Is the Alt-Right the Legacy of American Slavery? (Part 2)

In part two, we fast-forward to today—where echoes of Fitzhugh’s vision have returned in surprising forms. From alt-right influencers to Silicon Valley billionaires and traditionalist politicians, a growing chorus claims that modern freedom has failed—and offers a new feudalism in its place. In this episode, we trace how the old logic of benevolent masters, dependent workers, and enforced order is being reborn through technology, nostalgia, and despair. This isn’t just a critique of capitalism. It’s a counter-revolution. And it’s already shaping the future.

Transcript

Last time on American Socrates, we looked at a man named George Fitzhugh, a 19th century pro slavery writer who made a shocking claim that freedom was a lie and people were better off under the control of a strong and paternal ruler. He defended slavery, not just as an economic system, but as a moral one, one where elites ruled and the masses obeyed for their own good. But this episode isn't just about history. It's about what that legacy looks like now, because Fitzhugh's dream didn't disappear when slavery ended; it adapted. Today, you're going to hear how the same logic of hierarchy, dependence and manufactured security is still at work, especially in the way modern right-wing thinkers respond to the failures of capitalism. This isn't about nostalgia for the past. It's about a dangerous blueprint for the future.
Welcome to American Socrates. I'm your host, Charles M. Rupert. Let's jump right back in. Shall we? You might think Fitzhugh is just a footnote in the history of slavery, this bizarre figure whose ideas died with the Confederacy. But sadly, that's not the case. His core argument that freedom is a myth, that equality is dangerous and that some people are better off being ruled never really disappeared. It changed clothes today. You can hear echoes of it in some of the loudest voices in our politics, in our culture, even in our technological sectors. Let's walk through a few places where this logic still shows up. And I want to explain to you how it's there, how it has its roots in this idea of domestic slavery for everybody. Let's start at the extreme then the far right. Nick Fuentes, for example, the leader of the so-called America First movement, talks like a critic of capitalism. He attacks globalism, immigration and liberal democracy. He says they destroy identity, and they erode culture, and they unleash a brand of chaos. He even borrows language from the left, complaining about workers being exploited, markets, not caring about families, the system being broken in all of these important and fundamental ways to the health of individuals. But where does he go with that critique? It's not towards the system of justice, not towards a kind of solidarity with other people, Fuentes. A solution is a return to hierarchy a society ruled by Christian white men. He isn't against capitalism because it's oppressive. He's against it because it pretends everyone is equal, at the very least equal under the law. He Himself, however, believes that those like him are, in fact, superior to others. Christians are superior to all other religions. Whites are superior to all other races, men are superior to all sexes and genders. Those are Fitzhugh's ideas coming out of Fuentes' mouth. He might not even be aware of it, but the influence has come down to him in such a way that he has picked up on these threads and developed strings of thought that originated in domestic slavery. You see this same pattern in the Trad movement online. These are communities that are pushing a mix of nostalgia, aesthetics, traditionalism, and outright reaction to things. They'll say things like, Capitalism destroys the family. Consumerism emasculates men, but their fix again here isn't economic reform. It's rigidifying gender roles. It's white identity politics and a return to some sort of patriarchal order. In short, they sound anti-capitalist, but they aren't fighting for a freedom in which people can be themselves. They're fighting for a form of control where they themselves get to be the new masters. The same sort of logic doesn't just live on the fringes, though you can also find it sometimes softly spoken, sometimes shouted very loudly in mainstream politics as well, in both the US and in Europe, right-wing populism often wraps itself in concern for the working class. Leaders talk about things like protecting jobs, protecting industries, defending traditions and restoring national pride. It sounds like they are appealing to a sense of solidarity. Just join me and I will bring back the glory days. But they're not. That's not what they're really trying to do. The real villains in this story aren't the corporations or. Oligarchs, they're immigrants, they're feminists, they're people of color, they're trans and queer people, socialists, college professors, liberal church members. The idea is that the elites have betrayed the true citizens by empowering the wrong people, and then all of this could be fixed if people would just empower the right people, meaning themselves. If you surrender to Me, If You Give all of your authority over to me, if you let me rule you, I will be a kinder, gentler master than the sort of freedom you get right now from the capitalist system. Take the great replacement theory as a kind of extended example of this same sort of logic. It's the belief that white populations are being deliberately replaced through immigration, the argument that Biden let millions of people into the country to vote for him, even though these are brown people with a different culture and a different way of doing things. And it's there to destroy the true Americans, who are all, of course, white. It's dressed up as a concern for jobs or for protecting culture or something like that, but underneath it's just racial panic. It's just the idea that, like there are other people who do things differently than the way I do things, coming into my country, and that should be stopped. I don't like that. It always ends in the same place, too. Calls for more control, for more shutdown of the borders, for more law enforcement, those sorts of things. A more "big brother", totalitarian society is just absolutely necessary here to protect us. Here again, we can see Fitzhugh's Ghost walking among us. He argued that enslaving people was a way to protect them from the chaos of capitalism. Yes, you have to give up your freedoms, but it's actually better for you. It's okay to give up your freedoms. Now, populist politicians argue that authoritarian rule is necessary to protect, quote, the people, unquote, from globalism and multiculturalism, from DEI and from any sort of social change. It's the same structure. Capitalism failed you, but equality is worse. What you need then isn't freedom. What you need is us to be in charge. You need me to be your ruler. Just put me in power, and I will protect you. It's a simpler game, right? If these people, these masters, are in power, all you have to do is be loyal, is do what they tell you, and you'll be taken care of. If you're not loyal, if you want to do something different or something for yourself, well, then you deserve whatever the Master does to you. Another example of this is the quieter but just as dangerous echo of Fitzhugh coming from the top tiers of Silicon Valley. I'm thinking of people like like Peter Thiel, the billionaire who helped found PayPal, and with his one-time partner, Elon Musk, who invests heavily in right-wing causes. Thiel once wrote that he no longer believes democracy and freedom are compatible. Freedom for Thiele comes in the form of control of ownership. This is exactly what Fitzhugh was trying to say he's rediscovered Fitzhugh in a pedestrian way. Thiel and others like him talk openly about restoring a kind of natural aristocracy, the idea that the smart, the talented, the exceptional people that they see themselves as, should rule without any kind of check or limitation on their power. They see democracy as somehow inefficient, that it doesn't work well because it doesn't allow them to do everything that they would like to do. They see average citizens then as obstacles, or at worse, as enemies to some sort of techno-utopia that they envision. They all believe we could be jetting around Mars by now, except, you know, poor people just don't want their kids to die off. So they imagine a future where powerful individuals, or more likely, corporations, benevolent ones, to be sure, guide society more directly than it's allowed to under capitalism. I mean, this sounds a lot like central planning, but this is somehow right-wing and positive central planning. In some cases, this is going to take the form of corporate paternalism. Big companies that offer housing or food or wellness programs and they take care of their workers like some kind of 21st-century plantation. It's marketed as a humane form of capitalism, but what it really is is cultivated dependency. It's a life where your boss isn't just your boss, he's also your landlord. He's your doctor. He. He's your support system. He's the guy who decides what groceries you'll get to buy. He's the guy who decides what kind of house you'll get to live in, what kind of car you'll get to drive, what kind of video games you'll get to play. It's Fitzhugh's dream updated for the computer age. He argued that the cruelest thing you could do to somebody was to tell them that they were free and then leave them unprotected in a brutal competitive market against people who were way smarter and way better, and to be fair, had a lot more money than they did in competition with a billionaire, you're always going to lose, and today, some of our most powerful people agree with Fitzhugh and his solution, and many of them are ultra rich. Their solution was not to give more people democracy, but to give them smarter, richer rulers who know what's best for them and could simply tell them how to live their lives. This is a return to the company town, the Pullman town for the modern age, the idea that you'll work for some big tech company and they'll own you in every conceivable way, but that somehow that's better for you in a way that then you're doing right now. You lose your autonomy, you lose your freedom, you lose your ability to determine what you want for yourself, but you gain some sort of economic security, and if you don't like that, then you can go pound sand. They'll come for you with guns. Examples. Don't just stop here. Take the wave of online masculinity influencers, guys like Andrew Tate, even some of the tamer manosphere voices, they start with real pain. Men are struggling. They're isolated. They're lonely. The old patriarchal way of domineering over women just isn't seeming to work for them anymore. They're unsure what the role of a man is in society, and that makes society feel kind of hostile towards them. And that's somewhat true. There is something of an identity crisis here, men are having been asked to evolve beyond the old way of doing things, by feminists, by progressives
and so on.
But the solutions that these guys are peddling, guys like Tate and these other you know, man bros, isn't some sort of healing or growing or solidarity. It's a return to traditional hierarchy. They say things like, be a real man, reject equality. That's some sort of feminist lie. Their fantasies of order mean returning to these rigid gender roles where men command and women are meant to obey. That's again, Fitzhugh's logic wrapped in this protein shake, swigging steroid raging sense of masculinity, the market chewed you up. Yeah, fine. But instead of fixing systemic problems that affect you and many other people, they want to crown a new king, and if you support this king early enough, you might get to be a knight in the new round table; there will always be losers. That's the price of restoring order, they say. But let's just make sure that those losers are women or queers or somebody else other than you, or another example, consider the absolute war on public education that some people on the right are waging right now across the country, politicians like Ron DeSantis in Florida, Greg Abbott in Texas, or Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansas, are leading a movement they say is about protecting kids and restoring parental rights, and it starts with the familiar frustrations. Schools are failing. Students. Kids are confused. Reading levels are down. Families are under attack. It's a real fear. I've complained myself on this podcast about the way that grades, for example, kill education. There are problems with education. There are problems with the way that we do education, but the solutions being offered here are not meant to address the actual problems. They are meant to grab power. If you look at what they're doing with these sorts of problems, you can see that the solutions don't actually address them. They're doing things like banning books about race or gender or history, as if keeping kids ignorant about these things is going to somehow fix the problem. They're attacking teachers for discussing inequality or identity or just any problem that the US is actually facing again. It's as if, if we just pretend hard enough, somehow our problems are all going to go away. They're forcing schools to post things that they believe in, like the 10 Commandments, or teach people patriotic narratives or, most recently, that the 2020 election was being highly contested and was just riddled with fraud. That is, they're removing teachers' discretion and forcing them to spread whatever their right-wing narrative is, whether it's backed up by evidence or not, to children in schools. This isn't about improving education then it's about control. It's about creating a system where kids aren't encouraged to think, but are being told what to think. They don't want to fix a broken institution. They want to turn that institution into a pipeline for ideological conformity that serves their interests. Again, Fitzhugh would feel right at home here. He believed that the answer to chaos was hierarchy enforced from above. Strong indoctrination should replace education. In his view, groupthink and common sense should replace critical thinking and good sense and authority to replace independence in thought and in speech. Those are all things meant for Masters, critical thinking, going to college, and learning to understand problems and address them individually. That is what masters do. You can see it. And the same politicians who are complaining about, you know, colleges being so woke and so liberal, and they're just indoctrination factories, are still sending their kids to those schools. You know, you can complain all you want about the Ivy Leagues talking about how woke they are and stuff like that. They're not sending their kids to trade school. None of them are. They are still sending them to those colleges because those colleges do teach critical thinking. They do teach good sense. They do teach kids to think for themselves and stand on their own two feet. Today's cultural warriors just want something that's not an open society, but something that's a carefully controlled one where those in charge define what's true and everybody else is just meant to fall in line or go to jail. And this is because, in their version of order, freedom itself is the problem. Okay? One last example. Let's look at Jordan Peterson, who has quite literally made a career out of this kind of logic. He's not shouting about men's rights on TikTok like Tate, but his message hits a lot of the same chords, and for a lot of people, it does sound like wisdom. He's more measured, he's even earnest and compassionate. He starts with ideas like this: life is hard. You're probably feeling lost. You feel like no one's telling you the truth. Maybe you're being manipulated, and all of that's real. He's not wrong about any of that. People are overwhelmed by the modern chaos, by the economic, cultural and personal problems. They are being manipulated. This is where Peterson steps in, and he says, Well, that's because you've abandoned order. But by order here, Peterson means hierarchy, not the biological hierarchy or the cultural hierarchy or the Spiritual Hierarchy. Things that he complains that cultural Marxism does. His vision seems to be a restoration of some sort of old order into a permanent new form. Clean your room like your parents say. Know your place in society and don't step out of it. Respect the dominant hierarchy, because that's how lobsters do things and look it works for them. This feels like rebellion. He's offering like, some sort of rejection of authority, like some sort of freedom itself. But in fact, it's the very opposite. What he's offering is rank. It's a kind of benevolent submission, where life gets better when people simply accept the inequality as natural, and don't try to rock the boat, don't try to step out of line, you know, stay in your lane. It's the same core logic then that fits you is using people aren't equal so if you want stability, you're going to need a strong top-down structure where everybody polices everyone else, and we just simply call that natural. We're going to need someone in charge, and you need someone underneath as well. Now, Peterson doesn't call this slavery, obviously, but the pattern is familiar. He offers relief from chaos by reasserting a sense of domination from above, a sense of control, especially over those who he deems as weaker or more emotional or less disciplined. So yeah, the tune sounds the same. And maybe capitalism is a jungle. But instead of clearing a path through that jungle, Peterson tells you to bow to the alphas and find comfort in your rung on their ladder. All of this is Fitzhugh's legacy, the legacy of slavery in the United States. This is what makes Fitzhugh more than a historical curiosity. He was honest about capitalism's failings, but instead of demanding justice, he demanded obedience, and that same move that bait and switch is still happening today, whether it's a white nationalist live stream, a populist campaign rally somewhere, or a TEDtalk from a tech CEO, the message tends to be the same, yes, capitalism is broken, and that's why you're struggling. But don't fight for equality. Don't unionize, don't work together. Instead, fight for your place in the new hierarchy, make me your king, and all reward your loyalty with largesse. What began as a defense of slavery, then has quite simply become a reusable template for authoritarianism and techno feudalism, and if we don't recognize that logic, we don't call it out when we see it, then history won't just repeat itself. It'll evolve into some new, slimier beast, slouching its way towards Bethlehem to be born. So what do we do when the critics of capitalism are half right, but their solutions are traps that will make us worse off, not better off? Well, we don't just reject the bad answers. We build better ones. More than anything, we need a vision on the left, a rival to the technological Neo feudalism, something that will serve as a long-term address of the failures of capitalism, not just the patchwork solutions that liberals have slapped onto the leaky holes for the last few decades. I've already offered my suggestion of a world where rent is abolished and an income is guaranteed. I'm sure to talk about that more in future episodes. But for now, let's just look at some practical ways to get started. The first is that we need to support economic democracy. If the problem is exploitation, the answer can't be authoritarianism. It has to be shared power. Organizations like Cooperation Jackson and Mississippi are creating networks of worker-owned cooperatives rooted in black self-determination and democratic control. That idea can be utilized then and repurposed all over the United States. In Philadelphia, LISC, which stands for Local Initiative Support Corporation, has a community-based economic inclusion project that is working to dismantle barriers to economic mobility through place-based strategies that Center Community Voices more nationally, groups like jobs with justice, and Working America organize for labor rights and economic fairness, pushing back against the corporate dominance of Washington. A second thing that we can do is invest in community-led alternatives to capitalism. We don't need to, and obviously can't wait for top-down solutions to come to fix things, but communities are already out there building their own solutions. Do you want to support farmers directly? You could join a local CSA, which stands for Community Supported Agriculture, where you buy shares in whatever the farm's produce for that year is going to be and then receive that produce throughout the season. The global tapestry of alternatives connects grassroots movements worldwide that are creating ecological, feminist and post-capitalist economies without any sort of hierarchy. In the USA, prosperity now supports inclusive economic policies and community wealth, building initiatives that prioritize equity over profit and race forward works to advance racial justice through research, media and practice, ensuring communities of colors are at the forefront of systemic change. The point here is to get involved with the people around you, rather than further isolate yourself and develop a further sense of dependence on hierarchy and the structures of capitalism for your support and well-being. If you truly want to be free, you're going to need other people to help you with that. Independence must not be confused for isolation. It never works that way. No king is a king without being dependent upon his subjects and their recognition of Him as King; we are either all free together or none of us are. A third thing that we can do is re-imagine public safety and care. Instead of relying on coercion, some cities are investing in types of care. Seattle's community-assisted response and engagement or care department diverts police funds into non police crisis teams focusing on mental health and community support. The Milwaukee's LiberateMKE campaign successfully redirected police funding to youth programs and affordable. Housing, demonstrating the power of community-led budgeting. These disrupt the school to prison pipeline by shifting our response from one of punishing those who are struggling and instead helping them to not struggle without and and this is the really important thing that's different from Fitzhughes vision without cultivating their dependence on us or forcing our control on them. This help has to not come at a price. A fourth thing that we could do is just simply stay politically engaged. Authoritarianism thrives on disengagement, on ignorance and on apathy; just not bothering is all that a dictator needs you to do? Organizations like Fair Fight are combating things like voter suppression and promoting fair elections, ensuring that marginalized voices are actually heard. The Equal Justice Initiative challenges racial and economic injustice through legal advocacy and public education, working to dismantle systemic inequalities. The Movement Voter Project is a one-stop shop for investing in year round organizing and movement building to shift culture, win elections and transform policy. They help democratic and other progressive donors channel funds to organizations building power to transform communities, states and the country over the long term. Finally, we also need to focus on building society, and not just nostalgia. The past that's idolized by Fitzhugh and his modern equivalents wasn't better for everyone; it was only better for people just like them. Movements like the Poor People's Campaign continue the legacy of leaders like Fannie Lou Hamer, fighting for economic justice and human rights across racial and class lines. The Transgender Law Center advocates for a world where everyone can live safely and authentically free from discrimination and violence. But this could be as easy as educating yourself on good history, on critical history, on why things like race matter hell, just listening to this podcast can kill the little fascist living in your heart, maybe just support your local library help other people find the support that they need, and then they'll be there for you when you inevitably need them. It's the little things that end up building big movements, and it doesn't start at the top, not without collapsing into something like authoritarian hierarchy. So in the end, Fitzhugh's arguments sound persuasive, not because he was any kind of moral genius, but because he was honest about the suffering that people were enduring. He saw that capitalism chews people up and spits them out, that it sells freedom but delivers insecurity, that markets leave people rootless, disposable and alone, and that in that diagnosis, he's absolutely correct, but then he offered a cure that was worse than the disease, a permanent hierarchy, an enforced dependence, slavery, rebranded as economic security. That's the trick. That's the dastardliness of this new right, and it's still happening today. A lot of modern ideologies, especially on the reactionary right, start by naming real pain, alienation, exploitation, chaos, loneliness, economic desperation, hopelessness, despair. But then they smuggle in a solution that's more about controlling people than helping them. They say, we'll put the right people in charge. We'll shut the wrong people out of the country. Everyone needs to stay in their place. Everyone needs to be loyal. Simply obey, and it's all going to work out. This is not a blueprint for justice. It's the blueprint for domination. If you're disillusioned with capitalism, good, you should be but be careful, some of the loudest critiques out there come with hidden baggage. They want to replace the market's cruelty not with compassion or equality, but with a stricter, more natural chain of command. I'm giving you permission to agree with Fitzhugh, in and of the sense that he's right about capitalism and its problems, its instability, its alienation, it's exploitation. But just because he's right about that doesn't mean we have to agree that his solution is better, that it will fix our problems. It probably won't, not unless you're already a billionaire. It's okay to agree with someone on their main complaint and then reject their solution. That's the whole point of this episode, really, is to show you that you can find solidarity with people who have a different view from you. The right and the left seem very united to me in their idea that capitalism is broken. The division comes almost entirely from what the solution should look like. True liberation doesn't mean hierarchy with a. Softer face. It means abolishing rent, ending enforced dependency, and creating real material freedom through some sort of guaranteed income and a decentralized power structure.