false narrative that needs to be deconstructed and exposed.

The second part of the socialist temptation involves the serpents—I mean the socialists—themselves. This is a class of people that has no idea how to create wealth. Pretty much the only thing they know how to create is words. This does not mean, however, that they are untalented. They are actually very talented, just not at making iPhones or warehouse delivery systems or getting oil out of the ground. Resentful of those who can do these things, the socialists proclaim them “selfish” and “greedy” and imply that such vices are responsible for their notable prosperity and success.

What the socialist class is good at, however, is creating envy and entitlement. This is their peculiar talent. And even though they won’t admit it, they are engaged in a desperate battle for social control. What they seek is a displacement of power in society in which they, not entrepreneurs, direct the great apparatus of American industry, indeed direct the lives of the people themselves.

They cannot, of course, admit this publicly, or even to themselves. If they admitted it, they would have to concede that the very labels that they apply to the entrepreneurs—namely greed and selfishness—would more accurately apply to them. So they insist that society is in need of a neutral, administrative class. Someone to run things fairly, to iron out the inequities, to take care of the needy, to check and penalize the bad guys, to regulate “hate” and “intolerance,” to always keep the public good in mind.

They then anoint themselves to carry out this necessary task. They profess to undertake it on behalf of the people, in the name of the people, yet the people are scarcely involved at all. The people aren’t even persuaded. They have to be cajoled, propagandized and bullied. This is the first task of aspiring socialists. This is what they are doing now. And they do it ruthlessly, relentlessly, keeping their eye on the prize they are seeking. They want to be Plato’s guardians, the “people of gold” who rule by right over the lower orders, the “people of silver” and the “people of bronze.”

Their entitlement and their virtue are, in reality, ignoble lies. In fact, they are motivated by the same ambition and desire for power and gain as anyone else. They love money and sex and all forms of perversion as much as anyone else, and they are just as reluctant as the next guy to share what they have with others. In fact, they are the least compassionate, most uncharitable group in society. This, then, is the temptation of the socialists: they are tempted to annihilate their consciences to conceal the ugly truth about themselves.

One fact they cannot face is that the only difference between them and capitalist entrepreneurs is that they seek unearned power, power without genuine accountability. As I will show, entrepreneurs are genuinely accountable to their customers, who exercise direct democracy: they vote every day with their purchases for the products that entrepreneurs supply. The socialists wish to answer to nobody. They are driven, as Nietzsche pointed out more than a century ago, by a nasty, vengeful “will to power.”

Will capitalism undo itself and submit to the governance of this vile kakistocracy? It’s a genuine danger. But I’ll show that this fate is not inevitable. The socialists are, in the end, a corrupt gang. They conceal their crookedness behind a mask of virtue, and they appeal to crooked people by giving them reasons to steal from others. Thievery masked in this way can thrive for a while, but thievery unmasked cannot. Once the socialist morality play is exposed as a theft scheme, as I’ll do in this book, they are done.

We need to reaffirm capitalism, not back away from it. Capitalism is what has brought us to where we are, and it’s only just getting started. So what about “the end of work”? Capitalism can even meet this, its final challenge. Even in sowing the winds of “creative destruction” (Schumpeter’s term), which displaces old industries and old institutions, the free market can and will create new opportunities for humans to thrive. It can help us rise above the muck and mire of routine labor to the exhilarating creativity and rewarding new forms of labor uniquely suited to human intelligence and aspiration, and to which man was from the beginning called by his Creator.



1

THE INVENTION OF INVENTION



AMERICA AND THE IDEAL OF THE SELF-MADE MAN

Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.1

—WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN

America was founded and built on principles antithetical to socialism. Strangely enough, two people who recognized this were Marx and Engels. Marx called America a “bourgeois society” and later noted that capitalism had developed in America “more rapidly and more shamelessly than in any other country.” Engels stressed the distinctiveness of America, and while he insisted that “there cannot be any doubt” of the ultimate triumph of the working class, he admitted “the peculiar difficulties for a steady development of a workers party” in the United States.2 Only their doctrinaire faith in the inevitability of socialism convinced Marx and Engels that socialism would come to America at all.

In 1906 the economist Werner Sombart published a book titled Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? Sombart knew that socialism had been all the rage in Europe. There were socialist movements, socialist parties, ultimately socialist governments. In other words, socialism was in the political mainstream. But not in America. Sure, America had socialists, and soon it would have a socialist candidate, Eugene Debs, running for president. Yet Sombart recognized, as Marx and Engels did, that socialism would have trouble gaining an enduring foothold in mainstream American politics. Sombart’s explanation for this was that the American workingman has it too good. His stomach is too full for him to become a socialist agitator. In America, in Sombart’s words, “all socialist utopias have come to grief on roast beef and apple pie.”3

Another man who seems convinced that socialism isn’t coming to America is Donald Trump. In his 2019 State of the Union, Trump resoundingly affirmed that “America will never be a socialist country.” He echoed the same theme in his 2020 address. It has now become a standard line at his rallies, guaranteed to evoke whoops and cheers. For Trump—unlike for Marx, Engels and Sombart—this is not a matter of sociological analysis or historical prophecy. Trump’s point is that he and other Americans must fight hard to prevent socialism from being established here.

It’s obvious what Trump is against, but what is he actually for? And the same question can be asked more broadly of the Trump movement, of the Republican Party and of conservatives. What do conservatives want to conserve? We can answer this question by examining Trump’s official 2016 campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.” Or his unofficial 2020 campaign theme, “Keep America Great.” For me, all of this raises a prior question: How did America become great in the first place? It would seem that this quality—the spirit that built America—is what we are trying to conserve and revive.

As an immigrant, I became interested early on in this question of the building of America. When I arrived in Arizona in 1978 as an exchange student from India, I was simply stunned by the opulence of ordinary American life. Not the life of the “rich and famous” but the lives of everyday Americans. Like those of my host parents: a small-town postmaster and his wife; the local pastor and his wife; a rancher and his second wife; two public schoolteachers. These were ordinary people, yet they lived so well—a second car, a kitchen “island,” a nice backyard—and they were all such characters who lived unique and interesting lives.

Shortly after I was settled in the small town of Patagonia, Arizona, just sixty miles from the Mexican border, my host family proposed to take me on a sightseeing trip. “We’ll take you to the Grand Canyon,” they said. “We’ll take you to Tombstone, the site of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.” “Oh wow,” I said. “That sounds fantastic.” But what I really had in mind was a different kind of sightseeing.

I wanted to see the local supermarket where I could survey the endless varieties of cheese and ice cream, or the hardware store where I could check out the countless contraptions, or a local farm where I could watch one guy on a tractor plow and fertilize hundreds of acres, or the mall in Tucson where I could ride the escalators and investigate innumerable objects of wizardry, from electric typewriters to reclining furniture to microwave ovens to toys that sang and talked.

Years later, I marveled at one of the most ingenious contraptions of all time: roll-on luggage. Such an obvious idea! Take mankind’s oldest invention, the wheel, and attach four of them to a suitcase. Voilà! Yet people had been traveling for eons before anyone did that. Think of all that huffing and puffing, all those pulled shoulders and bad backs! Our lives are so much easier now because of roll-on luggage. Whoever thought of it is a genius. I wish I could meet the guy and thank him, but I don’t even know his name.

Most Americans take the basic amenities of modern life for granted. What’s the big deal? Growing up in a country that lacked all these basic things, however, I have a special appreciation for them. I know what life is like without them. I also know that not so long ago, Americans didn’t have them either. In fact, America was one of the poor, backward countries. It was still largely rural and agricultural at the time of its founding.

Then, in relatively short order, America became the most productive and prosperous nation in the world. America doubled its gross domestic output in the middle of the nineteenth century, then doubled it again in the late nineteenth century. One by one, the United States surpassed all the advanced European countries, even overtaking its mother country England at the dawn of the twentieth century. That has been termed “the American century”—the century of unquestioned American dominance—and America remains to this day the world’s most innovative and prosperous society.

So how did all this happen? This is the transformation that has produced not only American prosperity but also the contemporary American lifestyle, the American dream, the American experience of being the architect of your own destiny. So who made the goose that lays the golden eggs? I mean this quite literally: Who are the people who did this? What are their names? I’m interested in these people, and I’m also interested in the creation of a system that produces one marvel after another, giving each generation opportunities and experiences that even the wealthiest members of earlier generations completely lacked.

That’s the topic of this chapter. I want to show the secret of American success, how America became rich, not just through inventing this or that but by creating a mechanism for innovation and growth, “the invention of invention.” This is the genius of the American Revolution and of the American founding. It also creates a paradox for conservatism, a term ordinarily identified with stasis and stability. But not in America. In America, conservatism means conserving the principles of the American Revolution. This means that we are heirs to a revolutionary tradition, and rebellion, change and making our own destiny are all in our political DNA.

Implied here, and in the founding, is something more than a framework for prosperity and success. The founding also created the framework for a new type of human being, what both Abraham Lincoln and the runaway slave Frederick Douglass would later term “the self-made man.” We will meet some self-made men in this chapter. Thus, America is responsible for the greatest of all inventions, one that makes Americans recognizably distinct everywhere in the world, and one that gives a thrilling immediacy to each American life: the idea of self-invention.

HISTORY FROM BELOW

The roots of American prosperity and of American self-invention could scarcely be more important, yet oddly enough they are completely ignored in the curriculums and classrooms of American schools and in the media. I learned little or nothing about them at Dartmouth, and now, a generation later, young people are comparably clueless about them. Why is this the case? Because the history that I learned then, and they learn now, is progressive history, history from the progressive viewpoint. This viewpoint is striking both for what it includes and for what it leaves out.

What it includes is what progressives call “history from below.” Typical of this approach is Howard Zinn’s classic work, A People’s History of the United States. Zinn purports to show the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, the Mexican War from the angle of deserting servicemen, the rise of industrialism as experienced by women working in the Lowell textile mills, the two world wars as seen by socialists and pacifists and postwar America’s role in the world as seen by peons in Latin America.4

Essentially Zinn uses the victim’s perspective to generate an anti-American narrative, one that is not confined to the academic sphere but has now spread virus-like through the culture. Precisely that same animus is behind New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s recent assertion: “We’re not going to make America great again, it was never that great.” Along the same lines, Eric Holder asked, “When did you think America was great?” That remembered past, he said, “never in fact existed.”5

This is the voice not just of socialism but of identity socialism. This is the perspective I was inundated with in college, and which is the dominant narrative taught to young people today. This victimology has now reached the point of parody. How can Einstein’s equations be viewed from the perspective of the illiterate? How did Patton’s military conquests appear from the viewpoint of a crow? My reaction then, as now, to this whole approach of identity politics was, to some degree, one of indifference. The founders, as we’ll see, shared my lack of concern.

At first, this may seem like gross insensitivity, but it’s not. Mexican migrants and Arawaks don’t spend their time thinking about me; why should I spend my time thinking about them? Several years ago in a debate on race, my faculty opponent said to me, “Why are you so obsessed with African Americans?” To which I replied, “Obsessed? I don’t particularly care about African Americans. I’m not African American. So my concern is only to the extent that I affirm the universality of the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Beyond that, I have no interest.”

The truth is that no ethnic group—not even the groups that Zinn invokes—cares very much about any other ethnic group. Nor do immigrants, in general, care about the perspective of indigenous minorities. They are part of a familiar imploring mass that we’re all too familiar with in our native countries. We’re far more interested in the America that we left our countries to become part of. We’re moderately interested in how American prosperity became more widely distributed, since that expansion now includes us, but we’re much more interested in how it came about in the first instance.

Here progressive history lapses into silence. This is the great subject it leaves out. Progressive history tends to take America’s wealth for granted and merely focuses on the issues of who has it, who doesn’t and how lavishly it is spent. Typical of this approach is historian Charles Beard, whose famous work is called An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. As part of his investigation, he might be expected to examine whether the founders were responsible for creating a system to produce the great explosion of wealth that took America from the back ranks to the most affluent society in the world.

Beard deftly skips over this. He doesn’t affirm it or deny it; he merely ignores it. Instead, he generates an “economic biography” of the estimated 160,000 men involved in the framing and adoption of the Constitution. He seeks to portray them as members of a wealthy merchant class of moneylenders, traders and financiers. According to Beard, they were merely trying, through the new constitutional system they set up, to protect their class interests.

Beard tries to show that the delegates to the constitutional convention voted as economic interest groups. This guy was a whiskey producer, and that guy was a grain producer, and that’s why they wanted protective tariffs! Beard’s theories were resoundingly affirmed by other progressives who shared his ideological hostility to the founders. As a consequence, they held sway for a generation without anyone actually checking his facts.

Eventually historians like Forrest McDonald and Robert Brown did, and they found that Beard had spun his data. Convention delegates did not, in fact, vote as interest groups. There were merchants on one side of the debate who favored tariffs, but there were others in the same trades on the other side who opposed tariffs. Beard’s quasi-Marxist theory of the founding as an institutional manifestation of class oppression doesn’t hold up.6 Yet progressive historians still promulgate Beard’s discredited theories, losing no opportunity to portray the founders as dirty, rotten scoundrels.

Another classic of progressive scholarship is Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class, first published in 1899, which deplores the excesses of the Gilded Age. Veblen focuses specifically on how American tycoons lavishly display their wealth. He devotes considerable attention to their coddled pets, cap-and-gown graduations, card games and walking sticks, all indications of their vacuous idleness. He surveys their ostentatious mansions, making particular note of the curved driveways. Why would anyone want a curved driveway? Veblen’s theory is that it exists to demonstrate wasted space. Curved driveways show that their owners are so rich that they can afford to waste their own land by having driveways meander pointlessly before reaching the main house.7

All of this is clever enough—what savory intellectual hors d’oeuvres for the faculty cocktail circuit!—but I read Veblen wondering how those guys got those mansions. What did they do that Veblen didn’t know how to do, since Veblen never had a mansion?

I’ve read a lot about those robber barons and about the vulgarity of the Gilded Age. Here is Jack Schwartz in the Daily Beast: “The Gilded Age produced an unbridled capitalism and a culture of excess that led to financial panics impoverishing millions at the hands of corporate profiteers professing the sanctity of property.”8 Here are all the familiar clichés reflecting the sour taste of progressive prejudice: “unbridled capitalism,” “culture of excess,” “sanctity of property.” Each of those terms warrants critical unpacking.

We can pick up the same conventional wisdom from a recent article in the American Interest that says, “The Gilded Age economy was lopsided and dysfunctional, producing untenable extremes of vulgar opulence and abject poverty.”9 Once again, questions abound: Lopsided how? Dysfunctional in what way? Untenable for whom? Vulgar by whose standard? Abject compared to what? Surely not to how those poor people lived before, or else they would not have moved from the rural areas to the cities.

In the same vein, the Encyclopedia Britannica characterizes the Gilded Age as one of “gross materialism” dominated by “greedy industrialists.” Not a word about what those greedy industrialists did. What we do learn is that Mark Twain coined the term, and that the period produced “the novel as a vehicle of social protest, a trend that grew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the works of the muckrakers and culminated in the proletarian novelists.”10 Yes, this is progressive history in which the inevitable upward path is to the progressives themselves!

In 1984, Orwell warns of the socialist project of cleansing history where “the past is erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”11 That has almost happened in this case. Fortunately, we can still excavate the truths that lie buried under the progressive palimpsest in order to save our history and, in the end, ourselves.

THE GENIUS AND THE BUM

It is tempting to begin our examination of the American founding with documents, but I’d like to begin with the founders, and one in particular, Benjamin Franklin. The founders, let’s recall, were not career politicians or mere “men of letters.” They were scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs and builders—in other words, practical men of varied talents.

President John F. Kennedy captured the spirit of the founders when he said at a dinner honoring Nobel Prize winners, “This is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”12 George Washington was a farmer, whiskey entrepreneur, military leader and statesman. Franklin was a publisher, inventor, diplomat, philanthropist and author.

Through the founding, I believe, the founders sought to perpetuate Renaissance men like themselves. This is the grain of truth in Beard’s indictment. The founders weren’t advancing their economic interest, but they were, in a broad sense, replicating their own human types. That’s why Franklin’s Autobiography is so interesting. It captures a distinctive American mold that I’ll call “capitalist man.”

The first thing that strikes me on reading the book is the sheer variety and breadth of Franklin’s pursuits. He edits and prints a newspaper, publishes Poor Richard’s Almanack, organizes a fire company and later a defensive militia, establishes the American Philosophical Society, helps finance a hospital, founds a subscription library, invents a new type of stove, conducts electrical experiments and promotes the paving and lighting of Philadelphia’s streets. This is not an exhaustive list! And while Franklin is not averse to serving his nation as a diplomat in France, he expends virtually all his energies in the private, entrepreneurial and civic sectors.

Second, Franklin is endlessly curious. His is not the idle form of curiosity that proverbially killed the cat. Rather, it is a practical curiosity. He sees construction workers with axes building a fort and times them to see how long it takes. He inquires into the art by which native Indians conceal their fires. He investigates the cultural and matrimonial practices of the Moravians. He conducts experiments and publishes his observations on electricity, and when a French pedant challenges him—partly based on incredulity that such work could come from America—Franklin refuses to reply, insisting that his time is better engaged “in making new Experiments, than in Disputing about those already made.”

Third, Franklin is eloquent on self-fashioning and self-improvement. He doesn’t take himself the way he is; he seeks to make himself into what he aspires to be. He admits that he has been profligate in his youth, granting his participation in “that hard-to-be-govern’d Passion of Youth,” which I take to be cavorting with prostitutes. Franklin terms this one of his “great Errata,” but not entirely because of moral compunction; in retrospect he regrets the expense, distraction from worthier pursuits and risks to his health.

Franklin makes a list of what he terms the seven virtues—temperance, frugality, sincerity and so on—and then enumerates them in a single column down the left-hand side of a page. At the top he lists the seven days of the week. His plan is to take the first virtue and practice it for one week straight. No Errata! He notes his progress each day with a check mark. His idea is that if he can practice a virtue for seven days, he will have internalized it. It will become part of his character. The following week he can take up the second virtue, and in this way he continues for seven weeks in a remarkable—and amusingly systematic—project of character improvement.

One final note about Franklin: he seems just as concerned with the appearance of virtue as with virtue itself. For instance, once he becomes prosperous through his business ventures, he is eager to show that he is still industrious and frugal. He took care, he says, “not only to be in Reality industrious and frugal, but to avoid all Appearances of the Contrary.” So to demonstrate he was not above menial labor, Franklin “sometimes brought home the Paper purchas’d at the Stores, thro’ the Streets on a Wheelbarrow.”13

Franklin’s Autobiography is itself a bit of a wheelbarrow ride. The book camouflages as much as it reveals. Still, it reveals plenty. One cannot help chuckling at Franklin, this picaresque fellow who always puts himself first but also never forgets to look out for others. I admire him for his creative genius and his perseverance, and I like him, despite his energetic self-promotion. He knows he’s vain, so he tries to make himself less vain while admitting to some vainness about his advances in modesty. He’s an American original and yet an American type; I have met a number of Americans who remind me of Franklin, and I intend the comparison as a compliment.

Yet the Franklin type is hardly the norm in America, and now we find other, less impressive types. Today in this country we have “capitalist man,” but we also have “socialist man,” and my case study here is Bernie Sanders. I recognize, of course, that Sanders and Franklin are separated by a chasm of two centuries. Even so, it’s worth contrasting them because the Sanders type is recognizable all over the world—I had a close relative in India who was just like Sanders—while the Franklin type is uniquely and recognizably American.

Sanders too is the product of self-fashioning. Sanders, like Franklin, has made something of himself. But what has he made? Sanders is now well into his seventies, yet until he became a politician, well into his middle age, he never had a steady job. His main output to that point was a child produced out of wedlock with a woman named Susan Campbell Mott. In college he was a poor student, by his own admission, majoring in a topic that would become his career: political science. Most of his time seems to have been spent with the Young People’s Socialist League.

His young life seems to have been devoted to agitating for two causes: socialism and sexual freedom. In his college years and in his twenties, he emphasized the latter. He editorialized about how sexual repression leads to cancer—“The manner in which you bring up your daughter with regard to sexual attitudes may very well determine whether or not she will develop breast cancer”—an idiotic theory he seems to have adopted from the crackpot theorist Wilhelm Reich. (Reich was imprisoned for selling bogus sexual treatments, and died in prison in 1957.)

Sanders also published rape fantasies—“A woman enjoys intercourse with her man as she fantasizes being raped by 3 men simultaneously”—that he now tries to explain away on the grounds that he was merely sounding an early version of Fifty Shades of Grey and seeking to explore and challenge conventional sex roles in America.

Occasionally he pivoted from sexual to social activism, as he does in his essay “The Revolution is Life Versus Death,” in which he envisioned jobs in a capitalist system this way: “The years come and go. Suicide, nervous breakdown, cancer, sexual deadness, heart attack, alcoholism, senility at 50. Slow death, fast death. DEATH.” There is more, quite a bit more, in this vein; basically, it’s the kind of talk that one would expect to hear from a crank.

To foment an actual revolution, Sanders teamed up with a fellow socialist named Peter Diamondstone. They became friends because they “knew all the same Communists,” according to Diamondstone. “When I was on the road,” Diamondstone says, “I would stop at his house and I’d sleep downstairs, and we’d yell at each other all night long, and sometime around 3 o’clock in the morning, we’d say, ‘We gotta stop this,’ so we could get some sleep. Five minutes later we’d be yelling at each other again.”

In 1971 Sanders showed up at a commune in Vermont called Myrtle Farm, a hippie outfit dedicated to self-sufficient living. Yet Bernie showed no interest in doing any kind of labor there. While others toiled to grow food and do repairs, Bernie engaged in what commune members held to be “endless political discussion.” Recognizing this, the commune expelled Bernie for laziness, for failing to contribute to sustaining the commune. I’m trying to imagine what Ben Franklin would have made of a guy like Sanders.

Although Sanders for many years listed his occupation as “journalist,” he published only a few articles over that entire period, mostly in small-circulation socialist and hippie rags that paid little or nothing. So there is no way he could have supported himself through writing. He seems to have done so through collecting unemployment from the government and leeching off his friends. One of them, an artist who lived next door, said Sanders “would take extension cords and run down to the basement and plug them into the landlord’s outlet.”

When Sanders was evicted from his house on Maple Street in Burlington for nonpayment of rent, he moved in with a friend, Richard Sugarman, and slept on his couch. This seems to have lasted for several months. Sanders’ main contribution to his roommate during this period seems to have been late-night diatribes about how to save society from the evils of capitalism. Since Sanders didn’t work, he could hardly claim that capitalism was exploiting him. Evidently, he was convinced that it was exploiting others, and his mission was to seek justice for them while finally getting a nice regular salary for himself.

After multiple failed tries, Sanders finally won elective office, as mayor of Burlington, and now he is a U.S. senator, drawing a handsome salary from the government. Public service has been good to him; Sanders now owns three homes, making him a multimillionaire.14

Unlike Franklin, Sanders does not focus on self-improvement. In fact, Sanders is basically the same person in his seventies that he was in his twenties. He seems at ease with his lack of curiosity, his unproductivity, his self-serving sycophancy and his parasitism on the largesse of capitalism to pay his salary through taxpayer outlays. Socialist man, you see, is dependent on capitalist man to keep him in business. Franklin types don’t need Bernie types, but Bernie types need Franklin types. Yet Bernie shows no appreciation. He’s hostile and indignant toward the Franklins of today, even while shamelessly leeching off them. Bernie, like Franklin, may indeed have invented himself. If he ever tells us this, we should accept it as an apology.

PASSIONS AND INTERESTS

Democratic socialists like Sanders are not fans of the American founding. That’s because they recognize the founding as a free market revolution. Consequently, it was antisocialist even though the term “socialist” had not been coined yet. Moreover—and this is a more controversial point—it was also antidemocratic. By this I mean that the founding rejected democracy in its original meaning and adopted a specialized form of democracy called a “constitutional republic.” The constitutional republic erected numerous barriers to direct popular rule.

The most influential socialist publication in America is Jacobin. Get it? These guys want to identify with the French Revolution, not the American, and they don’t hesitate to identify with the most radical faction of that revolution—the one associated with the guillotine and the Terror. The socialist historian Eric Foner urges Bernie Sanders not to look so much to Europe as to “the rich tradition of American radicalism.” But this tradition as Foner sees it begins with Thomas Paine—an Englishman sympathetic to the American Revolution—and continues with the abolitionists, Frederick Douglass, and on to Eugene Debs and Franklin Roosevelt.15

Even here Foner is stretching things: Paine was a champion of free markets and property rights, and Douglass championed the “self-made man” who is anathema to modern socialism. What I want to stress here, however, is that Foner makes no identification with the American founders. As far as he’s concerned, radicalism in America means moving to amend, transform and perhaps even overturn the principles of the founding.

We find the same antipathy to the founding in socialist Astra Taylor’s recent paean to socialism in The New Republic. Taylor identifies the American founding with classical liberalism, but this liberalism, she says, with its staggered elections, free press, religious liberty, judicial review, separation of powers and federalism, is “not strong enough to survive, let alone constrain concentrated economic power.” Liberalism, in her view, has been vanquished by capitalism, specifically by “unaccountable plutocrats who have rigged the rules of the game.” Some form of socialism that overturns the structure of this constitutional republic is the only remedy.16

In October 2019, Harper’s sponsored a symposium on the Constitution, raising the question, “Has America’s founding document become the nation’s undoing?” The progressive legal scholars who made up the panel mostly answered yes. For Rosa Brooks, relying on the Constitution today was akin to a neurosurgeon using the world’s oldest neurosurgery guide, “or if NASA used the world’s oldest astronomical chart.” Mary Anne Franks averred, “We have not, as a county, fully confronted the fraudulent nature of the Constitution and the founding itself.” And Louis Michael Seidman said that courts and law schools should dispense with the Constitution. “We need to forget about constitutionalism entirely.”17

Let’s see what the socialists find so troubling about America’s founding principles and how they have played out in this country. I’ll begin with Abraham Lincoln’s 1859 lecture on discoveries and inventions, in which Lincoln attributed much of the economic success of his country to Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution. Among the few express powers granted to Congress, the framers charged it “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

This, let us note, is the only time the word “right” appears in the original Constitution, prior to the later addition of the Bill of Rights. Before the advent of the patent system, Lincoln says, “any man might instantly use what another had invented.” So the patent system “secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention, and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things.”18

This is Lincoln doing his best Adam Smith imitation, which is significant because Adam Smith is a “visible hand” behind the American founding. The founders, we know, were familiar with his work. Franklin knew Smith personally, having initially met him through their mutual friend, the philosopher David Hume. Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, the same year that the Declaration of Independence was adopted.

Lincoln takes up Smith’s point that entrepreneurs and inventors need to be motivated—in economic terms, they need incentives—and moreover they need a regime dedicated to the protection of patents, property rights and contracts. Historically wealth was mainly land, but Lincoln now identifies wealth with new ideas and new human production. Underlying Lincoln’s philosophy is the message that “the hand that makes the corn has the right to put the corn into its own mouth”—in other words, that people have the right to keep the fruit of their labor.

We can situate Lincoln’s argument better by putting it in the context of Albert Hirschman’s important book The Passions and the Interests. Hirschman argues that from ancient times, wealth was considered a zero-sum game. If you have more, I have less. And the only way for me to get more is to get some of yours. Hirschman reminds me of when I’d go to elementary school with ten marbles in my pocket. I realized that the only way for me to get more marbles was to take some from others. There was no other way to increase my collection of marbles.

Wealth in ancient times, Hirschman contends, was obtained mainly by seizure. Conquest, theft and looting were the preferred mechanisms for acquisition. Recall the famous story of Alexander the Great, who summoned a pirate and asked him, “What is your idea of raiding other ships and seizing their possessions?” The pirate replied, “The same idea as yours, except that you do it with a larger fleet and are therefore called a great emperor, while I do it with my small boat and am therefore called a pirate.”

Hirschman identifies the powerful human impulse to raid and seize and conquer with the passions. For centuries, he says, humans turned to religious and moral exhortation to temper and regulate the passions, but with limited success. One may say that the lower side of human nature tends to predominate. So the early modern philosophers came up with a rival human proclivity that they considered just as powerful. This was “interest”—specifically interest in capitalist accumulation.

Passion is sudden, tempestuous, violent; interest is steady, calm, rational. The desire to accumulate, Adam Smith tells us, “though calm and dispassionate, comes with us from the womb, and never leaves us till we go into the grave.”19 So in the long run, interest can overcome passion. Why go on a raiding spree when you can make steady improvements to your house and yard? Moreover, through a system built on interest, we discover that wealth is not zero-sum after all. It does not have to be seized; it can be created. Who wants to take someone else’s marbles by force when there is a way of trading for them, or better still, making marbles of your own?

This is what Lincoln was getting at in his praise of the patent laws. Notice that for Lincoln, as for Adam Smith, self-interest is not a bad thing. His concern is not to suppress it but to motivate it. More self-interest means more wealth legitimately gained; it also means less passion and less seizure by unlawful force. Hirschman sums up his argument with a telling quotation from Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws: “It is fortunate for men to be in a situation in which, though their passions may prompt them to be wicked, they have nevertheless an interest in not being so.”20

These are the principles that shaped the American Revolution—or perhaps I should say both American revolutions, the Revolution of 1776 and the Revolution of 1789. The first was the War of Independence, provoked by the Declaration of Independence; the second was the framing and adoption of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Most people focus on the second and ignore the first, even though the first laid the foundation for and actually provides valuable clues about what motivated the second.

HANDS IN OUR POCKETS

What motivated the first American Revolution? George Washington put it well in 1774: “Great Britain hath no more right to put their hands into my pocket without my consent than I have to put my hands into yours for money.” This helps us to understand that the right to property was the first principle at issue in the American Revolution. “Can there be any liberty,” wrote James Otis in 1763, “where property is taken without consent?”21

Consider how John Dickinson, in an influential pamphlet, responded to the Stamp Act, which aimed at bringing in revenue to the British Treasury. “If the Parliament succeeds in this attempt, other statutes will impose other duties … and thus the Parliament will levy upon us such sums of money as they choose to take, without any other limitation than their pleasure.”22 Strikingly, American resistance here is not over the amount of taxation, which was quite modest, but the process by which the British Parliament imposed these taxes.

The British repealed the tax, but then in the Declaratory Act of 1766 they rejected the American insistence on “no taxation without representation.” England retained full power to make law for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” Then came the Townshend Acts imposing import duties on essential goods, including paper, glass, lead and tea. Some of these were also repealed, leaving in place—to italicize a point of privilege—the tax on tea. All these measures were, in Jefferson’s words, “a series of oppressions” that “plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.”23

This theme of asserting economic freedom from government confiscation continues to undergird the Constitution, as explicated in its magnificent apologia, The Federalist. “The first object of government,” Madison writes in the tenth book of The Federalist, is “the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property.” Note that this is not one of the goals of the new regime created by the Constitution; it is the primary goal.

Hamilton in the twelfth book of The Federalist continues this theme. He notes that all statesmen now recognize “a prosperous commerce” to be “a primary object of their political cares.” Consequently, “by multiplying the means of gratification,” the new government can ensure that “the assiduous merchant, the laborious husbandman, the active mechanic, and the industrious manufacturer … all orders of men, look forward with eager expectation, and growing alacrity, to this pleasing reward of their toils.”24

Even though he was Hamilton’s political rival, Jefferson agreed with Hamilton that government should not seek to redistribute the gains of private enterprise. “To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.”25

For the founders, this principle was about more than assuring growth and prosperity. It was about the cultivation of human personality itself. This point was made much later, by the psychologist William James, but in a way that the founders would have affirmed. “It is clear,” James wrote, “that between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine, the line is difficult to draw.… Our fame, our children, the work of our hands may be as dear to us as our bodies are, and arouse the same feelings and the same acts of reprisal if attacked.… A man’s self is the sum total of all that he can call his … his reputation and work, his land and houses and yacht and bank account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax or prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down.”26

The importance of this passage is its emphasis that economic rights are no less fundamental than civil rights and civil liberties. It makes no sense to say that I own my religious and political opinions and have a right to them but I don’t own my labor and have a right to the fruits of it. As James explains, we are equally attached to what we possess as to who we are—in fact, we define ourselves in extended form to include the home we have built, the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, the books we have written and the things we have made. James’ point resonates with me as it would have with the American founders; I know I feel this way.

So the founding is a socialist nightmare. It’s a nightmare because it affirms as the possession of citizens what the socialists would like to take away through the agency of government. In order to take away your wealth and earnings and possessions, the socialists must insist that those things don’t really belong to you. You somehow stole or appropriated them. You seized for yourself what belongs to the commonweal of society. A majority of citizens, agitating through the democratic process, have every right to seize some or all of what belongs to you to cover the wants or demands or “entitlements” of others.

For socialists, this is what democracy means: the collective right to appropriate. What gives this right the force of justice, and of law, is that it is supposedly an expression of the “will of the people.” But the founders did not agree with this. They did not agree that there is some “will of the people” that can directly govern a society. And even if there were, they rejected the premise that the people have the right to gang up in a majority and seize the property and earnings of their fellow citizens whose only crime is to be in the political minority.

TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY

Let’s begin by considering the very definition of democracy: rule by the demos, or the people. Yet the people don’t directly rule in any existing society. Even in ancient Athens, where there was direct democracy, only a few thousand people actually showed up at the agora to vote and decide issues. This is the same democracy that routinely violated life and liberty, as evidenced by its practice of mass-scale slavery and its decision to put Socrates to death just for philosophizing on the streets of Athens.

For Madison, writing in the tenth book of The Federalist, democracy is mob rule. “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.”27 Ancient Athens, for all its glory, fits this tragic description.

The central principle of democracy is majority rule. We’re so accustomed to hearing progressives and democratic socialists sing the praises of majority rule that it’s worth pondering why majorities have a right to rule in the first place. Consider this: Should the citizens of a large country dominate those of a smaller country because they are more numerous? Certainly not. Why then should the majority of a society hold sway over the whole society, making decisions not merely for itself but also for the minority?

Let’s say the majority makes rules that discriminate in its favor and against minorities. Should this be allowed? Let’s say we have a society of 100 people, and 51 of them decide to confiscate the property or earnings of the other 49 for their own use. Or to force the other 49 to build their houses in a certain way, or to pay for the majority’s children to attend college, or to purchase healthcare at prices set by the majority itself. How about if the majority passes a law to seize the lawfully acquired wealth of a single citizen—say Bill Gates? Are these things just or permissible?

If these seem like fanciful examples, they are not. I get them from the proposals of progressives and democratic socialists who never run short of ideas for appropriating other people’s wealth or controlling their lives. Moreover, there is historical precedent for majorities acting oppressively. Lincoln confronted precisely such a doctrine from his Democratic rival Stephen A. Douglas. Douglas advocated “popular sovereignty,” a system in which majority rule in each state and territory would decide on allowing or forbidding slavery.

For Lincoln, this was morally unacceptable. First, a majority cannot “choose” to enslave others, because this is a choice exercised in order to deny choice to someone else. No majority, Lincoln insisted, has the right to steal the bread that is made by the sweat of other men. In Lincoln’s words, popular sovereignty amounted to saying that if one man chooses to enslave another, no third man is allowed to object. Thus majority rule in this context amounted to a legitimation of tyranny.

Lincoln understood the socialist impulse and rejected it. Responding to both slavery apologists and socialists who condemned what they called capitalist wage slavery, Lincoln said, “The man who labored for another last year, this year labors for himself, and next year he will hire others to labor for him.” Cautioning against socialist wealth confiscation schemes, Lincoln told a delegation of workingmen during the Civil War, “Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him labor diligently and build one of his own.”28

Jefferson and Madison would have agreed: even democratic majorities have no business seizing the property or earnings of citizens. “An elective despotism,” Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, “was not the government we fought for.” In his famous discussion of faction, Madison identified two types: minority factions and majority factions. How do they arise? “The most common and durable source of factions,” he writes, “has been the various and unequal distribution of property.”29

Minority and majority factions, says Madison, pose a danger to the public welfare because they both enviously eye the belongings of others. Yet of the two types of factions, Madison considers majority factions to be more dangerous. Why? Because minority factions can be curbed by the power of the majority. But how, Madison asked, can majority factions be curtailed? Nowhere does Madison assume that majorities have an unlimited right to do their will. On the contrary, he seeks mechanisms to regulate and control the will of the majority.

These observations lead to a startling conclusion. The American founders held that unrestricted majority rule is the principle of modern tyranny, just as unrestricted one-man rule is the principle of ancient tyranny. As historian Gordon Wood points out, they broke with their British predecessors in this respect. “So convinced were the English, in the decades following 1689, that tyranny could come only from a single ruler that they could hardly conceive of the people tyrannizing themselves.”30 The American founders, by contrast, sought to avoid dual forms of tyranny: tyranny of the monarch, and tyranny of the people as expressed through majority faction.

Of course the founders, like Lincoln, did submit to the principle of majority rule. But they did so in highly qualified terms. Majorities are not inherently wiser than minorities. So why should they rule over them? Lincoln spelled out the logic in his first inaugural address. Ideally society would be ruled by unanimous consent. Since unanimous consent is practically impossible, there are two alternatives: majority rule or minority rule. Obviously minority rule over the majority would be unjust, so majority rule is the only remaining alternative.

But how to prevent majority rule from being unjust? This was the fundamental problem that the founders, through the constitutional structure, sought to solve. The founders did so through several block-and-tackle measures designed to limit, frustrate and in some cases thwart majority rule. I count at least eight.

First, they adopted a written Constitution—again a departure from Great Britain, which has a common law but no such constitution—that operates as a supreme charter, overriding the will of the majority. The Constitution creates a framework for limited government—which is to say, the authority of the federal government covers enumerated areas but no others. Outside that purview, the government has no authority.

Second, the Bill of Rights. Later added to the Constitution—ironically at the insistence of its Anti-Federalist opponents—this roster contains a series of limitations on government that typically begin, “Congress shall make no law.” Congress shall make no law restricting speech, or the press, or the free exercise of religion. Citizens have the right to assemble, and to own firearms, and to enjoy due process of law, and to be protected against unreasonable search and seizure. In his famous commentary on the Constitution, Justice Joseph Story noted how a bill of rights places strict limits on majority rule. “A bill of rights is an important protection against unjust and oppressive conduct on the part of the people themselves.”31

Admittedly, the Constitution can be amended, but the process is so onerous that it requires something approaching unanimity for this to occur. The authority to compare federal laws to the Constitution and to strike down those that contravene constitutional provisions is given to the Supreme Court. So this is our third block-and-tackle mechanism, judicial review. The Supreme Court has independent authority to enforce the Constitution and protect the rights of citizens against the will of the majority.

Fourth, representative government. What this means is that the people do not rule directly; they rule by electing representatives who govern in their stead. Madison counted this practice—a radical departure from the direct democracy of the ancient Athenians—as the distinguishing mark between a “democracy” and a “republic.” A large and extended society, in Madison’s words, can function effectively only as a republic.

Fifth, separation of powers. Here power is divided between an elected legislature charged with making laws, an elected executive charged with enforcing them and an appointed judiciary empowered with arbitrating and resolving legal disputes. Sixth, federalism, which divides power between the national government and the states, so that some powers are exercised at the national level, others at the state and local level.

Seventh, checks and balances. This means that in addition to dividing power, there is mutual oversight. Congress has the power to make laws, but the president can veto them, and vetoes can be overridden only by congressional supermajorities. The president and his executive branch enforce the laws, but there is congressional and judicial oversight. The judiciary interprets the Constitution and the laws, but judges are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

Finally, the Electoral College and the two branches of the legislature, the House and the Senate. While the president, members of Congress and senators are all elected by the people, the distribution of power is weighted to give representation to small and large states. The Electoral College ensures that a few large states cannot by themselves decide the presidency. Small states have fewer congressional representatives than large ones, in proportion to size, but all states, small and large, have two senators apiece, creating a parity among states in that branch of the legislature.

What does all this mean? It means that America was designed to foster a spirit of freedom and enterprise among its people, and to thwart majority rule from tyrannizing over that spirit. In sum, America is a free market society whose founding principles, as long as they remain intact, provide a powerful bulwark against socialism of every stripe, including democratic socialism.

SELF-MADE MAN

It may seem surprising that, in this account of the American founding, I have given so little emphasis to what the founders thought about race, gender and sexual orientation. In other words, I seem to have neglected the “identity” issues altogether. For progressive historiography, this is something of a scandal. Progressive scholars across a range of disciplines talk of little else. They write as if the founders cared about little else.

Yet the truth is that the founders gave little attention to the politics of race, even less to the politics of sex and none whatever to the politics of sexual orientation. Why? Not because the founders were racists and sexists. Rather, they were concerned with the norms of society, and in constructing these, they emphasized the typical or normal case. They were not unfamiliar with the anomaly of race. They understood that their wives and daughters were part of their novus ordo seclorum. I would be shocked if Franklin and Jefferson—in Europe if not in America—had not encountered the phenomenon of the homosexual or the transvestite.

So why not build a society keeping minorities and outliers foremost in mind? For the same reason that every group in the world organizes its society without giving primary consideration to the outsiders who might wish to emigrate to that society. For the same reason that a dinner host organizes a party keeping the general tenor of the guests in mind. The basic principles are those of normalcy and inclusion. Most people eat meat, so there will be meat on the menu. A few are vegetarian, so let’s make sure that there is enough for them also.

Now imagine that one of the invitees is a dwarf. I don’t pick this example at random. Identity politics includes physical handicap; this is one of its recognized categories. So here we have our dwarf, and he is annoyed to discover that the chairs are too high for him to climb into. Moreover, his view is consistently blocked by the taller people around him. The dwarf also notices that no one is paying special attention to him. Becoming angrier by the minute, he finally shuts off the music and screams at the top of his lungs, “You people are bigots! You are all obsessed with height!”

It’s very hard for the dwarf to understand that the guests are actually indifferent to height. This is not a party organized by dwarves or for dwarves. The good news is that there is a principle of inclusion. The organizers have made room for him to be part of the festivities like everyone else. But the operating principle is one of universality, not of difference. This is the aspect of the American founding that identity socialists hate.

Frederick Douglass, the runaway slave, hated it too. At first he viewed the American founding purely from the point of view of the slave. Why didn’t the founders outlaw slavery at the outset? Douglass couldn’t see what Lincoln saw: the founders could not do this and still make a union. Slavery prior to the founding was legal in all the states; many—and certainly the southern states—would refuse to join a union that forbade slavery at the outset.

So the founders chose, in Lincoln’s words, to create a union that tolerated slavery. They hoped and even expected that slavery would continue to lose political power in such a union. Even Jefferson—one of the largest slaveholders among them—anticipated a total emancipation. The founders really believed all men are created equal. They simply couldn’t make good on that belief in their own time. So, in Lincoln’s phrase, they chose to declare the rights whose enforcement would follow as soon as the circumstances permitted.

When he heard this argument, Douglass’ reaction was that this was very easy for a white man to say. Douglass carried his animus over to Lincoln. Lincoln, he charged, was the white man’s president. Blacks were at best the accidental beneficiaries of his actions. After all, Lincoln didn’t campaign in 1860 to get rid of slavery; he campaigned merely to arrest the spread of slavery. Even that, Douglass bitterly noted, was framed in the Republican platform in terms of opening up the new territories to white settlement.

Until he met Lincoln, Douglass never considered the question from Lincoln’s side. Lincoln was white; why should he give priority to blacks? Douglass, after all, considered it right and natural for him to give priority to his own race. Douglass saw that Lincoln treated him not as a black man but simply as a man. And that, Douglass realized, was enough. He didn’t need Lincoln to see difference; he only needed Lincoln to recognize their common humanity.

Over time, Douglass reconsidered his longtime hatred for the founders. He came to see that the founders too articulated universal norms and rights that included him even while not recognizing his blackness. Douglass termed slavery the mere “scaffolding” to be removed when the American edifice was completed. And Douglass also championed women’s rights and women’s suffrage in the understanding that these too were an application of the equality principle of the Declaration of Independence. “All men” was a phrase that was, from the beginning, intended to include women.

Speaking to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society just days after the Civil War ended, Douglass raised the question, “What must be done for the slaves?” His answer: “Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us.… If the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone.… If you will only untie his hands and give him a chance, I think he will live.”32

Douglass’ most famous speech—the one he delivered most often—was in keeping with this philosophy of self-reliance. In fact, it went beyond self-reliance to stress the theme of self-invention. It was titled “Self-Made Men.” America, Douglass argued, is the land of the self-made man, and in the fulfillment of its original principles it offers that prospect to the woman no less than to the man, to the black man no less than to the white man. Douglass himself, the self-taught former slave who became a publisher, an orator and a diplomat, was a walking embodiment of the self-made man.

As if addressing the identity socialist across the reach of time, Douglass noted that there are those who scorn the self-made man, crediting his achievement to privilege or luck. This criticism, he said, takes “no cognizance of the very different uses to which different men put their circumstances and chances.… It does not matter that the wind is fair and the tide is at its flood, if the mariner refuses to weigh his anchor and spread his canvas to the breeze.” The self-made man is not a whiner; he makes full use of the opportunities that luck provides.

The self-made man is not perfect, Douglass admitted. He can be rough-hewn, he can be somewhat arrogant, attributing all his success to himself. Even so, Douglass said, the self-made man can take justifiable pride, because he is indebted to himself for himself. In Douglass’ own phrase, he has made the road on which he has traveled. He has built his own ladder. “There is genuine heroism in his struggle, and something of sublimity and glory in his triumph.”33

Douglass, who started life at the bottom, one might say as a dwarf, became what he could become only in America: a giant among men. He did so despite enduring the slings and arrows of racial prejudice, both in the North and in the South. He became a patriot and a stalwart of the Republican Party who insisted, at election time, that “the Republican Party is the ship—all else is the sea.” Here, in the argument and person of Douglass, is the moral case for America and for the Republican Party, and a full and decisive refutation of the identity socialist’s indictment of the American founding.

IN PRAISE OF ROBBER BARONS

I’d like to conclude this chapter by highlighting the achievements of some of the men of enterprise who embody the spirit of the American founding, the Franklin spirit. These are the very “robber barons” vilified in progressive and socialist historiography. I’ll focus on three figures who pioneered America’s industrial revolution and also the first communications revolution, defined by the steamship, the railroad and, later, the airplane.

The progressive narrative focuses on various government subsidies that were extended to pioneers in these industries. Naturally, there was a scramble for the loot, and corruption was commonplace. The left blames the corruption on the greed of the capitalist class. Yet for progressives, the positive lesson is that without government aid, the railroads and other key modes of transportation would not have been built. So history, in this version of the story, illuminates that the path to government direction of industry—the path toward socialism—is the right one.

The truth, however, is precisely the opposite. The great innovations examined here all occurred without government involvement; in fact, they were achieved in the face of obstacles erected by the government. The corruption in virtually every case involved a group that we may term the “political entrepreneurs”—namely businesses that sought to thrive not by prevailing in a free market but by accepting government subsidies and protection.

When Cornelius Vanderbilt began running steamboats on the Hudson River, the traffic was controlled by Robert Fulton’s vessels. Fulton’s monopoly had been granted to him by New York State. Under the monopoly arrangement, Fulton could charge higher prices, since customers did not have a choice. Fulton paid off the politicians, and the politicians returned the favor by giving Fulton exclusive control over the Hudson waterway. Under this cozy arrangement, Vanderbilt’s boats were technically illegal. Yet Vanderbilt eluded the law and offered lower prices.

Fortunately for Vanderbilt, there was a public uproar. The uproar led to lawsuits, and the Supreme Court struck down the Fulton monopoly. This was the landmark case of Gibbons v. Ogden. It opened up the Hudson River to competition, which attracted more steamship operators and drove down prices. Fulton could not compete and went out of business.

Vanderbilt offered the lowest prices, his business flourished and he expanded to routes all over New England. At one point, historian H. W. Brands notes, Vanderbilt cut his ticket price on the Albany line to a meager 10 cents; then, when a local association of steamboat operators tried to undercut him, he offered his service for free, covering his cost and making a profit solely based on selling food and drink to passengers.34

As steamers got bigger and began to make transatlantic crossings, the British line Cunard dominated, in large part through subsidies from the English Parliament. An American, Edward K. Collins, convinced the U.S. government to give him subsidies to compete with Cunard. Vanderbilt challenged Collins with no subsidies. Vanderbilt built better ships, conserved his costs, offered high-volume, low-cost fares and put Collins out of business once his subsidy ran out.

During the Civil War, Vanderbilt gave his 5,000-ton ship, somewhat immodestly named the Vanderbilt, as a gift to the U.S. Navy. He also offered to personally sink the Confederate ship Merrimac, requesting only that while he was doing it, the government should stay “out of the way.” After the war, Vanderbilt moved his investments from steamships into railroads; he was instrumental in building the New York Central Railroad, which connected New York with Chicago and other Midwestern cities.

Progressives like to tell the story of the multiple railroad companies that built their cross-country lines with the help of government charters and subsidies. The two best known are the Union Pacific Railroad and the Central Pacific Railroad. Both desperately sought to fill their coffers with government cash as they raced to complete their projects. Meanwhile, Henry Villard’s Northern Pacific attracted both investors and government subsidies with his promise to build a railroad across the Rockies up through the Pacific Northwest. The moral of the progressive story is that, without the government, it can’t be done.

The problem with this narrative is that while the rush for subsidies was at full pitch—and this is where the corruption came from—James J. Hill built a transcontinental line through the Northwest with no federal aid. Notwithstanding his government subsidies, Villard failed and went bankrupt; Hill, however, succeeded.

Why did Hill succeed and Villard fail? They both faced a daunting challenge because of the remoteness of the Northwest and the harsh climate. The difference came in their contrasting approaches to the task at hand. Villard, a political entrepreneur who came from New York, viewed the Northwest like a postcard; he built along the most scenic routes. It cost more, but so what? Villard was spending the government’s money. Hill, a local man with more practical concerns, chose the shortest and most efficient routes. Hill was spending his own money.

Villard viewed the great Pacific Northwest as good for passing through; Hill encouraged the development of farming communities alongside his railroad. To make this happen, Hill imported cattle and gave them to settlers free of charge. He offered to transport people to the Northwest for just $10 if they would farm near his railroad. Hill expected that if these farming communities prospered, his railroad would too.

Unlike Villard and other railroad builders on government support, Hill was obsessed with efficiency. He had heard, from the expeditions of Lewis and Clark way back in 1805, that there was a crossing called the Marias Pass that shortened the distance through the Rockies. No one, however, could locate the pass. So Hill hired local adventurers to comb through western Montana to find it. They did, and Hill was able to cut his costs by cutting his distance by a hundred miles.35

Finally, we turn to airplane travel, where the story is nearly the same. The well-connected political entrepreneur Samuel Langley had pledged to build an airplane. He had the support of the Smithsonian, the most prominent scientific institution in America. He had hundreds of thousands of dollars in government subsidy. He received devotional press coverage as the man who would conquer the sky. Yet despite multiple attempts over a period of 10 years, Langley’s airship project failed miserably.

Meanwhile, as historian David McCullough tells the story, two owners of a bicycle business, Wilbur and Orville Wright, used $1,000 in profits from their company to purchase building materials. They designed an airplane. They got their materials to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. They paid their own way to get there. They built the makeshift airplane. They flew it. In doing so, they revolutionized the capacity of human beings to travel—now not just on land, like animals, or by sea, like fish, but also through the air, like birds.36

Vanderbilt, Hill, the Wright brothers—these are the American pioneers. They were self-made men who also helped make a new nation. What a transformation these men wrought, taking a country from the infancy of its development to a great and prosperous maturity. They spearheaded a communications revolution even more radical and life-changing than the one we are living through now. Ignored these entrepreneurs may be—vilified even—in progressive historiography. Yet who can deny that they embody the inventive, enterprising and—I hope—indestructible spirit of America?


Copyright © 2020 by Dinesh D’Souza.