Where did the idea of socialism in its current broad political sense originate and how did it develop? (2 of 2)

In the 2009 post I cited in Part 1, I was reacting to the bizarre Tea Party rhetoric and weird constructions of far-right commentators like Glenn Beck who were losing what minds they had over the Presidency of Barack Obama. Or, as Trump always says, Barack Hussein Obama. Those featured much the same kind of bizarre usages of terms like Marxism, Communism, fascism, liberalism and socialism that today’s Trumpistas still use.

I used as a jumping-off point a meme from Bluesky that states:

A democratic socialist is not a Marxist socialist or a communist. A democratic socialist is still a capitalist, just one who seeks to restrain the self-destructive excesses of capitalism and channel government’s use of our tax money into creating opportunities for everyone. Democratic socialists believe that both the economy and society should be run democratically to meet human needs, not simply to make profits for a greedy few.

That pitch presumably is meant to be reassuring but it sounds more self-defeating than anything because it’s defensive and makes points that rightwingers will just dismiss. “Democratic socialists support Social Security, Medicare for All, public education, and labor unions” would seem to be a more affirmative self-definition.

The understanding familiar to Americans of “liberal” as “left” on the political spectrum is basically only used in the US and Canada. In European parliaments that seat parties according to their ideological identification from left to right, the parties identifying themselves as the liberal parties are typically seated to the right of the conservative parties.

As much as the Trumpistas love their name-calling, how can someone even have a simple understanding of the most basic events of the 20th century without having an elementary notion of the differences between well-established concepts like liberal, conservative, socialist, communist, Marxist, or far-right authoritarianism? It would be pointless for anyone with that concept to try to understand the political process by which Adolf Hitler came to power, for instance, to take one of the more consequential events of the last century. Because trust me: none of it will make jack for sense to you.

I’m trying here to give a 20-miles-high overview of the topic in the 20th century.

Without knowing some basic facts about the topics I’m touching on in this post, like the split between the Social Democrats and Communists around the German Revolution of 1918-19; and without knowing something about why the Nazis were fighting the Social Democrats and the Communists in street battles as well as in elections during the 1920s up until 1933; and without understanding something about how the Nazis fit into the German rightwing spectrum; and how their stances meshed with the position of wealthy and powerful Germans opposed to the liberal democracy of the Weimar Republic: forget making any coherent sense of those events. Just memorize the fact that Hitler came to power in 1933 and don't give yourself a headache even trying to understand any of it.

In particular for our xenophobic Republicans, they would also have to understand the difference between what "liberal" means in most of the world and what it has meant in the US since 1920 or so. It was around that time that pro-labor activists who had called themselves progressive appropriated the word liberal to differentiate themselves from the dying Progressive movement as well as from explicit communists and socialists, though the latter two were not very numerous in the US.

After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917

John Kenneth Galbraith did a public television series in 1977 called The Age of Uncertainty, that was accompanied by a companion book by him of the same name.

In this episode, he talked about the crash of the old world order that we now call the First World War, though the Great War was the more common label before 1939. (1)

The Great War brought, among other things, the Russian Revolution which brought the Russian Social Democrats led by Vladimir Lenin – also known as the Bolsheviks – to power. In 1918, the party changed its name to the All-Union Communist Party, usually referred to as simply the Communist Party.

This brought a major split with Social Democrats of the Second International, the international union of socialist parties that was refounded with that name in 1889.

The Second International stood for parliamentary democracy and finally, at its London Congress in 1896, expelled from its ranks the anarchists, who opposed it. Yet, after much debate, the Second International rejected the theory of the gradual achievement of socialism and cooperation with nonsocialist parties in office, and it reaffirmed the Marxist doctrine of the class struggle and the inevitability of revolution. Its main concern, however, was the prevention of a general European war. (2)

Social Democrats in Europe were committed to a massive nationalization of large industrial enterprises, just as the Soviet Communists were. But they were also committed to the concept of achieving a social revolution primarily through parliamentary means, though they were not formally pacifist parties. Their general concept, officially and largely in practice as well, envisioned taking power by parliamentary means but being willing to use official violence to maintain their governments against coup attempts by reactionaries.

The Civil War that followed the Bolshevik takeover lasted from 1917 to 1922, including massive support for the counterrevolution by the Western Allies, including direct military interventions to replace the Communist government and draw Russia back into the war against Germany on the side of the Western Allies, didn’t create ideal conditions for elections. And when the Social Democrats became the governing party in Germany, they soon found themselves facing what became known as the Spartacus Revolution, led largely by German Communists who had aligned with the Third (Communist) International created in 1919 at the lead of the Soviet Communist Party.

The notion of creating a completely separate international network from the Second International, however practical it may have been for the Soviets at the time, created an immediate institutional competition between the Social Democratic and Communist parties in other countries, and they both were largely competing for the same potential voters and supporters.

In the Soviets’ self-understanding, their country and government were the vanguard of the world socialist revolution. That fairly quickly evolved into the concept that advancing the foreign policy goals of the Soviet state was the most important tasks for Communists in other nations, since they were all part of the same world revolution. And, in particular, the Soviet Communists’ understanding was that they would not be able to establish socialism as they understood it without the help of new socialist governments abroad, and in Germany in particular. But socialist revolution was stalling out in Germany, which led the Third International to encourage revolutionary uprising in 1923 in the German states/provinces of Saxony and Thuringia.

How well the German government handled the revolutionary efforts of that moment are still a matter of historical dispute. But it also meant that the USSR turned to the idea of “socialism in one country,” focusing on developing a centralized national economy based on public ownership. (3)

It also meant that their government, which they described as a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” became Communist dogma and was generally rejected by Social Democrats as undemocratic. (How the German “proletariat” came to be a standard English usage when “working class” basically means exactly the same thing is one of the irritating questions I need to research one of these days.)

The Soviet model was also based on extensive state ownership and control of industry, which was a goal that Socialist parties shared. But the Communist model came to stress the immediate nationalizing of major industrial and financial business as the ideal standard. European social-democratic parties also advocated nationalization of major businesses and industries and some did so, the British National Health Service being a famous example. (This is obviously a very brief summary of a big, complicated topic!)

The parties of the Third International considered themselves socialists, as did those of the Second International. And while the Communists established Marxism-Leninism as their official ideology, the parties of the Second International still were also explicitly influenced by Marxism. But the concept of “dictatorship of the proletariat” was a major ideological difference broadly between the Socialists and Communists. Germany’s Karl Kautsky, one of the leading theorists of the Second International wrote a book critiquing it already in 1918. (4)

For political theory geeks, it’s ironic this was a concept that Karl Marx himself did not stress. He used it only once in a published work, The Civil War in France (1871), which focused specifically on the Paris Commune, a workers uprising that lasted not quite a month and a half in which a workers government controlled the city of Paris until it was suppressed by the French implicitly backed in that task by the invading Prussian army. In the 1920s, the Austrian Social Democratic Party argued for a radical-democratic interpretation of the dictatorship-of-the-proletariat concept. In that understanding, the governments of class societies are in their nature class dictatorships. So, an elected government with a majority for the Social Democrats in the parliament would be by definition a class dictatorship of the working class. Which could be voted out in free and fair elections.

But that view was never generally accepted by the parties of the Second International. And with the rise in fascism in Germany, even the Communists adopted more mixed forms of governments as valid goals, like a “united front” (Socialists and Communists together) and “popular front” (various kinds of democratic policies including Communists creating coalition governments).

If you think those kinds of disputes among groups that consider themselves broadly socialist sound convoluted, check out the polemics between Chinese and Soviet Communists during the 1960s:

In the second half of the 20th century, the split between the Soviet and Chinese Communists on ideology, foreign policy, nuclear armaments, and various issues within the larger group of socialist countries became even more elaborate. Soviet ideology designated its Warsaw Pact partners in Europe “people’s democracies,” which is theoretically somewhat similar to the “popular front” concept. Today, the governments of China, North Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam has some form of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” though not all by that exact term: China: “people’s democratic dictatorship”; North Korea: "a dictatorship of people's democracy"; Cuba: “democratic, independent and sovereign socialist State of law and social justice”; Vietnam: “socialist republic.”

So today there is less implied similarity between Socialist parties and the remaining Communist Parties who explicitly endorse a Marxist-Leninist outlook than there was prior to the Second World War. So Glenn Beck-type Trumpista fantasies of liberalism, communism, socialist, and fascists all being the same thing make even less sense than they ever did.

Going back two centuries to when the term “socialism” began to be use for a political trend, there were disagreements among socialists both in terms of tactics and strategy, including their broad ideological understandings of the socialist outlook. And that is many times more true today in a world with far more political systems with parties contesting power, including through elections, than two centuries ago. But shallow stereotyping is problematic. It’s worth remembering that the lifelong Communist Mikhail Gorbachev in his last years in power tried to move the USSR into a more Social Democrats type system – despite decades of competition and often hostility between those two groups. The specifics of both policies and process matter. I’m guessing that anyone who is not a Trump cultist or a far-right Putin fan would likely guess that a social democratic type government like those of Sweden or France – both formally “kingdoms” rather than “republics”, btw – would be preferable to Putin’s brand of oligarchical and thoroughly capitalist regime.

In short, social-democrats/socialist/progressives have to define themselves based on what they actually stand for and not get caught up defending themselves from all the crazy things Republicans and billionaire-funded interest groups say about them and will always say about them. One example: George Packer reports that Tech Bro oligarch Marc Andreessen claims that the Biden Administration officials told him in May 2024 that they thought “Silicon Valley had to be nationalized or destroyed.” (5) To say that claim is highly unlikely to be true would be giving it way more credit than it deserves. That’s just how reactionaries talk.

Notes:

(1) The Age of Uncertainty Episode 5 Lenin and The Great Ungluing. sveinbjornt YouTube channel 10/17/2011. <https://youtu.be/sxAoymq_SEA?si=b2CmzVjxdCrdJUdc> (Accessed: 2026-28-06).

(2) Britannica Editors. Second International. Encyclopedia Britannica 08/11/2025. <https://www.britannica.com/topic/Second-International> (Accessed 2026-28-06).

(3) Pohl, Karl Heinrich (2023): The German Army Toppled a Pioneering Radical Government and Opened the Way for Nazism. Jacobin 10/23/2023. <https://jacobin.com/2023/10/germany-army-saxony-radical-government-social-democrats-nazism-weimar> (Accessed: 2023-23-10).

Pohl, Karl Heinrich (2023): Das links-republikanische Projekt. Jacobin (Deutsch) 14:2023. 18-24.

(4) Kautsky, Karl (1918): The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1919 English translation). <https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1918/dictprole/index.htm> (Accessed: 2023-23-10).

(5) Packer, George (2026): The Venture-Capital Populist: How David Sacks and the new tech right went full MAGA and captured Washington. The Atlantic June 2026, 51.

Where did the idea of socialism in its current broad political sense originate and how did it develop? (1 of 2)

With the recent electoral successes of self-described democratic socialists of the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) type – and the inevitable foaming at the mouth about it among Republicans and corporate Democrats - I thought I would do a short, 20-miles-high overview of the broad political concept of socialism.

Especially after I saw this meme appearing on Bluesky posts:

I assume this is a well-meaning attempt to tell people not to be panicky idiots over the s-word, or the s-d words. But it strikes me too fuzzy to be much use. Because Trump and his cult followers call everything they don’t like socialist. And also Communist, Woke, DEI, anti-Christian, dictatorial, and unmanly. For them, all those words mean, “It’s bad, I hate it, it means Transgender For Everybody and Hatred of America.” In the vocabulary of the Trumpistas, facts and history are just “Woke” propaganda that opposes their preferred state of Asleepism.

So in this first of two parts, I’m taking a look back at the socialism of the 19th century.

Several years ago, I did a blog post about the early uses of the word “socialism.” (1) I’m going to plagiarize myself a bit from that one here.

Anyway, I thought this post would be a good place to mention the real historical origin of the word socialism, based on a couple of articles from what is known as the Grünberg Archiv, after its editor Carl Grünberg (1861–1940). (2)

And possibly the earliest usage of the word Grünberg found was from an Italian cleric in 1803, who used it to refer broadly to the opposite of individualistic philosophies, which Grünberg describes as "a thoroughly different" meaning that the one it was to later acquire. He finds a French usage from 1831 of "socialisme" where it referred to ... the Catholic Church! In the sense of the Universal Church: Catholic theology emphasized the importance of community in contrast to the more individual-oriented Protestant theology.

Perhaps the first use of "socialist" in the sense that would become familiar is in 1827 from the English Co-operative Magazine and Monthly Herald, a publication of Robert Owens' reform movement, to describe the Owenites themselves. Grünberg notes that the word didn't catch on for a while in England.

In 1831, Grünberg finds "socialisme" used in a French paper, Le Globe, where it describes the Saint-Simonist reform doctrine in contrast to individualism. This is a very similar usage to that of the English Owenite paper in 1927.

So, in other words, the term “socialist” came into usage as a reference to the reformist doctrines that later came to be known as utopian socialist, particularly those associated with Robert Owen (1771-1858), Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and Claude Henri Graf von Saint-Simon (1760-1825).

Grünberg and Ernst Czóbel find the first usages of the adjective form sozialist in German in 1840, though it's not clear which among them was the earliest: Fr. J. Buss in a speech of July 1840. or August Ludwig Churoa, writing under the pen name of Rochau, in the book Kritische Darstellung der Sozialtheorie Fouriers. Grünberg finds the first use of the noun form in German in an 1842 book by Lorenz von Stein (1815-1890), Sozialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreichs. Czóbel finds the earliest incidence of the word in Hungary in 1842.

In short, the use of "socialist" and "socialism" in the sense to which the world became accustomed in the 19th century began around 1830 and by the 1840s was beginning to come into general usage to describe utopian reform schemes like those of Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon. As the title of Von Stein’s 1842 book indicates, “communism” was also beginning to be used describes political movements aimed at a more radical form of democracy.

Words that have been commonly used for two centuries around the world wind up having a lot of variations. After the 1848 revolutions in Europe, Marxism became a leading theoretical orientation of the parties that called themselves Socialist or Social Democratic, which were synonymous terms. His and Frederick Engels’ famous pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, was published in February 1848, (3) a month before the March revolution broke out first in Europe. It’s still common to refer to European political history in terms of “pre-March” and “post-March” periods. Their famous work had little practical effect on the course of events in 1848, though both Marx and Engels were well known as radical journalists. Their pamphlet took its title from a small group called the Communist League, which dissolved soon afterward.

Marx and Engels were in Brussels, Belgium, at the time. The coffee house/restaurant in the central city where they used to meet with workers’ political groups – and maybe where they drafted part of the famous manifesto - is still there. The present-day marketing for the venue – La Masison du Cygne - doesn’t have any doubt on the latter point:

The strongest world power at the time was the Austro-Hungarian Empire whose Imperial Capital was in Vienna. Things got rowdy there, too. To the point where the royal family fled Vienna for a while. (4)

In the small town where I grew up in southern Mississippi, the first business in the town’s center was started by a Jewish Austrian immigrant in the 1850s, who was possibly a refugee after the 1848 revolutions were suppressed. I mean, why else would he pick somewhere so far out in the wilderness to go?

Speaking of the Deep South, it’s worth recalling how much anything that smacked of socialism, social revolution, or workers’ uprisings terrified Southern slaveowners, including the European events of 1848. The leading journal among the pre-Civil War Southern planters was De Bow’s Review, which published a review of a book by conservative historian Thomas Carlyle in 1860 that showed that “1848” still sent shivers up the backs of the economic oligarchs of the day. And also that slaveowning capitalists in the US were not always using language which sugar-coated how their system functioned:

Labor creates wealth trade and speculation transfers and accumulates it. Far less labor is necessary now to produce the comforts of life than was required a century ago; but trade transfers wealth at a more rapidly - increased ratio than the ratio of increased production. Hence, there are more paupers and more rich men in society than ever before. The false distribution of wealth is the master evil of modern times. With increased wants, increased intelligence, and more productive industry, the poor find themselves sinking lower and lower in the social scale, and receding farther and farther in physical comfort from the rich, just in proportion as they approximate to them in knowledge. Seeing their means diminishing just in proportion as their wants increased, and their labor became more productive; seeing themselves exploitated [sic] (defrauded) more and more, by skill and capital, through their agent and engine, trade, of the products of their labor, the became desperate and burst out into bloody revolutions - first in France , afterward throughout Western Europe. The end is not yet! Strikes and trades' unions still carry on the war of labor against capital. Now, really, we think that this eighteenth century was no hypocritical, no humbug century, but a downright, serious, earnest, and working century. Nor did it commit suicide. The French revolution is not over, and the eighteenth century survives in the nineteenth century. It blazes up every now and then, and spreads over half of Europe, as in the " three days " in 1830 [the 1830 July Revolution in France], and again in 1848. It has its standing army of six hundred thousand trades' unionists in England, and its frequent strikes in England and New-England. No, the eighteenth century " is not dead but liveth." Or, at all events, its ghost oft appears in the streets of Paris, London, and New-York, and frightens folks clean out of their propriety. [my emphasis in bold] (5)

That last sentence could have been inspired by the famous opening words of the Communist Manifesto, “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.”

Also, the comment, “Labor creates wealth,” is a concept famously contained in Marx’s theory of “surplus value.” It was actually Adam Smith who came up with the idea. Economic theories generally in the early 19th century focused on the organization of labor. It was only in the late 19th century “neoclassical” economic theories, including those of the Englishman William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882), the Galician Carl Menger (1840-1921), and the Frenchman Léon Walras (1834-1910) that markets became the central focus.

De Bow’s Review in 1860, of course, was terrified of their version of the ghost, fired as it was by the decades-long chronic fear of slave revolts.

Others speaking in similar terms took a different perspective on which side of that conflict was the villain for supporters of democracy and the rule of law. Abraham Lincoln in his first State of the Union message when the traitorous Confederacy had already been killing American soldiers in defense of their Peculiar Institution, i.e., slavery:

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation. [my emphasis] (6)

The American Marxist (and Communist Party leader) William Z. Foster wrote in 1954 about the bitter polemics between representatives of the slaveholding planters in the South and industrialists in the North prior to the Civil War: “Never, in any country, have the sinister workings of capitalism been so thoroughly aired from within.” (7) Because abolitionists carried on polemics against the slave system, while advocates for slavery portrayed it as a humane and civilized system compared to the horrors of the industrial systems based on free labor. Hinton Rowan Helper, a Southerner, wrote one of the most influential abolitionists books, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (1857), which focused on economic limitations of the slavery system. (8)

There were already significant social democratic parties in Europe and they generally sympathized with the Union during the Civil War. Britain was officially neutral between the Confederacy and the Union, and the British upper classes tended to favor the Slave Power, not least because Britain was heavily dependent on American cotton. But organized British labor opposed it, even though the British textile business was hit hard by US actions constraining the Confederacy from exporting its cotton, which was its most important crop by far. (9)

An alliance of the socialist/social-democratic parties was established in 1864, the International Workingmen's Association (IWA), which is remembered as the First International. Karl Marx wrote a formal address to Abraham Lincoln on behalf of the International, stating:

[T]he working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. (10)

International solidarity among the workers of different nations was a generally shared sentiment among socialists/social-democrats. Although the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) would put that solidarity to a severe test, and the First World War even more so. Nationalism proved to be a more powerful narcotic than socialist leaders had hoped.

Socialism and democracy

There were many variations of socialism in the 19th century. Like the “utopian socialists” mentioned above. Most of them called themselves Socialist or Social Democratic. There were many variations and shades of opinion among them like James Madison famously observed of political “factions” back when today’s brand of political parties were first developing. (11)

There were various brands of competing socialist theories, including anarchism, which distinguished itself advocating the complete abolition of the state, to be replaced by a collective organization of workers who would run things collectively. As in the One Big Union advocated the International Workers of the World (IWW) group in the US, aka, the Wobblies.

In Europe, the Socialist/Social-Democratic parties were the main advocates for parliamentary democracy and for something that at least moved in the direction of universal suffrage, aka, voting rights for all adult citizens. In general, the Socialists were not enamored of Montesquieu’s separation of power’s structure practiced in Britain and the EU. Their model was more akin to the French Revolution’s model of parliamentary supremacy. That’s an interesting historical and theoretical topic. But, in practice, the Western liberal democracies today practice a basic form of parliamentary democracy with a separation of powers, including those countries with kings, like Britain, Denmark, Spain, and Sweden. Although in formal terms those later countries are kingdoms rather than republics, although both types have forms of what the US Constitution calls a “republican form of government.” (Article 4, Sec. 4)

Seizing the means of production, one of the conservatives’ great bogeymen

In part 2, I’ll attempt a 20-mile-high overview of socialism, social democracy, and Communism, including the notion known as “socializing the means of production.” That was generally a part of the goals of the 19th century socialists. But no socialist party was able to gain control of a national government then, so they weren’t in a position to undertake whatever it was they meant exactly by that concept. One significant instance of a government “seizing the means of production” was the abolition of slavery in the US after the Civil War. The slaves in the US were legally the human property of their (mostly) white masters. The 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery literally liquidated that property without compensation to the slaveowners. The former slaves weren’t nationalized, i.e., made property of the federal government. That kind of private property was simply abolished.

Referring back to the meme to at the start of this post, it’s hard to tell what it’s supposed to mean when it says, “A democratic socialist is not a Marxist socialist or a Communist. A democratic socialist is still a capitalist.”

Say what? Not all democratic socialists would describe themselves as Marxists. But nineteenth- century Marxists would have identified themselves as democrats and socialists. And many social-democratic parties well into the 20th century also identified as Marxist. What exactly that meant to them is another question. Opinions differed. Marx himself famously quipped about contemporary arguments among French socialists in 1882 as to what the True Marxist positions were, "What is certain is that I am not a Marxist." (12)

The meaning of “A democratic socialist is still a capitalist” in 2026 seems fairly enigmatic. It seems like someone attempting to reinvent the wheel under the illusion that Trumpistas and libertarians will stop calling people who support Social Security or public schools Communists, socialists, and fascists.

But if the last 150 years or so give any indication, they won’t.

Notes:

(1) Who you callin' a socialist? 11/22/2009 Contradicciones (Original). <https://oldhickorysweblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/who-you-callin-socialist.html>

(2) The publication was actually called Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung (Archive for the History of Socialism and the Workers Movement). Grünberg later became director of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research), better known as the Frankfurt School. These two articles referenced from the Archiv deal with the origins of the words "socialism" and "socialist": Carl Grünberg, Der Ursprung der Worte „Sozialismus“ und „Sozialist“ 2/1912 and Ernst Czóbel, Zur Verbreitung der Worte „Sozialismus“ und „Sozialist“ in Deutschland and in Ungarn 3/1913.

(3) If we want to split hairs, the actual title was Manifesto of the Communist Party. <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf>

(4) Photo: Der Brand am Josefs-Platz den 31ten October 1848. Wien: Franz Werner 1848. Signatur: F 17.993. Revolution 1848 - Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, 2017. <https://sammlung.wienmuseum.at/objekt/3063-der-brand-am-josefsplatz-zu-wien-am-31-october-1848/> (Accessed: 2026-28-2026).

(5) Frederick the Great, by Thomas Carlyle. Unsigned Book Review, De Bow's Review 29 (Jul.-Dec. 1860), 158-159. <https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101065217190&seq=168&q1=1848&start=1>

(6) Abraham Lincoln First Annual Message 12/03/1861. The American Presidency Project-UC Santa Barbara. <https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/first-annual-message-9> (Accessed 2026-28-06).

(7) Foster, William Z. (1954): The Negro People in American History, 204. New York: International Publishers.

(8) Opposition to slavery was not identical to regarding black people as equal to whites. Helper’s postwar writing showed him to be venomously white supremacist. Which in a weird way gives some added credibility to his criticism of the slavery system, which was not based on what he called the “humanitarian or religious aspects of slavery” in the preface to his 1857 book.

(9) See: Foner, Phillip S. (1981): British Labor and the American Civil War. New York: Holmes & Meier: New York.

(10) Address of the International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America: Presented to U.S. Ambassador Charles Francis Adams January 28, 1865. <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm>

(11) Federalist Papers No. 10. Yale Law School. <https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp> (Accessed: 2026-28-06). Madison’s essay was written while advocating for the adoption of the Constitution. He gives a seemingly negative connotation to “faction,” emphasizing the importance of unity among the states. It’s worth noting that Madison’s description of the origins of factions/parties is basically similar to that later advocated by socialists. And he was writing that over two decades before Karl Marx was born.

(12) “ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste” (original in French, my translation to English). <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm#n5>

Crispus Attucks, first martyr of the American Revolution (2 of 2)

The concept of a secular and/or patriotic “martyr” is conceptually a little dicey. But people do see certain figures as martyrs in the kind of secular sense that Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. are seen as martyrs.

So I’m not inclined to split hairs over that concept here. Despite the gaps in the available documentation, the specifics of the 1770 Boston Massacre are clear enough to say there were five American colonists killed by British soldiers on that day and that they were then and later seen by American patriots as secular martyrs in the event.

Just a week after the massacre, Paul Revere engraved a story reporting on a funeral procession for four of the five victims: Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick, James Calwell, and Crispus Attucks. The coffin on the right is for C.A. and he is named in the story. (1) The fifth martyr of the event, Patrick Carr passed away soon afterwards.

As the text in that story notes, their fellow citizens staged a procession for the bodies on their way to the cemetery of “the unhappy Victims who fell in the bloody Massacre of the Monday Evening proceeding.”

Thomas Jefferson also invoked the martyr theme when he wrote in 1787, “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots..." The quote in its original context is followed by a sentence that sounds a bit odd in the context of 2026: (2)

[W]hat country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure. [my emphasis]

Couldn’t he have said “fertilizer” instead of “manure”? :)

Paul Revere also did this engraving of the Boston Massacre later that month, which was titled “The Fruits of Arbitrary Power, or the Bloody Massacre." (3)

The Wikimedia page on the image describes it as a “sensationalized portrayal of the skirmish, later to become known as the ‘Boston Massacre,’ between British soldiers and citizens of Boston on March 5, 1770.” It also notes that the image is “Not entirely an accurate depiction of the event that transpired.”

And it notes Revere’s published version included these verses, likely from him, as part of the pamphlet A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston:

Unhappy BOSTON! see thy Sons deplore,

Thy hallow'd Walks besmear'd with guiltless Gore:

While faithless P--n and his savage Bands,

With murd'rous Rancour stretch their bloody Hands;

Like fierce Barbarians grinning o'er their Prey,

Approve the Carnage, and enjoy the Day.

If scalding drops from Rage from Anguish Wrung

If speechless Sorrows lab'ring for a Tongue,

Or if a weeping World can ought appease

The plaintive Ghosts of Victims such as these;

The Patriot's copious Tears for each are shed,

A glorious Tribute which embalms the Dead

But know, FATE summons to that awful Goal, 

Where JUSTICE strips the Murd'rer of his Soul:

Should venal C--ts the scandal of the Land,

Snatch the relentless Villain from her Hand,

Keen Execrations on this Plate inscrib'd,

Shall reach a JUDGE who never can be brib'd.

The “P—n” in the first verse clearly refers to Captain Thomas Preston, the British commander of the massacre. He was acquitted. Eight other soldiers were tried for murder, of whom six were acquitted and two were convicted of manslaughter. Revere obviously did not take a generous view of the killer – nor should he have!

In a 1918 article for a American historical journal by Lousie Pehlps Kellogg – whose account is notable for its sympathetic description of the British killers – wrote, “Revere was an ardent patriot, and in all probability formed one of the crowd of spectators in King Street Square when the soldiers fired upon the populace. In the Boston Public Library is still preserved a sketch by his hand.” Even though it doesn’t seem that she meant it as a compliment, her description of Revere as “an ardent patriot” was certainly true!

And she does give a detailed account of the effects the image itself conveys. Including the backhanded compliment that the picture has “the charm peculiar to primitive productions.” But she also notes, “The passionate appeal for sympathy for the slain made by these inscriptions indicates the depths of feeling aroused by the massacre.” She also notes that a another Boston engraver, Henry Pelham, accused Revere of having plagiarized his work in the image, a claim to which she seems all too eager to give credence.

She closes by criticizing Revere’s image for being too patriotic: From a trivial encounter between imperial troops and the Boston mob, the incident [the Boston Massacre] arose to a position of international importance.” An outcome she obviously regretted! (4)

Karsten Fitz over a century later called attention to the problem of Crispus Attucks getting shortchanged in images of the massacre. She also examines the Revere engraving, noting that the image was “originally engraved-though most likely not produced - by Paul Revere.” She considers it likely that he took the image from an original engraving by Pelham. (5)

It’s notable in Revere’s color image that there are no dark-skinned individuals on the Patriot side. But Revere himself knew that Attucks was one of the victims, and he was very likely from the available evidence of African and indigenous American descent. The Wikimedia source page notes image is “[n]ot entirely an accurate depiction of the event that transpired.” But it doesn’t elaborate.

Fitz argues unambiguously, “All available textual sources consider Crispus Attucks as the leader of the Boston crowd which harassed the guard of the Custom House on March 5, 1770.”

She notes that John Adams himself in his closing arguments for the British defendants that Attucks was the leader of the protesters, quoting from the following passage:

... this Attucks ... appears to have undertaken to be the hero of the night; and to lead this army with banners, to form them in the first place in Dock square, and march them up to King street with their clubs ... this man with his party cried, do not be afraid of them . . . to have his reinforcement coming down under the command of a stout Molatto fellow, whose very looks was enough to terrify any person, what had not the soldiers then to fear? He had hardiness enough to fall in upon them, and with one hand took hold of a bayonet, and with the other knocked the man down: this was the behaviour of Attucks ... a Carr from Ireland, and an Attucks from Framingham, happening to be here, shall sally out upon their thoughtless enterprizes, at the head of such a rabble of Negroes, &c. as they can collect together. ...

Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan make a strong argument for Attucks as the leader of the protest. They write, “At the trial of the king's officers, the fallen Attucks seemed very much alive. The evidence given in court, the newspaper reports, the earliest tradition, all single him out, in praise or blame, as the shaper of the event.” (6)

There is no official register of Martyrs Of The American Revolution. But Phyllis Wheatley, a slave who according to the Kaplans, one of the two “first black poets whose poems were in print at the time of the Revolution, and who they also identify as the first slave and third woman to publish in a book of poems in the US, gave the first-martyr designation to Christopher Steel. Steel had protested against British soldiers in Boson and was executed for the murder of a Tory customs officer the 1769, a year before the Boston Massacre. She eulogized him in one of her poems:

In heaven's eternal court it was decreed
Thou the first martyr for the cause should bleed
To clear the country of the hated brood
He whet his courage for the common good.

Notes:

(1) Photo: Four coffins of men killed in the Boston Massacre. Library of Congress - Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-45586. <http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a45777> Originally appeared in The Boston-Gazette, and Daily Journal 03/12/1770. Also included in: Hinderaker, Eric (2017): Boston’s Massacre, 14. Belknap Press: Cambridge & London.

(2) The tree of liberty... (Quotation). Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia. <https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/tree-liberty-quotation> (Accessed: 2026-26-06).

(3) Gallery Slideshow File:Boston Massacre high-res.jpg. Wikimedia Commons. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boston_Massacre_high-res.jpg> (Accessed: 2026-26-06).

(4) Kellogg, Louise Phelps (1918): Paul Revere Print of the Boston Massacre. Wisconsin Magazine of History 1:4, pp. 377-387. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/4630108>

(5) Fitz, Karsten (2005): Commemorating Crispus Attucks-Visual Memory and the Representations of the Boston Massacre. Amerikastudien/American Studies 50:3, 463-484. <htps://www.jstor.org/stable/41158169>

(6) Kaplan, Sidney & Kaplan, Emma Nogrady (1989): The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, Revised Edition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Crispus Attucks, first martyr of the American Revolution (1)

The Boston Massacre of 1770 is generally considered to be the opening act of the American Revolution. The famous slogan of “no taxation without representation” referred to the facts that Americans shippers and merchants resented the restriction and demands for tax revenue imposed by London on their American colonies.

The Seven Years War of 1756-63 in Europe grew out of the military struggles between King Frederick the Great’s Prussia and the Habsburg Empire ruled from Vienna over the Polish province of Saxony. It wound up expanding in 1740 to a war pitting Britain and Prussia against France and Russia. And it included Britain and France fighting it out over territory in North America, which was known to the American colonists as the French and Indian War. That was the conflict in which Washington gained the military experience he would apply to great effect as head of Continental Army in the American Revolution.

France maintained its Canadian colony and claimed colonial ownership of much of what is now the eastern half of the United States until President Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase of 1803. But the post-1763 period ended the direct challenges of France to the British colonies that became the United States. It also gave a boost to Britain’s imperial plans for its North American subjects. But new successes bring new problems:

The immense acquisitions of the Seven Years War persuaded British statesmen that their bigger empire required more ships and soldiers. These would cost money; and unless the British taxpayer supplied it all, the colonies, which also benefited, should contribute to the cost. Revenue could be extracted from the colonies only through a stronger central administration, at the expense of colonial self-government. As Governor Hutchinson [colonial governor of Massachusetts 1771-1774] wrote in a sentence that lost him his job, 'There must be an abridgement of so-called English Liberties in America.' Furthermore, the Acts of Trade were strengthened to an extent that began to impose real hardships on important colonial interests. [my emphasis] (1)

The Seven Years War also carried a particular significance for the city of Boston. The intensification of military preparations and fighting in that war meant that, as Eric Hinderaker explains:

... the town of Boston and the colony of Massachusetts Bay had been enthusiastic partners. With deeply rooted militia traditions and a strong, assertive sense of Protestant English identity, New Englanders Were especially well prepared to join in the task of fighting Catholic New France. Massachusetts Bay soldiers participated in the military campaigns of the eighteenth century in large numbers, while its merchants supplied the provisions and ships that carried the effort forward. Britain’s victory in the Seven Years’ War validated New Englanders’ confidence in the righteousness of their cause and the efficacy of their institutions. (2)

The beginning of the American Revolution is conventionally taken to be the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770. Tensions between British soldiers and the citizens of Boston had been growing due to the increased pressure being exerted by the British for revenue and against smuggling by the colonists to evade British regulations. A Boston man name Crispus Attucks became famous as the “first martyr” of the Revolution when he became one of several people killed by British occupying soldiers on March 5 in front of the Boston Customs House. There were no mobile phones in those days, and photography was yet to be invented. So the available evidence from the time is considerably less clear and explicit than, say, the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota earlier this year by masked ICE Gestapo thugs. Presumably the British killers in the Boston Massacre were the same kind of cowardly goons that Good’s and Pretti’s murderers are. Nevertheless, as Eric Hinderaker writes, “the facts of the case and their meaning were examined repeatedly in the months and years following the massacre.” And that included a formal trial of the soldiers for murder.

Captain Thomas Preston was the commander of the soldiers that committed the massacre.

Crispus Attucks likely worked as a sailor and dockworker out of Boston. He is also thought to have had a black father and an indigenous mother and was very likely a fugitive slave. He has often been described as the leader of the protest at which the massacre took place and the first of the five patriots to be killed. (3)

Henry Wilson wrote a three-volume work after the US Civil War, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America. Abolitionists before and during the war referred to the hostile, subversive slavery-based regime and economy in the slave states as the Slave Power. And it was an apt label.

Some of these bore an honorable part in the War of Independence. Crispus Attucks, a colored patriot, was a leader, and the first martyr in the Boston massacre, on the 5th of March, 1770, which so fired the hearts and aroused the patriotism of the people. One of that race mingled his blood with the fallen patriots of the 19th of April, 1775. The sons of Africa fought side by side with their countrymen of the white race at Bunker Hill, where Major Pitcairn, as he stormed the works, fell mortally wounded by the shot of Salem, a black soldier. soldier. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that some of the most heroic deeds of the War of Independence were performed by black men. (3)

There are some historical ironies surrounding the Boston Massacre. John Adams, who decades later would serve as Washington’s Vice President and then as the second President, defended the British soldiers who were arrested and prosecuted for the massacre. He claimed that he did so because he supported the principle that even the worst villains deserved competent counsel at trial. And his claim to that effect may well have been sincere. On the other hand, as President he later supported and enforced the Alien and Sedition Acts, which in today’s terms we would say was an attempt to turn the new government in an authoritarian direction.

Paying attention to facts in history is critical for honest history writing. But history in the broader sense is also a source of icons and of reflections of how tradition can inform and inspire contemporaries on topical questions. Eric Hinderaker writes of the evolving image of the Boston Massacre, which “occupies a timeworn niche in the American memory palace” as “a half-forgotten event in a shared patriotic past.” But that also makes it available as a framework for understanding contemporary events.

[N]ew contexts can bring new meanings to the fore. Initially, memories of the Boston Massacre provided a vital spark of outrage in the growing conflict with Great Britain. But at the end of the American Revolution, the usefulness of that function faded. Recollections grew more ambivalent, and the event fell into disfavor in public memory. When memories of the Boston Massacre were revived in the nineteenth century, they came with a surprising new twist: Crispus Attucks, one of the men killed in King Street, was recast as the most important figure in the shootings. A sailor of mixed African American and Wampanoag ancestry, Attucks was taken up by Boston’s African American community in the decades before the Civil War as the first martyr in the struggle for American liberty. This rhetorical move triggered a decades-long dispute in Boston about whether Attucks and the other victims were lawless rioters or a patriot vanguard. Eventually that conflict was settled and the Boston Massacre resolved, once again, into a vague and uncontroversial memory.

In more recent times, the Boston Massacre has been invoked for political purposes when the firepower of the U.S. government has been directed against its citizens. It happened during the Vietnam War; more recently, it has framed discussions of the militarization of policing in the twenty-first century. And as race has become increasingly salient to those discussions, Crispus Attucks has again been invoked, this time as a new kind of symbol of African American citizenship. Identified in the nineteenth century as the first martyr of American independence, in the twenty-first century he has become the first African American victim of unrestrained police brutality. [my emphasis]

Hinderaker describes the available contemporary accounts as often vague and contradictory. But there is no doubt that the massacre of five people occurred, their names were known and published immediately after, and news of the event was popularized in the colonies and in Britain, particularly in a pamphlet issued two weeks after the event, A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston. As the title indicates, it expressed outrage against the British killers. Boston justices of the peace and British officials also collected testimony about the event. The published British versions of the story, true to imperialist practices to this day, accused the uncivilized natives of attacking the soldiers, forcing the poor, put-upon Brits to reluctantly murder them. They protesters were accused of throwing snowballs at the soldiers.

And here’s where democratic sentiments (including the expectation that government officials act within the law), nationalist impulses, and the rapidly developing patriotic sentiments among the colonists turned outrage at murderous official misconduct into a wider sentiment of identity and rebellion. As Hinderaker writes:

Events of the 1770s would show that this small port community, perched on a tiny North Atlantic peninsula, had the power to shape the fortune of the Western world’s greatest empire. Even as [the exact details of] the Boston Massacre remains an enigma, Boston’s massacre – a global event shaped by local sensibilities - rises in sharp relief.

He also describes how the after-effects of the Seven Years War in British policy wound up promoting democratic resentments against the British. And also how some colonists criticized the British by referring to older democratic principles:

When Parliament decided to station a large body of troops in North America following the Seven Years’ War, and political and military leaders subsequently chose to dispatch four regiments to Boston as a peacekeeping force, they were marching onto an unmapped landscape. The shootings in King Street that came to be called a massacre were one result. But they occurred only after seventeen long months of military occupation: a period marked by confusion, outrage, and endemic conflict. The clash between local and imperial authorities derived from Bostonians’ deep attachment to older republican principles, which were incompatible with the eighteenth-century rules under which British officials sought to manage imperial relations. [my emphasis]

In the British world prior to the eighteenth century, the English Magna Carta tradition demanded popular participation in the governments that made their laws, albeit to a very limited degree compared to today’s standards. (King Charles referred to that tradition in his 2026 address to the US Congress). This was very much a part of the notion of the rule of law. Which was not just a concept that laws should exist. It was a concept that for laws to be legitimate, they must be enacted by a government that provided representation for its citizens and that those laws should be applied equally. Democracy and the rule of law are inextricably bound together, really two sides of the same thing.

Those “older republican principles” were given expression in the colonists’ protest of “No Taxation Without Representation.” That slogan was not an earlier equivalent of rightwing libertarians today bitching and moaning about having to pay taxes. It was a demand for democratic representation in the making of the laws applied to the colonies, very much in Magna Carta tradition. They were making that argument as British citizens appealing to a fundamental British political tradition.

It’s both important and interesting to look at the political theories motivating the Revolution and key documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that formalized and institutionalized the democratic ideas and sentiments motivating it. And it was very much part of a democratic awakening and the development of democratic movements. And that is so despite the fact that democracy in 2026 means something much more expansive than it did in 1776. A redwood tree spouting out of the ground early in its life looks very different than it does after a few hundred years of growth.

The reference to democratic sentiments in this context is not an anachronism. The Massachusetts colonial charter, writes Hinderaker, despite imposing a royally-appointed colonial governor, was “more democratic than that of any other royal colony” due to the role of the elected assembly. When people get the idea that the government is there to represent the people and establish stable and fair legal justice, that tends to make them not really open to the idea of foreign troops just being able to gun down protesting citizens just because they feel like it that day. We don’t have to rely on history books to see that. We’ve seen it on the daily news from the US in 2025 and 2026 as citizens resist the depredations of Trump’s ICE Gestapo.

Notes:

(1) Morrison, Samuel Eliot et al (1977): A Concise History of the American Revolution, 62. New York: Oxford University Press.

(2) Hinderaker, Eric (2017): Boston’s Massacre, 1-32. Belknap Press: Cambridge & London.

(3) "Crispus Attucks," by Herschel Levit, mural at the Recorder of Deeds building, built in 1943. 515 D St., NW, Washington, D.C. Library of Congress.

(4) Wilson, Henry (1875): History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Vol. 1 (4th edition), 18-19. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company.

Slavery and the American Revolution

Historian Sean Wilentz wrote in 2019 about the contradictory political impulses toward slavery involved in the American Revolution. (1) He was addressing a concern that he raises about an argument made as part of the 1619 Project that highlights the history of slavery in North America, which was that an major impulse for the Revolution was to defend slavery against British abolitionism.

The American Revolution is a key founding myth of the United States. Interpretations of it vary, of course, both in academic discussions and in popular political understandings of it. From the beginning, there were more conservative adherents and more radical ones. Paul Revere and Thomas Paine could be taken as symbols of those two poles, respectively.

And over time, there have been interpretations made from a range of ideological and partisan viewpoints. On the academic side of the discussion, a lot of the differences are related to how “revolutionary” the American Revolution was, in the sense of how drastically it altered fundamental social and class relations, how much it democratized governance, and what the sources of it were. And the status of slavery is a key issue in those perceptions, as is the question of to what extent the Constitution represented the democratic impulses of the Revolution.

Back in the days when Calvin Coolidge was in the White House, the historian J. Franklin Jameson shook up the dominant academic narrative with a series of lectures published in 1926 as The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement. The conservative consensus regarded the Revolution as basically a war of independence against Britain but not as a social revolution.

Jameson was one of several prominent historians who were emphasizing the Revolution’s social dimension, including Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., Carl Becker, and Charles Beard. Beard depicted the creation of the Constitution as a kind of sleazy backroom deal made by rich men to scam the system to the benefit of their own pocketbooks in his An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of The United States (1913). The stodgy-but-reliable Britannica is a bit more generous in describing it in its article on Beard:

In this book he claimed that the Constitution had been formulated by interest groups whose motivations were just as much personal financial ones as they were political ones. Although American politicians were generally outraged at the implications of material interests embodied in the Constitution by the Founding Fathers, the book was received by academicians as an innovative study on motivational factors among socioeconomic groups. (2)

This was generally taken to be a “left” version and Beard was counted as a Progressive historian. He became one of the founders of the left-leaning New School of Social Research in 1919. But his view of the Constitution and the purposes of the men who had led the Revolution also lent itself to a kind of everybody’s-in-it-for-themselves viewpoint which was more laissez-faire individualist dogma than a left view. And Beard’s turn later in life to what can reasonably be described as a crackpot rightwing isolationist viewpoint that he expressed in President Roosevelt and the Coming of War, 1941 (1948) certainly makes it reasonable to wonder to what extent his view earlier in his career was consistently “left”.

Similar ambiguity can be encountered with ethno-nationalist historical narratives of the American Revolution. They can be rhetorically similar to left perspectives in terms of looking at the dark, undemocratic, inhumane, anti-egalitarian realities of American history. But they can also play into a rightwing narrative which argues, for instance, that white racism is as American as apple pie and it pointless and un-American to challenge it. In fact, for people who are looking to shift their image from very left to very right, that kind of argument is a natural.

Wilentz defines a common historical view in more recent times of the American Revolution that proceeds from this assumption, “The American Revolution may not have overthrown the institution of slavery but its egalitarian principles were at least implicitly antislavery.”

He describes a problem he sees with this comfortable interpretation:

One problem with this familiar view is that it obscures how new, how radical, antislavery politics were during the revolutionary era, and how, for many patriots, American slavery and American freedom were perfectly compatible. I’m referring here not to those slaveholders with troubled consciences like Jefferson and James Madison, Virginians who perceived slavery as an intolerable offense yet who (at least after the 1780s, in Jefferson’s case) lifted not a finger toward ending it - critics of slavery who continued owning, buying, and selling human beings until the day they died. I’m referring instead to stridently proslavery figures like that young South Carolina grandee and signer of the Constitution, Charles Pinckney - a patriot who served as an officer in the revolutionary militia and who, as a delegate at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, asserted “if slavery be wrong, it is justified by the example of all the world.” I am also referring to those white Northerners, as well as most white Southerners, who believed that the Declaration’s egalitarian principles were perfectly sound but that they categorically did not apply to blacks, slave or free. Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney attempted finally to enshrine this racist egalitarianism in American national law in his notorious ruling on the Dred Scott case in 1857.

These proslavery Americans and apologists for slavery and their progeny were no less products of the American founding than the early abolitionists inspired by Woolman and Benezet or the conflicted enlightened Virginians like Jefferson. Plantation slavery grew stupendously in the United States after the Revolution, generating a well-organized slave power that long dominated national politics. Slavery’s defeat was not inevitable. Nor, obviously, did white supremacy die with slavery. Over the century and a half since slavery’s abolition, the racist Americanism of Charles Pinckney and Roger Brooke Taney has survived and flourished in new forms, along with dominating social and political structures that uphold it. Far from vanquished, it has morphed and resurged in ways expected and unexpected, from the bloody overthrow of Reconstruction to the menacing rise of Donald J. Trump. [my emphasis]

But Wilentz also contests an alternative view that the Revolution itself was motivated by the fear of the colonists that Great Britain would abolish slavery. In other words, one of the American Revolution’s central goal, if not the central one, was to preserve slavery. He describes the implication of this view as follows:

The American Revolution, in effect, anticipated the slaveholders’ rebellion eighty-odd years later: the American patriots allegedly declared their independence of Britain in 1776 for the same reason that the Southern states seceded in 1860–1861, to guarantee that slavery would endure. American independence, in this view, was a precursor of Southern secession.

Wilentz continues:

It is worth noting that Jefferson Davis and the rebellious slaveholders also depicted secession as a glorious replay of the American Revolution, although they did not go so far as to claim that the patriots of 1776 fought to protect slavery. Not for the first time, modern critics have concluded that the Confederates were basically correct about American history, whereas Lincoln as well as most abolitionists, above all Frederick Douglass, were wrong—as when Douglass, in his most famous speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” excoriated American hypocrisy and white racism but also praised the US Constitution as “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.”

That dig Wilentz makes about “modern critics” who conclude that the Confederates were basically correct about American history” seems to be mostly casting shade on those like today’s MAGA radicals who operate very much in the spirit of Confederacy, as most dramatically illustrated on January 6, 2021 when Trump sent his violent mob to try to facilitate a coup. But is also makes the point that there were tensions between the emancipatory impulses of the Revolution and considerable amounts of unfreedom, particularly for slaves and for native peoples.

I won’t go further into the controversy in this post. But the cynical perspective implied in Beard’s approach is inadequate to understanding the real historical of democratic and liberal ideals and practices. And any interpretation of the American Revolution that fits with Jefferson Davis’ or John Calhoun’s view of its values and meaning should not be lightly accepted.

I’ll close by noting that a central factual-historical argument that Wilentz makes is to emphasize how rapidly antislavery ideas emerged in a particular time-frame, relying on the eminent historian of slavery David Brion Davis:

Suddenly, in the late 1740s and early 1750s, Western culture reached a turning point, producing what the great modern scholar of slavery and the antislavery movement David Brion Davis called “an almost explosive consciousness of man’s freedom to shape the world in accordance with his own will and reason.” The causes of this moral revolution were manifold and remain much debated, but need not detain us here; what is important is that it brought, in Davis’s words, “a heightened concern for discovering laws and principles that would enable human society to be something more than an endless contest of greed and power.” That concern made slavery appear for the first time - to the un-enslaved - as a barbaric offense to God, reason, and natural rights. [my emphasis]

And Wilentz adds, “Between 1767 and 1775, a wave of antislavery petitions, sermons, pamphlets, and private missives swelled across the colonies, from New England as far south as Virginia - a political outburst unprecedented in the Atlantic world.”

Notes:

(1) Wilentz, Sean (2019): American Slavery and ‘the Relentless Unforeseen’. NYR Daily <https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/11/19/american-slavery-and-the-relentless-unforeseen/>(Accessed: 2019-28-12).

(2) Britannica Editors (2026): Charles A. Beard. Encyclopedia Britannica, 11/23/2025. <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-A-Beard> (Accessed 2026-24-06).

Atari could beat today’s AI LLMs on chess?

The current AI hype seems to be encountering some gravity at the moment. Gravity as beeing pulled back toward the earth, and its consequences may obviously be "grave" in important ways.

This is an engaging discussion by Chris Hayes with Ed Zitron about the business of AI and the financial bubble that we’re experiencing right now: (1)

The following is an hour and a half discussion with Gary Marcus that focuses on the development, capabilities, and limitations of AI than on the status of the AI business or the current AI bubble. (2)

Zitron also did a appearance last week on The Majority Report, in which he also talks about his jaded and skeptical take on the recent, dodgy, Space X IPO: (3)

Science fiction writer Cory Doctorow recently published a book on the topic, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late (2026) from Verso, a left-leaning publisher with something of an academic tilt.

In a report on Doctorow’s position, Dorian Lynskey writes: (4)

A decade ago, when the likes of Elon Musk and Sam Altman were still passionate advocates of heavily regulated ethical AI (ha!), the technology’s most widely discussed downside had an apocalyptic glamour: superintelligent AI could one day destroy the human race. But since Altman’s company OpenAI released its large language model ChatGPT in November 2022, AI’s public image has fallen to earth: it’s now widely seen as a job crusher, a fact mangler, a slop maker, a privacy invader, a climate trasher and a general pain in the neck. Never before has a new technology been rammed down our throats with such speed, determination and complete disregard for public opinion. [my emphasis]

Doctorow in this podcast discusses the present moment: (5)

And even Paul Krugman has waded in on the current AI situation in this 11-minute clip. (6) Krugman is not afraid to go against the consensus opinion of those he has famously and ironically labeled the Very Serious People. And he very often right in his analysis – and often point out how he has gone wrong on some expectation.

Notes:

(1) Is the AI Boom About to COLLAPSE? MS NOW YouTube channel 06/10/2026. <https://youtu.be/-Mn-TNLwQys?si=rHa2yF0O0d6OGwwW> (Accessed: 2026-06-22).

(2) The Uncomfortable Truth About AI “Reasoning”. World Science Festival YouTube channel 05/16/2026. <https://youtu.be/iFYF_e1GSGI?si=J_noG6NqQ9p2jBpv> (Accessed: 2026-06-25).

(3) The AI Bubble Crash Will Be Worse… The Majority Report YouTube channel 06/16/2026. <https://youtu.be/8_2nB68Ruig?si=395Lk7AFp3e8Lj3P> (Accessed: 2026-06-22).

(4) Lynskey, Dorian (2026): The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow review - the real price of artificial intelligence. Guardian 06/22/2026. <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jun/22/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai-by-cory-doctorow-review-the-real-price-of-artificial-intelligence> (Accessed: 2026-06-25).

(5) AI Was Never About Helping You | Cory Doctorow. The Atlantic YouTube channel 06/19/2026. <https://youtu.be/SPQNPJ0CEPo?si=4nJZPQYPDzUsG1RV> (Accessed: 2026-06-25).

(6) The Chips Are Down. Paul Krugman YouTube channel 06/24/2026. <https://youtu.be/erdyFIwkXk0?si=b6wQUAFLMgKQWJYn> (Accessed: 2026-06-25).

Looking at a sloppy German news report on immigrants

The German news service Tagesschau just ran an article about expulsion of refugees from Afghanistan that illustrates part of the problem with the politics of xenophobia in Germany and other European countries.

The three opening paragraphs read as follows:

Afghan criminals are to be deported more consistently in the future, according to the German government. A corresponding increase in flights was agreed at a confidential meeting with representatives of the Taliban government [of Afghanistan].

According to a media report, the German government is significantly expanding the deportations of Afghan criminals to their homeland. After confidential negotiations at technical working level between representatives of the Federal Ministry of the Interior and the Afghan Taliban government, the number of deportation flights to Kabul is to be increased, reports the Bild am Sonntag [a notoriously conservative tabloid].

So in the future, up to three charter flights per month will be possible. In addition to charter flights, repatriations via regular scheduled flights will continue to be possible at any time, the newspaper writes. With the increase to the almost weekly frequency, the Ministry of the Interior wants to establish a permanent "deportation airlift". (1)

As a general rule, the earlier paragraphs in a news story get read more than the later ones. And sometimes what some readers would find to be the most important information may be in the middle or later parts of the story.

So what does a casual reader get from the first three paragraphs?

We are talking about “criminals” from Afghanistan. What kinds of crimes? Murder? Rape? Petty theft? Assault-and-battery? Speeding in a 30-kilometers-per-hour zone? Spray-painting graffiti on a wall? Walking in a demonstration where some people are chanting “from the river to the sea”?

Well, it doesn’t say. But it matters. The xenophobes understandably try to associate immigrants of a type they don’t approve with violence, crime, fanaticism and immorality. Yet vague references to “criminals” in news articles like this just reinforce general and often mindless or malicious stereotypes - which plays exactly to the nationalist-xenophobic political agitation from groups like the far-right AfD in Germany or the UK Reform Party in Britain.

Before readers even get to the first three paragraphs, they are presented with this image of a large plane flying in the direction of strands of razor wire.

Because we must be talking here about some really dangerous characters, right?

A few more factual assertions creep into view in the fourth paragraph: “This has to do with serious criminals and dangerous people who are in prison in Germany. According to the report, at least 100 Afghan offenders willing for deportation are currently still in regular detention or in detention pending deportation.” And it adds, “According to the information, the criminals are rapists, dangerous people [Gefährder] and drug dealers.”

The Gefährder category refers to people who in American terms would be persons detained under suspicion of having committed a crime and who are considered a flight risk. It’s a category often applied in Germany to suspected Muslim terrorists.

But if you’re not just looking for a fig-leaf reason to rant about how foreign Muslim criminals are all over the place, there come some obvious questions. Germany is a country of nearly 84 million people. So according to the skimpy factual information in the article, there are around one hundred people who are Afghan citizens that fall into this category of dangerous characters who need to be sent to Afghanistan who are (apparently) in custody in Germany, including rapists, drug dealers, and Gefährder (suspicious characters). We could be generous to the Tagesschau and assume we’re not talking about two convicted rapists, five people who were illegally selling cannabis, and 93 people who some local cop busted because he thought they “looked suspicious.”

My point in writing more words about the article than it contains is to say that sloppy reporting like this helps give credibility to some of the most irresponsible and antidemocratic elements in European politics. There are also laws - German laws, EU laws, international humanitarian laws – that address whether it is legal to repatriate people to a country where there is a likelihood they will be killed or tortured by the government or subject to lawless conduct in violent civil conflict or extreme gang violence. It’s also worth remembering that Germany was one of the NATO allies officially supporting the US war in Afghanistan. Sending a Gefährder suspected of illegally selling pot back to Afghanistan could be a death sentence - especially if they had worked for NATO during the war. Which for xenophobes is a feature, not a bug.

There‘s also a factor at play that articles like this don’t help address. Too much of the official rhetoric on immigration enforcement in the EU is based on proposals that are essentially scams, sometimes expensive scams. The repeated talk of exiling immigrants to “third countries” for indefinite warehousing are often largely scams. And prolonged detention of asylum seekers in substandard “processing centers” for months are years is not much different from the ICE concentration camps that the Trump 2.0 regime has established for accused unauthorized immigrants in the United States. The “third country” approach is also called “externalizing” immigration and asylum issues. As the immigration scholar Judith Kohlenberger wrote in 2024:

Externalizing asylum responsibility is still being hailed as a key instrument, if not indeed the solution to the EU’s “migration question” - from processing asylum claims off territory to providing neighbouring countries with aid and monetary incentives to host refugees to full-scale offshoring of migrants to third countries with which they have no actual ties. Despite growing evidence that such deals offer no sustainable solution (see the notorious EU-Turkey Declaration or the intended deal with Tunesia struck in summer 2023) or are not, in face, practically feasible (e.g. various European governments’ botched attempts to offshore asylum seekers to Rwanda), both heads of state and the EU commission continue to consider such “partnerships” with third countries a viable solution to growing anti-refugee sentiment, the rise of right-wing populist parties and deteriorating social cohesion across Europe. [my emphasis in bold] (2)

It’s important to remember that “third country” solutions can be practical and effective in the face of an immediate refugee crisis. But the idea of just warehousing refugees indefinitely in a third country is not a decent long-term solution. It needs to be followed up with a systematic resettlement policy like that of the 1970s in the crisis of the Vietnamese “boat people.” (3)

I would say that much of Europe, including Germany, are still struggling with the disastrous effects of how the euro crisis that reached its apex in the confrontation with Greece in 2015 coincided so closely with the peak immigration surge of that same year when nationalistic posturing among EU countries became a barrier to a decent solution.

And though it’s not discussed very prominently in this context, it is always worth remembering that the surge of Ukrainian refugees into EU countries after the Russian invasion of 2022, a surge considerably larger than that of 2015-16, was handled without the massive freakout and the prolonged retention of refugees in a third country (Turkey) that occurred in that earlier situation.

Kohlenberger rightly says, “The long-term effects of externalization on the EU includes diminished credibility, increased vulnerability to coercion, and the legitimization of an authoritarian, deterrence-focused stance on migration control.”

They need to do better.

And the United States should be setting a better example itself than sending masked Gestapo goons into US cities to terrorize the Latino population, both immigrants and native-born.

Notes:

(1) Deutlich mehr Abschiebeflüge nach Afghanistan. Tagesschau 21.06.2026. <https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/afghanistan-abschiebungen-dobrindt-100.html> (Accessed: 2026-15-10). My translation to English.

(2) Kohlenberger, Judith (2024): Migration Policy: European Union Increasingly Outsources Responsibility for Asylum Heinrich Böll Stiftung 10/15/2024. <https://www.boell.de/en/2024/10/15/migration-policy-european-union-increasingly-outsources-responsibility-asylum> (Accessed : 2026-15-10).

(3) See: Knaus, Gerald (2024): Statement on Migration agreements with safe third countries. European Stability Initiative June 2024. <https://www.esiweb.org/pdf/Knaus-BMI-Statement-on-migration-agreements-with-safe-third-countries-June-2024.pdf> (Accessed: 2026-15-10).

Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s 1991 book on multiculturalism and nationalism (It's more interesting than you might think)

I’ve been looking through some retrospectives on the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. I’ve been mostly thinking of it in its Enlightenment context (With all the ambiguity that comes with that!)

In the process, I took a look at Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s 1991 book, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. (1)

That year 1991 was part of a particular transition time, when Reaganite neoliberal thought combined with Christian-nationalist social conservatism was dominant in American politics. But it was also the period when the Warsaw Pact was disappearing into history’s rearview mirror, and then the Soviet Union itself. (Spoiler: results were mixed!)

Dramatic changes in politics were taking place and the Western countries were looking for liberal-democratic approaches with a fresh eye. At least nominally, with some misfires like “the end of history” idea that was famously applied to the moment. More wars and rampant oligarchic abuses changed that tone soon enough.

One of the trends of the time was “multiculturalism,” which for people who are now Trumpistas was a horror vision that threatened their cherished goal of America as a white Christian homeland, in which African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants, and uppity wimmin all knew their assigned places in the social hierarchy.

Along with the increasing popularity of Rush Limbaugh, who used the term “feminazi” to describe those uppity wimmin – truly one of the weirdest rightwing concepts ever – many good conservatives started weeping over “political correctness.” That was yet another schizophrenic rightwing concept by which they meant ideas like equal protection of the law with which they disagreed, So conservatives were bragging about being politically INcorrect, meaning to them being right about political issues, i.e., politically correct from their own viewpoint.

Yes, that whole schtick was demented. But that’s the direction the Republicans went, a direction that wound up with the Orange Anomaly in the White House.

And that weird conservative trend is still with us, thanks to a crackpot narrative popularized by William Lind, which said that a group of German Jewish Marxists (the Frankfurt School) who invented something called Cultural Marxism (they didn’t) that spawned Postmodernism (it didn’t) that created Political Correctness (it didn’t) which spawned Critical Race Theory (it didn’t) that morphed into DEI and Wokeism, which stills seems to be the current Trumpista term. Because Asleepism is the Trump Cult’s preferred state of mind among voters and citizens.

This strange conspiracy theory was analyzed just recently. by Patrick Iber:

In this telling, the movements for civil rights, women’s rights, and gay liberation are not responding to real forms of discrimination. Instead, the cultural shifts that have taken place since the 1960s can be dismissed as the influence of radical foreign Marxists who have undermined the foundational unities of American life through their control of cultural institutions. It is poor intellectual history, but powerful pseudo-history. It frees the believer from considering the demands of people facing oppression as legitimate and justifies the destruction of knowledge-producing institutions. For the right, it replaces hard questions with obfuscation, using obscurity to create a false sense of clarity. [my emphasis] (2)

Schlesinger was never part of that kind of crackpot thinking. But in his Disuniting period, he was particularly irritated by some instances of what he considered to be sloppy history-writing by some historians who indulged in an ethno-nationalist approach to history. John Henrik Clarke, Asa Hillard, Leonard Jeffries, and Maulana Karenga were four historians who he particularly criticized on those grounds. As he put it in Disuniting:

Cultural pluralism is not the issue. Nor is the teaching of Afro-American or African history the issue; of course these are legitimate subjects. The issue is the kind of history that the New York task force, the Portland Baseline essayists, and other Afrocentric ideologues propose for American children. The issue is the teaching of bad history under whatever ethnic banner. [my emphasis]

He also cites several major black scholars who contributed solid historical accounts of race-related issues: W. M. Brewer, John Hope Franklin, Rayford W. Logan, Alruthius Taylor, Charles Wesley, Carter G. Woodson. Franklin’s textbook From Slavery to Freedom went through many editions and is one of the most important contributions to African-American history.

Schlesinger did have a very pro-democracy, New Deal/Great Society liberal who was opposed to the kind of racial discrimination and xenophobic politics that are central to Trumpist attitudes and ideology – to the extent that a “Trumpist ideology” can be said to exist. Massive corruption and illegal diversion of public funds don’t really count as an ideology. Schlesinger was very much a liberal Cold Warrior, though he became critical of ill-conceived imperial wars and the authoritarianism of the “imperial Presidency.”

He is known especially for his books on John and Robert Kennedy and for his early book, The Age of Jackson (1945). It focused in particular on the Jacksonian reform era as a predecessor of the New Deal. He later expressed regret that he had not dealt with Jackson’s Indian policy in that work. I’m a bit cranky in today’s terms by insisting that the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democratic movements were an important part of the development of what we know today as democracy. Because history involves processes. By today’s standards, America in 1900 could be considered a democracy because black citizens and women did not have the right to vote nationally. But the US was radically more democratic in 1900 than it was a century earlier.

In his 1991 book, Schlesinger praised the work of Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), neither of whom could be considered conservatives on racial issues and democracy in American history.

Notes:

(1) 1991 edition from The Larger Agenda Series. Knoxville: Whitttle Direct Books. See also: the 1992 edition at the Internet Archive: <https://archive.org/details/disunitingofamer00arth>

(2) Iber, Patrick (2026): Dissent 73:2 Summer 2026, 101-108. <https://dissentmagazine.org/article/cultural-marxism-conspiracy-frankfurt-school/>