Is the Alt-Right the Legacy of American Slavery? (Part 1)

In this episode, we dive into the writings of George Fitzhugh, a 19th-century American Lawyer and social critic who launched one of the earliest full-throated critiques of capitalism—not from the left, but from the slave plantations of the South. Fitzhugh believed that freedom was a myth, and that most people were better off being ruled. Slavery, in his eyes, was not a shameful past—it was a blueprint for a stable society. We examine how his arguments worked, why they were persuasive to some, and what they reveal about the deep entanglement between race, hierarchy, and current right-wing thought in American history.

Transcript

Have you ever noticed that sometimes the people on the right sound a lot like the people on the left? We hear a lot today on both the left and the right about how capitalism has failed. Ordinary people. Wages are stagnant. Housing is simply unaffordable. Families are falling apart. For example, here's Tucker Carlson on Fox News talking about capitalism.

(Tucker Carlson): "Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is worth about $150 billion it's certainly enough to pay his employees well, but he doesn't. A huge number of Amazon workers are so poorly paid they qualify for federal welfare benefits. According to data from the nonprofit group new food economy, nearly one in three Amazon employees in Arizona, for example, was on food stamps last year. Jeff Bezos isn't paying his workers enough to eat, so you made up the difference with your tax dollars. And if you think that's remarkable, meet Travis Kalanick. He's the youthful founder of Uber. His personal fortune is close to $5 billion his drivers, by contrast, often make less than minimum wage. One recent study found that many Uber drivers lose money working for the company that's not a sustainable business model. The only reason it continues is because of your generosity, because you're paying the welfare benefits for Uber's impoverished drivers, child billionaires like Travis get to keep buying bigger houses and more airplanes. If you can think of a less fair system than this. Send us an email. We'd love to hear about it. This system is indefensible, and yet almost nobody ever complains about it. How come? Well, conservatives like us support the free market, and for good reason the free market works, but there's nothing free about this market. A lot of these companies operate as monopolies. They hate markets. They use government regulation to crush competition. There's nothing conservative about that, just as there's nothing conservative about most big corporations, just the opposite. They are the backbone of the left. Corporate America enables the progressive lunacy you see every night on this show. They are funding the revolution now in progress. That's exactly why liberals say nothing as oligarchs amass billions by soaking our middle class because they've been paid off."

Welcome back to American Socrates. I'm your host. Charles M Rupert, the idea that the free market always knows best just doesn't sit right with people anymore. Even populists and nationalists are starting to turn on it, but there's an unsettling question behind this rhetoric: what if some of the earliest and most passionate critics of capitalism weren't wrong about its failures, but were arguing for something even worse? I'm not talking about socialism, and I'm not talking about communism. I'm talking about totalitarianism. I'm talking about institutionalized human slavery, American slavery. George Fitzhugh was one of the strangest and most disturbing minds of 19th-century America. He was born in 1806 in Virginia. He was a white southern gentleman, but too poor to own slaves himself. He was a failed lawyer turned social theorist who hated capitalism as much as European intellectuals like Karl Marx. He looked at the factory floor models of the industrial north, the children working long hours, the men tossed aside like broken tools, and women engaged in non-domestic work. And said This is worse than slavery, and he meant it. Fitzhugh wasn't interested in social progress. He didn't want unions or fair wages or even democracy. He wanted a feudal hierarchy, something of masters and slaves. Fitzhugh believed freedom was a lie, and most people just weren't fit for it, not just black people, poor whites, too, women, and natives. The list is pretty extensive. Fitzhugh argued that the ideal society was one where the strong ruled and the weak were cared for, like pets. His two books, Sociology for the South and cannibals, all were bold, bizarre manifestos. He praised slavery as a moral good. He attacked Adam Smith, John Locke, and the entire Enlightenment tradition. He was one of the few people in American history to say out loud that slavery is not just defensible. It's better than freedom. In this episode, I'm going to argue that Fitzhugh's logic. Still echoes today. You hear it when Tucker Carlson warns that freedom is not the goal and that people need to be protected from their own choices, or when Bronze Age pervert an influential far right writer says democracy is a sham and we need a new aristocracy of strong men to rule over the masses, even the language of natural hierarchies, law and order over chaos and tradition over autonomy, recycles Fitzhugh's central idea, which is that most people are better off being ruled than being free. Today, the packaging is slicker. The targets might be different, but the impulse is the same, distrust, freedom, worship, strength, obey, stay in your place. So I thought today we would examine these in some detail, find the source of this logic and trace its roots back to the antebellum southern United States, and, of course, Fitzhugh's defense of slavery. 

Let's start with a little background here. You know exactly who George Fitzhugh was. Fitzhugh first came upon the ideological stage in 1849 with his pamphlet titled slavery justified. The ideas he expressed there were developed and expanded in his later books Sociology for the South in 1854 and cannibals all 1857
at the heart of George Fitzhugh's argument is a brutal image of capitalism, he said, turns men into cannibals. Not literally, of course, but in the capitalist world, people devour one another for profit. We see this, the people eating each other up. The exploitation of workers by capitalists, the exploitation of renters by landlords, the exploitation of borrowers by banks. With Freedom, he argues, all men being equal, all aspire to the highest honors and the largest possessions. Good men and bad men teach their children one in the same lesson, go ahead, push your way in the world. In such society, virtue, if virtue, there be, loses all her loveliness because of her selfish aims, none but the selfish virtues are encouraged because none other aid a man in the race of free competition, good men and bad men have the same end in view are in the pursuit of the same object: self-promotion, self-elevation. He continues. Selfishness is almost the only motive of human conduct, with good and bad in a free society, where every man is taught that he may change and better his condition, a vulgar adage, every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost, is the moral which liberty and free competition inculcate okay, what is he saying here? He's telling us that society is sick. There's something wrong with the way we built the system that our idea of everyone being free and everyone being equal has a noble but fatal flaw built into it. Not everybody can be free, like Thomas Hobbes before him, he's making the argument, when everybody's free and everyone could just do what they want, and everybody's more or less equal, then you're going to turn on each other. The world will become dog-eat-dog, and nobody can flourish, nobody can succeed, nobody can do well. The only way to eliminate this in Fitzhugh's mind is to overturn the system that makes him sound very much like the people on the left. He and Karl Marx would have sounded very similar in this vein, although ideologically they were on diametrically opposed sides of the political spectrum. Here, Marx being on the far left and Fitzhugh on the far right. Fitzhugh looked at the so-called free labor system in the north, where men, women and even children worked really long hours and factories, they barely survived. You know, by really long hours, I mean, like 60 to 80 hours a week for just enough to like to feed yourself, and he asked the question that we would all ask, how exactly is this freedom? It seems like you're free to starve, you're free to be terminated at will. You're free to watch your kids go without. You're not free to rest or to be cared for or to feel safe. This is not poverty he's talking about here. This is an important distinction we should really talk about. This is pauperism. It's a word that's kind of making a slow comeback today. A pauper is a person who is fully employed but makes too little money to survive. You could be in poverty because you're not working, but if you're a pauper, that means. You have a full time job, it just doesn't earn you enough money to actually pay for the things you need to live. Imagine working for something like $1 an hour, and you get the idea of what I mean here. You could work all week long, even overtime, and still not make enough money to feed yourself, let alone a family or something like that. Fitzhugh, then has adopted the socialist script that is. He's taken on the complaints of the left and flipped them. This is not what most of the southerners of his age were doing. Most Southerners said that slavery was a necessary evil, an abomination that must endure until God saw fit to change it. Those were the words of General Robert E Lee. But Fitzhugh disagreed, arguing instead that slavery was a positive good because it came with responsibility, Fitzhugh drew this shocking conclusion, if wage labor is just slavery without responsibility, then what society really needs is the opposite, slavery with responsibility, and not just for black people, but for everybody, white, workers, immigrants, women, children, the poor, Native Americans, Anyone who couldn't fully and totally provide for themselves without the use of loans or renting or any of the rest. He called for a kind of universal slavery, a paternalistic, permanent, and class-based slavery, a world where the superior people would rule and they would protect the inferior the way parents take care of children, where people would belong to someone, and in doing so, they would be taken care of. He imagined a kind of benevolent feudalism, where hierarchy was fixed and masters loved their servants like their pets. Fitzhugh is not joking about this. He wasn't hedging in any way. He wrote, quote, Liberty is an evil which government is intended to correct. The modern right wing attack on government has its roots in this very logic. Government is the source of the problem because it protects people from being owned by other people, or at the very least being controlled by them. Let's dig into that a little further. The idea is that Liberty has to be protected. You cannot simply be free because people will turn on each other. Why is your freedom more important than my freedom? An easy example of this that's relevant to the subject at hand here is that, why should my freedom to own slaves be taken away from me in order to protect your freedom not to be owned? Freedom is freedom, is freedom. So why should yours be more important than mine? The kind of infighting that you would get from this, then, is meant to be tempered by the government. That's the whole point of a liberal government is to resolve these sorts of internal conflicts. Am I allowed to exploit you? And if so, how much? How much of it can we say is exploitation? How much of it can we say is just your choice? Those sorts of things. Do you have alternatives? If you don't have alternatives, am I allowed to use you in any way I see fit? These sorts of questions? The proper grounds for it, according to the founders of this country, was government. We would settle this ourselves. We would make the rules, and then we would all follow those rules. But under fitzhugh's view, government then becomes the enemy, because the idea is, is that you need an elite class to run and control everything, some set of benevolent aristocrats, I'm sure he had in mind, like Southern gentlemen, southern planters, as the bow ideal of this new system. So this is a kind of socialist logic that he's taken up here a socialist critique of capitalism, but not with the goal of fixing capitalism so that it works for everybody, but of removing capitalism and restoring a type of feudalism, a hierarchical feudalism. The problem here is not the economic system; in his mind, it's democracy. So Fitzhugh used what sounded like socialist logic, the criticisms of wage exploitation, industrial cruelty, degradations of the poor, those sorts of things. But instead of calling for workers to rise up and become united, he argues that they should all kneel. He took socialist moral energy and used it to build a defense of aristocracy. We're going to fix capitalism's horrors here by replacing them with a rigid hereditary chain of command. What makes this argument so dangerous is that Fitzhugh wasn't just defending slavery, he was reimagining it something of a full-blown alternative to capitalism, and he had a two-part case, one practical, one moral. Let's start with the practical side. He writes, the employer is a cannibal. He devours his fellow man by inches. Capitalism. Then he's saying legalizes exploitation. This is straight out of the mouth of people like Karl Marx. It encourages selfishness. It destroys loyalty. It rips people away from their families, their churches, their traditions. His slave feudalism, he says, will restore all of this. He compared his ideal slave plantations to a family with the master as the Father. The slaves were like the children. Everybody knows their role. Everyone has a place in this society. Nobody's left out. Everyone gets provided for. Then he writes, a man loves his children because they are weak, helpless and dependent. He loves his wife for similar reasons. When his children grow up and assert their independence, he is apt to transfer his affections to his grandchildren. He ceases to love his wife when she becomes masculine or rebellious. But slaves are always dependent, never the rivals of their master. Hence, though men are often found at variance with wife or child, we never saw one who did not like his slaves as a father who loves his children, would not beat or harm them, so a slaveholder would never harm his slaves. He would never abuse them, because he's just too good of a person to do things like that. The slave owner then he argues, as a kind of property owner, has a lifelong investment in the health and well-being of the enslaved. He can't just fire them because there's been an economic downturn or something. He still has to feed them. He has to house them. He has to treat them when they're sick, and so he's obligated to take care of these people, because as his property, they would lose value if he did not. In contrast, a northern employer has none of these ties, none of these duties. The Northern employer could use you up, and then, if you ever get sick, simply fire you, just to get rid of you and replace you with somebody else. Now, of course, that's not how slavery actually worked, right? Slavery was built on violence and terror and dehumanization. Masters often did savagely harm their slaves, slave men, slave women and even slave children. Frederick Douglass, in his slave narrative, accused slave masters of giving freedom to slaves in their old age for almost exactly the same reason as employers fire employees they don't currently need. They no longer had to care for the slaves then, after their capacity for laboring had diminished, if the other slaves for which this would've been a father, a grandfather, you know, something like that. Wanted them to not starve to death. They would have to give up portions of their own food and their own meager possessions in order to keep this old person alive. The white slave owner was not going to do that for them anymore, because they were no longer useful to them. But Fitzhugh's image, his idealized version of all this was a system of enforced responsibility. It was order. It was permanence, wage labor, he wrote, is slavery without benefits. This is slavery with benefits. Fitzhugh wasn't wrong about the symptoms of capitalism here, the exploitation, the instability, the alienation; he was naming real problems that other thinkers like Marx were noticing too, but where most people saw a need for justice or reform or solidarity, Fitzhugh offered something else entirely. The problem with capitalism is that it's simply not slavery. So another way to think about this is that Fitzhugh and Marx have the same diagnosis, right? They see the same disease in capitalism, but they have vastly different prescriptions for how to treat that disease. Consider the following passage from Fitzhugh, one of the wildest sects of communists in France, which proposes not only to hold all property in common, but to divide the profits, not according to each man's input and labor, but according to each man's wants. Now this is precisely the system of domestic slavery with us we provide for each slave in old age and in infancy, in sickness and in health, not according to his labor, but according to his wants. The Master's wants are most costly and refined, and he therefore gets the larger share of the profits. A southern farm is the Beaux ideal of communism. It is a joint concern in which the slave consumes more than the master of the course products, he means, like food and the basic necessities of life, and is far happier, because although the concern may fail, he is always sure of a support, he is only transferred to another master to participate in the profits of another concern. He marries when he pleases, because he knows he will have to work no more with a family than without one, and whether he lives or dies, that family will be taken care of. He exhibits all the pride of ownership. Despises a partner in a smaller concern, what he calls a poor man's Negro boasts of our crops, horses, fields, and cattle, and is as happy as a human being can be. And why should he not? He enjoys as much of the fruits of the farm as he is capable of doing, and the wealthiest can do no more. Great wealth brings many additional cares, but few additional enjoyments. Our stomachs do not increase in capacity with our fortunes. We want no more clothing to keep us warm. We may create new wants, but we cannot create new pleasures. The intellectual enjoyments which wealth affords are probably balanced by the new cares it brings along with it. What Fitzhugh is trying to get at here is the idea that certain people have desires that are more elevated or higher than others. White people, in his estimation, need things like intellectual stimulation. They need music. They need deep understanding for like philosophy, or something like that, whereas other people, the coarser people, and this would include poor whites, don't they simply don't. They just need bread and circuses. The idea is, you keep them entertained and you keep them fed and you let them fornicate, and that's that's really all there is to them. They're more like cattle than they are, like people, and so if you think of them in that way, you can have this system where the cattle are maintained by these elites, and it's the best of both worlds the other people, they don't have to think about anything. They don't have to live their lives. They are not in control of themselves in any meaningful way, and that's going to make them happy, because ignorance is bliss, at least for them. For these other people, for the elites, the Masters, that's not how it works. If you put them in those conditions, it would be absolutely terrible for them. This brings me to the second part of Fitzhugh's argument, his moral worldview. Fitzhugh wasn't just talking about economics. Here. He was making a claim about human nature. Fitzhugh believes that people are not equal. Some were smart and others were simple. Some people are strong, other people are weak, and pretending that everyone is more or less the same and trying to give therefore everyone the same rights, equal voice was, in his words, unnatural and destructive. This is what's going to separate him from traditional conservatives. Conservatives like the old Republican Party are still in the liberal tradition, in and of the sense that they believe in equality. They just believe in equality. Under the law. There should be the same law for everybody. Everyone should have to play by the same rules. That's not what Fitzhugh is arguing for. And I would argue that most of the people on the right today have moved away from that idea as well. They're moving more towards this sort of hierarchical view, where, you know, the elites get to play by a completely different set of rules, and if they do certain things, it's okay because they're elites, like if they murdered a man in the street, well, that guy just probably needed to be got, whereas if a poor man murdered someone in the street, well, yes, he is committing a crime, and that's wrong. So here's the leap. Then if people are unequal in ability, then society should be unequal to he's arguing we shouldn't work against hierarchical power structures of domination and control here, but actually lean into them as good things, positive things. Slavery protects people from the burden of freedom. He says it gives them a role in a society that is otherwise dog-eat-dog, it provides purpose and a caretaker in the form of the master. This is how Fitzhugh defends slavery as a positive good, because in his mind, slavery doesn't just benefit the master. It benefits the enslaved as well. It protects them from feelings of abandonment, from the insecurity, from hunger, from the stress of making choices they're not equipped to handle. This is not just about race, although Fitzhugh did believe that all black people were inferior to whites in every meaningful way. But still, he said, If a poor white man can't support himself or his family, then he should be enslaved. To he should belong to a company or a plantation or something like that. In fact, his perhaps most insidious argument is that white people are the superior of all other races in some pretty despicable ways that he believes slavery could help. He writes that it is where two races of men of different capacities are brought into juxtaposition. It is the boast of the Anglo Saxon that by the arts of peace, under the influence of free trade, that he can march to universal conquest. However true this may be, all know that if Englishmen or Americans, settle among inferior races, they soon become the owners of the soil and gradually reduce to poverty the original owners. They are the wire grass of nations. The same law of nature which enables and compels the stronger race to oppose and exterminate the weaker is constantly at work in the bosom of every society between its stronger and weaker members liberty and equality, rather encourage than restrict this law in its deadly operation, a northern gentleman who was both a statesman and philosopher once told us that his only objection to domestic Slavery was that it would perpetuate an inferior race who, under the influence of free trade and free competition, would otherwise disappear from the earth.
Fitzhugh was trying to say in this passage that white people are monsters. They sail the earth and destroy all of the people that they come in contact with. This is the argument against colonialism. These are colonizers. They go into places. They meet interesting and different people, and they decimate them economically. They take over, they instill a sense of free trade and private property, and then quickly make themselves the owners of everything, and thus destroy the other people. He's trying to make the argument that slave masters are better for black people because black people are innocents. They are naive, they are foolish, and the wily white men of the North will decimate them in free competition, and so only through slavery can they be protected, and can they survive and thrive and endure. I mean, this is an insidious argument to say that black people's best chance at survival must be through their enslavement to white people, because most white people are so evil that they would destroy them, but the good slave owners will just exploit them in a way that's beneficial for both parties. I mean, that's that's about as insidious as it gets. So he's trying to say that the only way to protect these less violent people is through slavery by making them property, noble slaveholders will have the authority to save them from the savagery of white people. So what Fitzhugh wants wasn't white supremacy exactly. It was a full-blown theory of authority that applied to every single aspect of life. It was his idealized Southern gentleman as the head of these so-called households with the supposed moral superiority of such people and their descendants, who we could just trust with our complete control. Of course, they can run our lives because they're going to do a better job of it than we would. They're going to know what we need better than we know it ourselves. So why wouldn't I surrender all of my autonomy, all of my freedom, to that person who is going to use me in a way that is much better for me than I would ever do for myself? He wanted a world where the strong ruled and the weak were simply ruled over, granted with kindness, to be sure, but with force of violence to back it up. In his mind, what Justice looks like is submission to authority, and that fits you. He hated capitalism not because it was too oppressive, but because it wasn't oppressive enough. He wasn't trying to make people free. He was trying to make them obedient to the elites in power.
Join me next week, where I will take this episode and combine it with a part two in which we will examine how this legacy of Fitzhugh's is still manifest in our world today by looking at some real-world examples of it still continuing to bounce around you.