Anthony Mansueto
The past decade has shattered the confidence of people everywhere, but most especially in the United States, in their understanding of how the world works. Partly this challenge is a result of things we already knew were happening or were inevitable, but which surprised us nonetheless as they have actually begun to affect the way we experience the world. Climate change is no longer a process measured in tenths of degrees Celsius, but in body counts from deadly storms and acres of grasslands and forests and hundreds of homes destroyed. That deadly pandemic which people have been playing at in video games for so many years, the one which destroys not only human cognitive capacities but also undermines human empathy (Hampshire et al 2024, Hou 2025)[1] suddenly became a reality, even though most retreated into denial as soon as they could. Technological change has been disrupting human livelihoods for as long as there have been human beings. But now, suddenly, with the emergence of Large Language Models, education has suddenly ceased to be an effective prophylactic. We have long known that capitalism alienates people from their essential nature (Fromm 1941). We have long known that we live in a racist and misogynist society. But it was still a shock when social media made people aware of the depths of police brutality and when enough people voted for a rapist that he was able to steal the election.
That said, the changes of the past several months have been of an entirely different order. After decades during which the inevitability of globalization was not even questioned, and during which we adapted our economy accordingly, what we have built is now being pummeled with oppressive tariffs. We have been through nearly fifty years of efforts, some more vigorous than others, to dismantle the social safety net and to defund culturally sensitive programs in the humanities and social sciences. But we have also been accustomed to the protections offered by the legislative process and bureaucratic inertia. Now, suddenly, without any legislation, legally appropriated federal funds supporting public health, infrastructure, education, and research are being clawed back, while entire government departments (and most of the US foreign policy and research infrastructure), built up over decades or longer by both both the Democratic and Republican Parties, are suddenly being dismantled. Masked men seize people –documented and undocumented, native born and naturalized—off the street and “disappear” them to sites in countries to which they have no ties. And all this, often, in defiance of explicit court orders.
What is happening to us? Who are we, anyway? What should we do?
***
We need, first of all, to address what I am inclined to believe is a very common, but also incorrect, understanding of what has happened and the false hope to which it gives rise. According to what is almost certainly the majority view on both the Center and the Left, the Republican victory in the 2024 General Elections was a result of fundamental errors made by the Democratic Party. Those on the Center, such as Matthew Yglesias (Yglesia 2025), argue that the Democratic Party has veered too far to the Left, both in embracing a radical identity politics focused on antiracism and LGBTQ rights, and in tolerating within its ranks and being modestly responsive to a significant Democratic Socialist faction. Those on the Left, on the other hand, especially the Democratic Socialists, argue that the Democratic Party has become a sort of rest home for octogenarian politicians out of touch with the revolutionary dynamism of the people, whether on the identify front, the class front, or both. (Springfield 2023). Both the Center and the Left have largely embraced the idea that Joe Biden was, if not an incompetent leader and probably senile, then at least obviously too old to have run for a second term, and that Kamala Harris was an ineffective candidate who did almost everything wrong.
According this view we just have to get through the next few years and be sure that we do the right thing (veering either sharply to the Left or sharply to the Right as the case may be) and win the 2026 midterm and 2028 Presidential elections. Then everything can return to normal.
Both the Center and Left variants of this position are not just incorrect; they are opportunistic and self-serving narratives developed by very specific political interests –Neoliberals on the one hand and Democratic Socialists on the other—to advance their own narrow political aims. Joe Biden was neither incompetent nor senile, but was incredibly effective under the circumstances and almost certainly the most progressive US President since Roosevelt. The Democratic Party did not lose the 2024 election because it was too cautiously Centrist or too radically Leftist. On the contrary, the party brought a powerful, compelling candidate, backed by the record of one of the most progressive administrations in US history. Nor did we lose because of this, that, or the other strategic or tactical error made by the Harris campaign. On the contrary, we lost because of a complex mixture of factors, the relative importance of which is not yet fully clear, but a correct understanding of which drives home the impossibility of any “quick fix” at the electoral level, while at the same time leaving solid grounds for hope (Mansueto 2024).
None of this means that we should sit out the next election. But we need to be clear that electoral business as usual –especially when accompanied by recriminations against other elements in the popular front against fascism– will not be enough.
First, at the level of deep structure, capitalism has been burning through the social fabric for centuries now. By alienating people from their underlying nature, and absorbing more and more of humanity’s time in activities directed at the accumulation of capital, thus eroding non-market institutions which help cultivate human beings who actually want to serve the Common Good, capitalism has led to the literal de-moralization of humanity. Capitalism has gradually but inexorably made us less moral. This has taken a very long time. For hundreds of years the village communities which sent their sons and daughters to work in the city, and the congregations and parishes, mutual benefit societies and trade unions, community organizations and political parties they built once they got there, struggled constantly to keep alive the flame of authentic humanity and to feed it through capitalism’s long, dark, night. Much, probably most, of this work was done invisibly by women. Sometimes it involved visionary leadership. Sometimes it took the form of a cautionary sermon. Much of the time, though, it was just a matter of organizing a pick-up softball or basketball game when things were getting hot. But in the end capitalism burned through so much of the social fabric, and so alienated us from who we are that we reached a tipping point where a significant part of the population has degenerated into vicious hatred, and a much broader group have consented to the effects of that hatred.
These are all, in some measure, global developments and they affect every single community on this planet. But something specific and distinctive has happened in the United States. The current regime in Washington is unique in its single-minded dedication to acting systematically on the hatred capitalism has cultivated, and on destroying everything in its path, including the country it claims it wants to make “great” again.
To some extent, one might argue, this is a result of the more radical commodification of life in the US. But there are also other, more specific features of US history and of US political structure which have contributed to the situation. First, while a failure to act effectively to protect liberal rights and democratic accountability against fascism is a universal tendency of the liberal bourgeoisie, this tendency is more extreme in the United States. This is partly a result of the historic weight of chattel slavery in the process of primitive accumulation in the United States, so that capitalism was built less as a liberation from feudalism and more as an outgrowth of slavery. But it is also and perhaps even more important a result of the way the liberal bourgeoisie chose to handle its victory over the Southern landed elites in the Civil War. The end of Reconstruction in 1876 and the withdrawal of Union troops from the South effectively guaranteed that the United States would forever remain safe for those looking to reverse the verdict of the war and restore slavery. Advocates of slavery have always had a seat at the table here.
This, in turn, affected the way in which the United States handled other assaults on liberal rights and democratic accountability. Thus the decision not to prosecute those involved in the Businessmen’s Plot against Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Thus the decision to welcome NAZI scientists in the US and to allow NAZI collaborators to participate in the leadership of postwar Germany, while US Communists who served in the OSS and other key roles during the war were purged and persecuted and hounded from public life. Thus, the failure, after Watergate, to prosecute the far more egregious offenses of Ronald Reagan, who conspired with Khomeini to hold the hostages until after the 1980 election, ensuring his victory.
There are, furthermore, specific features of the US political system which have made it more difficult to resist fascism. Winner take all legislative elections effectively require a two-party system by making the threshold of entry to Congress very high. While this has historically limited the advance of “extremist” alternatives, it means that once a radicalized faction has seized control of one of the parties, they begin to play an outsized role compared to their actual support in the population. This is reinforced by a strong Presidency, a Senate which vastly over-represents, and a House which significantly over-represents, conservative rural areas, and by a Supreme Court which has been subjected to what is probably the most effective “penetrate and control” operation (conducted under the auspices of Opus Dei and its legal instrumentalities) in human history (Gore 2024).
These weaknesses already put progressive forces at a disadvantage in the United States. And that, in turn, makes it much easier to “steal” elections, whether indirectly through media manipulation and voter suppression, or more directly, as some evidence suggests happened in November 2024, when Elon Musk bragged that he had “won” the election for Trump (Mansueto 2024).
***
With these factors in mind, we are now ready to analyze the sequence of events since 2008 up until the present, so that we can arrive at a correct assessment of the current situation. Contrary to the narrative created by the Democratic Socialists, peak neoliberalism ended in 2008, with the Great Recession. Obama, while a complex and ambivalent figure in some ways, was not a doctrinaire neoliberal. He was, rather, a transitional leader trying to find a road forward for the country as neoliberalism was collapsing. And he scared the Right —badly. Thus the “birther” movement and thus the emergence of the Tea Party. Specifically, elements on the Right, including a significant part of the high technology sector, which had, up until that point, understood itself as libertarian and which had often supported the Democratic Party on issues like free trade and reproductive rights, finally understood that the radical free market policies they wanted would never be implemented under even a flawed democracy, giving rise to the Dark Enlightenment, about which we have written extensively elsewhere (Mansueto 2017). Thinkers like Curtis Yarvin (Moldbug 2002), an operative of Peter Thiel, began to argue that the country was dominated by a “Cathedral” made of secularized Liberal Protestants who controlled the academy, the mass media, the foreign service, and the bureaucracy and that simply electing libertarian politicians wouldn’t do anything unless this Cathedral was utterly destroyed. This led ultimately to to Yarvin’s platform in 2024: RAGE, or “Retire All Government Employees.”
During the same period, Russia had finally recovered sufficiently from the collapse of the Soviet Union for Vladimir Putin to make a bid to restore the Russian Empire. He positioned Russia economically as a major energy exporter, rebuilt the military as best he could, and exploited both the historic Russian comparative advantage in Human Intelligence and Information Operations and emerging technologies to lay the groundwork for a major assault on the US –one which, as we know, played a major role in Trump’s first victory in 2016.
Throughout this same period, the Left in the United States experienced a modest but significant resurgence. On the one hand, it was a period of major victories for LGBTQ rights and a period of awakening for many Americans of European ancestry regarding the police brutality which African Americans and others historically colonized peoples within the US have always faced. On the other hand, the slow recovery from the Great Recession led to a renewed interest in socialism, tracking the emergence of “left-populist” parties across Southern Europe and the “Socialism of the Twenty First Century” in Latin America. This new Democratic Socialism, especially in the United States, however, was infused with generational naivety and neither inherited the wisdom nor confronted the errors of earlier anti-capitalist movements. While nominally committed to democracy, it was incredibly naïve about the complex ways in which authoritarianism emerges. At the same time, it seemed to assume that we could simply vote out capitalism and vote in socialism with no effective resistance from Capital at all. The result was a naïve maximalism which almost never understood which issues were most important when, or how to be both ideologically challenging and politically savvy. While there was significant progress in trade union organizing, it was nowhere near enough, and other forms of organizing continued to decline precipitously with the erosion of the social fabric on which they depended.
Finally, the religious right underwent a profound transformation. First, there has been a shift among Evangelical Protestants from dispensational premillennialism to dominion theology. Dispensationalist premillennialism, which emerged from the disappointment which followed the end of Reconstruction, which had been drive as much by progressive, socially reformist Evangelicals as it had by Liberals, argued that it was impossible to build a just society during what it called the “Church Age,” and that in fact the social teachings of Jesus, which they regarded as part of the Jewish Law, as not even in force at this time. Christians should devote themselves exclusively to saving souls (Marsden 1980). This trend was mobilized by the Right in the US and Latin America against the Christian Left in the 1970s and 1980s, but it was unable to provide adequate theological support for an effort at displacing democracy and actually imposing Christian rule. Dominion theology, on the other hand, which has its roots in the High Reformed tradition but which has been especially strong among Charismatic and Pentecostal Christians, argues that Christians need to seize hold of and control human institutions, including the state, on behalf of Jesus, in preparation for his return (Ingersoll 2015).
Beyond this, the Catholic Right has continued to grow, thanks in large part to the work of Opus Dei, which is one of the most effective cadre organizations in the history of humanity, but also due to a strange, half-ironic Catholic Traditionalist chic which as emerged among the “dirt bag left.” Indeed, the election of Francis in 2013, and the loss of the sponsorship of the Vatican, may well have led many less extreme conservatives to begin looking to Opus Dei for leadership (Gore 2024). Russian Orthodoxy, finally, has also experienced a resurgence, especially on the periphery of the “manosphere,” with Orthodox priests, often with no historic connections to the Greek or Slavic world, offering workshops for men on how to enhance their masculine prowess –all of course, under the carefully direction of the Russian Intelligence agencies which have long controlled the Russian church (Ash 2025).
It was in this atmosphere that, partly due to Russian information warfare and partly due to Democratic Socialist abstentionism, Donald Trump won his first term as President. That first term was full of cruelty and bluster and Trump tipped his hand regarding just how far he would ultimately go on immigration and tariffs and anti-vax nonsense. But in terms of major legislation all he got was his tax bill, which is what Republicans have, in general, always been focused on getting. It was bad, but it was predictable. Trump remained significantly constrained by the civil service, the foreign service, the intelligence community, and the military, and largely served the function other Republican Presidents have served since at least Nixon: engaging in reactionary racist bluster in order drum up support for tax cuts. This is best illustrated in his handling of the early stages of the pandemic: drumming up resistance to vaccinations and public health measures generally, while going ahead and actually developing the vaccine.
Biden’s victory, rooted in a broad base extending across the working classes, oppressed communities, women, and the humanistic intelligentsia could have, and in many ways did, represent an historic turn not just away from the spiral towards fascism, but also away from neoliberalism and Democratic acquiescence in the gradual erosion of the social safety net. Biden undertook bold initiatives on climate change and infrastructure, moved to strengthen trade unions and begin shoring up the social safety net, began looking seriously at debt relief, questioned free-trade dogmatism without flipping to destructive protectionism, and tried to do much more. Joe Biden is also a deeply good man whose moral leadership was never merely performative.
There were, however, two key errors under Biden which helped set the stage for Trump’s Return. First, he succumbed far too easily to advisors who told him that a strong vaccination policy was sufficient to defeat the pandemic and then, when, largely due to information warfare from the Right, we failed to meet his 70% target, and the virus turned out to be perhaps less susceptible to this strategy than we had hoped, he acquiesced to Capital’s demand that the pandemic be declared “over.” While Biden undoubtedly experienced the process leading up to this decision as a normal consultation with technical experts who knew more about the science and more about public health than he did, the fact is that Capital was profoundly panicked over working class gains (rising wages for “essential” workers and greater autonomy in the form of remote work for the professional “middle” class) as a result of the pandemic and the “experts” Biden consulted were profoundly compromised by their relationships with capitalist patrons. The result of declaring the pandemic over was to:
- Gaslight a population which was still experiencing serious illness and vastly increased levels of long-term disability, so that they became even less willing to listen to challenging and uncomfortable direction from public health leaders,
- Allow the continued spread and mutation of a virus which causes large scale disability including significant harm to both cognitive function and empathy, and
- Set in motion the termination of pandemic supports and subsidies, so that life suddenly became worse for the majority of people in the US, in spite of the fact that the rest of Biden’s policies would have benefited them in the long run. People forgot that Biden’s contribution to the subsidies and supports that they received was much greater than Trump’s and only remembered that they stopped under Biden. And Biden took the “blame” for the protective measures, and especially school closures which they found disruptive and which they were battered into believing had destroyed their children’s life prospects.
Second, the Biden administration chose to prioritize adherence to ordinary legal processes in pursing criminal cases against Trump and his associates. This was likely a result both of the incorrect belief, shared by most liberals no matter how far they lean left otherwise, that rule of law is a self-sustaining rational system which is best maintained by following its processes consistently and without “bias.” Biden also correctly understood that the Supreme Court, which Trump had managed to turn far to the Right, would ultimately overturn any verdicts against Trump unless they were rock solid. And he was not ready for extrajudicial action. On the other hand, Trump, or at least his advisors, were probably aware that they did not actually own this Supreme Court, individual members of which had ruled against him on a range of issues, a pattern which has now opened up into an open fissure in the Right between the Opus Dei led Federalist Society and other elements in his coalition. This meant both that Trump remained in serious jeopardy of spending the rest of his life in prison, and that he remained at large and a free actor during the course of the 2024 election cycle.
And as for the Deep State … to the extent that there is a Deep State, it is apparently far more committed to following legal norms and the direction of elected officials than anyone ever imaged. There is no Nocturnal Council.
This is the context in which the 2024 Presidential Election unfolded. Here is how Trump “won”:
First, despite the outstanding overall performance of the Biden administration, overall turnout and specifically Democratic turnout, were both suppressed by a combination of the factors noted above:
- The underlying racism and misogyny (and quite possibly the declining cognitive and empathetic capacities) of the population,
- Ongoing voter suppression across much of the country, and
- Effective Republican targeting of the Democrats for both pandemic restrictions, and the belt tightening after pandemic subsidies were withdrawn.
Second, Trump was highly motivated to win the election in order to avoid prison, and was willing to cut deals with players who had remained on the margins during his first campaign and presidency, especially the Dark Enlightenment cabal around Peter Thiel. A meeting in the Summer of 2024 consolidated the alliance and a series of actions followed including:
- A national smear campaign which leveraged many key democrats to push for Biden to withdraw from the race, charging that he was senile or at least physically unfit for office.
- When this group was unable to force a “redo” of the primaries, which would have left the party without any candidate for months, and Kamala Harris was then selected by the Democratic National Committee to replace him, the Republicans then leveraged the underlying racism and misogyny of the population to undercut Democratic turnout.
- In what was almost certainly a false flag operation, Trump was shot at by a disaffected recent graduate of the Community College of Allegheny County, who was then shot by police, while aides staged what looked like heroic photographs of their candidate under fire.
- Musk, meanwhile, beginning in January 2024, had “quietly and rapidly begun building a low-orbit Direct-to-Cell constellation, of which 265 satellites were operational before the November 5 election. These low-orbit satellites effectively place the equivalent of hackers’ ‘Stingray’ device in every voting precinct in America,” which he then used to make the necessary “adjustments in vote totals to ensure Trump’s victory (@This Will Hold 2025.01.29)
With the Democratic Party already battered and divided, and the terrain for any possible effort to contest the election results salted by a mass media poised to paint any possible Democratic charges of election tampering as simply a mirror image of Trump’s claims four years early, there was little the party could do but stand down and regroup.
Once in office, Trump began implementing Yarvin’s RAGE agenda (Jamison and Dwoskin 2025), firing vast numbers of foreign aid and civil service personnel, shutting down entire agencies such as USAID, clawing back research funds, and largely ignoring court orders to cease and desist, or for that matter even to pause. Trump began applying tariffs in what amounted to revenge posts, then pausing, rescinding, and reapplying them, creating chaos in the global economy. And he turned ICE loose on the people, terrorizing gardeners and agricultural workers but also tourists from Chile and Norway and legal residents of many decades standing, throwing people into concentration camps designed to inspire terror, while actually deporting fewer criminals than Biden did in the last year of his administration. His One Beautiful Bill extends the damage to public health, infrastructure, the social safety net, and investment in scholarship and research while making permanent the disastrous tax cuts of 2017 and adding trillions to the deficit. On the international front he has publicly humiliated foreign leaders, held back military support for Ukraine and then acted surprised when Putin took advantage, supported Netanyahu’s efforts to starve Gaza, attacked Iran, and threatened to arrest and execute Barak Obama. Republicans across the country, meanwhile, are redrawing congressional districts to undercut Democratic prospects even in other wise free and fair elections. And it is unclear that Democratic constituencies already intimated by voter suppression efforts can be counted on to vote in the next election when they may well simply be picked up by ICE on the way to the polls (or at home, before they have a chance to vote) and shipped to wherever Trump has built his newest concentration camp.
***
Why, under these circumstances, should we continue to have hope? And how do we act on that hope? In order to answer this question, we need to dig deeper, in to the metaphysical and civilizational levels of our predicament.
Human beings, like everything else in the universe, seek Being. Where minerals seek Being under the form of thermodynamic stability, by retaining their form, plants through nutrition, growth, and reproduction, and animals through sensation and locomotion, we humans, endowed with reason as well as sensation, and will as well as passion, seek Being under the higher forms of the Beautiful, the Good, the True, and the One –or what is the same thing, under the form of God.
This does not mean that human beings are all naturally “believers.” What we want, at least initially, whether we “believe in God” or not, is to be God. We want to have the Power of Being as Such in ourselves, to Be necessarily, and thus be free of our dependence on others and the inevitable constraints it imposes –and most importantly of the constraint imposed by our own mortality. It is only through a complex and prolonged process of spiritual development by which we come to terms with the impossibility of this aim, and that we can learn to seek God in ways that promote authentic growth and development for ourselves and others. On the way, we do a great deal of good, but also pursue ways of seeking Being which are violent and rapacious, individually and collectively, and eventually build up structures which form people to be violent and rapacious, all in the service of an end —Being— which is, in itself Good.
At first this violence and rapacity was spontaneous and episodic: raiding and pillaging, for example, which we know extends back into human history to the Paleolithic. But eventually, with the advent of metal technology around 3000 BCE, violence became systemic and structural: conquest and exploitation, the principal strategy by means of which some groups sought Being (in the form of better material conditions as well as ritually legitimated deification) by instrumentalizing others. This, in turn, radically disempowered women who, with a few exceptions, were not the principal warriors in human communities, leading to the development of patriarchy. And it created a stratification between classes and peoples. Some now lived off the labor of others, extracted in the form of rents, taxes, and forced labor under pain of annihilation by men armed with bronze weapons, while others toiled to produce far more than they needed and saw their lives reduced to that of mere instruments of production. And those who won these battles saw themselves as superior to those they conquered, part of divine lineages radically distinct from the great mass of humanity: not yet racism, but the seed from which it grew. These structures, furthermore, formed the basis in experience for understanding Being in terms of conquest and exploitation, something which was reflected in the emergence of gods of war and sacrifice who promised that we could transcend our finitude and contingency by these means.
Since that time humanity has developed many different ways to oppress, exploit, and instrumentalize, and many different ways to resist and to try once again to be human. Peasant revolts constrained the warlords and the emergence of specialized agriculture and crafts production and along with it of petty commodity production, opened up new roads to prosperity without direct exploitation. The result was the Axial Age (Jaspers 1952), the period between 800 and 200 BCE when people began to question inherited ways of being human, supplemented image and story with concept and argument as ways of seeking meaning, and opened up political and spiritual leadership, which had previously been the monopoly of ruling lineages, to increasingly large strata of the population. This was the period which led to the birth of Judaism, Hellenism, Buddhism, Upanishadic and Puranic Hinduism, Confucianism and Taoism, which we have grouped together elsewhere as constituting, respectively, the ways of justice and liberation, wisdom, and harmony.
In response, the most powerful and ambitious warlords fought back, building “world” Empires, which sought to systematize and rationalize exploitation on as nearly global a scale as possible, in order to maximize productivity and their ability to centralize and allocate surplus. Sometimes this was legitimated directly, as by the Chinese Legalist School, as serving the population as a whole even as it attempted to all but militarize them. But more often it was legitimated by means of Axial Age ideologies. Thus, the Mauryan Empire carried out land and debt reform and founded monasteries and temples, becoming a great sponsor of Buddhism but also of Upanishadic and Puranic Hinduism. The Roman Empire claimed to be an alliance of free cities maintaining a global peace which enabled citizens to live lives of civic engagement and philosophical reflection, though the whole enterprise rested on chattel slavery in the West and brutal taxation in the East, and the old republican fora such as the Senate and the city councils became simply mechanisms for imperial legitimation and for collecting taxes. The Han, Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties leveraged the structures created by the Legalists to support Confucian and Taoist scholarship and Buddhist monasteries, in the process working a new synthesis, the daoxue, which fostered a level of governance in service the common good never previously seen on such a scale. But it did not eradicate landlordism and the extraction of surplus for luxury consumption, nor could it withstand the ultimate onslaught of the Mongols and later of the Japanese and Europeans. And Islam took Judaism’s focus on knowing God in the just act and transformed it from the ideology of a marginalized ethnoreligious community into a global project centered on creating an actually just society, “commanding right and forbidding wrong,” all the while building yet another world empire –more just and progressive than most, but nonetheless founded on taxing both the peasantry and the Silk Road trade networks.
Christianity occupies a distinctive place in this history. Originally a messianic sect within Judaism, quite possibly one of the groups which led up to the Jewish War (Eisenman 1997), it was transformed (or rather effectively re-founded) by Paul of Tarsus (Maccoby 1987, Voskuilen and Sheldom 2008) as a new religion which taught that human beings were in fact in capable of fulfilling the Law, understood as a set of divine decrees made by what amounted to a Cosmic Emperor, sent his own Son to pay the price of our sins by being executed by crucifixion under the authority of the Roman Empire. Paul suppressed the mechanisms of economic redistribution which had been emerging in the Christian communities (Theissen 1982), counseled obedience to the political authorities, and modelled a cosmopolitanism of submission which positioned Christianity as an alternative form of legitimation as the claims of the Roman Empire to be “making the world safe for democracy” became untenable.
The appropriation of Christianity as a means of imperial legitimation was of limited efficacy in the West, and the Catholicism which flourished there, especially in the Latin and Celtic lands softened considerably Paul’s construction of Christianity as cult of Cosmic Empire. The canon of the New Testament which the Church affirmed included elements which conserved the Jewish and specifically Pharisaic focus on ethical conduct and social justice, even if it was also laced with antisemitic attacks. And the Church fully embraced a syncretism with Hellenic philosophy which stressed seeking wisdom and cultivating virtue, and which kept alive the idea of the Empire as a framework in which republican city states could thrive. The the collapse of imperial structures in the West made room for the emergence of new agricultural technologies such as the alpine plow and the three field system, which led to rapid population growth, the creation of new artisanal and alchemical technologies, the re-emergence of towns and cities, and the resurgence of democracy as an ideal. Unfortunately, as this all unfolded in the context of feudal structures, once all of the arable land had been “improved” and allotted to the emerging warlord aristocracy, it also led to a crisis, with young Knights Bachelor unable to marry riding through the countryside raping and pillaging as young warlords will.
The solution of the ruling classes to this crisis was to mobilize these violent young men for a series of conquests, beginning with the Crusades, continuing with the Reconquista, and culminating in the conquests of Africa, the Americas, and much of Asia. This set in motion the primitive accumulation of Capital and also the formation of increasing large, centralized, absolutist states (actually small territorial empires with growing overseas colonies). Peasant revolts and the Black Death increased the power of the peasantry and undercut feudal revenues, leading landowners to displace their peasants and replace them with sheep. Patronage from the Papacy and the Empire favored the emergence of free cities where guilds emerged which cultivated high levels of skill and forced Europe to enter the global market by competing on quality, not price, while encouraging the most successful masters to invest in labor saving devices, and ultimately to support the liquidation of the guilds. The result was a system which allowed vastly more freedom, at least for those who had the resources to use it, but which required more and more people to sell their labor power in order to survive.
At the ideological level, these developments created the basis in experience for the emergence of a high doctrine of divine sovereignty, reflex first of the absolutist monarchies which carried out the Conquests, and later of the marketplace itself, inexorable and inscrutable in its operations —and agnostic regarding the merits of those it raised up and cast down—though hard work, savings, and investment might be signs that one was among those chosen by God as the instruments of His work. This is what Weber (Weber 1920/1968) saw in inner-worldly asceticism generally and the Protestant Ethic in particular. We call this orientation theistic secularism, the project of doing God’s will in the world. Ultimately God’s “will,” of course, turned out to be nothing other than the accumulation of Capital, and theistic secularism became largely a form of legitimation for the secret religion of high capitalism: the technocratic secularism which seeks to transcend finitude by means of scientific, technological, and economic progress.
At the same time, the emerging urban bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, and especially the stratum of intellectuals emerging out of the clerici vagantes, the young sons of the nobility left without benefices, mostly wandering bards and university lecturers, inspired by the legacy of Hellenic philosophy and civic engagement, began to transform the patchwork of privileges they had negotiated for themselves into claims about universal rights to freedom of conscience and expression, eventually joining with the peasant masses and proletarianizing artisans and craftsmen, in demanding the right to collective self-determination. Thus, the emergence of what I have called the humanistic secular project, which sought to create a political subject which could make humanity the master of its own destiny.
Capitalism and theistic and technocratic secularism on the one hand, and humanistic secularism, even in its liberal and democratic as opposed to its socialist forms, were always distinct and ultimately contradictory projects. But they did find a synergy. The emerging bourgeoisie knew from the beginning that not just traditional monarchs but also magnates arising from their own ranks were dangerous, and they helped to create the liberal order in order to protect themselves, as both human beings and as accumulators of Capital, from the predations of their fellow capitalists. While they never envisioned anything like universal suffrage, they tolerated it because democratic accountability helped protect liberal rights and democratic decision making provided a way to negotiate differences between different sectors of their own class, and to protect all from the hegemony of any one individual or sector. Along the way, the bourgeoisie also, additionally, demonstrated at least some capacity for enlightened self-interest and concern for the Common Good: recognizing, for example, that capitalism depends on final demand and that they cannot prosper if they impoverish their own workers who, therefore, become unable to purchase what they produce, undercutting the realization of the surplus which Capital extracts, and supporting civilization-building institutions through both philanthropy and public investment funded by taxing themselves along with the rest of the population.
That said, the contradictions between the two projects are ultimately fundamental and beyond resolution. As Marx pointed out (Marx 1844/2000), when people are forced to sell their labor power in order to survive, they become alienated from what makes them human: their search for meaning, their creativity, and their essentially social nature (Fromm 1947). While Marx’s language, drawn from Hegel, may obscure his thesis even as it adds conceptual precision, the basic point is simple: How can we realize the liberal ideal of rational autonomy if we are forced for most of our waking hours to do what someone else, our employer, commands us to do? What is the meaning of collective self-determination if one of the principal forms of power —Capital, or organized money—is in the hands of those employers?
Marx, furthermore, ultimately established that there are contradictions within the capitalist system itself. Technological progress drives down the value of labor power and thus the level of wages, making it impossible for workers to buy the products they are producing and for capitalists to realize the surplus they extract. It also drives down the rate of profit (which comes from the value added by living labor, not from the tools and raw materials workers employ), because with technological progress living labor becomes a smaller and smaller part of the production process.
Marx believed that these contradictions would be resolved when and only when workers organized to build and exercise the power necessary to restructure the economy in a way which freed workers from the need to sell their labor power in order to survive. He was (intentionally) not entirely clear on just how this would happen, but seems to have assumed that it would take place through a transitional period he called socialism in which the means of production would become public property.
As powerful as Marx’s critique was —and remains—however, it didn’t run deep enough. First, Marx actually underestimated the depth of the alienation caused by the commodification of labor power, especially as non-market institutions (which form people to serve the Common Good) are squeezed out of existence and people lose touch with the humanity he assumed they would organize and fight to defend (Fromm 1947). Historic socialism, furthermore, never took credible steps towards the decommodification of labor power, and turned out to be less the form of transition to authentic communism which Marx imagined it would be, and more nearly a way to jump start the accumulation of Capital on the peripheries of the world-system, and ultimately to restore territorial empires such as Russia and China, which had been marginalized by British and then US hegemony. Finally, it never occurred to Marx that the very largest capitalists would try to resolve the contradictions of capitalism in their favor by leveraging technological progress to eliminate workers entirely or almost entirely, and ultimately creating a post-capitalist system in which robot workers produce use values for a small stratum of capitalist magnates who retain human servants more out of the agonistic drive to dominate them as out of economic necessity, while breaking down the liberal democratic structures and the liberal international order which have allowed the bourgeoisie as a whole collective global hegemony in favor of wholly owned autocratic territorial empires or city states.
Yet this is precisely what has happened. The neoliberal regime of accumulation in force since roughly 1978, while tending globally to support the emergence of Capital as an autonomous intelligence independent of the historic bourgeoisie (Mansueto 2025), has also allowed the emergence of a new stratum of capitalist magnates who resent their subjection to anything which limits their ability to do as they please. This includes not only the rule of law and ideological and moral constraints, but market forces as well. Capitalism is, now, in other words, under attack from the Right, and perhaps more powerfully than it ever was from the Left.
***
So, what comes next? Why should we still have hope? And what must be done?
Clearly much has been lost, and more will be. We refused to recognize that we could not “go back to normal” after the beginning of the pandemic. Now we will be forced to accept that life as we have known it is over. It is entirely possible that very little of what has been good about the United States will be conserved or recovered, and that, perched on the precipice of a civilization-threatening climate catastrophe as we are, those losses will turn what was already going to be a century or more of crises into centuries of civilizational collapse.
That said, in the very longue durée, I would like to argue, our reasons for hope in the future are as strong as the reasons for sober recognition of our utter defeat in the present. First, matter has an insatiable thirst for Being, and even when it is beaten back into a state of pure potential (yes, all the way back to what contemporary physics, with its dark poetry, calls the quantum vacuum) it inevitably gives rise to new and increasingly complex forms of organization, life, intelligence, and sapience, new ways to love and new ways to create. We are lured into Being by the incredible Beauty of God, even if God does not, strictly speaking, exist in anything like the same sense we do, and we live and are sustained in the embrace of other contingent beings who are, in the end, our other-selves. The universe isn’t about us as individuals. Indeed, as Buddhist dialectics demonstrates convincingly, we lack any sort of atman or svabhava, self or identity or inherent existence. We are not the same from one instant to the next. Every breath, every idea, every motion of love is at once death and rebirth. But we are a permanent and ineradicable part of the universe considered as a whole, across space and time, part of a great tapestry, a great symphony, and a great epic which, however many times we think it has ended, simply begins a new panel, a new movement, a new chapter.
If you doubt any of this, just go out to walk on a quiet evening when everything is still and meditate on the profound fact (perhaps the only certain fact) that there is something rather than nothing. When we can quiet our mind sufficiently to experience directly and non-conceptually the reality of Being, then we really do begin to know God.
What does this all mean at the more immediate level? On what economic, political, and cultural resources can we depend? How do we cultivate them? And how can we deploy them to turn the tide against the Darkness? Here it is important to realize that while, at the empirical level, our defeat is complete and total, at a more fundamental level, it is simply an illusion. Power is relational by nature. It requires two (or more) people, a purpose, and a plan. Our adversaries have power only because we have stood down or because they have been able to enlist others, alienated from their authentic human nature and filled with hatred, in what only seem to be plans and in what only seem to be purposes. But while capitalism undercuts our ability to exercise our human nature, it does not utterly destroy it. Even the most damaged human beings have a thirst for Being. And our adversaries’ “plans” are ultimately incoherent. Their whole aim is to free themselves from dependence on other human beings. They imagine that they can live off the labor of robot slaves and entertain themselves by dominating a remnant of human servants who are so utterly disempowered that they can no longer demand anything. But this is an illusion. Any automaton sophisticated enough to replace human beings will have needs and make demands. And human beings can always withhold their consent.
Strategically, this means that we need to help the people recover their sense of what it means to be human, to reconnect them with their history and traditions, their creativity and their aspirations. This is why we put so much emphasis on conducting individual relational meetings and in-depth interviews with people, not only capturing their stories but helping them to tell and capture their own stories, and thus who they really are. We need to build and rebuild relationships and communities and institutions which challenge people to “be all they can be” and to imagine new and more wonderful ways of being. And we need to organize. We need to bring people into relationship in a way which allows them to develop shared dreams and shared plans, and to act on those plans effectively, in ways which allows them to reclaim, or to build and exercise for the first time, the power which is theirs. All of this follows from deep, intentional, conversations, from eating together, and ultimately from creating together.
Operationally and tactically, the power we build in this way can be exercised across many different domains. It is what we need in order to get as much as we can out of electoral work. A ground game helps. Deep canvassing (Demetrious 2022) is even better. But ultimately the only way to move people whose electoral support the Right has consolidated is through conversations with people they respect in the context of a community being gradually drawn away from the darkness. But it doesn’t stop there. Our adversaries are still very far from being able to remain as wealthy and powerful as they are without the labor of millions (of billions if we think globally). And if we can organize effectively, we can (to redeem a phrase) just say no. The power of refusal, of the strike, is something we have only begun to explore. Regulated collective bargaining certainly has its place as a way to apply pressure in an authentically civil society defined by mutual respect and recognition as well as differing interests, but it limits the use of strikes too rigidly. General strikes have generally been used simply as an accompaniment to other forms of struggle. But a population which can call and sustain a general strike for long enough can bring down any government and win any actually possible concession from any force on the planet. And the people organized for general strikes can also hold accountable whoever steps into the void created when the Right finally falls, an accountability which is essential even if those stepping into the void are “us” or part of “us.”
***
Clearly there is much more involved in coming to terms with the current situation than we have been able to discuss in this brief paper. But the message is clear. The current crisis is profound and will be extraordinarily painful. But we have the power to survive it and to rebuild for the simple reason that we ARE the power, which resides in and only in matter’s ineradicable drive towards Being, which lures us out of pure potential to develop increasingly complex degrees of organization, and in the vast network of relationships through which we sustain and nurture, challenge and push each other, and hold each other accountable.
We have been taught well how hard it is to seek the dawn in the twilight (Battiato 1985). But it is not impossible. And everything depends on our decision to try.
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[1] Hampshire et al 2024 shows cognitive decline in people affected by COVID 19, as measured by intelligence quotient, with the severity of the decline dependent on the severity of the infection. Those with resolved symptoms showed a lost of 3 IQ points. Those with persistent symptoms showed a loss of 6 points, and those treated in an ICU showed a loss of 9 points. The same study showed effects on memory, reasoning, and executive function tasks. Hou et al 2025 shows roughly 36% of those infected show enduring symptoms. While direct impact on empathy is difficulty to measure, we know that empathy is dependent on the ability to interpret visual and auditory cues. There is also a powerful case to be made that the pressure to return to normal in the wake of continuing infection and debilitation, including returning our children to schools where the risk of infection remains very high, and the simulatanous decision to pull pack pandemic supports and supports for the disabled generally both reflects declining empathy and has a hardening influence on those who consent.
