Our Counterrevolutionary Duty: Defending the Old Society
“In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.”—Karl Marx
Here’s where we are. Two forms of government are competing for dominance in the United States. Both are operational in the present space but in contradiction to the other. They cannot be synthesized; their incompatibility means that one will have to win out over the other—that is, if we wish to truly free as a people. That makes this a pivotal moment in our nation’s history, indeed in world history. The dialectic will either be resolved with a preservation of the higher unity our nation achieved at its founding—a once-in-a-millennial moment—or result in a New Dark Ages of corporate neo-feudalism. As Theodor Adorno warned us in Negative Dialectics, contradictions do not always resolve in a higher unity.
One form of government in the current context is the aforementioned historic achievement of the constitutional republic founded on the classical liberal values and principles of humanism, individualism, rationalism, and secularism. This is the rights-based basis of the American system of government. This is why our forefathers risked everything to rebel against the British Crown. This is why brother killed brother during the Civil War. This was why millions of young men put their lives on the line to repel the fascist threat to the Enlightenment project. We had one shot at this. We won’t have another moment to make a nation as great as this one. If we lose this, it’s gone forever.
This is the American Creed: “The United States of America as a government of the people, by the people, for the people; whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed, a democracy in a republic, a sovereign Nation of many sovereign States; a perfect union, one and inseparable; established upon those principles of freedom, equality, justice, and humanity for which American patriots sacrificed their lives and fortunes.” Our freedom requires our dedication to the Creed. You may have your own personal creed, but you also have this one—if you are a patriotic American.
The other form of government is the corporate state and progressive ideology, the praxis of a soft fascism waiting for the Creed to be overthrown in order to establish a hard New Fascism, a system that moves beyond the liberal world order of nation-states to make a global system of authoritarian governance. This New Fascism, what Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism,” in its best moments operates through managed democracy, a fake democracy; in its worst moments, it’s a police state that resorts to selective mob rule (which we witnessed in the summer months of 2020 and may soon witness again if Trump is elected).
If the people (or the system) elect (or install) Kamala Harris, and when the latter form of government is entrenched and the constitutional republic negated, this will fix the totalitarian system over us. History will be erased and revised (it already has to an alarming extent) and we will become a population under transnational corporate rule. Democrats, profoundly illiberal and itching to fully institutionalize technocratic controls over the people, are the party of that class power. They see the working class as the deplorables, the hobbits, the proles. It will be Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four come to life disguised as Huxley’s Brave New World. This monster is already stomping around in its adolescent form.
Not all the people who will vote Republican this cycle have awaken to these facts intellectually, but their common sense (for those for whom common sense still works) is telling them that the Republican Party under Trump has become the party of populist-nationalism, which is what we were at our founding, an identity reaffirmed by the Party of Lincoln in overthrowing the slavocracy, the regime of unfreedom represented by the Democrats and the landed aristocracy that rebelled against the American republic to preserve the feudal way of life (and that established Jim Crow after Reconstruction—and the ghetto after that). This is why patriots like Bobby Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard have left the Democratic Party and joined the Republicans. They know what time it is.
They know that the future under Democrats is a neo-feudalism, organized by the corporatocracy that rose from the ashes of the slavocracy, where the people are subject populations interred on high-tech estates governed by technocrats in the service of transnational power. The Democrats are open about the plans they have for us. When they say in the above video (please watch it) that they mean to extinguish freedom of speech, they mean it. They mean to take aways your guns and privacy, too. They mean to weaponize the government and the law against their enemies (lawfare). They’re telling you what they want to do to you—you can see it in their actions—and there are tens of millions of functionally un-American citizens who want to do this to you, too—the academic, the culture industry manager, and the propagandist who go by the name “journalist.” They’re the people with or who speak for the people with the signs in their front yards that begin “In this house….”
The future under Republicans is a restoration of the democratic-republican principles that underpin our Constitution and our Bill of Rights, that express the spirit of our Declaration of our Independence. When we say that the goal of populist-nationalism is to deconstruct the administrative state—the unconstitutional, unelected, and unaccountable federal bureaucracy and its army of technocrats—this is what we mean: taking the country back to the three branches, separation of powers, and the federal system that defend individual rights and the relative autonomy of the fifty states. In a word, the Creed. When we say this is the most important election in our lifetime, that’s not that throwaway line. It has never been the case—not in our lifetimes—that we have this stark a choice before us, the choice between Americanism, on the one hand, and anti-Americanism, on the other.
This is why the Democrats run down our founders and demonize our culture, smearing the white majority as racist and ignoring the plight of black Americans they caused, while elevating backward Third World cultures and hateful ideologies and religions, opening our borders to the barbarians they wield to disorder our communities and derail our spirit (the sociopathic overlords are executing the same plan in Europe). They do not believe in the Creed and they will, if they win, snuff it out. It will be a New Dark Ages.
The Democrats are neither socialists nor communists. They are corporatists. We need not argue about which form of authoritarian is more dangerous—corporatism is bad enough. We fought this evil in another guise in the Second World War. We don’t need to guess at this. They’re telling us who they are. Harris has been endorsed by the war machine. Harris has been endorsed by the censorship-industrial complex. Harris has been endorsed by the medical-industrial complex. This is the same person who legitimized the color revolution in 2020. Her party is the party of lockdowns, masks, and vaccine mandates. Her party is the party of NATO and the provocation of war in Eastern Europe, actions that have brought to the threshold of WWIII. This is the party that enabled the Islamists who terrorize Israel. Her party is the party of the PATRIOT Act and the forever wars.
As readers of Freedom and Reason know, I am no longer a socialist. This is because every real-world instantiation of socialism has been totalitarian, and I am a libertarian. At the same time, just as I am a Darwinist because I recognize natural selection is the logic of the natural world, I am a Marxist because Karl Marx saw clearly the logic of the social world. Marx never personally saw really-existing socialism on the societal level, and he would, like me, have been appalled to see how it turns out. For Marx was at heart a liberal man. With this clarification in mind, I want to close with this observation from Marx’s 1859 An Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy.
“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”
This is the materialist conception of history. It is a predictive model: “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.”
We can see the dynamic Marx’s identifies working itself out before our very eyes. At this stage of development, the corporate state’s rise reflects a conflict between the material productive forces of global capitalism and the existing relations of production grounded in the nation-state system and liberal constitutionalism. What once served to advance economic growth and individual freedoms now threatens to become a fetter on further development of corporate control. The relations that once nurtured capitalism’s expansion are transforming into barriers, as corporate power increasingly undermines the constitutional order, shifting towards a technocratic collectivism. This systemic tension signals the revolutionary moment, as changes in the economic base reshape the entire political and legal superstructure, pressing for a fundamental transformation of society. The role of patriots in this moment is to be the counterrevolutionaries.
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