Since Lovecraft is most known for his darker cosmological works, I thought it might be helpful to create a brief commentary explaining one of Lovecraft’s few depressive absurdist humorous works. Something I could barely understand myself when I first read it. He subtitled this “A Poem of Profound Insignificance” and then proceeds to force the reader to pay very close attention to get anything out of it. Much like the original T.S. Eliot poem “The Wasteland” which he is consciously parodying. I read it as a dark absurdist reflection. This is as funny as he gets.

1. Cosmic grandeur collapses into drunkenness and a bicycle

Πἀντα γἐλως καἱ πἀντα κὀνις καἱ πἀντα τὁ μηδἐν

Out of the reaches of illimitable light
The blazing planet grew, and forc’d to life
Unending cycles of progressive strife
And strange mutations of undying light
And boresome books, than hell’s own self more trite
And thoughts repeated and become a blight,
And cheap rum-hounds with moonshine hootch made tight,
And quite contrite to see the flight of fright so bright
I used to ride my bicycle in the night
With a dandy acetylene lantern that cost $3.00

Lovecraft begins by mocking extremely elevated language, describing the creation of the planet before bringing us down to his own bicycle and a lamp that cost three dollars. We move from “illimitable light” to light with a price tag. The universe has scarcely come into existence before we are dealing with boring books, recycled thoughts, drunks and bicycle equipment. The point of the parody, as I read it, is that T. S. Eliot’s sophistication risks becoming a performance of profundity. Eliot’s original poem is concerned with spiritual and cultural fragmentation, and its broken observations are intended to give that fragmentation a form. Lovecraft makes the hostile counterargument: how do we distinguish meaningful fragments from an elaborate collection of scraps? At what point does sophisticated language cease to illuminate anything and begin asking us to admire the sophistication itself?

The fact that Lovecraft begins in Greek makes the joke sharper. “All is laughter, all is dust, all is nothing” is itself a learned introduction, that proceeds to puncture learned seriousness. There is something almost Wittgensteinian about the question this raises for me: are we understanding something profound, or being impressed by the language in which it is presented? Too often people try to “wow” compliance with sophisticated words, where simple good short brief Germanic Anglo-Saxon words would suffice and seem far more honest. One can accept the same physical reality as another person without accepting the same feelings, romance or religious significance that person attaches to it. This is where I would take Lovecraft’s joke further. The seriousness of someone’s feelings does not, by itself, oblige another person to find their language profound. We can look at the same light: one person sees the tragedy of existence, the humiliation of loves lost or taken or dying, while another remembers only what his bicycle lamp cost.

2. Childhood memories, popular songs, and the cinema

In the evening, by the moonlight, you can hear those darkies singing
Meet me tonight in dreamland . . . BAH
I used to sit on the stairs of the house where I was born
After we left it but before it was sold
And play on a zobo with two other boys.
We called ourselves the Blackstone Military Band
Won’t you come home, Bill Bailey, won’t you come home?
In the spring of the year, in the silver rain
When petal by petal the blossoms fall
And the mocking birds call
And the whippoorwill sings, Marguerite.
The first cinema show in our town opened in 1906
At the old Olympic, which was then call’d Park,
And moving beams shot weirdly thro’ the dark
And spit tobacco seldom hit the mark.

Imagine someone beginning a solemn reflection on memory and lost love, suddenly slipping into Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off,” interrupting himself with “BAH,” remembering the little band he had in his garage as a Grunge Goth Teen, and then drifting into “Call Me Maybe.” Before we can decide what any of this means, he remembers the cinema, and people spitting tobacco on the floor. We might begin by making connections in our own heads. “Shake It Off” becomes a statement about rejecting the past; “Call Me Maybe” becomes a desperate appeal for human connection; the tobacco on the cinema floor becomes the degradation of beauty in modern society. Perhaps. But perhaps someone merely remembered two songs and a dirty floor. That’s the reality.

That is where Lovecraft’s mockery bites: familiar scraps and ordinary absurdities can acquire an appearance of profundity when arranged like a mysterious puzzle. We recognise the songs, attach our own feelings to them, and then risk mistaking the meaning we have supplied for a revelation the poet has delivered. Eliot’s defence would be that arrangement itself can create meaning, that the relationship between the fragments matters. Lovecraft’s parody asks; how we distinguish that achievement from a jumble we have interpreted too generously?

3. Literary culture, family history, and “Shantih” reduced to a title

Have you read Dickens’ American Notes?
My great-great-grandfather was born in a white house
Under green trees in the country
And he used to believe in religion and the weather.
“Shantih, shantih, shantih” . . . Shanty House
Was the name of a novel by I forget whom
Published serially in the All-Story Weekly
Before it was a weekly. Advt.

What another person experiences as spiritual consolation, inherited belonging, or profound cultural meaning can register to this speaker as little more than a verbal association. In this passage especially, I hear Lovecraft anticipating a tendency I associate with parts of the postmodern Left: the impulse to dismantle the traditions and inherited meanings that give people a sense of belonging. This is striking given his own racial feelings and attachment to an ancestral past.

I am drawing a comparison here, rather than suggesting that Lovecraft was commenting on today’s “multicultural” impositions. But the effect reminds me of how a man’s normative healthy attachments to ancestry, religion and cultural inheritance can be dismissed as pretensions to be exposed, by those who envy a solidarity they can never be a part of; rather than sources of meaning to be understood. Lovecraft makes that dismissal intimate: a remembered ancestor, a house beneath the trees, a religious belief, all briefly appear, only to have their significance punctured. To me, he becomes the ultimate depressive: attached to the world he inherited, yet unable to leave its consolations intact.

4. Disillusionment, bodily irritation, and grotesque violence

Disillusion is wonderful, I’ve been told,
And I take quinine to stop a cold
But it makes my ears ring . . . always ring . . .
Always ringing in my ears . . .
It is the ghost of the Jew I murdered that Christmas day
Because he played “Three O’Clock in the Morning” in the flat above me.
Three O’Clock in the morning, I’ve danc’d the whole night through,
Dancing on the graves in the graveyard
Where life is buried; life and beauty
Life and art and love and duty
Ah, there, sweet cutie.
Stung!

It is here that I feel the most for Lovecraft, or at least for the voice speaking in these lines. Nobody asks to have their consolations torn away. For someone whose beliefs once sustained them, losing faith can feel like being left with half a body: one continues to exist, but something that made existence whole is missing. To then be told by intellectuals that this loss is actually a wonderful achievement is hardly impressive. “Disillusion is wonderful, I’ve been told.” Yes, but being told that the loss is good does not make one feel any less amputated.

5. Misquotation, fashionable sophistication, and rejection of the past

Out of the night that covers me
Black as the pit from pole to pole
I never quote things straight except by accident.
Sophistication! Sophistication!
You are the idol of our nation
Each fellow has
Fallen for jazz
And we’ll give the past a merry razz
Thro’ the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber
And fellow-guestship with the glutless worm.

This is where I see Lovecraft’s accusation against Eliot most clearly: word salad dressed as sophistication. “I never quote things straight except by accident” almost gives the game away. The speaker piles up quotations, fashionable references and impressive phrases, while Lovecraft invites us to question whether their arrangement actually establishes anything.

How often do we encounter something similar in academic circles? Someone goes round and round in specialised language, speaking to everything except the actual complaint, and then treats our dissatisfaction as evidence that we simply do not understand. We see it in theological disputes too: someone attacks another religion from within a closed system of their own, using terminology whose authority the other person has never accepted. When challenged, they retreat into more supercilious verbiage.

I am extending Lovecraft’s joke here, but the resemblance strikes me. “Sophistication! Sophistication! / You are the idol of our nation.” Sophistication itself becomes the object of worship. The question is no longer whether the language answers anything, but whether we are sufficiently impressed by the person using it.

6. High culture dissolves into facts, copyright notices, and railway directions

Next stop is 57th St.—57th St. the next stop.
Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring,
And the Governor-General of Canada is Lord Byng
Whose ancestor was shot or hung,
I forget which, the good die young.
Here’s to your ripe old age,
Copyright, 1847, by Joseph Miller,
Entered according to act of Congress
In the office of the librarian of Congress
America was discovered in 1492
This way out.
No, lady, you gotta change at Washington St. to the Everett train.
Out in the rain on the elevated
Crated, sated, all mismated.
Twelve seats on this bench,
How quaint.
In a shady nook, beside a brook, two lovers stroll along.
Express to Park Ave., Car Following.
No, we had it cleaned with the sand blast.
I know it ought to be torn down.

This passage works like a mind changing channels: epic poetry, historical facts, a toast, copyright notices, and public transport all interrupt one another. The broken connections are precisely part of the joke. The idea being that you can extract from a man’s life all kinds of things, which if then filtered through the mind of an alien like “data” would mean absolutely nothing, and would provoke no feelings and no empathy at all.

Knowing that Lovecraft himself died at forty-six makes me pause over the line in a way the poem does not. I am not treating his early death as proof of his goodness. What strikes me is how a phrase tossed away as a cliché can acquire an entirely different weight once we know what happened to the person writing it. Lovecraft makes the words sound disposable; his own death makes them difficult to pass over.

7. Sentimental homecoming becomes a drunken musical jumble

Before the bar of a saloon there stood a reckless crew,
When one said to another, “Jack, this message came for you.”
“It may be from a sweetheart, boys,” said someone in the crowd,
And here the words are missing . . . but Jack cried out aloud:
“It’s only a message from home, sweet home,
From loved ones down on the farm
Fond wife and mother, sister and brother. . . .”
Bootleggers all and you’re another
In the shade of the old apple tree
’Neath the old cherry tree sweet Marie

Here, even the love of family becomes material for a drunken musical number. “Home, sweet home,” mother, sister and brother briefly summon the stability and belonging that most of us would take seriously, only for “Bootleggers all” to puncture the picture. This is something that would hurt me personally the most, because we all know, how when a breakdown happens, the worst hurts come from love or stability that has been broken. Perhaps Lovecraft is mocking the cheap sentimentality through which popular songs package these feelings. But to me, the effect reaches further: something that might sustain a person through an otherwise miserable existence is reduced to a chorus, a joke, and another half-remembered tune. The song may be sentimental; the need it speaks to may be far from trivial.

8. Poe, nonsense rhymes, and poetry as advertising

The Conchologist’s First Book
By Edgar Allan Poe
Stubbed his toe
On a broken brick that didn’t shew
Or a banana peel
In the fifth reel
By George Creel
It is to laugh
And quaff
It makes you stout and hale,
And all my days I’ll sing the praise
Of Ivory Soap
Have you a little T. S. Eliot in your home?
The stag at eve had drunk his fill
The thirsty hart look’d up the hill
And craned his neck just as a feeler
To advertise the Double-Dealer.

The mockery here I totally get. Eliot, as Lovecraft presents him, reminds me of that lout of a friend who comes over at Christmas, drinks your booze, enjoys everything you have provided, and brings no presents. He helps himself to the cultural inheritance, but what has he brought to the gathering? Nothing but that which you already have. To me personally, it is a little like being lectured at about your country and ancestry be an immigrant fresh off the boat, who thinks his wealth and sophistication gives him a right to talk down to you, and order you around, and enter politics the minute he shows up. That is what it feels like, and that is what I think Lovecraft is accusing Eliot of. You cannot command someone else’s feelings about you, simply by saying “we” and “ours.” Those psychological tricks only go so far with those who have truly suffered, and might truly be far more attached to those things, from which he has been disillusioned from. This is a very “human” complaint. Both the foreigner and the native can feel it about each other. Both the believer and the unbeliever can be at odds, while seeing the same thing. It is here, where I understand Lovecraft’s cruel humour the most. Literary names become material for jingles, rhymes seem to generate themselves, and poetry slides into advertising. Even Eliot becomes a household product: “Have you a little T. S. Eliot in your home?” Sophistication begins to look like something we purchase and display. The question is whether the poet has made something from his borrowings, or merely arrived carrying everybody else’s valuables.

9. Artistic pretension breaks down into verbal noise

William Congreve was a gentleman
O art what sins are committed in thy name
For tawdry fame and fleeting flame
And everything, ain’t dat a shame?
Mah Creole Belle, ah lubs yo’ well;
Aroun’ mah heart you hab cast a spell
But I can’t learn to spell pseudocracy
Because there ain’t no such word.
And I says to Lizzie, if Joe was my feller
I’d teach him to go to dances with that
Rat, bat, cat, hat, flat, plat, fat
Fry the fat, fat the fry
You’ll be a drug-store by and by.
Get the hook!

William Congreve was an English Restoration playwright. His name can suggest an older literary culture and its ideal of cultivated gentility. The idea being that imitation can sometimes ruin what was once far more beautiful. To me, this briefly summons the older world of cultivated feelings, attachments and literary inheritance which gave birth to Lovecraft himself. Then comes the accusation: “O art what sins are committed in thy name.” The sins are committed in the name of the figurative “gentleman” standing beside the accusation makes me think of a civilisation watching its inheritance cheapened. At least this is how I would read what Lovecraft is complaining about here. He is saying in other words, “I cannot care as you care, as long as you cheapen what was mine.”

10. Gothic grandeur returns which collapses into “Nobody home”

Above the lines of brooding hills
Rose spires that reeked of nameless ills,
And ghastly shone upon the sight
In ev’ry flash of lurid light
To be continued.
No smoking.
Smoking on four rear seats.
Fare win return to 5¢ after August 1st
Except outside the Cleveland city limits.
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir
Strangers pause to shed a tear;
Henry Fielding wrote Tom Jones.
And cursed be he that moves my bones.
Good night, good night, the stars are bright
I saw the Leonard-Tendler fight
Farewell, farewell, O go to hell.
Nobody home
In the shantih.

“Nobody home / In the shantih.” This is where I hear something more than an accusation of intellectual emptiness. Eliot’s invocation of peace becomes, in Lovecraft’s parody, a house at whose door we arrive only to find nobody there. The language promises a spiritual habitation; the speaker leaves us questioning whether anyone actually inhabits it. Emotions should not require the appearance of sophistication to express or justify. If I love you, I inhabit you. I don’t need to prove it. There is a difference between feeling that one belongs and producing an impressive account of belonging. The pain is more devastating that a mere rejection. To discover that no one is home.

After all the cultural references and spiritual gestures, nobody answers the door. This is cold absurdism at its worst. Like a Christ hanging on the cross, only to awaken and discover that humanity does not exist, was never there, and the whole ordeal meant nothing. There was nobody to save, nobody to reject him, nobody even to witness the sacrifice. The pain was real, but the relationship that made it bearable was an illusion. Even betrayal would have left someone on the other side of it. Here, there is no other side, only an unanswered appeal. The suffering remains, while everything that might have redeemed it disappears. That is the horror I hear in “Nobody home.” One has carried the memories, spoken the prayers, preserved the inheritance, and endured the disillusionment, only to discover that the door opens onto an empty house. What seemed like a difficult relationship with the world becomes the possibility that one was speaking alone all along.

Power depends partly on the ability to decide who may participate, who may benefit, and who must remain outside. Max Weber examined this through his distinction between open and closed social relationships. In his discussion of closure, he describes arrangements in which while a relationship may be open to all in theory, in practice there are complications. For example, anyone including international students may get an education, may be entitled to pay for extracurricular activities, may be entitled to run and even dominate student elections, but he may be barred from faculty, he may be disliked by individual members.

Participation in an egalitarian order does not always mean de facto acceptance or entrance by all other members. An institution can admit people to one activity while restricting their participation in another. A university may admit students to its courses without giving them authority over hiring, research funding, or institutional policy. Admission to the institution therefore tells us little by itself about access to its different powers and opportunities. The question is always: participation in what, on whose terms, and with which rights?

“A relationship will, on the other hand, be called ‘closed’ against outsiders so far as, according to its subjective meaning and the binding rules of its order, participation of certain persons is excluded, limited, or subjected to conditions. Whether a relationship is open or closed may be determined traditionally, affectually, or rationally in terms of values or of expediency”

— Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, “Open and Closed Relationships,” p. 139.

Social closure helps explain how groups secure opportunities for themselves through membership rules, qualifications, inheritance, and control of admission. A professional association, a workers’ organization, a political party, and a hereditary elite can each establish boundaries that protect their members’ advantages. Weber’s framework directs attention to how those boundaries operate and whose interests they serve. Power always sets boundaries even when it has constitutional declarations that sound egalitarian.

That being said, it should be noted that “closure” is not automatically an abuse. Technical standards, professional competence, and defined membership can sustain institutions and protect those who depend on them. The difficulty is that the same requirements can also preserve an incumbent group’s advantages. For my proposed settlement, the test is whether a restriction serves a defensible function and whether citizens have a realistic route to meeting its requirements. A qualification becomes suspect when those who demand it also monopolize the means of obtaining it.

For a settlement, seeking broadly distributed property and independent citizens, this raises a central question: how can a political community protect its members’ opportunities while preventing a privileged circle within it from monopolizing ownership, office, and advancement? ( This would be the direction of my own social national settlement, since the thing that ordinary workers, the dying middle-class and the destitute actually want and need, is more “property access” not merely an expanded government with expanded provisions and indeed restrictions. ) My preferred social national settlement would give priority to the economic independence of productive citizens.

The settlement would preserve necessary standards while expanding the means of meeting them. Training, technical education, and opportunities for responsibility must remain accessible, so that competence does not become the exclusive possession of an established circle. Restrictions should serve identifiable purposes and remain open to review; ownership and advancement should follow clear rules rather than personal favour or party loyalty. Its success would be measured by whether successive generations of citizens can acquire productive property and meaningful authority, enlarging the middle tier of capable owners and preventing either private concentrations or state officials from monopolizing economic opportunity.

The following nine points summarize Weber’s discussion in “Open and Closed Relationships,” pp. 139–143. The examples illustrate the distinctions; the distributive programme developed in the conclusion is my own application.

1. An open relationship admits willing, capable participants.

Its rules allow anyone who wants to participate and can actually do so to enter.

• In Weber’s day: A public market where any buyer with sufficient money could purchase goods.

• Today: A public online discussion that anyone with internet access can join without an invitation.

2. A closed relationship restricts participation.

The group excludes some people or makes entry depend on particular conditions.

• In Weber’s day: A private gentlemen’s club requiring nomination and approval by existing members.

• Today: A professional association admitting only people with specified qualifications.

3. Closure has different foundations.

People restrict entry because of inherited customs, emotional attachments, shared convictions, or calculated interests.

• In Weber’s day: A religious congregation could require a profession of faith to preserve its religious commitments.

• Today: A founders’ investment group could admit only selected investors to preserve profitable opportunities for its members.

4. Members may favour expansion or restriction.

They welcome newcomers when expansion seems beneficial and restrict entry when exclusivity seems more advantageous.

• In Weber’s day: A craft organization might recruit additional members to strengthen its bargaining position, then restrict admission to reduce competition.

• Today: An online marketplace might initially welcome sellers to attract customers, then limit new sellers to protect established participants.

5. External closure leaves internal distribution undecided.

Keeping outsiders out does not determine whether insiders compete, share equally, or receive fixed advantages.

• In Weber’s day: A restricted association of traders could let its members compete freely for customers or assign particular trading opportunities to particular members.

• Today: A housing cooperative might restrict residency to members while allocating apartments through a waiting list, a lottery, or seniority.

6. Secured advantages become rights.

An opportunity becomes a right, in Weber’s terminology here, when the group’s rules secure it to a particular holder; inheritance and transfer further determine its character.

• In Weber’s day: A household’s recognized claim to a particular agricultural holding could pass to its heirs.

• Today: A cooperative member may hold an enforceable occupancy right, with rules specifying whether it can be inherited or transferred.

7. Closure comes in degrees and can change.

Groups can impose lighter or stricter admission conditions, and those conditions can change over time.

• In Weber’s day: Attending a public church service required less admission scrutiny than entering a monastic order.

• Today: Reading an online forum may be unrestricted, posting may require registration, and becoming a moderator may require selection.

8. Transferable property introduces a complication.

When members can sell their secured rights to outsiders without other members’ approval, strong individual ownership can create a route into the group.

• In Weber’s day: An outsider can acquire a transferable landholding where ownership carried participation rights and existing holders lacked a veto.

• Today: Someone can become a shareholder in a publicly traded company by buying shares without obtaining existing shareholders’ permission.

9. Principal motives include preserving quality, prestige, subsistence, and earning opportunities.

Closure can protect standards and honour, preserve resources supporting the livelihoods of members, or reserve profitable activities.

• In Weber’s day: A guild can restrict admission both to uphold workmanship and to protect members’ earnings.

• Today: A medical licensing system restricts entry to protect professional standards; a numerical cap on licences could additionally protect incumbents from competition.

Weber’s underlying distinction is between the boundary around a group and the allocation of advantages inside it. A country could reserve economic benefits for its citizens while allowing a small minority of those citizens to own nearly all productive assets. Citizens would share membership, but their economic independence would differ enormously. I take this distinction as a warning, and as a starting point for the distributive property settlement I propose as a stronger alternative to communism. National membership alone cannot secure the independence of productive citizens. That requires institutions through which they can acquire property, accumulate ownership through their work, and exercise enforceable rights over the assets they help build.

If we want this alternative to succeed, productive assets must become accessible to more and more competent members of the community: through physical ownership, possession of the necessary technical information, and practical access to tools, infrastructure, and markets. Competence must itself be cultivated through training and experience, so that it does not become another qualification monopolized by those already inside. We want the middle tier of technically capable, property-owning citizens to expand, with ownership carrying meaningful powers of use, decision, and economic defence. Otherwise, we risk reproducing the concentration I oppose in both capitalist and communist arrangements: a small number controlling productive property and access, while everyone else remains dependent on their permission.

“National socialism” did not begin with Hitler, and it did not always designate the same political project. Friedrich Naumann’s National-Social Association, founded in Germany in 1896, sought to combine national strength with social reform.[^1] A more direct precursor to Nazism emerged among German nationalists in the Habsburg lands: their party adopted the National Socialist name in 1918, and Rudolf Jung published Der nationale Sozialismus in 1919.[^2] Hitler’s party adopted its National Socialist name in 1920, before Lenin’s accusations against Stalin in December 1922.[^3] These are related expressions and selected historical uses, not a claim to have established the term’s first-ever occurrence or a single continuous ideology. I think tracing the history of words goes way beyond semantics which is why I bring it up. Words are fought over, precisely because they are used to define legitimacy and history itself.

Therefore I am going to go through the history of the semantics here, precisely, because the use of this very odd term, is tied up precisely with what counts as “Left and Right.” Typically, those of us who are Post-Liberal in the Anglo West, and Post-Soviet in the Russian East, live under the legible constraints of the French Revolution. It is this vital semantic origin which I suggest, we must reject in practice. The Marxist, and by default, the standard whole sweep of the modern progressive Left ( with few exceptions ) generally believe that the French Revolution and the Paris Commune ( and its failure ) set the stage for all of political history up to the Present. The “revolutionary conservative” or “revolutionary Right” obviously rejects this, since we do not see history as merely an “economic engine.” It is from this that they justify seeing “Right” as status quo, and “Left” as revolutionary, regardless of whatever material position, the people on the ground using these terms actually occupy. This is why the use of the term “national socialist” or “nationalist socialist” becomes important.

An earlier use of the term, appears in Lenin’s wartime polemics. In 1915, he denounced “social-nationalists”: socialists who, in his judgment, subordinated international class solidarity to their own governments and national bourgeoisies. Unlike movements that proudly adopted a National Socialist name, these figures generally rejected the accusation. Thus, before the Georgian controversy of 1922, the expression already functioned as a charge that socialist language was concealing national allegiance. As with all of these examples, the context and use of the terminology is wildly different. [^4] The wording here follows later English translations of Lenin’s Russian texts. My point is that visible appearance of the terminology, appears in a case, long before Hitler’s Nazism became the popular and defining meaning of the term. And yet, the meaningful distinctions and tensions were already present.

The thing that is most interesting to me, is that within Bolshevism, the closely related expression “nationalist-socialism” served two very opposed accusations. Stalin’s camp applied it to Georgian communists such as Budu Mdivani and Filipp Makharadze, accusing them of placing Georgian national autonomy above socialist unity. Lenin then reversed the charge against Stalin himself: the man condemning the smaller nation’s nationalism was enforcing the nationalism of the dominant nation. [^5] What is especially interesting to me about this today, is the way in which Modern Communists and Modern Laurentian Post-”nation” Canadian liberal “nationalists” are solidly on the “same team” when it comes to maintaining a “Big State” against all possible separatists; while not willing to pay any lip service whatsoever to genuine national feelings, apart from that of the recent imported “New Canadians,” and their coalition of Anti “Old Canadian” allies. The “Big Statists” of today, may be either Communists in theory or Capitalists in practice, but either way, they are committed only to maintaining power over the big state.

Lenin described Stalin as a “real and true ‘nationalist-socialist’” and a Great-Russian bully. One accusation targeted resistance to centralization; the other targeted coercive centralization in the interests of the dominant nation. Lenin did not consider them morally equivalent: he believed concessions to the smaller nation could restore the trust necessary for international solidarity. [^5] What this suggests to me is something interesting and unsettling for our present times. In the past, this was not merely theoretical rhetoric for Lenin. Lenin actually was, being sincerely sensitive to the “feelings” of long established “national minorities” and subordinated nations. What he might say, in our modern post-national age is a separate question. That he was effectively “anti-racist” in rhetoric, on this, I do not doubt, and indeed, in utilitarian class directive, though it might not be seen so in modern practice, especially if it means, the smaller nations do not fit the picture of the modern “oppressed.” Great-Russian bully power, could be seen as the “multi-cultural” imposition of his day; perhaps in the same way, in which, our Post-National Canadian “identity” is largely an imposed mask on various people’s who hate the founding core majority. Again, it depends on who is speaking, and who sees who as the imposition.

In other words, this is a debate over the tactics that foster unity between the nations they want to have in their union and ultimately their planned proletarian alliances. No matter what you might think of their motives or long-term intentions. Perhaps you might think them bad, perhaps not. You can see the tension, between the central core, run by the party administrator de facto wanting the “small nations” to be in line with whatever Russia wants; vs. Lenin’s worry over mistrust and feelings of subordination. This is my interpretation of the dispute; Stalin was general secretary, not yet an uncontested supreme ruler in December 1922.[^6] In many such cases, I find that who the “coward thug” is, between a dominant nation and a subordinated nation, depends on what in practice is being extracted and at what cost, from who. As well, as who is contributing to what, and what precisely defines and determines the relationship lines and independence of the nation. In many cases, a subordinated nation, benefits immensely from the more dominant nation. Examples of these, would be Greenland and Denmark, or any case, where a smaller nation, simply couldn’t exist at all, if the larger nation simply, “went away.” In other cases, as with today, we can find inverse relationships, where a majority may feel parasitized on by minorities, or a special region in a nation, an example being Alberta, may simply provide so much value, than their walking away is completely feasible. These are not however issues that the contemporary Left is willing to deal with in good faith.

Finland supplies a further contrast. Yrjö Ruutu’s National Socialist Union, founded in 1932, combined Finnish national solidarity with radical social proposals and drew on fascist and German National Socialist influences. Here the expression was an affirmative programme: the nation would provide the framework within which social divisions were overcome. In the Georgian dispute, by contrast, “nationalist-socialism” was a charge of betraying international solidarity. Similar terminology could thus describe an intended synthesis of nation and social reform, condemn a smaller nation’s assertion of autonomy, or condemn a dominant nation’s imposition of its will.[^7]

I find it utterly fascinating that Yrjö Ruutu, founder of the Nazi-influenced National Socialist Union of Finland (Suomen Kansallissosialistinen Liitto), subsequently joined the Social Democratic Party of Finland (Suomen Sosialidemokraattinen Puolue, SDP) in 1937, alongside followers of his earlier movement. Denmark offers a different contemporary complication: its Social Democrats, Socialdemokratiet, have embraced restrictive immigration policies and concerns about integration and national cohesion often associated with the nationalist Right, presenting these as compatible with defending working people and the welfare state. To me, this illustrates how social democracy can seek to protect the sovereignty, national continuity and democratic self-government of the historically rooted Danish people without abandoning its social commitments.

Japan supplies another early and distinct use. During the 1910s, Takabatake Motoyuki developed kokka shakai shugi, an expression translated as either “state socialism” or “national socialism,” with a documented publication appearing in 1919.[^8] Here the national state was presented as the framework for socialist reconstruction. Unlike Lenin’s accusatory use of “social-nationalist,” this was an affirmative political project. Its origins preceded Hitler’s prominence, although successors to the movement later engaged with German Nazism.[^9] A Japan National Socialist Party was formed on 29 May 1932.[^10] The Japanese example therefore shows both an independently developing national-state socialism and its subsequent encounter with the Nazi movement.

Poland supplies a final contrast in Józef Piłsudski, the socialist revolutionary who became a national military leader. His political trajectory shows why national priorities within socialism should not automatically be read backward through the later categories of Nazism or fascism. In the Polish Socialist Party’s split of 1906, Piłsudski’s camp placed the struggle for Polish independence at the centre of its programme.[^11] For him, socialism became increasingly a route toward national liberation, rather than a commitment to subordinate Poland’s future to an international Marxist revolution. Lenin was familiar with this rival socialist tradition, although Piłsudski was not a former member of Lenin’s party.[^12] Nor does this make Piłsudski a pacifist: he embraced armed struggle and later established authoritarian rule. [^13] Lenin’s classification of these movements also deserves scrutiny. In November 1906, he placed the Polish Socialist Party among the “main types of bourgeois parties.” This was a political classification imposed on a rival socialist tradition, rather than a description its members would necessarily have accepted. For Piłsudski’s current, Polish independence was a condition of political emancipation. For Lenin, socialist language and revolutionary activity were insufficient if the movement’s programme remained, in his judgment, within bourgeois limits.

Lenin’s own New Economic Policy, introduced in 1921, complicates any attempt to make participation in capitalism the decisive test. His government permitted private trade and capitalist enterprise while continuing to call itself proletarian. Lenin had his excuse: capitalist methods could serve a socialist transition when political power and the principal economic instruments remained under proletarian control. Consequently, the existence of markets, profits and private proprietors did not, by itself, determine the class character of his government. But this raises the question of who establishes that proletarian control actually exists. If Lenin could accommodate capitalism without forfeiting his socialist credentials, rival socialists cannot be dismissed merely because their own plans, also accommodated private property or pursued an immediate objective other than socialist transformation. Their institutions, constituencies and distribution of power require examination too. Lenin could argue that the Polish socialists subordinated workers to a national project; his critics could ask whether Bolshevism subordinated workers to the preservation of its own party-state.

The comparison does not make the two projects identical. It does challenge the privilege of treating one movement’s compromises as strategic necessities while treating another’s as proof that its socialism was fraudulent. Calling a party “bourgeois” states a conclusion. It does not relieve us of having to demonstrate whose interests that party actually served.

Post-Soviet Russia offers a further challenge to the assumption that socialism and nationalism occupy opposite political worlds. Its later parliamentary parties combined national allegiance with different economic and historical commitments: United Russia emphasized the authority of a multinational state under Russian cultural leadership; the LDPR offered a more overtly ultranationalist and imperial rhetoric; the Russian Communist Party joined socialist economics and Soviet nostalgia to Russian patriotism; and A Just Russia combined welfare politics with state loyalty. These were not simply successive degrees of nationalism, but competing accounts of what deserved allegiance, the state, the historic nation, the Soviet inheritance, or some combination of them. Accommodation of ethnic difference could coexist with severe intolerance of political dissent. [^14] These are overlapping political emphases, rather than four equally independent alternatives: the parliamentary opposition operates within a heavily controlled political system.

The Russian case becomes even more revealing when we look at the actual confrontations surrounding the post-Soviet settlement. The decisive example is the constitutional crisis of September–October 1993. Communists, Russian nationalists, National Bolsheviks and outright neo-Nazis could be found on the same side against Boris Yeltsin. Alexander Barkashov’s Russian National Unity supplied armed supporters of parliament; Eduard Limonov and the emerging National Bolshevik movement also joined the anti-Yeltsin opposition. These were distinct movements with different ambitions, and yet they were nevertheless brought together by a common enemy. Their cooperation did not require agreement over what should replace him; they were effectively forced into one camp.

Here is the irony for anyone who treats “Left” and “Right” as automatic synonyms for good and evil, or freedom and slavery. Communists and neo-Nazis stood within the same opposition camp, while the president identified with liberal reform and Western support ordered tanks to fire on parliament. The presence of fascists among parliament’s defenders did not make Yeltsin’s actions constitutional; the presence of elected deputies did not make every armed defender a democrat. Neither side’s ideological labels settle the question of what its participants were actually doing.

Putin adds a complication. He emerged from the St Petersburg reform establishment around Anatoly Sobchak, subsequently entered Yeltsin’s presidential administration, and became his chosen successor. The political order he inherited came from the victory of the presidential camp, rather than the victory of its Communist and nationalist opponents. The strengthened presidency established after 1993 then supplied instruments through which Putin consolidated his own authority. This does not make Yeltsin and Putin ideologically identical. It does make the institutional continuity difficult to ignore.

For me, the lesson is that political labels do not substitute for examining alliances, institutions and conduct. People who bitterly disagree about history, economics and the nation may nevertheless stand together against the same government. A movement associated with freedom may strengthen executive coercion; opponents with authoritarian ambitions may find themselves defending an institution that limits the executive. The useful questions are therefore concrete: who is allied with whom, against which power, defending which institution, and seeking what settlement afterward? The problem with Left vs. Right, labeling is that it is actually directed by less than useful inherited emotionalism. It is, if anything more primitive and anti-utilitarian than the old charge of bigotry used to be. It is for me, a political bigotry, which refused to comprehend both the motives of those who are “on your own side” and “those who may oppose you.” And it is bigotry which defines the current Western “Left.”

The revealing division for me is therefore not merely between nationalist and internationalist, but over which differences the national order could tolerate and when, which loyalties were going to be considered primary by the state, and whose interests it actually would claim to represent. The narrower point is that socialist origins could still lead toward national independence without beginning as explicit Hitlerian racial politics. “National” and “socialist” were elements whose relationship remained contested, rather than words that already identified one fixed political destination. This comparison does not make all the parties described above socialist, or establish that they share one ideological ancestry. My point is that history is a mixture of what you may perceive of as “good and evil” and just because someone who was “on your side” won or lost, is not the issue, when it comes to building new coalition and new programs, which you want to see succeed in the future. Addressing new problems requires learning from past histories, not dismissing everything you don’t like as belonging to your enemies.

My own “Social Nationalism” Today

What does this mean for those of us today? My own “Social Nationalism” would be very different from all these examples. I am firmly anti-war, and I want international worker solidarity; I am not primarily interested in abolishing productive industrial capitalism. If anything, I want it back under new very tight institutional terms, with government controls, granting preemptive rights to property, alongside an extremely free market, broad ownership, and protections for ordinary people’s bargaining power. By a free market under tight institutional terms, I mean competition within rules protecting ownership and bargaining power, rather than an absence of all government regulation. This is my proposed programme, not a description of the historical movements above.

Meanwhile, I see the question of oppression differently from the nineteenth-century revolutionary Left, which understandably opposed the subordination of smaller nations in the interests of unity. Today, I believe we face different, and in some respects opposite, problems. In England, France, Germany, Canada and the United States, I see policies and institutions that too often disparage long-established national communities, discount their continuity, and diminish their effective democratic control over immigration and economic change. I fear that sustained demographic change, is imposed without public consent, weakens solidarity and leaves ordinary people feeling supplanted, humiliated and vulnerable, within their own countries. This is a criticism of elite decisions and institutional incentives. [^15]

Some smaller nations, such as Georgia and Poland, appear more willing to defend national continuity, though they have their own conflicts and contradictions. This is an almost complete inverse from the conditions in which the old Far Left could reasonably complain. Lenin recalled Tatars being mockingly called “Prince.”[^5] I invoke that example as a contrast in political emphasis, not as evidence that anti-Tatar or other ethnic prejudice has disappeared today. In my view, Whites are conditioned to accept ritualistic humiliation in all aspects of life, to ritualistically humiliate each other, and those lower on the diversity and inclusion left identity pecking order than themselves. In other words, today, in contrast to some of Engels’s nineteenth-century arguments, it is not the weaker nations which are “going away.” It is the once “strong nations,” like Germany, which Engels treated as historically consequential, which are slated for gradual extermination, in the name of equality and inclusion. [^16]

My Social Nationalism would therefore seek solidarity between the peoples of Western Europe and the Anglosphere to protect their sovereignty, national continuity and actual democratic rights, while respecting the same rights elsewhere. It would include substantial reductions in immigration and “remigration,” by which I do mean removal, of all those imposed on us, who we never consented to be included in our political community in the first place. I might for example, consider all “immigrants” who do not have at least one grandparent in the United States or Canada before 1967, to be somehow illegitimate. Where we draw the line does not matter to me personally. I am not going to be that racially neurotic, but what does matter to me is that there “is a line” which in existing and being acknowledged, respects the rights of the historically inherited political community, whose cultural inheritances reach back centuries, and in some cases much longer. The 1967 cutoff is my suggested political criterion, not an existing test of citizenship or lawful residence. It would encompass many people born in these countries and many citizens; changing their status or removing them would conflict with existing rights and would require explaining how my proposal could be reconciled with the democratic liberties I seek to defend. In North America, long-established communities must also be distinguished from Indigenous peoples.[^17] I fully realize that attack.

The point is that the mass movement of people’s for the purposes of capital, already violates those democratic liberties. Forcing a people to give up control over who is included in their historically derived political community is precisely what the Left, complains about when it done in past iterations of Imperialism, therefore we might justly ask, why or how they can possibly condemn a patriot of England, France of Germany, requiring a line to be drawn, which does not reduce its citizens to interchangeable cogs that can be replaced.

It is in denying that there should be any line, which I consider disrespectful to the political community. My programme’s purpose would be a reassertion of those “bourgeois liberties,” ( now denied by our own elites ) democratic rights and national sovereignty that I believe our current elites too readily subordinate to global capital and an ideal of the interchangeable, politically submissive global citizen. Solidarity should strengthen people’s capacity to govern their own societies, their own nation, rather than require them to surrender their national existence. That is my “internationalism.” The language of recovering abandoned democratic liberties and national sovereignty deliberately echoes Stalin’s address to the Nineteenth Party Congress on 14 October 1952; it is a rhetorical borrowing, not an endorsement of his regime or proof of my contemporary diagnosis.[^18]

Footnotes

[^1]: Institut für Sächsische Geschichte und Volkskunde, “Friedrich Naumann,” Sächsische Biografie. Documents the founding of the Nationalsozialer Verein in 1896 and its social and national programme. Biography. Naumann’s earlier usage should not be equated automatically with Nazi ideology.

[^2]: “Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei (Österreich),” especially “Gründung,” documents the name change at the Vienna congress of 4–5 May 1918 and identifies Rudolf Jung as its principal programme writer; “Rudolf Jung” records his 1919 book. Austrian party; Jung. These are secondary reference summaries, not inspected originals of the 1918 programme or the 1919 first edition.

[^3]: Gabriel Eikenberg, “Anton Drexler,” Deutsches Historisches Museum, LeMO. Dates the renaming of the DAP to NSDAP and announcement of the programme to 24 February 1920. Biography.

[^4]: V. I. Lenin, “The Collapse of Platonic Internationalism,” published in Sotsial-Demokrat, no. 42, 21 May 1915, Collected Works, vol. 21, pp. 194–198. Lenin explicitly says that those he calls social-nationalists reject the designation. Text. Also “Under a False Flag,” written in 1915 but first published in 1917, vol. 21, pp. 135–157. Text. These dates concern the Russian works; the linked wording is an English translation.

[^5]: V. I. Lenin, “The Question of Nationalities or ‘Autonomisation’,” dictated 30–31 December 1922, Collected Works, vol. 36, pp. 605–611. This is the source for the accusation against the Georgians, Lenin’s reversal against Stalin, the distinction between dominant and oppressed nations, and his recollection that Tatars were nicknamed “Prince.” Text. Lenin reports a mocking practice; “Prince” is not presented as the Tatars’ political self-description. The English phrase “nationalist-socialism” should not be treated without qualification as the identical German party name. The bracketed explanations in the earlier pasted copy are not all Lenin’s own words.

[^6]: “Appointment of Stalin as General Secretary,” Pravda, 4 April 1922, reproduced in Seventeen Moments in Soviet History. Appointment notice. Lenin’s “Letter to the Congress,” December 1922, with the addendum of 4 January 1923, recommends removing Stalin from the general secretaryship. Text. These support the offices and dispute; the motives described in the paragraph are the author’s interpretation.

[^7]: Henrik Ekberg, “Nazism,” Uppslagsverket Finland. Identifies Yrjö Ruutu’s 1932 organization and compares its social radicalism with early Italian fascism and the Strasser current in the NSDAP. Entry. The entry “Ruutu, Yrjö” explains his national-community and state-ownership ideas. Biography. This concerns specific movements, not Finnish patriotism in general.

[^8]: Tatiana Linkhoeva, Japan’s Response to the Russian Revolution: Anarchism, Socialism, and Pan-Asianism in the Early 1920s, doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2014, discussion of Takabatake, especially printed pp. 53–56. Establishes the journal Kokka shakaishugi in April 1919 and cites Takabatake’s “Kokka shakaishugi no irowake,” 1 April 1919. Dissertation. The original 1919 issue has not been independently inspected here. Kokka means state; “state socialism” and “national socialism” are alternative contextual translations, not proof of identity with German Nazism.

[^9]: “The national socialist movement in Japan during the early 1930s: The debate over the Nazi Party and ‘Fascism’,” scholarly article indexed by Japan’s National Diet Library. Its abstract describes Nazi contacts and propaganda, as well as subsequent disagreements. Record and abstract. Used for the movement’s later reception of Nazism, not to characterize every Japanese socialist or nationalist.

[^10]: Shōji Arakawa, “Nihon Kokka Shakaitō” (日本国家社会党), Nipponica, Shōgakukan, reproduced by Kotobank. Gives 29 May 1932 as the founding date and identifies Akamatsu Katsumaro’s faction and a national-socialist trade-union faction as its founders. Entry. This party should not be conflated automatically with every organization descended from Takabatake’s circle.

[^11]: Museum of Polish History, “Józef Piłsudski’s letter to Feliks Perl.” Explains the 1906 PPS division between the internationalist “young” and the independence-oriented “old,” including Piłsudski. Article. See also the Józef Piłsudski Museum’s “Wiktor,” which dates the Vienna split to November 1906. Museum account. National independence was central; the claim that socialism increasingly became its vehicle is an interpretive summary, not proof that every social commitment was insincere.

[^12]: Lenin, “The Second Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. (First All-Russia Conference),” November 1906. His discussion explicitly places the Polish Socialist Party among republican bourgeois parties, demonstrating familiarity with the rival tradition. Text. This does not establish a personal meeting with Piłsudski.

[^13]: Józef Piłsudski Museum, “Józef Piłsudski 1867–1935.” Biography. The biographical comparison concerns his socialist origins, military activity and later rule; it is not an example of a verified early self-designation as “National Socialist.”

[^14]: “Two variants of the Russian radical right: Imperial and social nationalism,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42, no. 4 (2009), pp. 505–526, compares the CPRF and LDPR. Article. “Civic Myth, Imperial Reality: Putin’s Political Nationalism,” Kennan Institute, analyzes state loyalty and multinational inclusion. Analysis. Congressional Research Service, Russia’s December 2011 Legislative Election: Outcome and Implications, identifies the four-party parliamentary arrangement and Just Russia’s social-democratic profile. Report. European Parliament, Russian Opposition: Background Note (2020), discusses systemic opposition. Report. These describe selected periods and ideological tendencies, not a timeless complete party list.

[^15]: Editorial evidence note: statements about humiliation, absent public consent, diminished control and coordinated national replacement are the author’s judgments. No source supplied here establishes all those claims across England, France, Germany, Canada and the United States. Elections and legislative authorization are forms of public decision-making even where the author considers them inadequate; demographic change alone does not establish a deliberate extinction policy.

[^16]: Friedrich Engels, “The Magyar Struggle,” Neue Rheinische Zeitung, no. 194, 13 January 1849. Text on an archive mirror. Engels’s hostile predictions about certain “reactionary” peoples arose in the 1848–1849 revolutionary conflicts. See James Chastain’s reference entry “Non-historic peoples.” Historical context. This is not a universal prediction that every smaller nation must vanish, and cannot substantiate a modern claim that Germany is slated for extermination.

[^17]: Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, “Immigration Regulations, Order-in-Council PC 1967-1616, 1967,” explains the points-system reform. History. The date does not create an ancestry-based legitimacy boundary, nor is it a shared US–Canadian legal cutoff. Canada’s Charter, sections 6 and 15, protects citizens’ right to remain and equality without discrimination based on race or national or ethnic origin; section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 recognizes Aboriginal and treaty rights. Constitutional text. The article’s ancestry rule is a proposed political criterion, not existing law. Its extension to the United States requires separate legal analysis; no Canadian source establishes American legal rules.

[^18]: J. V. Stalin, speech to the Nineteenth Congress of the CPSU, 14 October 1952, Works, vol. 16. Full speech. In its concluding substantive paragraphs, Stalin urges communist and democratic parties to recover the banners of bourgeois democratic freedom and national independence allegedly abandoned by the bourgeoisie. This supports the rhetorical allusion, not the truth of Stalin’s accusations, the democratic character of his regime, or the author’s contemporary claims about immigration. It is his final Party Congress address; calling it his final speech of any kind would require an additional qualification.

Source list

Primary historical texts

• Lenin, V. I. “The Collapse of Platonic Internationalism” (1915). See note 4.

• Lenin, V. I. “Under a False Flag” (written 1915; published 1917). See note 4.

• Lenin, V. I. “The Question of Nationalities or ‘Autonomisation’” (1922). See note 5.

• Lenin, V. I. “Letter to the Congress” (1922–1923). See note 6.

• Pravda. Appointment notice for Stalin and the Secretariat (4 April 1922). See note 6.

• Lenin, V. I. “The Second Conference of the R.S.D.L.P.” (1906). See note 12.

• Engels, Friedrich. “The Magyar Struggle” (1849). See note 16.

• Stalin, J. V. Address to the Nineteenth Party Congress (14 October 1952). See note 18.

Historical scholarship and reference works

• ISGV, Sächsische Biografie: “Friedrich Naumann.” See note 1.

• Reference entries on the Austrian DNSAP and Rudolf Jung. See note 2.

• Deutsches Historisches Museum, LeMO: “Anton Drexler.” See note 3.

• Ekberg, Henrik. “Nazism,” and “Ruutu, Yrjö,” Uppslagsverket Finland. See note 7.

• Linkhoeva, Tatiana. Japan’s Response to the Russian Revolution: Anarchism, Socialism, and Pan-Asianism in the Early 1920s (dissertation, 2014). See note 8.

• “The national socialist movement in Japan during the early 1930s.” National Diet Library scholarly record. See note 9.

• Arakawa, Shōji. “Nihon Kokka Shakaitō,” Nipponica. See note 10.

• Museum of Polish History and Józef Piłsudski Museum accounts. See notes 11 and 13.

• “Two variants of the Russian radical right: Imperial and social nationalism” (2009). See note 14.

• Kennan Institute. “Civic Myth, Imperial Reality.” See note 14.

• Congressional Research Service. Russia’s December 2011 Legislative Election. See note 14.

• European Parliament. Russian Opposition: Background Note (2020). See note 14.

• Chastain, James. “Non-historic peoples.” See note 16.

Policy history and constitutional sources

• Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21. 1967 immigration regulations. See note 17.

• Department of Justice Canada. Constitution Acts, 1867 to 1982. See note 17.

1. Scotty’s medieval vocabulary — “Who Mourns for Adonais?”
   “You bloodthirsty Saracen!” The absurdity is that Apollo is a Greek god, while Saracen is an old term associated with Arabs and Muslims. Scotty apparently reaches straight into the medieval insult cupboard when fighting for his love. The Enterprise can transcend humanity’s ancient divisions, but its chief engineer still sounds ready to retake Jerusalem. Arab or Muslim viewers seethe, seeing their historical designation used as shorthand for a violent villain.

2. An insult inside a thank-you — “Bread and Circuses.”
   “I’m trying to thank you, you pointed-eared hobgoblin!” Even gratitude from McCoy, apparently requires a reference to the recipient’s species. Enlightened interstellar friendship, expressed as affectionate anatomical abuse. The most offended people will no doubt be viewers sensitive to appearance-based bullying, or anyone wondering how this passes Starfleet’s workplace standards.

3. Spock fact-checks the slur — “This Side of Paradise.”
   Kirk calls him a “mutinous, disloyal, computerised, half-breed.” Spock accepts the ancestry description but objects to the computer terminology. Kirk is deliberately provoking anger to break the spores’ influence, which makes Spock’s pedantic response especially funny. Your insult contains a technical error, Captain. Kirk’s cruelty is a calculated emergency measure.

4. United Earth, competing national drinks — “The Trouble with Tribbles.”
   Scotty pushes Scotch as the civilized alternative to Chekov’s vodka. Chekov retaliates by claiming Scotch was invented by a little old lady from Leningrad. Humanity has united, but Scotland and Russia are still fighting over the drinks cabinet.

5. Lincoln causes an awkward bridge moment — “The Savage Curtain.”
   The recreated Lincoln calls Uhura “a charming negress,” then apologizes. She explains that people in her century have learned not to fear words.

6. Kirk’s explanation for Spock’s appearance — “The City on the Edge of Forever.”
   “My friend is obviously Chinese.” He then explains Spock’s ears as an accident involving a mechanical rice picker, followed by corrective surgery from an American missionary. An enlightened future captain improvises an entire colonial adventure story as his cover. Kirk can negotiate with extraterrestrial civilizations, but explaining one pair of ears sends him straight into a 1930s stereotype.

7. Scotty tells Spock to keep his hands to himself — “Day of the Dove.”
   “Keep your Vulcan hands off me!” He follows with “you green-blooded half-breed!” Spock retaliates by complaining about serving with humans, and Scotty tells him to transfer out. An alien entity is amplifying their hostility, but the exchange sounds like the Enterprise’s workplace relations have completely collapsed.

8. Spock discovers that humans look funny too — “The Devil in the Dark.”
   After mind-melding with the Horta, Spock reports that she found humanoids’ appearance revolting. Kirk and McCoy immediately ask whether she mentioned Spock’s ears. The crew has just achieved understanding with a radically different life-form, and promptly returns to mocking its own first officer.

9. The future still uses “yellow civilisation” — “The Omega Glory.”
   Spock describes the planet’s history using “the yellow civilisation” and “the white civilisation.” It is an startling collision between futuristic scientific exposition and old racial analogs.

10. Too “primitive” even to explain the emergency — “The Paradise Syndrome.”
    Spock says the inhabitants are “too primitive to grasp the concept of space flight” and that the crew’s appearance would frighten them. The irony is that their ancestors reached the planet through alien space travel, although the inhabitants no longer know that history. Obviously, White liberal views, eager to pounce on “colonial paternalism” and sound enlightened by doing so, hate it when a superior intellect like a Spock is depicted using this terminology.

11. Chekov’s own historical insult cupboard — “The Gamesters of Triskelion.”
    He calls alien slavers “Cossacks!” Scotty reaches for medieval Saracens; Chekov reaches for historical Cossacks. Apparently every nationality brings its own antique insult collection into space.

12. Kirk brings Scotland’s national flower into it — “Who Mourns for Adonais?”
    While scolding Scotty for confronting Apollo, Kirk calls him a “stiff-necked thistle head.” Scotty insults Apollo’s supposed ethnicity; Kirk immediately mocks Scotty’s actual nationality.

13. Two assumptions dismissed in two words — “The Naked Time.”
    An intoxicated, sword-wielding Sulu addresses Uhura: “I’ll protect you, fair maiden!” She replies: “Sorry, neither.” Her response plays on both fair complexion and maiden virginity. A damsel from a European romance turns out to have her own assessment of the situation.

14. An alien infection unleashes Irish nationalism — “The Naked Time.”
    Riley boasts “One Irishman is worth ten thousand—”, takes over engineering, and repeatedly sings I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen over the intercom. The future’s sophisticated starship is held hostage by an Irish stereotype with access to the microphone.

15. Humanity becomes a contaminant — “The Gamesters of Triskelion.”
    When McCoy suggests Spock is showing the “human failing” of hope, Spock replies: “Constant exposure does result in a certain degree of contamination.” Interstellar cooperation, described by its science officer as catching something unpleasant from humans.

    

    ---

Here are ten reasons to give him that consideration.

1. He believed conservatism could provide material security.

Nixon accepted important achievements of the New Deal and Great Society rather than treating their destruction as his mission. His conservatism allowed room for public provision, economic intervention, and reform. There is something morally serious about a politics that takes responsibility for how ordinary people live.

2. He proposed an income floor for struggling families.

His 1969 Family Assistance Plan sought federal minimum support for poor families, including families already working. It combined assistance with work incentives and requirements for eligible adults. Although it never became law, the proposal recognized that employment and poverty could coexist, and that working families deserved help.

3. He wanted healthcare within everyone’s reach.

His 1974 Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan proposed employer coverage, assistance for people unable to afford insurance, and improved Medicare. It preserved private provision while accepting public responsibility for access. The proposal failed, but its ambition deserves recognition.

4. He helped protect the elderly and disabled from destitution.

In 1972, Nixon signed legislation increasing Social Security benefits by 20% and establishing automatic inflation adjustments. He also signed the legislation creating Supplemental Security Income for needy elderly, blind, and disabled people. These measures gave vulnerable Americans more dependable material protection.

5. He accepted that workers’ safety was a public responsibility.

Nixon signed the 1970 legislation establishing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. A worker’s willingness to earn a living does not release an employer from obligations concerning safety. His signature helped make those obligations enforceable.

6. He was willing to use economic power in the national interest.

In 1971, Nixon imposed wage and price controls, suspended dollar convertibility into gold, and introduced a temporary import surcharge. The results warrant criticism, but his willingness to intervene showed that market arrangements were subject to political judgment and national needs.

7. He wanted communities to exercise more control over public resources.

His New Federalism sought to move funds and responsibility toward state and local governments. Its underlying principle deserves respect: national resources can support institutions closer to the people who depend on them.

8. He supported Indigenous self-determination.

In his July 8, 1970 message on Indian Affairs, Nixon rejected forced termination and advocated Indigenous self-determination. He recognized that assistance need not require the surrender of a people’s institutions or identity. This is among the strongest moral reasons to reassess his presidency.

9. He could negotiate with ideological enemies.

Nixon’s anti-communism did not prevent his opening to China or his pursuit of détente and arms control with the Soviet Union in 1972. He understood that responsible leadership sometimes requires negotiating with governments one profoundly opposes.

10. He understood the political importance of people who felt unheard.

His appeal to the “silent majority” gave political expression to Americans who felt alienated from the protest movements of his era. That appeal gives his a special place for “The Dissident Right” which is shut out of any public discussion of identity or grievance; quieter citizens also possess interests, loyalties, and a legitimate claim to representation.

Manipulation can arrive as an offer, an argument, a favour, or an appeal to friendship. What makes it sly is the repeated attempt to obtain your agreement while avoiding your actual concerns. These tactics can appear in dating, friendships, sales, and business. A single phrase may be innocent; the revealing pattern is what happens after you clarify your objection or refuse. Watch for these patterns.

1. Turning Your Refusal into a Wording Dispute

What it does: Redirects attention from your objection to how you expressed it.

How it can feel: “My meaning was clear. Why am I suddenly defending my vocabulary?”

Explanation: “You didn’t tell me you disliked my semantics” makes the conversation about language when your concern may be honesty, dignity, or an unwanted proposal. Clarifying a misunderstanding is reasonable. Continuing to debate wording after clarification can avoid the substance.

How to deflect: Clarify your meaning once, then return to your decision.

“My objection is to what you are proposing. I don’t want it.” “You understand my answer. I’m not debating the phrasing.”

You do not need to produce a sentence so flawless that someone determined to argue cannot challenge it. You must maintain your disbelief in what is being offered. Belief is like a magic spell. Once you simply refuse the spell, you can see through it. Your manipulator may then turn to semantics, in order to refuse giving up, his own belief in his offer, or the appearance of its worth. Once you have rejected his worth, or the worth of the product, or the trustworthiness of the man, himself, he enters “frame control” mode. He will not give this up. He has to shift to semantics, or challenging you in some way.

2. Repeating the Request with Small Changes

What it does: Reopens a decision through slightly different proposals.

How it can feel: “Apparently, my answer only counts if it is yes.”

Explanation: “No date? Then just a drink. No drink? Then just come upstairs.” Each request sounds smaller, but the pressure continues. A respectful alternative leaves you free to decline; persistent bargaining keeps testing the same boundary.

How to deflect: Address the repeated request as a whole.

“I’m declining the invitation. Changing the details doesn’t change my answer.” “I have answered. I’m ending this conversation.”

Follow through. An announced boundary becomes useful when you act on it. This is where the person may shift between desperation and condescension. He may continue to demean your intelligence, with the pretense of being the person who wants to help, or who was always your best option. Remember, that if you have given up that belief, he has only really those two poles to shift between.

3. Demanding Reasons, Then Disputing Them

What it does: Makes your refusal depend on whether the other person accepts your explanation.

How it can feel: “I have been put on trial for making my own decision.”

Explanation: “Why not?” becomes “That’s not a good reason.” Every answer supplies another point to challenge. Someone can ask for understanding, but finding your reasons unpersuasive does not give them authority over your decision.

How to deflect: Give the explanation you choose to give, then stop supplying new arguments.

“You don’t have to agree with my reason. My decision stands.” “I don’t want to. That is my answer.”

Business agreements may involve contractual obligations or require an explanation. Even there, discussing the relevant terms need not become an endless defence of your character.

4. Offering Extravagant Rewards

What it does: Uses impressive promises to obtain immediate trust, cooperation, or access.

How it can feel: “They think I can be bought or dazzled into ignoring my doubts.”

Explanation: Promises of money, influence, romantic opportunities, or powerful connections can make an offer difficult to dismiss. The promised benefit may be vague, exaggerated, or impossible to verify, while what you must provide is immediate and concrete.

How to deflect: First decide whether you want the offer at all.

“I’m not interested, regardless of the promised benefits.” “Put the offer, obligations, costs, and evidence in writing. I’ll review them independently.”

Verification is for an offer you wish to consider. You do not have to investigate an unwanted proposition before declining it. Someone who constantly promises great rewards in the future has of course already failed verification. At least make sure that the Epstein talking to you, can deliver, whatever rare 18 year old prize, he has been promising. A person who promises you access to other people as prizes is revealing something about how he may treat you, too.

5. Creating a Debt You Never Agreed To

What it does: Turns gifts, favours, or promises into an obligation.

How it can feel: “What looked like generosity now has an invoice attached.”

Explanation: “After everything I’ve done for you” can become a demand for something you never agreed to provide. Gratitude does not automatically require money, loyalty, personal information, or romantic attention.

How to deflect: Separate appreciation from agreement.

“I appreciate the help. I never agreed to this in return.” “Before I accept, what are you expecting from me?”

Where practical, decline or return a conditional gift you do not want. If there is a genuine financial or contractual obligation, address that obligation specifically; it does not authorize unrelated demands. You never want to accept things from someone who is constantly changing the terms of a treaty, or is always adding additional fine print, or mountains you have to climb in order for him to make good on future conditional gifts.

6. Attacking Your Identity or Confidence

What it does: Makes compliance a test of your worth.

How it can feel: “I am being dared to betray myself to prove myself.”

Explanation: “A real man would,” “You’re insecure,” or “You’re not a serious entrepreneur” shifts attention from the proposal to your identity. Refusal is made to feel humiliating.

How to deflect: Decline the test itself.

“My identity is not something I need to prove by accepting your offer.” “If you have a proposal, explain its merits. Personal insults won’t influence my decision.”

Avoid getting trapped in a performance of courage, masculinity, loyalty, identity issues or sophistication. You can know who you are without obtaining this person’s recognition. The minute this person starts forcing you to defend your own recognition, you should know you are dealing with a slippery fish.

7. Minimizing What They Are Asking

What it does: Trivializes the request and portrays your objection as excessive.

How it can feel: “They are deciding what should matter to me.”

Explanation: “It’s only a little favour” leaves out who bears the cost. A request that seems minor to the person making it may involve your time, privacy, money, or dignity.

How to deflect: State your own assessment without trying to make them share it.

“It may seem small to you. I’m not willing to do it.” “I don’t share that information.” “I’m not spending money or time on this.”

You do not have to demonstrate enormous harm before setting a limit. If someone needs access to your time or network or resources, he may not have that much to offer in the first place.

8. Reversing the Blame

What it does: Moves attention from their conduct to your supposed unfairness.

How it can feel: “I raised a concern, and now I am expected to apologize.”

Explanation: “How could you think that of me?” can draw you into reassurance before your question receives an answer. People can reasonably object to an unfair accusation. The warning sign is a repeated pattern in which their offence replaces any discussion of their behaviour.

How to deflect: Stay with observable conduct and the unanswered question.

“I’m asking about what happened. Please answer that question.” “I shouldn’t have assumed your motive. I still need an explanation for what you did.”

You can acknowledge a mistake while maintaining a legitimate boundary. This is perhaps the hardest deflection that I have found. When someone is in an inferior position to another person, even an undeclared inferior position, it becomes incredibly difficult to deny accusations of wrongdoing. In this moment, the distinction between power and morality becomes inconsequential. The person with the power can determine reality, and if he has decided to accuse you of something, however trivial or nonsensical, for other motives, the pressure to simply agree, and concede is immense.

9. “But We’re Friends”

What it does: Uses the relationship to bypass questions of truth, dignity, or consent.

How it can feel: “Our friendship is being used as a claim on me.”

Explanation: Friendship can explain why someone hopes for trust. It does not settle whether a claim is true or a request is acceptable. When “But we’re friends” replaces an answer, the relationship becomes pressure to stop questioning.

How to deflect: Bring the conversation back to the issue.

“Our friendship doesn’t answer my question.” “If we’re friends, you can respect my refusal.”

You do not need to settle the entire status of the friendship before declining this particular request. Watch for the moment when friendship becomes something you must continually purchase through compliance. He may invoke your shared history, remind you of things you told him in confidence, or suggest that refusing him proves you never cared. The pressure is to defend the relationship by surrendering the particular boundary under dispute. Pay attention to whether your friendship still counts when you stop being useful to him.

10. Manufacturing Urgency

What it does: Restricts your opportunity to reflect, verify, or seek advice.

How it can feel: “I am being rushed past my own judgment.”

Explanation: “Decide now,” “This is your only chance,” or “Don’t overthink it” can make hesitation feel like failure. Some deadlines are genuine. Pressure becomes especially concerning when questions or independent advice are discouraged.

How to deflect: Set your own decision process.

“I don’t make this kind of decision under pressure.” “What creates the deadline? Send me the terms so I can check them.”

Urgency is used to keep you away from anyone who might question the offer. “Do not tell your friends yet.” “Your adviser will not understand.” “We need to settle this between ourselves.” Now you are being asked to make a quick decision inside a conversation whose terms he controls. If you hesitate, he may suggest that someone else will receive the reward, making you compete for an opportunity you have barely examined. Ask yourself why the offer requires both your immediate agreement and your isolation from other perspectives.

Know Your Value: House of Cards, Smoke and Mirrors

Sometimes your enemy has built his perception of value on a house of cards, on smoke and mirrors. Grand connections, supposed wealth, endless romantic opportunities, and claims of exceptional intelligence can create an impressive appearance without establishing much underneath. That is a possibility to examine, not a conclusion to assume. Separate what someone claims from what they demonstrate. Can their claims be verified? Do their promises become results? Do they honour agreements? Can they accept a refusal without belittling you? Knowing your value also means recognizing what is yours to decide: your time, attention, privacy, work, money, and participation. These are not worthless because another person dismisses them. Nor must you establish that you are superior to someone before you can refuse them. Most people do not know their value. Your value can range from beauty, genetic capital ( “race” ), health, and physical vitality to practical skills, earned qualifications, creativity, sound judgment, and the ability to build or repair something others need. It can include concrete assets: savings, tools, property, an audience you have cultivated, or a business you have built. It can also include a reputation for honesty, relationships grounded in genuine trust, knowledge of your community, cultural heritage, and the capacity to care for others and honour your commitments. Some of these qualities attract people; others create opportunity, security, or lasting contribution. None becomes worthless because someone refuses to acknowledge it. But knowing your value also requires honesty about what you actually possess and demonstrate, the same standard you apply to someone else’s smoke and mirrors. Your dignity and your right to refuse do not depend on how impressive your inventory is. If you do not make an inventory of your value: your enemy might be keeping a better inventory of you, than you do.

“What am I actually receiving?”

“What am I being asked to surrender?”

“Would I want this without the impressive performance around it?”

“What happens if I walk away?”

You do not need to demolish the house of cards before deciding you will not enter it.

Recognizing the Levers of Influence

Robert Cialdini’s writing on influence offers useful concepts here: reciprocity, liking, authority, and scarcity. A supposed debt invokes reciprocity; “we’re friends” invokes liking; impressive credentials suggest authority; an urgent deadline invokes scarcity. These principles describe ordinary influence as well as exploitation. The important distinction is whether you receive truthful information and retain a meaningful opportunity to refuse.

Who Sets the Terms of the Conversation?

In Pitch Anything, Oren Klaff presents “setting the frame” as part of his approach to pitching. His work is useful to mention when examining how the presentation of an interaction can influence its direction. My defensive application is this: notice when someone appoints themselves the judge of your intelligence, worth, or seriousness and requires you to perform for their approval. You can return to your own question: “Is this offer useful, credible, and acceptable to me?”

Know Your Alternative

Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton’s Getting to Yes popularized BATNA: your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. It means knowing what you will do if no agreement is reached. For this guide, the practical lesson is to develop alternatives before pressure makes one person’s offer seem indispensable. You might seek another supplier, another adviser, another opportunity, or decide that no deal serves you better. In personal relationships, this does not mean ranking people like business offers. It means remembering that declining an unwanted interaction remains an available choice.

The Question That Matters

Together, these ideas suggest useful questions: What is being promised? What is being demanded? Who has decided the terms? What can I do if I decline? The clearest evidence remains behaviour after clarification. Does the person address your concern and accept your decision? Or do they change tactics while continuing to seek the same result? You can say: “You understand my answer. I am not discussing it further.” You do not have to win the debate before your refusal counts.

The Governing Order, Then.

One starting contrast that I think a Right-Wing Leninism should make clear is this: identify the governing order of your own time and attack its claim to rule. In Lenin’s Russia, the monarchy and the Orthodox Church were bound together in public authority.[1] In other words, historical communism did win against a governing order that could be identified with Christianity. To put it more carefully, the governing order and its governing myth were allied with Christianity, and the Church was an institution that could readily be blamed. When leftists today speak of “systemic this or that,” I think they often forget their own position within that system. They are not attacking all-powerful churches today. In my analogy, they are the churches today.

Therefore, whatever one thinks of Christianity, ( I simply do not make it my public apron, tartan, or badge, ) it makes little sense to treat it as the central institution governing contemporary public life. Likewise, legally enforced white supremacy is no longer the declared constitutional principle of the United States.[2] Today, I see a governing order against which the average progressive finds it difficult to distinguish himself. This does not mean that I endorse every view of every Nazi or separatist group. Nor does it mean that every right-wing opinion is automatically correct simply because someone on the Right expresses it.

In the society that preceded the Russian Revolution, the Tsar claimed a sacred place above the people; the Church gave that claim ritual, language, and institutional support.[1] A radical could point to the throne and the altar and say: there is the order that governs us. Lenin did not personally overthrow the Tsar, of course. The monarchy fell in February 1917, before the Bolsheviks seized power in October.[3] But he must have understood the political force of confronting a myth people could see. I regard him as a remarkably successful practitioner of disciplined revolutionary organization, with affinities to the tradition associated with Auguste Blanqui. Calling him simply a “Blanquist,” however, would obscure Lenin’s own insistence that a successful insurrection required a favourable political situation and support beyond a conspiracy. It is this final part, which makes Lenin unique and admirable. The Marxism by contrast feels like “cover.” What matters is the favorable condition. I think the Left has forgotten this.[4] At least, that is how I think a good Machiavellian should approach the relationship between power and public belief.[5]

The victory produced a durable public myth: we overthrew a backward, abusive, religious monarchy and opened the way to a modern society. A simple story. I think that story is the inherited power on which modern leftists still run, like an engine running on dying fumes. Peter Hitchens is a relevant reference for the broader argument about revolutionary hostility to religion, but this particular “dying fumes” formulation, which he used for Christianity, is my metaphor, for why the Left seems insufficient despite “owning the streets.”[6] This story was simpler than the history, but that simplicity was part of its power. It named an enemy, explained why that enemy had lost the right to rule, and gave the victors a reason to be remembered. A communist in Canada today who speaks as though bishops still govern public life is borrowing that old victory without finding an equivalent in the present. The governing order of 1905 is gone. One cannot inherit the force of Lenin’s challenge merely by repeating the names of Lenin’s enemies.

Today, almost comically, Russia’s principal communist party has cultivated a relationship with the Orthodox Church while invoking the patriotic inheritance of the Soviet period.[7] I find this profoundly confusing when considering international left-wing alliances. A revolution does not just fight a system; it fights a myth. Lenin confronted an empire whose public story joined the Tsar, the Orthodox Church, and the established social order. He could make rebellion mean a break with the authority that claimed to govern Russia by right.

Modern communists, leftists, progressives, and their broad socialist coalitions can mistake an ordinary person with reactionary views for the governing order itself. They can spend years pounding that person’s head while the institutions that actually rule applaud from the sidelines. But a private prejudice held by a native-born white worker, with generations of citizenship and contribution behind him, is not itself the public myth. If your enemies are also the enemies named by the liberal state, its universities, and its corporations, what makes your movement a revolutionary alternative? You become their lapdog, turned on when useful and off when inconvenient. Your followers never learn what ruling story they are meant to overthrow.

Your attack on the public myth is weak if both communists and big corporations are waving the same Pride flag. The point is not that gay people are the ruling class, I am not quite saying that. The point is that waving the same flag does not tell anyone where you differ from the institutions that already hold power. Shared symbolism alone also does not prove shared economic interests. The test is whether a movement challenges institutional decisions, ownership, and power beyond that symbolism. To build an independent movement that speaks to new people on the ground, you must identify the promise those institutions make, show where they betray it, and offer a rival story of what society is for. The moder Far-left, old left, economic Left, despite their passionate contributions and indeed solid focus on “class” has cut itself off, from speaking to the sort of constituencies which might sympathize with them the most.

This is something I do not think our current Left adequately does, despite the sincerity of many people raised in communist political cultures, including Jewish “red-diaper babies.” I do not wish to dismiss communists or Jews as “evil” or “stupid” by making this contrast. I am not simply repeating right-wing talking points. I understand, and can privately sympathize with, the secular Jewish cultures that carried communist beliefs into Britain, the United States, and Canada. These were particular political traditions within much broader and politically diverse Jewish populations. I am not calling their adherents stupid. Drawing on James Burnham’s attention to political elites and the difference between professed ideals and actual power, I wish it were possible to call sincere opponents “noble,” though mistaken.[8]

A Southern Confederate, bitter and pining for the days when his ancestors may have owned slaves, also has feelings, although his nostalgia is far less justifiable. The existence of an inherited attachment does not settle its merits. My point is that conditions have changed. If Marxism is to function as an analytical tool and a project of emancipation, material analysis must be applied to present questions of freedom.[9] I do not think the Left is adequately doing that today. If it did, I believe it would see why the patriotic Right can occupy the higher ground in the contemporary struggle over the public ordering myth.

In June 2023, some Muslim parents kept their children home from a Pride flag raising at Northwood Public School in Windsor, Ontario. A teacher then scolded students over the absences, characterized them as hatred, and told the children to challenge their parents’ views. The incident was reported by Windsor News Today on July 20, 2023.[10] Listening to the students defend their families, I had the impression of a smirk behind their words, as if to say: “You cannot tell us what to do. We are the diversity.” That is my reading of the confrontation. It captures the contradiction I see: a progressive establishment had encountered religious dissent inside the coalition it called “diversity.”[10]

My purpose in bringing up this story is precisely to make the point that, if conditions change, your theory should change. Your rhetoric and your choice of political enemies should change. I find much of the Left ossified in this respect. By making the nation its political subject, the Right can avoid some of the contradictions faced by a Left trying to consolidate class politics among coalition partners for whom economic class takes a back seat to identity politics. That does not mean national coalitions lack contradictions of their own; employers and workers can disagree sharply while sharing a nationality. My purpose in making this contrast, is that the Left behaves as if they are powerless, when the present governing order myth, largely agrees with much if not most of their own rhetoric. My hope, is that in making this contrast, one can see, why the Right, can drive home at a stronger program, as the governing order myth stands starkly, both against their values, their history, and indeed, against a popular program.

Furthermore, this is why I think Marxism, when reduced to this prescription, becomes weak. A progressive coalition with “oppressed minorities” can remain stable only if it has a strong constituency that shares its values and goals. An alliance may work when progressives are the stronger partner and religious minorities seek their protection. It makes much less sense to turn people of immigrant backgrounds, Muslim, Hindu, Indian, or otherwise, into the base and shield of an identity-politics strategy while assuming they endorse its views on religion, sexuality, and family. These are different communities with different beliefs; calling them all “diversity” does not make them progressive. The Left in its current pretense of fighting the reactionaries of past ordering myths, makes itself an easy target to be refuted by liberals like Jordan Peterson, and the Christians who run cover behind him. It would ironically be a more cunning move, if the Far-Left spoke to the anxieties of the latter group. At least, that would be the prudent Machiavellian conclusion, from what we have seen over the past couple of years. After all, if Youtube theologians can exploit alienation, why do materialists presently refuse too?

The warning from the coalition that overthrew the Shah concerns who can command loyalty when the shared enemy is gone. Iranian secular leftists helped bring down the monarchy, but they did not control what replaced it. The Tudeh Party supported the new Islamic leadership before the Islamic Republic arrested its leaders and suppressed the party in 1983. Other left-wing organizations took different positions and experienced different trajectories.[11] If today’s progressives cannot sustain a strong constituency committed to their own programme, why assume that a larger coalition assembled under the word “oppressed” will remain theirs to lead? This is why I think they attack the wrong myth and choose the wrong enemies. It is also why I do not think ignoring the interests of citizen workers, or treating the political positions of all workers as interchangeable, makes sense in the long term, even from a leftist perspective.

The immigrant entrepreneur is not necessarily a socialist waiting to be recognized. Many people come West for the chance to earn, own, open a shop, buy a home, and pass something on to their children. They may vote Liberal or Conservative; either choice can express a belief in private accumulation rather than centrally planned equality. Yet parts of the Left count immigrants as members of a revolutionary coalition simply because they are minorities. That confuses identity with interest. The groups you claim to unite do not necessarily behave as your theory predicts. Statistics Canada documents substantial immigrant participation in business ownership.[12]

The shopkeeper seeking the small-business tax rate, the family saving for property, and the worker demanding stability may resist a state-run “share the wealth” scheme as strongly as the Boomer or Fox News viewer the Left sneers at.[13] Economic struggle does not automatically produce socialist consciousness; for someone building a foothold, it can make ownership more urgent. If your politics cannot speak to that aspiration, you are not challenging the public myth of opportunity. You are accepting its categories of “oppressed” and “privileged” while failing to notice what the people inside them actually want. It is not enough for someone to declare personally, “I hate such-and-such a social group.” Hatred is part of human life; no political programme can simply wish it away. One secret of politics is uncovering who hates whom. An Italian might be hated on the Right. A Mexican might be hated. A gay man might be hated. A Black man or a small businessman might be hated. The structural question remains: can you clearly distinguish yourself from the dominant narrative of the social order?

One of my problems with modern communists is that they fail to make this distinction. The liberal order already manages accommodations among social groups. It already turns the tap of reform on and off. One can speak a revolutionary language and still be cut off from the actual centres of power that turn a society. We no longer have a Tsar controlling the positions Jews could hold, where they could live, which universities they could enter, or whether they could acquire rural property. Under Tsarism, restrictions on residence, education, occupations, and rural property gave many Jews a concrete stake in overturning the governing order: their exclusion was written into its laws.[14] That did not make all Jews revolutionaries, and different legal restrictions had different exceptions, but it handly explains, why Jews, had an attraction to Communism. It was and is due, precisely to this historical memory. The fact that the governing order, was very pointedly, “against them,” at the time. The political question is therefore not merely who expresses hatred, but which institutions enforce exclusion, whose advancement they obstruct, and what changing the governing order would actually unlock.

Napoléon called this “le mystère de l’ordre social" or “the mystery of the social order” observing that religion sustained more than faith: it helped sustain the social hierarchy itself. In Tsarist Russia, the governing order drew legitimacy from Orthodoxy, autocracy, and the sacred standing of the monarch. My argument is that contemporary multicultural liberal democracy possesses its own legitimating narrative, expressed through diversity, inclusion, individual rights, and progress. The question is therefore whether the order delivers what its principles promise, and whose interests remain protected when it fails. A movement challenging the governing order must confront that contradiction in the present. Where institutions promise inclusion but leave working citizens without influence, or promise opportunity without a credible path to ownership, the challenge is to expose the distance between proclaimed ideals and lived conditions. Attacking the sacred authority of a vanished Tsar is easy; examining the legitimating beliefs of those who govern us now is more consequential.

The Governing Order Myth, Now.

The point of this contrast is not merely to reverse the direction of cultural criticism: it is to show why the Right must challenge today’s governing order at its strongest claim, that it offers a different opportunity, by demanding institutions through which ordinary citizens actually become owners.

All this leads me to a very unorthodox conclusion. Just as a Christian might resent uncomfortable facts about his particular sect, leftists and Marxists may resent this early detail about Lenin, the man from whom we take inspiration for organizational design.[15] This was a legal order in which certain attacks on religious sanctities were punishable. We have speech restrictions now, too. But the offences defined by the contemporary liberal state concern different protected groups and interests.[16] The contrast I want to draw is between the governing order then and the governing order now: what does each order protect, and what kinds of opposition does it treat as beyond the permissible boundary? The comparison is an argument about political legitimacy, not a claim that these laws have identical purposes or legal tests.

There have even been cases in which “class hatred” has been put forward. If hatred based on ethnicity, race, religion, or origins is condemned, a liberal democracy seeking consistency might also condemn class hatred. I think this creates a difficulty for communists: it asks them to explain the difference between their political culture and the liberal order on one salient issue, their recognition, at least in theory, that differences in class are not harmless or arbitrary in their effects on an individual’s economic life.

In Canada’s Winnipeg General Strike prosecutions of 1919–1920, promoting “class hatred” formed part of the allegation of seditious conspiracy against labour leaders, including R. B. Russell.[17] In Czechia’s 2025 amendment to its criminal law, Nazi and communist movements were expressly named in a provision targeting movements that suppress rights and freedoms or advocate specified forms of hatred, including class hatred; communist organizations condemned the measure as political suppression.[18] Class hatred was already present in the earlier Czech provision; the 2025 amendment added explicit references to Nazi and communist movements. Nor was the Winnipeg prosecution a modern protected-group hate-speech case.[18]

Side by side, these examples press the communist Left to distinguish its recognition of conflicting economic interests from liberalism’s commitment to equal protection. Its strongest answer must explain why opposing a class’s economic power differs from persecuting its members, and why class struggle should remain legitimate. A communist can make that distinction coherently: criticism of ownership arrangements need not entail hostility toward people simply because of their social origins. My argument is that the distinction must be made, rather than assumed. In the present liberal order, there is no Tsar to serve as the old common enemy. This is precisely where I think the Right can offer a stronger governing story. If property is to be defended, it must be property accessible to citizens. Making it inaccessible is what makes the class issue distinct when viewed from the Right.

Our current governing story speaks instead of diversity, inclusion, expertise, and opportunity. The Tsar is not in power. Meanwhile, the people told they live in a society of opportunity, endless equalism, rights for all but themselves, struggle to acquire the basic independence of a home, secure work, and an affordable family life. Housing affordability provides a measurable example.[19] Multiculturalism is held up as proof of moral progress while the material question, who can build, own, and govern a future, are ignored and put off for some future vengeance against those who actually built what already exists. And is corroding what their ancestors have built. All that was once solid goes up into air like smoke. To paraphrase Marx. Literally. Though not happily.

Principles must be judged by what institutions actually do with them. Who makes the decisions? Who receives the opportunities? Who can challenge the rules without losing his livelihood? Who acquires an enduring stake in the wealth society produces? A heterosexual man does not acquire influence over an institution merely because its previous directors were heterosexual men. Group statistics cannot substitute for an account of an individual’s actual position. And yet the Left increasingly for the purpose of their own political culture and coalition, must conflate inherited racial and sexual grievances with what would otherwise need to be a broad economic program. When the Right is forced to defend civic identity, it should push back, even in the name of its own states’ professed liberal principles. The Right is therefore, much less dependently, and I think, holds the ground, for a much stronger form of class unity; especially since Right-Wing identity politics are summarily shut out of institutions.

I would push back on broader grounds: a producerist, populist, nationally democratic alliance, perceived as somewhat more right-wing than the appeal in Stalin’s speech to the Nineteenth Party Congress on October 14, 1952. In that speech, Stalin argued that the bourgeoisie had abandoned democratic liberties and national sovereignty and urged communist and democratic parties to take up those causes.[20] If powerful economic interests abandon sovereignty, and if sections of the Left dismiss immigration enforcement or the jurisdiction of national governments on anti-colonial grounds, the field is open for a movement to defend those inherited liberties and national powers.

The governing story also concerns history and national belonging. I see sections of the Left dismissing the American flag, the British flag, and their associated histories while appearing bewildered at their loss of working-class and male support. Their criticism becomes intellectually impoverished when national inheritance is reduced to a catalogue of crimes. Where a Howard Zinn-style interpretation becomes the entire framework, rather than one contribution to a larger argument, we should restore the missing context: constitutional struggles, the expansion of political rights, abolitionist movements, scientific achievements, labour organization, and ordinary people’s efforts to improve their countries.[21] Zinn’s work itself discusses popular struggles for justice; out criticism is that the Left makes this their exhaustive religion. Long after the Governing Order has fundamentally changed.

The same standard applies to media representations. When ordinary white working people are depicted as backward, ridiculous, or morally suspect because of their religion, national attachment, or family aspirations, we should identify the examples and explain the contempt involved. Being mocked is not identical to being legally excluded. But institutions claiming to represent everyone should answer for treating some of the people who sustain them as objects of embarrassment. The Left fails to target how the most productive or formerly productive, and downgraded members of the working class, actually feel about their history and origins being held in contempt. My objection is to a political cosmology that assigns permanent moral status to races and histories: certain groups become inherently “bad,” and the oppressed remain forever “good.” The Right need not make that black-and-white culture its centre, even with national attachment and sovereignty at stake. The fact that males who belong to the founding stalks of their home countries, in which they are citizens, is in the new ruling order myth, something we can point too as analogous to the way in which Jews were treated in Tsarist Russia. Our objection here clearly is that the Leftist contemporary rhetoric that treats white ancestry itself as a source of inherited guilt, making white appearance and descent, rather than an individual’s conduct, power, or contribution, the basis of moral suspicion. This is the current, legitimizing order myth, in the now.

That all being said, the decisive issue is ownership. A movement can win every argument about representation and still leave the worker dependent. He can appear in advertisements, receive recognition, and be invited to celebrate inclusion while acquiring no greater control over his home, work, or future. Here we must distinguish different kinds of Left and different kinds of capitalism. Some socialists support cooperatives and worker ownership. Some businesses help employees accumulate assets. Our criticism should fall precisely on arrangements that promise emancipation or opportunity while offering no dependable route to personal independence. Where communists propose abolishing private ownership of productive capital, we should ask what enforceable personal rights the worker receives instead.[9] Who controls the enterprise and its surplus? Can the worker refuse the administrator, leave the organization, and retain property of his own? State ownership does not automatically answer those questions.

Where defenders of the existing capitalist order praise enterprise, we should ask how an ordinary producer becomes an owner. Legal permission to buy shares is valuable. But a society celebrating ownership should concern itself with whether wages, housing costs, access to finance, and industrial organization allow ordinary people to acquire a meaningful stake. This does not mean total collective ownership. It means a route to a home, savings, enterprise, and productive capital. Employee equity, cooperative enterprise, business succession to workers, and access to capital can give that ambition institutional form.[22]

Automation makes the question more urgent, and perhaps gives us something to push back on when the question of economic growth comes up. Inventors and entrepreneurs should be rewarded for successful innovation. Workers who build, install, maintain, and improve those systems should also have opportunities to acquire a lasting share in their returns. Training citizens to operate advanced industry should be joined to arrangements through which they can own part of it. Otherwise, technical progress may enlarge national output without giving the people who sustain it much greater independence.[23] The employment and wage effects of automation and immigration depend on the technology, sector, skills, and adjustment of the economy; neither has a single automatic effect on every worker.[24] It is the purpose of growth, which our institutional design addresses.

The alliance we need should bring together workers, aspiring owners, families, and citizens of every background who refuse to accept permanent dependence as the price of belonging. Its aim is a country where productive work leads to property, institutions answer to the people who sustain them, and a shared civic future is possible. Our challenge to the governing myth is therefore direct: if this is a society of opportunity, show us the route from contribution to ownership. Show us how the people who build its wealth acquire the independence its public language celebrates. If that alliance wins, its myth might be remembered like this: they promised opportunity while closing the paths to independence; we broke the arrangement and made ownership possible again.

What a New Institutional Settlement Might Promise

If a movement merely promises that a disciplined organization will permanently act in workers’ interests, workers remain dependent on the organization. If ownership rests ultimately with the state, workers may exchange dependence on private owners for dependence on administrators claiming to represent them. If every important economic right remains discretionary, a new ruling apparatus can gradually become the permanent custodian of what was originally promised to ordinary citizens.

A different settlement would borrow from Lenin the problems of consciousness, programme, organization, and institutional discipline while answering the property question differently.[25] Its destination would not be the abolition of private property. A Right-Wing Leninist may understand organizational discipline and purposeful action without accepting Marxist predictions about the inevitability of history. We accept that differences and disagreements between people are here to stay. We differ in treating widely held capital as a check on bureaucratic power and as an engine of personal liberty and independence. A tool can be good, while the old purpose was clearly incomplete, in error, and misunderstood, the slippery nature of capital and control.

Unlike the failed Communist experiments, we would seek the wider creation of private property, under a controlled settlement. We would safeguard citizens’ growing independence, rather than merely make them dependent on a party-state. We would seek to make them progressively less dependent on both the state and concentrated private capital. The final test would not be whether the movement permanently retains political command. It would be whether it has created constitutional rights, productive property, and economic independence that citizens continue to possess after its founders have disappeared.

That is where Lenin meets Kelso, Douglas, distributism, scientific management, and constitutional government. Louis O. Kelso supplies an argument for broadening ownership of productive capital; C. H. Douglas supplies a critique of purchasing power and credit; distributists such as Hilaire Belloc supply arguments for dispersed ownership; Frederick Winslow Taylor supplies an approach to the systematic organization of production. The synthesis is mine, and borrowing an element does not require endorsing every claim in the original doctrine.[26–29]

Lenin’s attack on Economism rested partly on the argument that genuine improvements could occur without changing the underlying political structure. Better wages and conditions could be won while workers remained confined within the existing order.[25] The same distinction appears in my criticism of Republican electoral institutions. The Republican National Committee, National Republican Congressional Committee, and National Republican Senatorial Committee can perform their electoral functions successfully. Candidates can win. Republican congressional numbers can increase. Money can be raised and elections contested.[30] However, electoral victory alone says little about what permanent power the voters who created it have acquired. A voter may help produce a Senate majority while remaining as dependent on wages, landlords, banks, employers, and concentrated capital the next morning as he was the previous day. This is the distinction between political victory and institutional settlement.

Lenin criticized political “tailism”: the tendency of organizations merely to follow spontaneous demands rather than connect them to a broader political analysis.[25] A modern political organization faces a related problem. Repeating popular grievances is not institutional design. A unified political worldview must show why apparently separate questions belong to one system:

• Immigration affects labour supply and population growth.

• Labour supply interacts with wages, training incentives, and capital investment.

• Capital investment shapes the machinery workers use.

• Automation changes the tasks performed by labour and productive capital.

• Ownership determines who receives income from that capital.

• Housing conditions affect whether wage income can become permanent property.

• Credit affects who can buy assets.

• Industrial policy affects whether productive capacity remains domestically available.

• Constitutional law determines which arrangements temporary political majorities can change.

These are connections to investigate, not a proof that one variable always produces the same outcome. In particular, additional workers can also increase demand, investment, and complementary employment.[24] A movement possessing only slogans reacts to each problem separately. A movement possessing a theory asks how each problem alters the distribution of power and property within the political community.

This is where the historical communist experience becomes decisive. Lenin’s answer to political fragmentation emphasized disciplined organization.[25] But organization cannot itself be the final guarantee of freedom. A constitutional settlement must place important powers outside the ruling organization’s discretion.

The object is therefore not movement → state → permanent movement control. It is movement → programme → state action → constitutional rights → independent citizens. The organization succeeds when citizens no longer depend on it for every important protection.

One practical addition would be individually vested capital accounts, with transparent funding rules, independent trustees, and a route to diversification. A worker’s savings should not rise or fall entirely with the same employer on whom his wages already depend. Nor should changing jobs erase ownership already earned. Employee ownership is a starting mechanism; the constitutional ambition is durable independence.[22]

From the Perspective of the American Constitution

Four property rights would form the core of that settlement. These are proposals for new rights, not descriptions of rights already guaranteed by the Constitution.

First, the right to possess. Lawfully acquired property should be protected against arbitrary deprivation by public institutions and against arrangements that permit private actors to confiscate vested claims without adequate legal protection.

Second, the right to acquire. Property rights have limited meaning if productive ownership becomes structurally inaccessible to most citizens. Citizens should therefore possess meaningful institutional access to the mechanisms through which productive property is accumulated.

Third, the right of labour-accretion. Productive contribution should progressively generate an enforceable route into property. Work should build claims first toward secure housing and subsequently toward productive assets, diversified equity, bonds, and other independently held capital. The claim should follow the worker when employment changes.

Fourth, the right of economic defence. When extraordinary industrial decisions threaten vested worker claims or the productive capacity on which a community depends, affected workers should possess defined procedural rights to information, representation, justification, and independent review. This would not subject routine management to plebiscites. The reserve right would apply to specified major decisions, such as closures, removal of productive equipment, or workforce displacement in contradiction with legally established claims.

The existing Fifth Amendment protects against deprivation of property without due process and against takings for public use without just compensation.[31] The proposed amendment would go further by addressing access to ownership itself. Existing constitutional protections generally constrain government action; a guarantee directly addressing private economic power would therefore require additional legal design, rather than merely restating the Fifth Amendment.[32]

The existing Bill of Rights, in its protection of property, largely asks: “May the state take what you own?” A new property amendment should also ask: “Does a citizen who spends a lifetime producing wealth possess an enforceable means of becoming an owner of wealth?”

The right of citizens to acquire, possess, accumulate, use, and transmit property shall not be denied. Productive labour shall give rise, under laws established by Congress and the several States, to meaningful opportunity for the acquisition of secure residential and productive property. Neither public authority nor concentrations of private economic power may arbitrarily deprive citizens of such property or of vested claims lawfully acquired through their labour.

To make this enforceable rather than aspirational, implementing law would need to specify when claims vest, how they are funded and valued, which institutions owe duties, and what remedy a citizen can obtain when those duties are breached. Constitutional protection should also preserve independent courts, political competition, and the right to organize against the movement itself. Otherwise, the promise of independence would remain dependent on its custodians.

Conclusion

The communist promise was that collective control of productive wealth would liberate the worker. The danger was that control exercised in the worker’s name could ultimately belong to officials instead. The proposed settlement reverses the direction of the promise: we do not merely want to tell the worker that the productive system belongs to “the people.”

Give the individual citizen enforceable rights and property that actually belong to him. Do not promise him permanent representation by a revolutionary organization. Give him enough political and economic independence to resist the organization itself. Do not merely redistribute the fruits of technological abundance after ownership has concentrated. Use the creation of new capital as an opportunity to broaden ownership while that capital is being created.

The measure of success would not be the permanence of the movement. It would be the permanence of the citizen’s independence. A successful political organization would eventually transfer a substantial portion of its original purpose into constitutional structure. Its purpose should be to facilitate and guard that constant transfer.

Its citizens would possess property. Its workers would possess productive capital. Inventors would remain free to invent; entrepreneurs would remain free to build. Engineers and technicians would know how the automated productive system functions. The government should possess enough capacity to defend the settlement, and the Constitution should possess enough authority to defend the citizen from the government.

The movement begins with organization. But its institutional destination is not merely the permanent, all-powerful party. It is the technologically capable, property-owning citizen who has a reason to participate in that structure to guarantee his own security.

Sources

The sources below support the particular historical facts, legal provisions, and intellectual references identified in the text.

1. Tsarist authority and Orthodoxy: Russian Fundamental Laws of 1906, especially Articles 4 and 62–64. Contemporary legal text in English translation.

2. Segregation and racial exclusion beyond the 1950s: National Archives, Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

3. February and October 1917: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Russian Revolution, 1917. The events’ conventional names follow the Russian calendar then in use.

4. Blanqui and the limits of the Lenin comparison: Auguste Blanqui, Instructions pour une prise d’armes (1866; French); V. I. Lenin, Marxism and Insurrection (September 1917). Lenin explicitly distinguishes Marxist insurrection from conspiracy and Blanquism. These texts supply intellectual context, not proof that Lenin was simply a Blanquist.

5. Machiavelli: Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, particularly Chapters VI, XVIII, and XIX. Reference for the discussion of political authority and appearances; the essay’s application is its own.

6. Peter Hitchens: The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith (Zondervan, 2010). Background reference concerning atheism, communism, and religion. The draft’s “dying fumes” attribution could not be verified and has been changed to the author’s own metaphor.

7. Russian communists and the Orthodox Church: CPRF, “The CPRF and the Orthodox Church seek constructive dialogue” (2010), and Gennady Zyuganov, “Defend our national values and sacred things!” (2012). Russian-language primary sources establishing the party leadership’s stated position, not independent endorsements of its historical claims.

8. James Burnham: The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (John Day, 1943). Intellectual reference for elites, political formulas, and power. It does not verify the removed specific attribution that Burnham called the communists discussed here “noble.”

9. Marx and Engels on class and property: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Chapter II (1848). Distinguishes bourgeois property from personal appropriation and sets out the programme’s class perspective.

10. Northwood Public School incident: Adelle Loiselle, “Windsor teacher recorded scolding Muslim students over Pride Flag raising absences”, Windsor News Today, July 20, 2023. Includes the teacher’s remarks, students’ objections, principal’s apology, and board response.

11. Iranian leftists and the Islamic Republic: Torab Haghshenas, “Communism iii. In Persia after 1953”, Encyclopaedia Iranica. See its discussion of the 1979 revolution, Tudeh’s support for the Islamic leadership, and the 1983 suppression.

12. Immigrant entrepreneurship: Statistics Canada, “Immigrant entrepreneurs in Canada: Highlights from recent studies” (2021). Describes business ownership and self-employment; it does not establish immigrants’ collective political motives.

13. Small-business tax treatment: Canada Revenue Agency, “Small business deduction webinar”. Eligibility concerns qualifying corporations and income, not immigrant ethnicity or origin.

14. Tsarist restrictions on Jews: Jewish Encyclopedia, “May Laws”, “Russia”, and “Alexander III”. Early twentieth-century reference accounts of residence, property, educational, and occupational restrictions; contemporary terminology and editorial perspectives require historical context.

15. Lenin’s legal work and the Mulenkov blasphemy case: I. B. Sternik, “From V. I. Ulyanov’s Activity as a Defence Advocate,” in the collection of articles on Lenin’s legal activity, opening section; also The Leninist Experience of Using Law in the Interests of Revolution, discussion of Mulenkov. Russian-language Soviet-era accounts reproduced on leninism.su, the website used in the earlier discussion. They cite the Samara court records. Their favourable reconstruction of Lenin’s advocacy should be distinguished from documented participation, charge, and sentence. The first account’s parenthetical calendar conversion is inconsistent, so the essay gives March 1892 without converting the day.

16. Canadian hate-propaganda law: Department of Justice, Criminal Code, section 319, and section 318 for the definition of an identifiable group. Consult the current provisions and their stated commencement dates; ordinary offence is not the legal test.

17. Winnipeg General Strike and class hatred: Judy Fudge and Eric Tucker, “The Freedom to Strike in Canada: A Brief Legal History”, Canadian Labour & Employment Law Journal, vol. 15, especially printed pp. 347–348 and note 33 citing R. v. Russell (1920), 51 D.L.R. 1. Supports the seditious-conspiracy allegation, not an analogy to a modern protected-group prosecution in all respects.

18. Czech amendment and opposition: Official e-Sbírka, Act No. 270/2025, amendment to section 403(1); Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, report on parliamentary passage; Party of the European Left, “Czech Law Criminalizes Communist Propaganda Efforts”. The final source documents opponents’ interpretation and response; it is not a neutral legal ruling. The amendment expressly inserts Nazi and communist movements into the existing provision.

19. Housing affordability: Bank of Canada, Indicators of capacity and inflation pressures for Canada, housing affordability index and historical data. This is a particular Canadian affordability measure, not proof of a universal trend across countries.

20. Stalin’s 1952 appeal: Joseph Stalin, Speech to the Nineteenth Party Congress, October 14, 1952. Source for his appeal to democratic liberties and national independence; citing the speech does not endorse his description of Soviet government.

21. Howard Zinn: “Historian Howard Zinn on History and Politics” and “The Heroes Around Us” (2000). The latter demonstrates that Zinn also discussed popular struggles for justice. Sources for his perspective, not proof of the essay’s critique of its contemporary reception.

22. Employee ownership mechanisms: U.S. Department of Labor, Employee Ownership Initiative, and Employee ownership: tools and resources. Covers ESOPs, cooperatives, ownership trusts, and the value of diversified retirement savings. The proposed constitutional accounts are the author’s addition.

23. Automation, output, and labour’s income share: Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Work, NBER Working Paper 24196 (2018). Research framework for displacement, productivity, and new tasks; it does not itself prescribe the settlement proposed here.

24. Immigration and technology need a qualified causal account: Gaetano Basso, Giovanni Peri, and Ahmed Rahman, Computerization and Immigration: Theory and Evidence from the United States, NBER Working Paper 23935 (2017). Evidence of interactions and complementary adjustment, rather than a universal claim that immigration undermines wages or automation.

25. Lenin on Economism, consciousness, and organization: What Is To Be Done?, Chapter II, Chapter III, and Chapter IV (1902). These support the historical description of Lenin’s arguments; their adaptation to Republican politics is the author’s analogy.

26. Louis O. Kelso: Louis O. Kelso and Mortimer J. Adler, The Capitalist Manifesto (1958); Kelso Institute, downloadable books, also including The New Capitalists (1961). Primary intellectual sources on wider ownership and capital acquisition.

27. C. H. Douglas: Douglas’s works, including Economic Democracy (1920) and Credit-Power and Democracy (1920), supplied by the Social Credit Secretariat. A source for Douglas’s own doctrines, not independent confirmation that his purchasing-power theory is correct.

28. Distributism: Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State (1912); G. K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity (1926). Primary references for dispersed property and critiques of dependence.

29. Scientific management: Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911). Source for systematic management and training; Taylor did not thereby propose the citizen-ownership rights outlined here.

30. Republican electoral organizations: RNC: Investments Memo (2022); NRCC: About; NRSC: About Us. Official descriptions of their House and Senate electoral purposes. These do not establish the essay’s judgment about the limits of electoral victory.

31. Fifth Amendment: National Archives, The Bill of Rights: A Transcription.

32. Government action and constitutional protection: Congress, Constitution Annotated, State Action Doctrine. Background to the distinction between existing constitutional restrictions and a proposed guarantee addressing private power.

Before people began asking whether Frodo and Sam were just friends, or what exactly Darth Vader felt about his secret apprentice Starkiller, men in positions of considerable power were already telling other men that they loved them. The modern temptation is to sort every declaration immediately: romantic, paternal, political, strategic, sincere. The men themselves were generally busy governing countries, planning revolutions, negotiating peace, or objecting to the powers of the secret police. They rarely paused to supply a helpful label. Who knows. My position would have been, “I don’t know how to take this.” That is usually how I feel when someone says, “ I love you.” If it’s a man. Which happens more often than you would think.

1. Joseph Goebbels

After meeting Hitler, Goebbels recorded in his diary on 19 April 1926: “Adolf Hitler, I love you,” praising him as both great and simple. This was written before Goebbels became the regime’s propaganda minister. He addressed Hitler by name on the page, which is intimate enough; we have no evidence that he said it to his face.

2. Joseph Stalin

According to Lenin’s sister Maria Ulyanova, Stalin was distraught when he thought Lenin regarded him as a traitor. “I love him with all my heart,” he told her, asking her to pass the message on. Maria did; Lenin frowned coldly, a reply that did not suggest an immediate exchange of flowers.

3. Thomas Cromwell

In June 1540, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer wrote to Henry VIII in disbelief that Cromwell had been accused of treason: he had thought Cromwell loved the king “no less than God.” Henry executed Cromwell six weeks later, demonstrating that love was not a particularly robust defence against Tudor criminal procedure.

4. King James I ↔ George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham

Buckingham referred in a letter to James to having said, “I love you better than myself.” James was hardly shy in the other direction: he told his Privy Council that he loved Buckingham more than anyone else assembled there. The council, whose members had presumably arrived expecting government business, received an unusually clear account of their place in his affections.

5. Voltaire

Voltaire assured Frederick of Prussia that he would always love His Majesty “with my whole heart,” in English translation. It is a declaration from Europe’s most famous writer to a reigning king, made in the correspondence of two men who could admire one another extravagantly and still quarrel. Affection among powerful men has never guaranteed a peaceful working relationship.

6. Alexander Hamilton

Writing to his fellow officer in 1779, Hamilton wished he could convince Laurens through actions rather than words “that I love you.” For once, a man famous for producing words complained that words were inadequate. The sentence survives in Hamilton’s own letter; what precise kind of love he meant remains mysterious.

7. Marquis de Lafayette

Lafayette wrote to Washington in 1782 that he loved him too much to be comfortable for even a minute unless Washington approved of his conduct. This was a general asking another general for judgment, with his affection stated as plainly as his anxiety. Washington’s approval had apparently become one of Lafayette’s essential provisions.

8. Talleyrand

During the negotiations for the Peace of Amiens, French foreign minister Talleyrand closed a letter to Napoleon’s brother Joseph: “Je vous embrasse et vous aime” meaning, “I embrace you and love you.” The letter concerned securing peace for France and Napoleon. Diplomacy, it seems, could accommodate both the fate of Europe and a personal embrace in the closing line.

9. Nikolai Bukharin

In 1924, Bukharin wrote to the chief of the Soviet political police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, arguing for fewer repressions and more legality. He then reassured Dzerzhinsky: “You know how much I love you.” Dzerzhinsky forwarded the letter to his deputy with a warning about Bukharin’s position. Bukharin had proposed restraining the police, declared his love for the policeman, and received the institutional equivalent of we should discuss this internally.

10. Thomas Jefferson

In August 1820, Jefferson wrote to his former political rival, John Adams, about the limits of human knowledge. He could doubt a great many metaphysical claims, he said, but was certain “that I love you with all my heart.” The two former presidents had fought bitterly over the direction of the American republic and then spent their later years writing to one another about politics, philosophy, age, and whatever else remained when an election was no longer at stake.

These ten statements do not all mean the same thing. Cranmer was pleading for Cromwell; Goebbels was writing to himself; Lafayette wanted Washington’s approval; Jefferson and Adams had survived their rivalry. It would be foolish to treat every “I love you” as a secret romance, and equally foolish to suppose that men stopped feeling affection whenever they entered a cabinet room. Perhaps the most revealing example is Bukharin’s. He did not withdraw his objection to Dzerzhinsky’s police powers before saying he loved him. He placed the two statements next to each other, as though disagreement and affection were perfectly capable of occupying the same letter. Considering Bukharin was executed later, sometimes the “I love you’s,” really should be restrained.

Antiwar opposition crossed the political spectrum. On the revolutionary left, Vladimir Lenin and Karl Liebknecht condemned the European war itself as an imperialist conflict. In the United States, the white supremacist politicians Thomas E. Watson and James K. Vardaman opposed American entry.

Henry Ford also campaigned for peace before 1917, though he later supplied the American war effort. These men were against the same policy at particular moments, but for very different reasons. Portuguese Monarchist, António Sardinha, as near as I can tell, appears to have been at least “neutral.” He was an “Anarcho-Monarchist.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) — Russian socialist

Lenin led the Bolshevik faction of the Russian socialist movement and later led the 1917 revolution. He argued that WWI was a struggle among powerful states for markets, territory, and domination. Workers had no reason to kill one another for those aims. He was therefore against this imperialist war, not against all armed conflict.

Karl Liebknecht (1871–1919) — German socialist and antiwar leader

Liebknecht was a lawyer and member of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD). In his explanation, he called the conflict a war for capitalist control of world markets and political power, rather than a war benefiting ordinary Germans.

James K. Vardaman (1861–1930) — Mississippi senator and white supremacist politician

Vardaman was a former governor of Mississippi and a US senator from 1913 to 1919. He built his political career appealing to poor white voters while advocating racial segregation and white supremacy. He was one of only six senators to vote against declaring war on Germany in April 1917. His vote establishes his opposition to US entry; but without one overarching theory of the war.

Thomas E. Watson (1856–1922) — Georgia populist and nationalist agitator

Watson had been a congressman and Populist presidential candidate; by WWI his politics had become white supremacist, antisemitic, and anti-Catholic. He argued that American lives should not be spent protecting financiers’ interests in a European war. He opposed US entry and fought the draft. The government barred his antiwar publications from the mail under the Espionage Act.

The thing that I loved about this story the most, is the very memorable twist, which transforms the story from more than just a criminal minds episode, but into a commentary on pre-Christian religions. It becomes a story of hidden Pagan identities which fascinate me. The really memorable twist centres around Francis Davey, the pale, albino Anglican Vicar of Altarnun. He initially appears to be one of the few cultivated and trustworthy people Mary encounters. But he is eventually revealed as the intelligence behind the wreckers and the murderer of Joss and Patience. And this is where it feels more like the famed Wicker Man movies by comparison. Davey isn’t just a greedy criminal. By the climax he has constructed an atavistic pagan identity for himself. Christianity, civilization and the respectable office of the Anglican clergyman are essentially a skin he has put on. Beneath it, he believes himself belonging to something vastly older, the pre-Christian Cornwall of stones, hills, Druids and sacrificial religion. His retreat across the moor with Mary therefore starts feeling less like a police thriller and more like a journey backward through historical layers of Britain.

Davey associates himself with the ancient people of Cornwall and imagines a kind of spiritual continuity with the Druids/pagan Britons. His final movement toward the heights and rocks of the moor has this extraordinary quality of a modern man trying to step outside Christianity and modernity and re-enter some imagined prehistoric Celtic world. In other words, what stayed in my subconscious for years about this story is the lineage of the folk horror and pagan remembrance. A chain that runs through, Arthur Machen, Victorian Celtic occultism to Jamaica Inn, and the wider genre of British folk horror. Ending in such cult films as, The Wicker Man. What Jamaica Inn anticipates is one of the central tricks of later British folk horror: the frightening discovery that underneath respectable modern Britain there might be an older Britain that never completely died. That is essentially The Wicker Man (1973). Sergeant Howie arrives carrying the assumptions of Christianity, law, bureaucracy and modern Britain. Summerisle appears quaint, but increasingly reveals an alternative religious order underneath. The horror comes from realizing that everybody else is operating under a different whose premise.

Davey produces a very similar inversion. He’s literally a Christian clergyman who has spiritually defected from Christianity. The respectable churchman turns out to be fascinated by a savage, reconstructed ancestral religion. Du Maurier makes landscape carry historical memory. Bodmin Moor isn’t scenery. The tors, fog, stones, ruined places and empty distances make modern civilization seem extremely thin. Cornwall starts feeling like a surviving fragment of another historical epoch. The present world is sitting on top of several older worlds that can suddenly become visible again. The difference from The Wicker Man is especially interesting, though. In The Wicker Man, paganism is communal: Summerisle has an entire functioning pagan society. In Jamaica Inn, Davey’s paganism is more individual, romantic and pathological. He has invented an ancestral identity for himself and then lives inside it. That arguably makes Davey even eerier to me. He’s not simply saying, I don’t believe in Christianity. He’s saying instead, “This Christian England is an interlude. I belong to the Britain underneath it.” And then he disappears into the older landscape.

In the 1983 film, Patrick McGoohan plays Joss Merlyn. Francis Davey, the character who believes himself to be a reborn Druid and finally dies at the Druid standing stones and cliffs, is played by John McEnery. McGoohan’s character is the landlord of Jamaica Inn and Mary Yellan’s uncle by marriage. He is a huge, intimidating, violent man who dominates his wife Patience and runs the inn as the base for the smuggling and wrecking operation. In the story he initially looks like the central villain because he is the most visibly brutal person around. But that is the trick. He isn’t. The Vicar is. When drunk, he begins confessing things to Mary, and you gradually realize that this apparently terrifying man is himself under the psychological control of someone else. That someone is Davey. The structure is a perfect Gothic sleight-of-hand: the obvious monster is not the deepest monster.

McGoohan was particularly well suited to Joss because he could give physically domineering characters an unusual amount of inner tension. His Joss isn’t merely a stock thug. He can seem almost like a man who has become trapped inside the role he has created for himself, violence, alcohol, criminal loyalty, and secretly, terror of the person above him. It gives you two kinds of evil: bodily, criminal, drunken, immediate violence, vs. intellectual, religious, antiquarian, mythic violence. The story does a great switch on the audience between a Georgian era crime story to a folk occult horror story. And that is why I like it. The criminal conspiracy turns out to have an archaic religious imagination behind it. That’s where Jamaica Inn feels like an ancestor of The Wicker Man.

“Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General.”

~ Lenin

“what has been done against my wife I consider having been done against me as well…”

~ Lenin

“Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command.”

~ Lincoln

“I shall do nothing in malice. What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.”

~ Lincoln

I have to maintain an admiration for Lenin, no matter how you might see him. A Mongrel Monster Vampire, or something sinister upon all metrics. That is not how I see such people. I am frequently floored in admiration, of men, who can both think autistically, and speak passionately. And above all, make vital distinctions, that pull movements of people together, and somehow keep them together. Many would be leaders I’ve seen push people away. He seems to have had a certain gentle character that I admire, which comes out in these two sentences against Stalin.

Lenin’s phrase “quite tolerable in our midst” reveals a distinction you rarely hear in contemporary leftist circles: a comrade could be rude, abrasive, or personally unpleasant without that alone putting him outside the group. Lenin’s objection was that Stalin’s rudeness became dangerous when joined to the power of the Secretary-General. He was judging the behaviour in relation to the office, rather than treating a lapse in manners as proof that the person was politically untouchable. In other words, he didn’t shift immediately to intellectual condescension. That is what I find admirable.

The letter about Krupskaya draws a different boundary. Lenin took Stalin’s treatment of his wife personally. Read together, the two passages suggest a world in which people could tolerate sharp exchanges among peers while still defending particular relationships and limits. That is the contrast I am noticing; in some contemporary leftist circles, a privately expressed offensive view or even an ill-judged remark can become an immediate test of whether someone belongs at all. Lenin’s lines suggest that rudeness itself did not automatically settle that question for him. This is something you rarely see today.

Lincoln gives me another example of a leader who could make a vital distinction without pushing a difficult man away. He had heard that General Joseph Hooker believed the army and government needed a dictator. Lincoln told him plainly that he believed the report, then wrote: “Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command.” He neither overlooked the remark nor decided that it defined everything Hooker could be. He saw a capable soldier, named a dangerous tendency, and entrusted him with a job whose responsibilities would test him.

Lincoln described his own boundary in another letter: “I shall do nothing in malice. What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.” That is the quality I admire. He could hear something alarming from a man, speak to him without condescension, and still judge what that man did with power. Later, when General Meade made a decision that angered him, Lincoln wrote a severe letter and left it unsent. His anger was real; so was his reluctance to let that moment of anger decide the relationship.

I would indeed be curious to find a list of other such remarkable individuals like this, who can both “draw a boundary” which is reasonable, understandable even, and yet be generally very tolerant to all rudeness, offense, or error, elsewhere. The value of this, is that leaders are supposed to be able to unite the strongest men. Too frequently, what ends up happening is that what “leaders” really want, or Top--Gs as Andrew Tate would call himself, is simply someone willing to endlessly prop up and serve his self-image of strength, power, and personal masculinity or popularity. A man who can be merely a meek Yes-man in private, while being able to emulate or show whatever level of public masculine strength, the leader permits him. I can admire a leader, who doesn’t need you to do that. Someone who doesn’t need the narcissistic supply. Those who can be both strong and silent, where it matters, tolerant, and intolerant. A secure leader can gather capable, independent people around him, including men who disagree with him or rival him in strength. An insecure leader wants capable men in public but submissive admirers in private. Their strength is welcome only while it reflects glory back onto him. These are the case studies I am looking for.

The Democratic Socialists of America can use Democratic ballot lines to elect candidates who advance a programme of its own; this is their huge singular advantage. They have a program. They are allowed to have a program. Of course, the democratic party can use and ignore them, but they do push clearly in one direction, no matter what one might think of them. They are like a focused spearhead. I see no comparable common obligation among the eight Republican bodies I am going to name. That is my problem. The RNC, NRCC, and NRSC are judged chiefly by electoral victories; the Club for Growth presses lawmakers toward free-market commitments that may conflict with national industrial policy; and the House Freedom Caucus can block legislation without necessarily demanding greater power for workers in its place.

Heritage develops policy within a tradition that joins social conservatism to free enterprise, Turning Point Action mobilizes voters, and the Conservative Partnership Institute trains personnel. All eight can succeed at their separate tasks while pulling against one another, or leaving unanswered my central question: will the party’s own working base gain lasting power over the productive wealth of the nation? The problem with The Right, is that it does not function as a focused cannon against one enemy, but as a competing arsenal full of contradictions. The purpose of a Right-Wing Leninist program, is to use its tight methodology to produce a new institutional settlement, which will attain its populists objectives under present unfavorable conditions. This is what the Right should discuss. I make no definitive answers here. These are a list of problems and suggestions.

(I write here from an American perspective, though I am Canadian. I would want a comparable program in Canada, Britain, Germany, and other countries, accompanied in each case by a complete moratorium on immigration.)

1. Republican National Committee (RNC)

The Republican platform includes border enforcement and protecting American manufacturing. However, it places no necessarily check institutionally upon replacing workers or the purpose of controlling free trade. This is a problem for a true Patriotic platform, which insists it must include these things. A faction with the RNC should start by organizing a broad party and elect candidates, who oppose the replacement of workers. A platform promise does not give citizen workers a continuing power to hold elected officials to account for wages, ownership, or control of production.

I can vote for a party that promises to defend the border and rebuild industry. However, these cannot just be promises from the institution. We need advocates for a new constitution that gives its own base, enforceable power over the economic decisions. For example, the American constitution has nothing in it against the replacement of a workforce, nor does it permit the people of the country or state any veto over such replacements, nor does it guarantee a right to property, which comes with the labor that builds and sustains an enterprise. It protects property people already hold, but it does not give working people a claim to acquire productive property or a voice when the productive capacity they built is sold, moved, or used to replace them.

I want our own additions for our own produced corollary institutional settlement to compete clearly with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA): rights that protect citizens’ political voice, their purchasing power, and their share of the value created by their work. Louis O. Kelso’s case for widening access to capital ownership gives us one starting point. The distributist insistence that property should be widely held gives us another. This also clearly distinguishes us from merely advocating for a communist program, which many, if not all, working class conservative voters, will misinterpret as being against their personal freedom. That is not the intention. By curtaining the power of American corporations over government, we seek to defend their freedom.

2. National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC)

The NRCC now promotes America First House candidates; it should not be written off as simply opposed to the party’s populist voters. In March 2026, the NRCC launched its “MAGA Majority” programme to promote a slate of House candidates it calls America First. That is a real concession to the party’s populist electorate, but the label does not itself bind those candidates to a programme of worker ownership or lasting economic power. Its stated function is to increase Republican numbers in the House. It can perform that function even if successful candidates disagree about unions, concentrated ownership, tariffs, or the power of employers to import labour. This came about ultimately as pressure from Trump candidates in 2016. My question, is whether this pressure goes far enough, and with the right direction. One row of teeth may replace another, but we need more rows of teeth, like a shark to come after.

A larger Republican House delegation tells me who won the seats. It does not tell me whether the workers who elected them gained any lasting power. This requires a program, that pulls solidly in such a direction and gives candidates something more definite to answer for than the label America First. I would want commitments to domestic production, access to productive ownership, and powers through which workers can contest decisions that destroy their livelihoods. Harold Macmillan’s The Middle Way reminds us that a conservative can treat economic organization as a political question within a “free society.” Obviously, we may understand that what qualifies as a free or unfree society is, as per Weber, and even Lenin, hugely context and program dependent, but the point remains. An economic program, comes from a worldview, and if the Right, has a worldview, a consciousness, it must treat economic organization as the most vital part of that question. Louis O. Kelso pushes the question further: who gets to own the new capital on which that economy increasingly depends? I would make property a constitutional command accretion of labour: after a defined period of work, a person gains an enforceable claim to housing and productive ownership, instead of relying on a house awarded at the discretion of Party officials, as in the case of China. We might do one better.

Every period of work would build an enforceable claim: first toward secure housing, then toward shares in productive property, diversified ETFs, and government bonds. The constitution would require government and banks to make that accretion happen, with contributions from employers and the state where wages alone cannot carry it. A worker’s claim would follow the worker, even when jobs change. Property would accumulate in ordinary hands by rule, rather than arrive as a favour from a Party official, a bank, or an employer.

3. National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC)

It seeks a Republican Senate majority and helps candidates with fundraising, messaging, and strategy. Individual candidates it supports may share parts of my national and social agenda, but it does not like a focused spear stick to one direction, like the Democratic Socialists of America does. We need an organization with an economic programme of its own, able to develop candidates and judge them against it before and after an election. A senator should know in advance that support depends on more than the party label: it depends on whether he will protect the political community’s power over its productive future. That is what I mean by Leninist method: a disciplined organization develops a programme, trains people to pursue it, and keeps its elected representatives answerable to it. I do not mean that its final settlement must reproduce the Russian settlement of party and state ownership. The Chinese institutional settlement, with its different arrangement of party authority, markets, and property, is different again; so is the borderless settlement the DSA seeks. Our settlement would be different even compared to these: constitutional rights that place productive property and political powers of resistance in the hands of the citizens who work and live here.

A Senate seat is its measure of success. My measure would be whether senators accept binding commitments on domestic productive capacity, labour power, and ownership. That means stating what a senator must do when an employer threatens to move a plant, when new machinery displaces workers, or when a merger places another industry under fewer owners. Without answers, “pro-worker” remains a sentiment that disappears at the first conflict with capital. The NRSC is accountable for electing Republican senators. I want to know who makes those senators accountable when their donors’ interests diverge from the workers who supplied their votes. A movement with its own members, candidate standards, and continuing powers of endorsement could answer that question. It would give the base a means to contest a senator’s conduct during the term, instead of waiting for the next campaign to hear the same promises again.

4. Club for Growth

This is where we have our clearest substantive conflict. The Club explicitly pressures lawmakers to act as free-market, limited-government conservatives. It has opposed tariffs, including steel and aluminum tariffs, and has argued for reducing other tariffs. Those are direct points of tension with a programme willing to use the state to preserve strategic industry. These people must be opposed and replace; they are the faction with which we have the biggest objection. Consumer prices and investor freedom are inadequate tests of national economic power. A country can purchase cheap goods today while losing the factories, skills, bargaining power, and independent producers it will need tomorrow. A major plank of our program must be “making things” and increasing the ways in which people can be independent producers, within the state.

Capital itself must be transformed from a power held by a narrow class into a source of income and control open to the people whose society makes production possible. Louis O. Kelso’s answer was to broaden access to the credit used to acquire new productive capital, so that workers and other citizens could gain income from ownership as technology increased output. This might well be a strong direction, that be used to distinguish what The Right offers, apart from the usual calls for free healthcare on the Left. The Left offers material benefits, and we should offer material benefits too. But our central offer would be something citizens can accumulate and exercise: secure housing, a growing share of productive property, and the power to defend both against employers and officials. We should indeed care about health and housing, but need to offer these things in a way that does not alienate, but unites. The Left has a strong suit to play in the game of cards. They can offer material benefits, even if at a leaks pace, while making other factors in society much worse, and generally alienating the most productive portion of the population. We must appeal to the population.

The banking system itself must be altered to account for the problem pointed out by the social creditors : Clifford Hugh Douglas argued that prices could include charges associated with capital equipment that were not matched by purchasing power distributed to consumers in the same period. I think this is the problem I am reaching for when I speak of what happens after investment in tools: machinery can raise output and displace wages, while the claims on the resulting output remain concentrated. Clifford Hugh Douglas’s proposed financial remedy is contested; I need not accept every part of his accounting theory to insist that credit, ownership, production, and purchasing power must be considered together. But this is one question, we might put forward for such a program when guaranteeing the economic rights of the citizens of the nation.

The Club for Growth can call itself pro-American and mean it. But when a national industrial commitment conflicts with its free-market commitments, I know which principle its organization is built to defend. The biggest current problem is that The Club for Growth undermines what our Right-Wing Leninist objections should be to the assumption that capital must be free to decide where production goes, whom it employs, and which communities bear the cost when it leaves , preserving growth for native citizens (to protect the rights of the already established political community in a country, as a matter of principle) by measuring it in secure work, rising ownership, and productive capacity held within their political community , a complete repudiation of the 1965 immigration act, as a governing assumption that employers should be able to enlarge the labour supply without a corresponding duty to protect the bargaining power and economic claims of the citizens already here. We must must look at the market as a social market and control it for our own workers and consumers through institutions that can enforce those duties, rather than leaving national loyalty to the discretion of firms.

5. House Freedom Caucus

Its associated foundation emphasizes accountable government, constitutional fidelity, and individual liberty. A caucus willing to withhold votes can also demonstrate the kind of organized resistance you think a movement needs.

Its power to block legislation does not, by itself, define a national economic settlement. It must also put forward legislation that introduces new rights to ownership for American workers. It shouldn’t just be the Left that wants to add to the constitution. The Right needs to put forward its own program or counterweight which safeguards the rights of productive contributing tax-paying American citizens (to protect the rights of the already established political community in a country, as a matter of principle). I would advocate for a similar settlement in Canada and other countries.

Limited-government commitments conflict with public coordination of industry or deliberate efforts to distribute productive ownership. One side of the political aisle can choose to limit government all they wish, while the other endlessly expands with their own left-liberal program. This cedes power physically only in one direction**:** the Right refuses to build institutions through which its own voters can govern economic life, then finds that the institutions built by its opponents are the only ones capable of acting. A constitutional programme of our own would state positive rights and powers: access to productive property, representation where industrial decisions are made, and lawful means to resist the destruction of a community’s economic base. I am arguing for new constitutional protections, not claiming that the Constitution lacks existing protections for property.

I respect a faction that can actually say no. My question is what it says no for: a stronger position for citizen workers, or chiefly a smaller federal government?” The size of the government is not the issue; the purpose and direction of government is.

6. Heritage Foundation

Heritage combines traditional values and national defence with detailed policy work. That is fine. Its Project 2025 effort also addressed the personnel and implementation problem. However, Heritage’s formal principles also put free enterprise and limited government at the centre. This is the problem, limited government always cedes the fields to those who want more governmental powers to utilize for their own program. Limited government is a red herring. Free enterprise is only free, within limits that protect the existing political community of the state, without watering down the rights of its citizen contributors. Our programme would therefore ask what powers citizens need over capital, credit, and production, and what public authority is required to secure them. Its Leninist element lies in organizing people and governing institutions around a defined purpose; its proposed settlement would disperse ownership among citizens and protect them against the managers of the state as well as the managers of corporations.

Heritage must consider that concentrated private power, deserves to be taken just as seriously as their current will to limit bureaucratic power. It is their refusal to deal with the problem of private power, which pulls against the best interests of the nation. Heritage understands that policy needs trained people to carry it out. I would ask those people to check the power of capital as well as the power of bureaucracy, and I cannot accept a Heritage that does not share both commitments. Our “Right-Wing Leninist” program would stress that both are serious problems.

Alasdair MacIntyre’s warning is useful here: political institutions cannot be understood as wholly independent of the relations between capital and labour. If private economic power sets the limits within which government may act, curbing bureaucrats alone will not return power to citizens. We must do more than just replace the current managerial class. We must introduce our own program with our own managers committed to that program.

7. Turning Point Action

Turning Point Action works on grassroots organization, conservative voter mobilization, and issues including speech and opposition to Big Tech censorship. The problem is that it uses conservative voters and conservative rhetoric to win elections and then casts them aside. Mobilizing the base does not decide what the base can demand of officeholders after election day. A programme must also contain accountability, after victory, not just activists who are occasionally willing to say what populists voters want to hear when campaigning. Turning Point can help assemble the people I want politics to serve.

I still want an answer to what power those people possess once their votes have been counted. I want a movement in which voters can remain organized between elections, defend an explicit programme, and withdraw their support when candidates abandon it. The distributist question belongs in that programme: how many of those voters will gain property and independence of their own, rather than merely another politician who speaks for them? We should want to grow the ability of ordinary citizens to replace a political class that betrays them; not make democratic participation prohibitively expensive and risky for law abiding citizens. That means building an organization in which members can scrutinize candidates, select and train successors, and enforce commitments after an election. Ordinary citizens would then possess a continuing political instrument of their own, alongside the property and economic independence the programme seeks to build.

8. Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI)

CPI trains conservatives and has supplied administrative, staffing, and legal support for allied organizations. I merely think they train them with the wrong principals, the wrong chain of reasoning and the wrong goals. Training and placing personnel answers who is prepared to govern. It does not settle whose economic interests govern their choices. I want a program that answers those missing commitments. The Democratic Socialists of America, force those commitments even upon a mainstream liberal democratic which will not honor them, but they do hone those commitment. The Right needs to force commitments long term.

CPI understands that victories require trained personnel. I want those personnel bound to a programme that can resist both administrative self-interest and concentrated capital. That training should teach future officials to ask who owns new machinery, who receives the income it creates, who controls the credit that finances it, and what powers the people who work with it retain. Louis O. Kelso, Clifford Hugh Douglas, Harold Macmillan, and Alasdair MacIntyre do not give identical answers. Together, they keep us from treating an election victory, a smaller bureaucracy, or cheaper goods as a complete account of national economic power.

The Democratic Socialists of America, may be full of what the Right calls, dysgenic individuals, who consume more than they produce, but they have one singular advantage: they can call upon all the disaffected quarters of society to form a coalition, and they have inherited a pointed spear and a long revolutionary tradition, despite its contradictions. The alliance between Capitalism and Left Wing Cultural objections has guaranteed them an endless row of shark teeth to replace, old shark teeth. This allows the Left to mutate continually, despite their disagreements, and contradictions both with the past, and with the established objectives of those rules classes, that ultimately utilize them. They nevertheless possess a pointed cannon. My purpose is to create a cannon for The Right. That is my intention, or what I think should be our object. The Right pulls in too many directions, like an arsenal firing at each other as much as at their enemies. I would call this an American constitutional answer to the problem that Lenin’s New Economic Policy and Deng Xiaoping’s reforms confronted: how to use markets, private initiative, and the state together without surrendering the direction of national development to capital. The analogy concerns method and purpose, not an identical final settlement.

I want a disciplined political movement capable of setting a direction for the state, followed by legal and constitutional adjustments that make that direction durable. But where the Russian and Chinese settlements concentrated decisive power in a ruling party, ours should place enforceable claims to housing, productive ownership, and political resistance in the hands of ordinary citizens. The early Soviet promise of workers’ control shows why this must be an institutional settlement, rather than a high ideal entrusted to the people temporarily in command: factory workers lost their direct power as authority moved to party officials and appointed managers. I would therefore give workers enforceable powers within their own industries, including access to the books, representation in decisions about production, and the right to contest closures or the removal of the productive capacity they helped build. Those powers must survive a change of leaders and remain available even when the state claims to act in the workers’ name. That is the American settlement I am proposing: a state capable of commanding national development, constitutionally bound to make its own people more independent of both corporate owners and state officials.

Clarification for further institutional construction:

( I do not propose that every productive decision be put to a workplace vote. Management should have room to make ordinary decisions, while workers’ constitutional rights remain in reserve. Those rights become active when workers identify a clear contradiction between an industrial decision and the commitments made to them: the closure of a viable plant, the removal of machinery built with public support, what is produced, how much, or the displacement of a workforce without honouring its claims to work and property. In those cases, workers must be able to obtain the facts, demand a public justification, and suspend the decision while an independent body hears their objection. The power of veto would be narrow, but real. It would keep productive management possible while preventing managers and officials from quietly discarding the settlement they were appointed to carry out. )

In the previous essay, I began with Stalin, Ustryalov and the problem of the capitalist concession, but I ended somewhere much larger. The question that increasingly interests me is not simply whether a society is “capitalist,” “socialist,” or “communist.” Those words tell us something important, but they do not by themselves tell us where power actually resides, how many independent centres of power exist, or what prevents one of them from absorbing all the others.

If productive capital, employment, housing, education, administration and organized social life are all concentrated within one political institution, then whatever we call the resulting system, an enormous quantity of social power has been concentrated. If, on the other hand, productive property is permitted to exist independently of the state, then another institutional centre has been created. But that immediately creates another problem: capital itself can concentrate. The capitalist can become as institutionally dominant in one direction as the bureaucrat can in another. Freedom requires trying to manage both concentrations, not just one.

1. I think the contemporary Left applies the category of “fascism” inconsistently. I find it striking that forms of class collaboration which are treated as perfectly intelligible within Communist or non-European political systems would very quickly be described as fascistic if the same arrangement appeared within a European Right-wing movement.

2. I think Ustryalov’s importance goes far beyond nationalism. What interests me about him is his argument that every capitalist concession creates interests of its own. The more the Soviet system relied upon specialists, technicians, private interests and economic differentiation, the greater the possibility that a new bourgeois social force might eventually reshape the regime itself.

3. I think the historic Far Left and Far Right begin from different political subjects. The traditional political subject of the revolutionary Left is class. The political subject of the revolutionary Right is nation, and sometimes race where race and nation have been conceptually fused.

4. I think neither political subject can remain entirely self-contained. A movement organised around class eventually encounters the problem of national solidarity, just as a movement organised around nation eventually discovers serious divisions of class and economic interest inside the nation. Each side eventually has to concede at least a small part of what the other side noticed.

5. I think political vocabulary changes more readily than the underlying struggle for power. Stalin could regard Ustryalov as an enemy of the proletariat and representative of a developing bourgeois interest without simply making “fascist” the universal description of his politics. That distinction interests me because it shows how political categories change even when conflicts over institutional and class power remain.

6. I think much of the contemporary Left has moved from class position toward ideological position. Increasingly, the decisive question seems to be not what economic or institutional position someone occupies, but whether that person belongs to the approved political coalition. In a 19th century world, someone like Lenin could logically take an effectively “anti-racist” position for systemic economic reasons. He could reason, that what mattered was class position, and the actions of that person, under his class position, primarily. Not his national allegiance. However, in a modern world, where the Left operates primarily according to left-wing identity categories, and has preemptively decided that some historical records are inherently “good” and some are inherently cosmically historically “bad” and oppressive, they have ceded that class based reasoning and the appearance of the moral high ground that came with it.

7. I think that creates a serious theoretical problem for a politics that still claims class as its foundation. If class becomes merely a vocabulary through which an ideological coalition describes itself, then something important has changed. “Class” is no longer necessarily the political subject. It may instead have become one rhetorical justification for a coalition whose actual organizing principles lie elsewhere. If your actual organizing principle is no longer class, and the effectively democratic equality of that class, is not something you in practice see as realizable. If you need to promise people that “China” will be your prefered path and end result, then you lose a lot of the rhetorical power, that left-wing movements have historically depended on. By contrast, you end up making Patriotism a much stronger force, than the 19th century class based identities that could unite diverse European ethnicities to oppose war.

8. I think the clearest distinction between state communism and capitalism, or idealized “end state communism” and idealized liberal-capitalism, may ultimately be institutional rather than simply distributive. In an extreme communist arrangement, productive capital, employment, investment, housing, education and much of organized social life can be drawn into a single commanding political institution. Capital therefore ceases to exist as an independent centre of power outside the political state.

9. I think the fundamental difficulty with one institutional block is that human beings disagree. They disagree about production, distribution, morality, authority, religion, social purpose and the meaning of the common good. These disagreements can’t all be reduced to class position. I therefore remain skeptical whenever a political movement assumes that its own institutional leadership possesses the uniquely “correct consciousness” necessary to resolve them.

10. I think independent institutions matter because they limit the concentration of political power. Businesses, professional associations, families, churches, local authorities, voluntary associations and other institutions can possess purposes and resources that do not originate entirely from the central political authority. Their independence consequently places limits upon how completely any single institution can absorb society.

11. I think private property and productive capital matter politically for the same reason. Their importance is not merely that people can buy and sell things. Their deeper political importance is that property can create an independent source of institutional power outside the government. This means that the ownership and distribution of capital become questions about political architecture as much as economics. It is true that not all economic questions can be planned perfectly. This was the weakness of the communist system, and the reason for its collapse.

12. I therefore do not think capitalism and communism can be understood adequately as a single sliding scale. History does not move definitively in one preordained direction. Power concentrates, and slides into new worse things. Two governments may permit almost identical forms of private enterprise while possessing radically different intentions toward them. One may regard private capital as temporary and ultimately seek its abolition. Another may subordinate it to political objectives. Another may deliberately distribute ownership more broadly. Another may regard independent property as a permanent feature of social organization. History is not an A-B test between “oppression” and “freedom.” Freedom itself is conditional on many forms of power management.

13. I think the deepest question is therefore the distribution of institutional power. Who controls the conditions under which the market operates? Which institutions possess genuine independence? Is economic power being concentrated, subordinated, abolished, preserved, or deliberately distributed throughout the population? That, more than the simple existence of a market, is what I mean by asking about the shape of the system.

14. Capital should function as a check upon bureaucracy, and for that reason it must itself be regularly distributed, where possible per industry. Bureaucracy presents the same fundamental problem of concentrated institutional power that I worry about in capital. If the state owns, administers or ultimately controls nearly every important productive institution, then the official who controls access to the state also controls access to employment, investment, advancement and increasingly social life itself. Abolishing the capitalist does not abolish concentrated power if his place is simply inherited by an administrative class.

Explaining the Problem

I do not think the decisive political question can be reduced to whether the government taxes at one rate rather than another, owns one industry rather than another, or permits some particular percentage of private enterprise. Those things matter, but beneath them lies the question of institutional structure. My instinct is therefore distributive in a much broader sense than merely redistributing income after the fact. I am interested in distributing institutional power: property, productive capacity, authority, organizational independence and the practical means by which people can resist becoming completely dependent.

This also explains why I do not regard capitalism as merely a destination on one end of a scale and communism as the destination on the other. Markets and private property can exist under extraordinarily different political arrangements. State intervention can serve extraordinarily different purposes. Public authority might concentrate power, but it might also prevent private concentration. Private property might create oligarchy, but when sufficiently distributed it can also prevent bureaucratic monopoly. The relevant question is always: what kind of institutional settlement are we building? The state should be strong, yes, but merely institutionalizing the capital in government, does not ensure freedom or the right of the reasonable to disagree.

Ustryalov understood that economic concessions create social interests, and that social interests eventually acquire political consequences. Stalin understood the danger sufficiently well to insist that the Party would remain politically dominant over those interests. Every institution we permit to accumulate independent resources becomes a potential centre of power. Every institution we abolish transfers some portion of its power somewhere else. The political problem is therefore not simply deciding which institution we morally prefer. It is constructing a settlement in which no institution becomes capable of swallowing the rest. My answer is many, under one: a strong public authority that protects a deliberate distribution of power among independent institutions. Working people should have broad access to productive ownership, not merely a vote over institutions on which they remain wholly dependent. They should also have enforceable rights to organize, challenge decisions and refuse abuses of power, whether the power confronting them belongs to a corporation or the state.

The reflex of the Left is to associate any form of “Third Positionism” with Nazism, and historically, there are understandable reasons for that association. But what I find both interesting and damning is the way the Left itself repeatedly retreats from the communist ideal it claims to uphold. Consider the Chinese flag: its four smaller stars have traditionally been interpreted as representing the workers, peasants, urban petit bourgeoisie, and national bourgeoisie, united under the leadership of the Communist Party. In other words, the symbolism expresses class collaboration. If an equivalent arrangement appeared in a European political movement, would it receive the same interpretation, or would it be labeled “fascist” almost immediately? I think it would be, almost instantly. The Left will tolerate things outside of “the European theatre” that they would never tolerate inside it. I simply think that a stark and blatant contradiction that can’t go unremarked on. People notice it even if they do not say anything about it.

More importantly, Ustryalov’s argument was not primarily about nationalism, although nationalism was certainly part of his position. His central concern was the stability of the Communist political subject itself. He was effectively arguing that the more the Bolsheviks borrowed from the capitalist world, the more technicians and specialists they rewarded, and the more economic differentiation and private interests they permitted, the more they risked producing a national bourgeoisie that would eventually reshape the regime. Ustryalov regarded that possibility as acceptable, or at least largely acceptable. Trotsky regarded it as a danger. Stalin insisted that he would prevent it. This is yet another factor in the contrast between Far-Right and Far-Left I find fascinating. The original “political subject” of the Far-Left was “class.” The political subject of the Far-Right is of course “nation.” ( Or “race” when a nation has been broken or malformed as in the case of a multiracial empire. ) The problem seems to emerge, when issues of class and social type, cannot survive without the political subjects that might break it, into constituent elements; and likewise, when those who make the “national subject” central, realizes that elements of the upper classes are dividing the nation, exploiting the nation. Left and Right disagrees on the proper political subject, the proper point of unity, but they always have to concede eventually to one small part of the other’s view or else collapse.

This brings me to a distinction that contemporary discussions often obscure. In the historical debate, Stalin’s documented characterization of Ustryalov was that of a class enemy and representative of the national bourgeoisie. That is not the same as accusing him of being a fascist. Stalin did, however, use accusations of fascist collaboration against Trotsky and other political opponents, while also employing the term “social fascism” against sections of the socialist and social-democratic movement. These were distinct political accusations, directed at different opponents and within different polemical contexts. I find this contrast extremely curious. The Marxist Left, when out of power, never treats social-democrats like this. However, Anarchists, do frequently call the Left-wing Marxist-Leninists, “Red Fascists” all the time. I think just as absurdly and dishonestly, as Stalin used the term, against Trotsky. However, understandable his reasoning.

Today, of course, anyone who refuses the Leftist “political subject” would instantly be called “Nazi” or “Fascist.” With the exception of those of clearly non-European origin, in which case, the Left typically permits legalized and institutional social masking. Such people end up employed in academia, or specially allocated portions of the corporate sectors, and can hide their true political subject, under the rhetoric of anti-racism or social justice. This is of course not permitted to “the Right.” There is no department of “Benevolent Hitler Studies.” There is no “White Supremacist” corporate loophole. Nor would I want there to be. The point is how the Leftist arsenal of attack has become both more sloppy and far less concerned with class position. Only ideological position. That is what I find both fascinating, and in their ridiculous condescending verbiage, “problematic.”

If questions of class, have really just become questions of socially dependent ideological alignments at any given moment, you have ceded the most vital part of what once granted the Left, the “moral high ground.” If “class” becomes mere rhetoric for hiding a political coalition, which is absolutely dependent on modern left-identity politics; it becomes increasingly difficult for you to complain to an objective mind, about “Nazis” or “Fascists.”

Back then, Stalin either didn’t or couldn’t do this to his “class enemies.” He attacked them clearly on what they were arguing on class terms. He never condemned them for their “nationalism” outside of those who waged aggressive imperialist wars. ( Britain or Germany. ) I find that distinction revealing. It suggests that Stalin’s political vocabulary did not simply, or merely could not at the time, collapse every nationalist or bourgeois opponent into the category of Fascist. He could regard a nationalist bourgeois thinker as an enemy because of the political direction and class interests he represented, without making fascism the primary description of his position. The question, then, is not whether Ustryalov was acceptable to Stalin. He was not. The question is why Stalin’s opposition to him was framed primarily through the language of class power, bourgeois restoration, and the survival of the Soviet political subject, rather than through the modern reflex of treating every nationalist or anti-cosmopolitan position as inherently fascist. That contrast is worth examining. It reveals how much political language depends on the ideological boundaries of the movement using it, and how easily those boundaries can change while the underlying struggle over power remains the same.

The Capitalist Concession

The clearest visual distinction between an extreme form of state communism and capitalism is the number of independent institutional powers that exist within society. Imagine an economy in which productive capital, employment, investment, education, housing, and the organization of social life are all brought under a single political institution. The state would not merely regulate economic activity. It would become the commanding institution through which virtually every significant economic decision was organized. Capital would no longer exist as an independent source of power outside the government. In the most extreme version of this arrangement, the distinction between economic administration and political administration would largely disappear.

But there is an immediate problem: people disagree. They disagree about what should be produced, how resources should be distributed, which institutions deserve authority, and what constitutes a good society. They disagree not only because they occupy different classes, but because they possess different experiences, temperaments, histories, convictions, and understandings of the world. Even people who sincerely believe themselves to be working toward “the common good” will disagree about what that good requires. This is just one reason, why anyone who has thought about this for more than five minutes, should at least smile, or retain some skepticism for the Marxist exception they give to themselves, when they say, “Ah but we have the correct consciousness, which the workers lack.”

As a result of these precise differences in experience and consciousness, even movements that aspire to comprehensive social ownership must confront the problem of institutional differentiation. They must decide if independent enterprises, professional organizations, private associations, local authorities, families, religious bodies, or other institutions are permitted to retain meaningful autonomy. The moment a political system permits independent economic power outside the central institution, it has created a limit to total political control. And when it permits private ownership of productive capital and market exchange, it has introduced elements of capitalism into its economic structure. The question is not whether every concession immediately transforms the entire system into capitalism, of course it doesn’t. The question is how much independent power the system permits to exist, and what political purpose that independence serves. Consequently, one might define a Fascist as being, simply any faction wanting his “nation” or “social group” a level of independent purpose, apart from whatever the ruling Party happens to permit. This, I think would be a much more honest definition of a “fascist” because it would instantly “catch all” groups that are even involved in Leftist constituencies in the first place. And not just “The Right.” It would also be a definition that most non-Communist Leftists would implicitly agree with, if it was only applied to "Rightist” constituencies.

This is why I think the central question is not simply where a society stands on a sliding scale between capitalism and communism. The more important question is what the governing party or political movement intends to accomplish through its management of that scale. Does it intend to eliminate independent economic power, subordinate it to a political authority, distribute it more widely among citizens, or preserve it as a permanent foundation of social life? Two states might both permit private enterprise while pursuing fundamentally different political and social objectives. The formal presence of capitalism tells us something important, but it does not tell us everything about the political order in which capitalism operates. Capitalism can operate according to social goals. It can be heavily controlled. Which is in practice, what many communist governments ended up doing.

The Scandinavian countries are often considered in this; and of course the Left has to ignore their unique histories, situation and indeed their ethnogenesis and relative isolation from the wars of Europe. Their extensive welfare states, public services, labor protections, and redistributive taxation do not eliminate their capitalist character. Private ownership, market exchange, and independent business activity remain fundamental features of their economies. Their distinctive position is therefore not that they have abolished capitalism, but that they have placed capitalist economic activity within a much more extensive system of social protection and public regulation. Their economies occupy a different position on the spectrum of state intervention and social provision from more laissez-faire systems, without ceasing to be capitalist. The same distinction matters when examining Singapore, which combines a market-oriented economy with unusually extensive state involvement in housing, savings, and economic planning.

Singapore presents a particularly interesting case because it demonstrates that strong government direction does not necessarily require the abolition of private capital. Its Central Provident Fund (CPF) requires employers and employees to make contributions to mandatory savings accounts, which support retirement, housing, and healthcare. Citizens can use CPF savings for approved purposes, including home purchases and retirement provision. The state therefore exercises significant influence over how individuals accumulate and deploy a portion of their income, even while Singapore maintains private enterprise and a market economy. This is not the abolition of capitalism. It is an example of a capitalist system in which the government imposes substantial institutional constraints and social objectives on private economic life.

The contrast is important to my argument here about this “sliding scale.” A government may permit markets without permitting citizens complete freedom over every use of their income. It may encourage private investment while requiring compulsory savings. It may defend private enterprise while maintaining substantial public ownership and direction in strategic sectors. The political question is therefore not merely whether the market exists. It is who sets the conditions under which the market exists, which institutions retain independent power, and whether that power is being concentrated, subordinated, or distributed throughout the population.

The Notion Club Papers is J.R.R. Tolkien’s unfinished experiment in combining literary criticism, occult speculation, time travel, and mythology. Written in 1945–46 and published posthumously in Sauron Defeated, it presents the discussions of an Oxford literary club whose members begin questioning whether dreams, language, and imagination can provide access to realities beyond ordinary experience. What begins as an argument about science-fiction spaceships gradually becomes an investigation into the nature of reality itself. Tolkien imagines consciousness opening onto forms of existence that space, matter, and ordinary perception cannot fully explain. He in effect, has a “Tesseract” story in his unfinished work.

At the center of the first part is Michael Ramer, who experiments with travelling through space by means of dreams and altered consciousness. Rather than imagining the universe as something reached through mechanical technology, Ramer envisions the mind moving through sympathy, perception, and direct contact with distant worlds. His visions include four extraordinary extraterrestrial realms: the green and biologically abundant Emberü, the silver world Ellor Eshúrizel, the radiant Golden World of Minal-zidar, and the crystalline Tekel-Mirim.

The thing that makes this unfinished story very “radical” is his suggestion that one may encounter other minds through dreaming. In other words, “ Does Tolkien think the ‘Machine Elves’ are ‘Real?’ ” The question becomes, where is the line between your consciousness in a dream and someone else’s consciousness. Is he dreaming or is he really seeing real existing other worlds, and experiencing real existing other consciousnesses? Tolkien makes a distinction between dreams manufactured by the individual imagination and “good dreams” that seem to possess an objective or autonomous character. In these latter dreams, the mind may encounter other minds and, through them, perceive places that exist independently of the dreamer.

Ramer describes experiences in which he seems to perceive qualities directly, almost without an image at all. He speaks of experiencing “Weight” as something in itself, a sensation so absolute that it becomes almost an object of consciousness. He also describes religious experiences in dreams in which one can pray or adore, but which he insists are not really dreams at all, nor ordinary waking experience. They belong to “a third thing.” This is an extraordinary idea for Tolkien: consciousness may have modes of perception that are normally inaccessible to the waking mind. The dream is therefore not necessarily an imaginary picture projected by the brain. It may be another state of awareness, capable of encountering qualities, minds, places, and perhaps spiritual realities that ordinary perception screens out. What looks at first like Tolkien writing about dream-travel becomes something much stranger: an experiment in whether consciousness itself has hidden senses.

Ellor Eshúrizel is the most suggestive of these worlds. There, Ramer encounters the En-keladim, beings whose true forms may be invisible but who become perceptible through their artistic and spiritual manifestations. He witnesses their Drama of the Silver Tree, in which song and collective imagination give visible life to a mythic performance. Tolkien thus imagines a civilization where art is not merely representation, but an event through which reality itself becomes luminous and participatory. Tolkien never tells us if these spiritual alien beings are “Elves” or some kind of “Fëa(r)” of them. They might as well be treated as his own completely ephemeral alien beings, who seem make the telling of some ancient cosmic story their purpose. Tolkien also explicitly discusses the possibility of minds encountering what he calls "ghosts" or other disembodied intelligences in these experiences.

Ramer begins encountering words from what he calls a Primal Language. The club debates whether language itself might be connected to the underlying structure of reality. He also notes that Earth appears to be the only "Talkative Planet." By contrast, on Tekel-Mirim, The Crystal Planet, Ramer cannot even determine whether the medium around him is air or water, nor can he properly determine the scale of what he is seeing. The planet is filled with an apparently inorganic form of life: enormous crystalline structures continually forming and disintegrating. Here, Tolkien is imagining something that is alive without resembling biological life at all. The crystals possess form, growth, dissolution, persistence and pattern. That makes Tekel-Mirim almost a Tolkienian anticipation of non-biological intelligence or even a universe in which the distinction between matter and life becomes unstable.

While trying to return from Tekel-Mirim, Ramer encounters a sphere and concentrates his will upon it. His perception accelerates enormously. He sees forests appearing and disappearing, civilizations arising and vanishing, and people seemingly moving like insects. Then he concentrates on one structure. Everything suddenly stops. He realizes: it is Oxford. Then he wakes up and goes to Mass. What I find most interesting here, is that while Tolkien’s character of Ramer, sees four extra-terrestrial planets, and travels in space, his counterpart, only sees the history, the memory of our own planet, “The Talkative Planet.”

His counterpart is Arundel Lowdham’s and his movement is in the opposite direction. Where Ramer reaches outward toward alien planets, Lowdham is drawn backward through language, ancestral memory, and the submerged history of Númenor. The two trajectories suggest that reality is not exhausted by the visible present: it extends both into the distant reaches of space and into the deep layers of humanity’s forgotten past. Tolkien’s concern is therefore not simply escape from the world, but the recovery of dimensions of existence that modern consciousness has neglected.

Tolkien’s dreaming men here are meant to ask questions of his own obsessions: Can dream and myth by a distorted memory? He then pushes it further, and asks if one can recover memory through dreams? It almost feels like Tolkien wants to go to a seance. His intention is to put forward the question, “If you went backward in time, would you find myth dissolving into history, or history into myth?” There is another feature of his unfinished work which makes the story increasingly bizarre and uncanny valley. Lowdham himself becomes part of the mystery. Lowdham's name connects him with Tolkien's older Ælfwine material, while the story also establishes connections among Lowdham, Elendil, Númenor and the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Christopher Tolkien notes that his father intended the real-world Lowdham to be connected with Ælfwine, the fictional English transmitter of Tolkien's earlier mythology. The “fiction” begins explaining how the fiction itself supposedly survived into the modern world. It feels deliberately recursive.

In this sense, Tolkien can be read as performing a kind of reverse Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s cosmic imagination often descends toward the chthonic, plutonic, material, and horrifyingly alien, where humanity confronts forces beneath or beyond meaning. Tolkien’s Notion Club visions instead move toward the ethereal and ephemeral: worlds of light, crystalline existence, spiritual communication, living beauty, and realities shaped through song, mind, and contemplation. His five-world image, consisting of Earth or Arda alongside Ramer’s four extraterrestrial realms, is not a completed cosmology but a poetic speculation about a universe whose deepest mysteries may be strange without being purely monstrous. Tolkien’s device isn’t a literal four-dimensional cube, but a conceptual tesseract in which space, time, language, memory, myth and consciousness become different faces of the same underlying reality.

Digital Tolkien’s transcription of The Notion Club Papers: the Sauron Defeated chapters:

The Notion Club Papers — Part One (Digital Tolkien)

The Notion Club Papers — Part Two (Digital Tolkien)

One problem I have with Communists is that they really do engage in hero worship and iconography, sometimes in ways that obscure how dramatically the underlying politics have changed. Some modern Communists admire China because it promises something they badly want: state capacity, discipline, and control. But contemporary China is very far from anything a 19th century Marxist would have expected communism to look like, whatever the Chinese Communist Party says about its ultimate destination. Western Communists gain remarkably little by constantly carrying water for Beijing. Yet some of them do it anyway. Acknowledging these twists and turns on the Left is one major reason why I would ideally reject the old Left–Right binary. Then I get laughed at for rejecting it. Perhaps rightly.

The mutation

Because although the Right disagrees about nearly everything imaginable, the Left still possesses something like a focused cannon. Its emphasis changes, its political subject changes, even its conception of emancipation changes, but the genealogy remains recognizable. The political subject can move from class toward what we might call left identity, while Marx, Lenin, revolution, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, and the inherited symbolic vocabulary remain. The symbols survive even when their meaning changes.

And here I expect the objection: “the Left has not abandoned class; it still talks constantly about workers, inequality, wages and exploitation.” Fine. My argument is not that the word class disappeared. It is that class increasingly ceased to exercise a veto over the rest of the program, it has become only a binding tribal watchword.

Thomas Piketty, Amory Gethin and Clara Martínez-Toledano examined more than 300 elections in 21 Western democracies between 1948 and 2020. In the 1950s and 1960s, social democratic, socialist and affiliated parties were disproportionately supported by lower-income and lower-educated voters. Over the following decades, that educational relationship reversed: by the 2010s, higher-educated voters had become substantially more likely to support the Left, while high-income voters remained more likely to support the Right. The authors call the resulting alignment a “Brahmin Left” versus “Merchant Right” system. Their evidence also links this reversal to the emergence of a new sociocultural dimension of politics involving issues such as migration, environmentalism and other cultural questions.

Across the Western democracies for which long-run data are available, the most highly educated voters went from being roughly 15 percentage points less likely than the rest to support left parties in the 1960s to about 10 points more likely by 2016–2020. Meanwhile, the share of the least-educated half of voters supporting social-democratic and affiliated parties fell from roughly 50 percent in the early postwar period to about 40 percent, while support among the most highly educated rose dramatically. Piketty and his coauthors therefore describe Western party systems as moving away from the older, predominantly class-based alignment toward a multidimensional or “multi-elite” political system.

This does not prove that every working-class voter has abandoned the Left, nor that cultural politics necessarily causes workers to do so. It does establish that the old educational and class alignment has substantially weakened. And immigration makes one part of that conflict especially visible. Research on Western European social democracy finds a genuine class divide inside the Left’s own electorate: middle-class social-democratic voters tend to be considerably more supportive of extending welfare rights to immigrants than working-class social-democratic voters. The same study found that when social-democratic electorates became more middle-class, governments were more likely to expand immigrant welfare inclusion; the size of their working-class electorate did not show the equivalent policy effect.

Britain, Germany and the United States has found that voters for whom immigration becomes especially salient are disproportionately likely to move toward conservative or national-populist parties rather than toward liberal or left-wing parties. That does not tell us that immigration is the only cause of working-class realignment, but it does make it difficult simply to dismiss the issue as false consciousness or manipulation. So when workers disagree with the contemporary Left on immigration, national sovereignty, cultural questions or the authority of the nation-state, my question is not whether the Left can still produce a redistribution program with the word worker in it. Of course it can. My question is whether the actual preferences of workers still have enough authority to alter the rest of the program. You can retain the rhetoric of class while changing which disagreements you permit the working class to have.

Immigration therefore exposes the contradiction. A politics organized around labor has obvious reasons to ask workers themselves what they think about immigration levels, labor-market competition, pressure on housing and public services, national sovereignty and social cohesion. Workers can also favor redistribution while taking more restrictive positions on immigration; those positions need not fall neatly on a single Left–Right axis. Research on European voters has indeed identified people who combine economically redistributive preferences with restrictive immigration preferences, and whose eventual party choice can depend heavily on which issue becomes electorally decisive. The interesting question, then, is not simply why workers have supposedly become “right-wing.” It is why political movements that historically regarded workers as their central constituency now find themselves competing for many of those workers against parties of the Right.

Why I disbelieve Leftist Historiography

That brings me to Molotov. I am skeptical of many of Molotov’s retrospective claims in his conversations with Felix Chuev precisely because Molotov was not a neutral historian. He remained a deeply committed Bolshevik and a defender of Stalin’s political legacy. I suspect that he often remembered events within the mythology through which Stalinism understood itself. Chuev once asked Molotov directly who was more severe, Lenin or Stalin. Molotov answered: Lenin, of course. There is also the famous secondhand anecdote in which Molotov supposedly remarked that, compared with Lenin, Stalin was a mere lamb.

I find the characterization doubtful. To be fair to Molotov, he does not make this claim casually. Throughout the Chuev conversations he returns to it again and again. When Chuev asks outright who was more severe, Lenin or Stalin, Molotov answers, “Lenin, of course.” He points to Lenin's messages to Dzerzhinsky, the suppression of the Tambov uprising, and Lenin's willingness to resort to extreme measures; he even recalls Lenin reproaching Stalin for softness and liberalism and complaining that Soviet power had become “milk-and-honey power” rather than a real dictatorship. Elsewhere Molotov argues that Lenin would not have tolerated serious opposition if circumstances had permitted him to crush it, that Lenin sometimes settled critical questions on his own authority rather than waiting upon what Molotov dismisses as “formal democracy,” and that people imagining a gentler Lenin are projecting their own wishes backward onto him.

When the subject turns to collectivization, Molotov again insists that “sacrifices were unavoidable,” and rejects the idea that Lenin would necessarily have followed a softer course. He even traces some of the institutions later associated with Stalin back to Lenin, pointing to the creation of the Cheka and the early camp system and portraying Stalin as having inherited rather than invented them. Yet Molotov complicates his own argument. He admits elsewhere that Lenin could show greater flexibility while Stalin was less tolerant, and notes that during the October crisis Lenin wanted Zinoviev and Kamenev expelled while Stalin defended them. He also says Lenin was superior to Stalin theoretically and personally, while regarding Stalin as unsurpassed in practical political work. Taken together, Molotov's argument is not really that Lenin and Stalin were identical. It is that Stalin remained fundamentally inside Lenin's revolutionary tradition and that later attempts to construct a humane Lenin in opposition to a uniquely brutal Stalin falsify that continuity. That is precisely where my skepticism begins. (Felix Chuev, Molotov Remembers, pp. 107–112, 251, 270, 411.)

That does not mean Lenin was gentle. Far from it. Lenin could be extraordinarily ruthless. Under War Communism the Bolsheviks endangered their alliance with the peasantry and employed enormous coercion. But Lenin was also capable of retreat. The New Economic Policy represented a massive tactical concession: slower transformation, private trade, peasant incentives, and a recognition that revolutionary ambition had collided with economic reality. Stalin ultimately abandoned that compromise.

Collectivization did not merely continue Lenin’s policy at a different speed. It represented a much more violent transformation of the countryside. The same problem appears in internationalism. Lenin remained much closer to the old revolutionary expectation that socialism belonged to an international process. Under Stalin, the centre of gravity shifted toward building, defending, and industrializing the Soviet state itself — socialism in one country — even though international communist institutions and rhetoric remained. So who was really harsher?

Molotov insists that Lenin was the harsher revolutionary. Perhaps he meant temperament. Perhaps he meant Lenin’s willingness to authorize extreme measures during revolutionary emergencies. But if we are talking about the scale, permanence, and institutionalization of coercion, Stalin’s mature system is much harder to describe that way. And yet there is something ideologically useful about insisting that Stalin was merely Lenin’s pupil. The revolutionary founder remains greater than the successor. Stalin becomes the faithful student carrying out Lenin’s work rather than the man who transformed the system into something substantially different. There is almost a strange humility in the mythology: Stalin cannot surpass Lenin even in brutality. It is a false humility, but very necessary to power.

The Cannon Keeps Firing on Autopilot

That is exactly why I distrust political traditions when they narrate themselves.

Lenin also operated among a generation of Bolsheviks who possessed substantial independent authority. Stalin’s mature system became far more concentrated around Stalin personally. Whatever Lenin’s own authoritarianism, Bolshevik politics under Lenin was not yet identical to the political structure Stalin eventually constructed.

Then came another rupture.

The Soviet leadership itself repudiated much of Stalin after his death. Khrushchev denounced the cult of personality and major crimes of the Stalin period. Communist movements consequently inherited a peculiar problem: they had to inherit a tradition that had already partially disinherited itself. The current Far Left often wants to speak the language of democracy again. Yet parts of it remain attached to the imagery, vocabulary, heroes, and mythology of political systems that became identified with one-party rule. They want the inheritance without always being able to explain which parts of the inheritance they actually accept. This can’t go unremarked on.

This creates many of the bemusing divisions on the Left.

Trotskyists, Stalinists, Maoists, Marxist-Leninists, Eurocommunists, democratic socialists, left communists and countless smaller traditions can all claim some privileged relationship to the same broad revolutionary genealogy while accusing one another of having betrayed it. The movement that supposedly refuses to be led ends up divided over which dead leaders were correct. And in practical political life, many of these groups eventually become small parties, pressure groups, activist networks, or intellectual tendencies operating within the very liberal-democratic order they theoretically claim to transcend.

That is another reason for my skepticism toward political self-labeling; towards the Leftist self-belief that they have an unbroken continuity of goodness, and that their enemies likewise have an unbroken continuity of evil. Left and Right just don’t mean anything, in the emotional terms their believers need them to mean, in an environment, in which a 19th century Victorian moralism, would be regarded as insane by present day progressive moralism. Left and Right are historical coalitions whose contents mutate, as former Catholic theologians might say, their “formation” has mutated. I simply see this mutation as something we cannot avoid remarking on.

This is why I disbelieve a great deal of what ideological movements say about themselves. It is not because I think Communists are uniquely evil. I actually don’t. It is not because I am blind to genuine accomplishments. Communist governments had some, at least in relative terms to circumstance. They could make that case, and I will not argue it here. It is because political history reaches us through layers of self-justification. What people said then was filtered through what the regime needed to present at the time. What ideological descendants say now is filtered through an entirely different problem: explaining why they still belong to the tradition while rejecting, revising, or quietly abandoning so much of what that tradition actually became. The cannon survives. The symbols survive. The labels survive. But the thing being described can change almost completely. The cannon survives, but it is firing on autopilot without a human mind behind it.

This is where my distinction between Left and Right becomes what I really want to focus on in my skepticism. The Right looks less like a doctrine than an arsenal. Libertarians, nationalists, market conservatives, religious traditionalists, populists and post-liberals ( like myself ) can occupy the same political side while disagreeing about the state, markets, religion, war, immigration and even what exactly they are trying to conserve. My claim about the Left is different. Its factions can hate one another and still inherit a vocabulary canon: emancipation, oppression, revolution, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, Marx and his descendants, and the conviction that history contains subjects who must be liberated from structures of domination. The gun crews change. They argue about who betrayed whom. Sometimes they shoot at one another. But remarkably, they are still standing around the same inherited machine. The canon becomes a cannon, firing at will.

Marxism once supplied it with an extraordinarily definite target: class society, private ownership of the means of production, and the historical struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. But the old target gradually ceased to organize the movement. The workers did not organize. The Left began shifting to Left Identity issues. A different target.

Yet the machinery did not simply shut down. The turret rotated. New political subjects entered the sights; new forms of oppression were identified; new enemies replaced old ones; while much of the inherited moral language, symbolic vocabulary and historical genealogy remained recognizable. The cannon had lost the target for which it was built, but it had not lost the command to fire.

The target changes faster than their targeting system.

Sources

Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty, “Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 137, no. 1 (2022): 1–48, https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjab036.

Eloisa Harris and Matthias Enggist, “The Micro-Foundations of Social Democratic Welfare Chauvinism and Inclusion: Class Demand and Policy Reforms in Western Europe, 1980–2018,” European Political Science Review (2023). The study compares working- and middle-class immigration-welfare preferences within social-democratic electorates across Western Europe.

Matthew J. Goodwin, Eric Kaufmann, and Erik Gahner Larsen, “Asymmetric Realignment: Immigration and Right Party Voting,” Electoral Studies 80 (2022): 102551, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2022.102551

Feliks Chuev, Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics—Conversations with Felix Chuev, edited with an introduction and notes by Albert Resis (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), especially pp. 107–112, 251, 270, 411.

The habit of putting labels on people, or “ists” and “isms” prevents real communication of ideas. For Leftists who are always about “nuance” when it comes to their trivial or bothersome sexual theories, which adds nothing to power realism, this can feel especially trite and unproductive. When looking at how I have been thinking for years, an honest clear self-assessment, mostly to explain myself to the Right, and Far-Right, would be to say, that I am “Leninist in theory of political action, but I am decisively post-Leninist in theory of society and desired settlement.” To explain myself to the Left and Far-Left, however, I would have to go much further back, to what I think was the original “Communist” or Leftist starting mistakes. Since I think their “error” goes back much further than 1920 or 1960. The real Left error, starts with thinking that the abolishment of built up institutional power, as seen in the French Revolution and Paris Commune is somehow sufficient for freedom. Liberal capitalists also effectively abolish things, without having to transfer power to any insurgent group, and they have been much more successful at preserving their own power.

1. You Do Need Organizations That Spread Your Opinion

“Institutions are primary,” political movements are only judged by whether they can:

• recruit serious people;

• impose discipline;

• coordinate action;

• control appointments and information;

• endure defeat;

• convert ideas into organizations;

• acquire sufficient power to implement a program.

Power should be distinguished from visibility, popularity and moral prestige. “The people” never spontaneously govern themselves. Every society produces organizers, administrators, specialists and decision-makers. This is best explained through, Weber and Burnham: bureaucracy, managerial control, elite formation and institutional command. Where I differ from Lenin analytically is that I do not pretend for the sake of attracting progressive, leftist or anarchist allies that the directing minority will disappear after the revolution. I expect it to become a new elite with interests of its own. That is a fundamental difference between the Communist and the non-Communist. Maintaining or dropping that pretense. I drop that pretense, and maintain instead that the modern world requires a new system for managing that bureaucracy, for continually rotating it.

2. Control matters more than Nominal Ownership

Legal ownership does not necessarily identify the actual governing power. The decisive questions are:

• Who appoints whom?

• Who controls credit?

• Who determines investment?

• Who possesses information?

• Who can reward, remove or exclude?

• Which organization can make its decisions effective?

The only thing that actually matters under modern conditions is which concrete managerial and institutional network actually operates the state, regardless of its pretended class identity. Lenin built an extremely hierarchical organization, although he theoretically regarded domination and class hierarchy as historically eliminable. That is where I differ. I think we are forced to be more candid today, because people are not stupid. Organization necessarily generates unequal authority, specialized knowledge and leadership. We can practice very deliberately methods for “turning over” our own ossification. But we cannot deny organizations run on their own unfortunate interests; the problem is being aware of when the interests of that elite are destroying their own base and country.

3. Favour strategic coalitions rather than ideological purity

Strange coalitions should at least be offered or publically pronounced, if only to draw anyone in the dissatisfied classes from the centre to the Right. Offering a coalition between the, BSW, AfD and potentially Die Linke, would be Lenin-like in method even though completely unlike Lenin ideologically. I prefer to ask what concrete issue draws support, what each faction inherited and what settlement might allow unlike forces to cooperate. It is important to distinguish ultimate doctrine from temporary alliances, tactical compromises and the immediate “main contradiction.” I would therefore attempt this through a proposed patriotic, socially conservative, labour-protective popular front which would represent this kind of strategic reasoning. I think the current Left-wing culture makes changing anything fundamental impossible; it is self-negating, and endlessly ossifying. One can only survive under the cultural left by becoming extra-individualist, and suspicious of all immigrant introgression.

Weber and Burnham tell us that elites, bureaucracy and hierarchy persist. They do not automatically tell one which elite should govern or what ends it should serve. This is what brings us then to MacIntyre, Macmillan, Douglas, Kelso and towards a producerism which supplies the normative design. That separation is one of my clearest departures from Marxism-Leninism. Lenin fused historical analysis, political strategy and moral purpose into one revolutionary doctrine. I deliberately separate:

• descriptive ontology: how power and institutions actually work;

• normative design: what kind of society ought to be built.

I believe in an implicit rule and an explicit rule in institutional design:

• Never destroy an inherited institution until you possess a demonstrably superior institution capable of performing its necessary functions.

• If something worked in the past, but needs modernization then we practice “backward marriage” to that thing.

This would be similar to keeping the form of a car, but if wheels no longer work, we replace them. My imagined political subject is closer to a historically continuous national people organized around production, citizenship and reciprocal obligation. I want international cooperation, yes, but I do not want national sovereignty dissolved into either global capital or abstract international revolution. If anything, the goal and ideal, should be more protection for distinct local people’s and autonomy, especially as technology makes the movement of people’s less and less necessary for economic reasons. Some things I absolutely can take from the Leninists as you see above, but on other things I depart radically towards a separate institutional design and a separate settlement, which would require a strong government which engaging in the widespread management and constant distribution of capital in a stakeholder state, to all productive native citizens.

Ultimately, I want a Right-Wing version of the “Democratic Socialists of America” which will deliberately seek power in exactly the same way that they do. Currently, “the Right” only has multiple divided republican organizations, which perform different tasks, but which seem slated to always lose and concede, they do not seek power in the same way; and that division of labour may itself be the problem: responsibility is dispersed among organizations with different funders, incentives, and priorities, leaving no single membership organization accountable for carrying a coherent political programme from recruitment through election to government.

The problem may lie in how the Republican movement divides its work among organizations with different priorities and different centres of accountability. The RNC, NRCC and NRSC seek electoral victories, which can favour broad appeal and compromise; the Club for Growth promotes free-market commitments that may conflict with those compromises; and the House Freedom Caucus can withhold votes from legislation Republican leaders want passed. Meanwhile, Heritage develops policy proposals, Turning Point Action mobilizes activists, and the Conservative Partnership Institute trains personnel, but these activities do not automatically serve one agreed programme. Each organization can fulfil its own mission while the movement as a whole fails to deliver anything. The weakness is therefore not specialization itself, but fragmentation without common accountability: responsibility for winning elections, defining policy and delivering results is spread across institutions that can pull in different directions.

There is no hexagram associated with David in the biblical text. The familiar association between the six-pointed figure and King David resulted from a much later convergence of names, symbols and traditions drawn from different sources. During Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the hexagram occasionally appeared as a decorative or protective design throughout the Middle East and beyond. It appeared in both Jewish and non-Jewish settings, but it was not yet the defining emblem of Judaism or the Jewish people. In early medieval Jewish liturgy, “Shield of David” was a title for God, the protector of David and his dynasty. No particular geometric design was attached to the phrase. The error made by some modern polemicists is to assume that because the hexagram eventually became known as the Shield of David, every earlier reference to a shield, star or astral god must refer to the same figure. That is historical association masquerading as historical evidence.

By the middle of the twelfth century, the Karaite scholar Judah Hadassi’s Eshkol ha-Kofer mentioned a magical sign called the Magen David, or Shield of David. This is the earliest reasonably secure textual reference to a sign bearing David’s name, but Hadassi did not describe its shape. We therefore cannot establish from his words alone that he meant the familiar hexagram. Pentagrams and hexagrams were also employed in Islamic and Christian settings and could be called the “Seal of Solomon.” This appears to be the general historical environment in which the six-pointed sign and the name Magen David gradually converged. In the later medieval period, Prague’s Jewish community employed the hexagram as a recognizable communal emblem. Its use subsequently spread through Central and Eastern European Jews. Only during the nineteenth century did it become a broadly recognized symbol of Judaism, functionally comparable to the Christian cross. The Zionist movement later adopted it, and it eventually appeared on the flag of Israel. None of this demonstrates that the hexagram was the “star of Remphan.”

That allegation ultimately appeals to Acts 7:43, which condemns the Israelites for carrying “the star of your god Remphan.” Acts is quoting the Greek version of Amos 5:26. Remphan is commonly connected with an astral deity, probably Saturn, and the passage refers to an idolatrous image carried in worship. But neither Acts nor Amos describes that image geometrically. Neither text mentions two intersecting triangles, six points or a hexagram. The fact that Christians refer to this in their polemics proves nothing. Later occult traditions sometimes associated the hexagram with the seven classical planets, including Saturn. But later correspondences cannot simply be projected backward into biblical antiquity. The use of the hexagram in one Saturnian magical system does not establish that every hexagram represents Saturn, much less that medieval Jewish communities knowingly adopted the condemned star of Remphan.

This uncertainty is precisely the point. The hexagram did not possess one unchanging meaning throughout history. It could be an ornament in one building, a protective device on an amulet, a representation of cosmic harmony in another tradition and eventually the public emblem of a people. Its intersecting triangles were especially open to reinterpretation: heaven and earth, fire and water, masculine and feminine, or opposing forces held in equilibrium. It is analogous to the swastika. Long before National Socialism appropriated that figure, swastika-like designs appeared across Eurasia, India and Indigenous North American art. Depending upon the society, they could signify good fortune, life, solar movement, cyclical time or cosmic order. National Socialist appropriation did not retroactively transform every earlier swastika into a Nazi emblem.

It would be ridiculous to assume that peoples of the Eurasian steppe, Indians, Indigenous North Americans, Finnish nationalists and German National Socialists all attached precisely the same meaning to the design. Sometimes symbols were transmitted between cultures; sometimes similar forms were developed independently. In either case, symbols accumulate new meanings rather than carrying one immutable message across every continent and millennium. The same principle applies to the Star of David. Its history does not prove that King David carried it, that God revealed it or that it was always uniquely Jewish. It does prove that an old and adaptable geometric figure gradually acquired a Jewish communal meaning.

One can criticize Judaism, rabbinic theology or the modern State of Israel without inventing a continuous demonic genealogy for the hexagram. Associating the Star of David with Remphan requires precisely the kind of mystical reasoning and unverified tradition that such polemicists ordinarily claim to reject. Nothing is served by demonizing someone who has no trouble doing that himself. Sometimes the evolution of a symbol is simply the evolution of a symbol. No secret theological intention needs to have travelled alongside it for thousands of years.

APHORISM 24 of 300

“Keep the Imagination Under Control.”

“Sometimes correcting, sometimes assisting it. For it is all-important for our happiness, and even sets reason right. It can tyrannise, and is not content with looking on, but influences and often dominates life, causing it to be happy or burdensome according to the folly to which it leads. For it makes us either contented or discontented with ourselves. Before some it continually holds up the penalties of action, and becomes the mortifying lash of these fools. To others it promises happiness and adventure with blissful delusion. It can do all this unless the most prudent self-control keeps it in subjection.”

— Baltasar Gracián

Explanation

Gracián is warning that the imagination is not merely a passive faculty for producing fantasies. It can become an active power over our emotional lives, making an already painful reality far more painful, or making an attractive illusion seem more real than the world before us. Imagination can assist reason by helping us anticipate consequences and understand possibilities, but when uncontrolled, it begins to tyrannize over reason.

We often suffer more in imagination than in reality. The original injury may occur only once, but imagination can repeat it a thousand times. It reconstructs the insult, invents the response we should have made, and returns us endlessly to the moment when we could not act, did not act, or did not yet understand what was being done to us. The cruelty of the event is therefore multiplied by reflection: what another person did to us temporarily, the imagination may continue doing to us for years.

I have found personally that some of my deepest unhappiness comes from reflecting upon past events in which I could not, or did not, act. Dwelling upon an unhappy situation or an affliction imposed upon me made the original cruelties far worse in imagination. The mind does not merely remember the wound; it reopens it, examines every detail, stages alternative outcomes, and condemns itself for lacking knowledge or power, which may have been impossible at the time. This is what produces the greatest torment; and that is my reading of Gracián here.

However, Gracián is not arguing that we should suppress imagination entirely. Imagination also enables foresight, sympathy and ambition. It becomes dangerous only when it begins to dictate reality, when imagined disasters become certainties, imagined happiness becomes entitlement, or remembered suffering becomes a permanent inner world. We should learn from the past without permitting it to reproduce itself indefinitely within us. The disciplined imagination remembers what happened, extracts the lesson, and strengthens us against its repetition.

There is a funny historical irony in Stalin’s paranoia accidentally creating the popular Hitler myth of his escape and survival in Argentina. His vigilance, cynicisms or disinformation, could not believe that Hitler could not possibly have “not escaped.” I just find this a kind of High Historical Comedy. A Legend created from paranoia or self-sustaining lies.

The forensic evidence had committed the considerable political indiscretion of suggesting that Hitler was dead. Witnesses described his corpse; Soviet investigators recovered dental remains, which his dental staff identified. Stalin nevertheless encouraged doubts and further investigation, while Soviet public statements kept an escape alive as a possibility. “No one has seen the body” made a great rumour, provided one avoided those who had. Driven by suspicion, calculation, or some administratively convenient combination, Moscow helped turn a dead dictator into an unresolved international appointment. Historical evidence, US National Archives

There were, admittedly, real reasons to investigate Nazi escape routes. Eichmann and Mengele genuinely reached Argentina, which gave the Hitler story its indispensable ingredient: something approximately true happening to somebody else. From there, the reasoning could proceed with magnificent economy. Some Nazis escaped; Hitler was a Nazi; therefore Hitler escaped. His inconvenient dental remains could be referred to a subcommittee. Antarctica offered later storytellers an even better destination, being large, remote, and poorly equipped with witnesses willing to contradict an underground Fourth Reich. Eichmann’s escape, Mengele’s escape

Generations of conspiracy enthusiasts, and some Hitler admirers, have consequently enjoyed a Führer who survived military defeat, forensic identification, and eventually the ordinary limitations of human lifespan. Argentina became his retirement address; Antarctica supplied additional accommodation whenever the plot required more secrecy and fewer vegetables. Soviet uncertainty helped nourish the legend, and later books and television programmes kept it comfortably employed. A 2018 forensic study identifying his remains supplied another unwelcome reminder that evidence does not automatically cancel a successful franchise. The survival myths, Forensic study

Here lies Stalin’s historical joke upon himself: the ruler whose armies helped destroy Hitler’s empire also helped furnish Hitler with a supernatural afterlife. We cannot establish that Stalin’s purpose was to remain indispensable, but the satirical logic is exquisite: The monster may still be abroad. Fortunately, I remain available to protect you. A conclusively dead enemy has limited administrative potential. An enemy who might be operating a submarine beneath a glacier can justify quite a lot of continued vigilance. Stalin helped win the war; Soviet pronouncements then helped ensure that its principal villain would never entirely finish losing it.