Posts Tagged ‘capitalism’

Fascism Becomes Background Noise

Posted: September 3, 2026 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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What Happens When Everyone Becomes a Fascist?

There is a word we have become remarkably comfortable using. Fascist.

We use it for politicians, parties, governments, corporations, institutions, strangers online, and people who disagree with us.

Sometimes the accusation is justified. Sometimes it isn’t. That distinction matters.

Fascism is not simply another word for bad politics. It is a historically specific political phenomenon with a documented history, recognizable characteristics, internal variations, and decades of scholarship attempting to distinguish it from authoritarianism, nationalism, populism and other forms of political repression.

The word itself has always been contested. Fascist movements fought over its meaning. Political movements have used it as a weapon. Scholars still disagree about its precise boundaries.

But contested does not mean meaningless.

The more interesting problem is what happens when a historically specific political concept becomes a generalized political insult.

Because if everyone is a fascist, eventually nobody is.

And if nobody is, we may become less capable of recognizing one when we actually encounter one.

Fascism was not Always a Comment-Section Insult

Fascism emerged in the early twentieth century, most famously through Benito Mussolini’s movement in Italy. Nazi Germany developed its own distinctive form, combining authoritarian nationalism with racial ideology, antisemitism, expansionism, and genocidal violence.

The two regimes were not identical, and fascism has never been one perfectly uniform ideology. But that does not mean the word can mean whatever we want it to mean.

Scholars have identified recurring characteristics including ultranationalism, political violence, rejection of liberal democracy, leader-centered politics, the creation of internal enemies, mass mobilization, and visions of national rebirth.

Different scholars weight these characteristics differently. That debate is useful. It reminds us that fascism requires analysis rather than a simple checklist. It also gives us some necessary distinctions.

  • Authoritarianism is not automatically fascism.
  • Nationalism is not automatically fascism.
  • Conservatism is not automatically fascism.
  • Populism is not automatically fascism.
  • Political repression is not automatically fascism.

A politician behaving badly is not automatically fascist. A government making a cruel or unjust decision is not automatically fascist.

And calling someone fascist does not make them fascist. Evidence does. That should be the starting point.

When a Warning Becomes a Weapon

Political language does more than describe reality. It shapes how we interpret it. Calling someone a fascist can therefore be an analytical claim and a rhetorical act at the same time.

It can mean: This person represents a dangerous political tendency. That can be a legitimate warning. But it can also become shorthand for: This person is beyond the boundaries of acceptable politics.

Once that happens, the word stops helping us distinguish political phenomena and starts helping us sort people into moral camps. This isn’t new.

Historian Stanley Payne has examined the complicated “career” of the concept of fascism and the semantic changes surrounding the term since the 1930s. Fascist movements themselves understood the political value of controlling language. Mussolini’s regime worked to attach “fascism” to the state, nation, empire, and political loyalty.

The fight over the word did not begin after fascism. The fight over the word was part of fascist politics itself. Today the word operates inside a different machine.

Social media and cable news reward speed, outrage, tribal identity and certainty. A careful explanation of political characteristics does not travel as quickly as a one-word condemnation.

“Fascist” is efficient. It tells your audience who the villain is. It tells your tribe that you recognize the villain. And it can end the conversation before the investigation begins.

That is where a useful political concept starts becoming political ammunition.

When Everything Becomes Fascism

Imagine a smoke alarm that goes off every time you make toast.

At first, you investigate. Eventually, you become annoyed. Then you stop listening. That is the danger of semantic inflation.

If “fascist” can mean authoritarian government, corporate power, censorship, a political opponent, an unpopular policy, capitalism, socialism or simply someone we find intolerable, the word can retain enormous emotional force while losing its ability to distinguish one political phenomenon from another.

The result is not merely bad vocabulary. It is bad perception. If everything is fascism, we lose the ability to identify what specifically makes something fascist.

And then something worse can happen. People begin treating the accusation itself as noise. The warning system still works. Nobody listens to it.

That is how a word designed to identify danger can become part of the environment that makes danger harder to see.

Fascism and Capitalism

This is where the history becomes uncomfortable.

There is a popular argument that fascism is simply capitalism in its most extreme form. Another argument is that fascism and capitalism are fundamentally incompatible. History supports neither simplification. Fascist governments did not simply abolish private enterprise.

In Nazi Germany, private businesses continued to operate. At the same time, the regime exercised enormous control over economic activity, redirected production toward military objectives, destroyed independent labor organizations, and incorporated economic institutions into a political system built around dictatorship, racial persecution, and war.

Businesses participated in processes including the expropriation of Jewish property and the exploitation of forced labor.

The relationship between private economic interests and the fascist state was not simply ideological agreement.
  • Profit mattered.
  • Institutional survival mattered.
  • Access to contracts and resources mattered.
  • Power mattered.

A company does not necessarily need to believe in an ideology to discover that cooperation with the government controlling its operating environment is useful.

Fascism did not require private ownership to disappear. It could subordinate economic activity to political objectives while allowing private businesses to operate and profit.

Nor does that mean capitalism naturally produces fascism. It doesn’t.

The historical lesson is more precise: Private economic power and authoritarian political power can coexist, cooperate, bargain, and become mutually useful without becoming identical.

That relationship is not confined to the history books.

A Recent Example

Look at India.

Recent scholarship has explicitly examined the relationship between Hindutva, fascism, neoliberal development, and global corporate capital. One 2025 Oxford chapter describes contemporary Hindutva as a Hindu supremacist fascist project increasingly intertwined with neoliberal global capital accumulation. Another study of Modi’s Gujarat model describes a political economy combining top-down development, favoritism toward big business, violently practiced Hindu nationalism, and repression of dissent.

Other scholarship is more cautious about the precise fascism label but reaches a related conclusion about the political economy. Research on Modi’s India describes an authoritarian project combining Hindu nationalism with neoliberal policy themes, while a 2023 study of authoritarian neoliberalism in India examines the alliance between right-wing authoritarian forces and neoliberal capital and its effects on labor, inequality and dispossession.

The point is not that India is simply another Nazi Germany. It isn’t. The point is that we now have a contemporary capitalist democracy in which scholars are documenting a relationship between majoritarian nationalism, authoritarian political practices, repression of dissent, market-oriented economic policy and concentrated economic power.

That is worth knowing. It also gives us a better vocabulary. The relationship between authoritarian politics and capitalism does not have to look like a dictatorship abolishing the market.

Sometimes it looks like the market continuing to operate while political power becomes increasingly centralized, dissent becomes increasingly costly, and economic policy increasingly serves particular concentrations of capital.

Turkey provides another example of this broader phenomenon. Scholars studying the Erdoğan era have described the country’s trajectory as “authoritarian neoliberalism,” in which executive centralization, autocratic legalism, cronyism, privatization, commodification, and the criminalization of opposition became intertwined.

That does not make every authoritarian neoliberal government fascist. It does demonstrate something important: Capitalism does not automatically immunize a society against authoritarianism.

And authoritarianism does not require capitalism to disappear. Those two facts are enough to make the relationship worth watching.

What are we looking at in America?

This is where historical comparison becomes dangerous if we stop thinking.

America in 2026 is not Nazi Germany. It is not Mussolini’s Italy.

The United States remains a constitutional democracy, and Freedom House continues to classify it as “Free,” even while its 2026 score declined and the organization identified concerns involving political polarization, institutional dysfunction, executive power, political violence, media concentration, and pressure on democratic institutions.

Democratic erosion is not the same thing as fascism.

But “we are still a democracy” does not mean there is nothing worth examining. Several contemporary conditions are measurable.

Trust in the federal government is near historic lows. Pew Research Center found that only 17 percent of Americans in 2025 said they trusted the federal government to do what is right most or all of the time.

Americans increasingly view political opponents through intensely negative emotional lenses.

Political violence is another measurable concern. A 2025 nationally representative study found that 35.6 percent of respondents considered violence justified for at least one of twenty political objectives. The researchers also found that the year-to-year increase was modest and that willingness to personally commit political violence was substantially lower.

Another 15 percent strongly or very strongly agreed that having a strong leader was more important than having democracy.

None of this demonstrates a fascist America. It demonstrates something more useful: authoritarian attitudes, political polarization, institutional distrust, and tolerance for political violence exist at measurable levels within American society.

That is a condition worth examining. It is not a diagnosis.

Follow the Money

The political system also exists inside an economy characterized by substantial concentrations of wealth and economic power.

The Federal Reserve’s distributional data show enormous disparities in ownership of financial assets between the wealthiest Americans and the bottom half of the population. Organized labor is substantially weaker than it was several generations ago.

In 1983, 20.1 percent of U.S. wage and salary workers were union members. In 2025, the figure was 10 percent. The private-sector rate was only 5.9 percent.

Again, none of this proves fascism.
  • Economic inequality is not fascism.
  • Corporate concentration is not fascism.
  • Declining union membership is not fascism.

But they tell us something about the distribution of power. And that matters because democracy does not exist only inside voting booths.

People encounter power at work. They encounter it when negotiating wages, deciding whether they can leave a job, dealing with dominant employers, confronting concentrated markets, or trying to make their political voices heard.

Economic power can become political power when it becomes sufficiently concentrated. That does not make concentrated wealth fascist. It does mean that any serious examination of modern political power should ask how economic institutions interact with the state.

History gives us reason to ask the question. It does not give us permission to skip the evidence.

The Danger of Looking for a Costume

One of the easiest ways to misunderstand fascism is to imagine that it arrives fully formed.
  • The dictator appears.
  • The uniforms appear.
  • The flags appear.
  • The secret police arrive.
  • Everyone knows what is happening.

History is rarely that clear while it is happening. Political systems are built through institutions. Institutions operate through incentives. And incentives change behavior.

A corporation does not have to become ideologically fascist to find cooperation with authoritarian power useful. A voter does not have to hate democracy to become comfortable with a strong leader. A political party does not have to abolish elections to weaken democratic norms. A government does not have to become a dictatorship overnight to accumulate more power than surrounding institutions can effectively restrain.

This is why historical comparison is useful when handled carefully. History does not give us a script. It gives us patterns worth investigating. And this is where the language problem comes back.

The Word Can Become Camouflage

If every authoritarian politician is simply “fascist,” then authoritarianism becomes a footnote. If every instance of corporate power is “fascism,” then the mechanisms of economic power disappear beneath the label. If every political disagreement is “fascism,” then political repression becomes indistinguishable from ordinary disagreement.

And if every use of state power is “fascist,” we stop asking the most important question: What kind of power is actually being exercised, against whom, and for what purpose?

That question is harder. It requires research. It requires history. It requires following money. It requires looking at institutions instead of personalities. It requires being willing to discover that the people we dislike may not fit the label we wanted to give them. And sometimes it requires discovering that the label fits more closely than we wanted to admit.

That is the uncomfortable part. Because precision is not a shield for our preferred side. It cuts both ways.

So What Should We Call it?

Don’t begin with the label. Begin with the behavior.
  • What is happening?
  • Who has power?
  • How is that power being used?
  • What happens to opposition?
  • What happens to independent institutions?
  • What happens to organized labor?
  • What happens to minorities and designated internal enemies?
  • Is political violence being normalized?
  • Is a leader being elevated above institutions?
  • Is national identity being defined around exclusion and a promise of national rebirth?
  • Are democratic constraints being weakened?
  • Are economic policies being insulated from democratic pressure while concentrated private interests benefit?
  • Are these developments isolated?
  • Or are they reinforcing one another?

Then ask the historical question: Does the pattern actually resemble fascism?

If it does, say so. If it doesn’t, don’t.

The point is not to make the word safer. The point is to make the analysis harder to bullshit.

Recovering the Word

There is a strange irony in all of this. We live in an age obsessed with political labels while becoming increasingly impatient with the work required to understand them.

Everything needs a side. Everything needs a villain. Everything needs a caption. Everything needs to be reduced to a clip that can be consumed before the next outrage arrives.

“Fascist” fits that environment perfectly. One word. Maximum emotional payload. Minimum explanation.

That is precisely why we should resist it. Not because fascism is too strong a word. Because it is too important a word to waste.

Fascism is real. It happened. It killed people. It destroyed institutions. It mobilized ordinary citizens against designated enemies. It subordinated independent organizations. It used violence as politics. It made loyalty to the nation and the leader more important than liberal democratic constraints. And it did not always arrive wearing a costume that announced what it was.

So when the word becomes a generic insult, something more than vocabulary is lost. We lose a piece of our political eyesight. And there is another reason to care.

The modern outrage economy has learned that fear sells. Anger sells. Tribal identity sells.

A frightened population is easier to divide. A divided population is easier to market to. A population that spends all day fighting over which side is fascist has less time to ask who owns the platform, who profits from the conflict, who benefits from the distraction, and what economic and political structures are operating underneath the spectacle.

That does not mean some secret cabal is sitting in a room manufacturing every argument. It means incentives matter. The machine does not need a mastermind. It needs engagement. And we keep feeding it.

That is where the capitalism question becomes impossible to separate completely from the language question. A political culture organized around outrage exists inside an economic system that can monetize attention, conflict, and division.

Political power can become concentrated. Economic power can become concentrated. Media power can become concentrated. And when those concentrations reinforce one another, democracy can weaken without anyone needing to formally announce that democracy has ended.

That is the part worth watching. Not the costume. Not the comment section. Not the person screaming “fascist” loudest.

The structure underneath.

If Everyone is a Fascist, Nobody is

That is not an argument for silence. It is an argument for precision.
  • Call authoritarianism authoritarianism.
  • Call political repression political repression.
  • Call nationalism nationalism.
  • Call economic exploitation economic exploitation.
  • Call concentrated power concentrated power.
  • Call political violence political violence.
  • And if the evidence shows fascism, call it fascism.
But be prepared to show your work.
  • What historical characteristics are present?
  • What evidence supports the comparison?
  • What characteristics are absent?
  • What alternative explanation fits?
  • What incentives are operating?
  • Who benefits?
  • Who loses power?
  • What institutions are being weakened?
  • What happens to people who resist?
  • And what evidence would change your mind?

Those questions do not tell you what to think. They give you something better. A way to think without being handed the conclusion.

Because the greatest danger of turning fascist into a meaningless word is not that somebody gets called a name they don’t deserve. It is that we train ourselves to hear the word and stop listening. And then, when something genuinely dangerous begins operating in plain sight, we may mistake the warning for just another piece of noise.

Fascism does not become less dangerous because we misuse its name. We simply become less capable of seeing it.

So protect the word. Not for fascists. For everyone else. Because political language is a tool.

Use it carelessly, and it becomes a weapon against your own understanding. Use it precisely and it becomes what it was supposed to be all along: a way of seeing power clearly.

The Politics of the Commons

Posted: August 13, 2026 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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What happens when a society starts asking whether everything should have a price?

For most of the last century, socialism carried a particular weight in American politics. It was less a political philosophy than a warning label.

Socialism meant government control. Communism. The Soviet Union. Central planning. Bread lines. The loss of individual freedom. For generations of Americans, the argument was settled before it began.

Capitalism meant freedom. Socialism meant the opposite. But something has changed.

In 2025, New York City elected Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, as mayor of the nation’s largest city. He was sworn in on January 1, 2026. A political label that once made national candidates nervous had become part of a winning campaign for one of America’s most prominent political offices. Mamdani is not the beginning of this shift.

Bernie Sanders spent years making democratic socialism part of the American political conversation. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez helped turn that conversation into a generational movement. In August 2026, progressive Democrat Abdul El-Sayed defeated establishment-backed Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, another sign of the political left’s growing influence, although El-Sayed himself is better described as a progressive than a democratic socialist.

The left is not simply talking about socialism anymore. It is asking voters to govern with some of its ideas.

But perhaps the more interesting question is not whether America is becoming socialist. It is why socialism has become politically thinkable again.

Because Americans have been having this argument for a very long time. Sometimes, we just haven’t called it socialism.

The Things We Already Share

Imagine introducing the public library to America today.

A politician proposes building a publicly funded institution where anyone can walk inside, borrow books without paying, use computers, access the internet, attend programs, or simply sit somewhere warm. There is no profit requirement. The service exists because we have decided that access to information benefits the community.

Would we call that socialism? Probably not. We call it a library.

The same is true of fire departments. Nobody asks whether a burning house is profitable enough to justify putting it out. We decided that fire protection is a public good. So we tax ourselves to maintain the institution before anyone needs it.

The same principle applies to public schools, roads, sanitation systems, parks, public transit, and countless other institutions.

The point is not that a library is secretly socialism. It isn’t. The point is that America has never operated according to a pure market model.

We have always maintained a commons: resources, institutions, and services we collectively decide should exist for public benefit. The argument has never really been whether the commons should exist. The argument is where its boundaries should be.

America Has Been Here Before

History makes the argument more complicated.

When Franklin Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933, the United States was in the depths of the Great Depression. The federal government responded by dramatically expanding its role in American economic life.

The New Deal created programs for employment, infrastructure, financial regulation, agricultural support, and social insurance. The Social Security Act of 1935 established federal old-age benefits, unemployment insurance, and assistance for vulnerable Americans.

The United States did not become a centrally planned socialist economy. Private property remained. Private enterprise remained. Markets remained.

But Americans increasingly accepted that some economic risks were too consequential to leave entirely to individuals.
  • Old age.
  • Unemployment.
  • Economic collapse.

The New Deal did not abolish capitalism. It put boundaries around it. That distinction matters. Capitalism and collective provision have never been mutually exclusive in the United States. The American economy has always been a hybrid.

The question has always been how much of that hybrid should belong to the market and how much to the public.

When the Market Becomes the Default Answer

For several decades, American political thought moved strongly in one direction.

Government was increasingly treated as the problem. Markets were increasingly treated as the solution.

There were good reasons for some of this. Markets can be remarkably effective. Competition can drive innovation. Private enterprise can respond quickly to demand. Profit can provide powerful incentives to create things people actually want.

Government can be slow, expensive, bureaucratic, and profoundly incompetent. None of that should be ignored because democratic socialism is having a political moment. But markets have limitations too.

A market does not ask whether something is necessary. It asks whether someone can pay for it. Those are not the same question.

A functioning housing market can coexist with millions of renters spending unsustainable portions of their income on housing. In 2023, more than 21 million U.S. renters, or 49.7% of renters, that the Census calculated, spent more than 30% of their income on housing.

A functioning healthcare market can coexist with enormous medical debt. KFF estimates that Americans owe at least $220 billion in medical debt, including approximately 14 million adults who owe more than $1,000.

And a wealthy economy can coexist with widespread financial fragility. In the Federal Reserve’s latest household survey, 63% of adults said they could cover a hypothetical $400 emergency using cash or its equivalent. That means 37% could not. Thirteen percent said they could not cover the expense by any means.

None of those statistics proves that capitalism is inherently bad. They prove something narrower: Economic growth and economic security are not the same thing.

The Price of Being Poor

This may be where the renewed interest in democratic socialism becomes easier to understand. A market economy can feel remarkably liberating when you have the resources to navigate it.

If a service doesn’t work, buy another one. If housing becomes expensive, move. If healthcare is inadequate, find a better plan. If transportation doesn’t work, buy a car. If wages are inadequate, invest.

But those choices depend on something that isn’t distributed equally: the ability to absorb risk.

A person with savings can survive an unexpected bill. A person without savings may have to borrow.

A homeowner with substantial equity has options. A person with no assets has fewer.

A person with inherited wealth can use it as a safety net. A person without it begins an emergency from zero.

This is where arguments about capitalism can become strangely abstract. We talk about markets, incentives, GDP, productivity and efficiency. But economies are ultimately experienced by human beings.

The question isn’t simply whether the economy is growing. It is whether people can build stable lives inside it.

The Wealth Behind the Safety Net

Wealth changes the meaning of risk.

The Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts show how concentrated household wealth remains. In the first quarter of 2026, the top 1% held roughly 31% of U.S. household wealth, while the bottom 50% held roughly 4%.

The composition matters, too. The top of the distribution holds enormous amounts of financial assets that can appreciate, generate income, and be liquidated when necessary. Households with little accumulated wealth have far less room to absorb a shock.

Income pays the bills. Wealth absorbs shocks.

Wealth buys time. It allows someone to leave a bad job, survive unemployment, help a child through school, make a down payment, absorb a medical emergency, or wait for a better opportunity. Without wealth, the same events can become existential. This is why arguments about “personal responsibility” can become incomplete.

Responsibility matters. So does the amount of room a person has to exercise it.

The Label Problem

There is another problem with the debate. Americans do not necessarily agree on what socialism means.

For some, it means public ownership of major industries. For others, it means universal healthcare.

For some, it means stronger unions, higher taxes on wealthy households, public housing, or expanded social programs. For others, it still means Soviet-style communism.

Those are not the same thing. Democratic socialism is not communism. Social democracy is not democratic socialism.

A mixed economy is not a centrally planned economy. And a public library is not evidence that the United States secretly became the Soviet Union.

These distinctions matter because political language can become so imprecise that the label replaces the argument.

There is an important warning here for the left, too. If “socialism” becomes a catch-all word for every policy someone likes, the word loses analytical meaning. If it means everything, it explains nothing.

Democratic Socialism Gets No Free Pass

Taking democratic socialism seriously does not mean giving it a free pass. Quite the opposite.

If the movement wants to govern rather than merely protest, its ideas have to survive contact with reality.
  • How much should government provide?
  • How much should it cost?
  • Who pays?
  • What happens when public institutions become inefficient?
  • What happens when bureaucracy becomes its own interest group?
  • How much taxation is economically sustainable?
  • Where should government stop?
  • What role should private enterprise continue to play?
  • How do we preserve innovation?
  • What happens when a public program becomes an expensive institution that no longer works very well?

Government is not inherently virtuous. Markets are not inherently virtuous.

Both are systems created and operated by human beings. Both have incentives. Both can be captured by powerful interests. Both can become inefficient. Both can produce extraordinary results under the right conditions.

The point isn’t to replace one ideology with another. It is to stop pretending that either system can answer every question.

The Argument for Capitalism

There is, of course, a serious argument on the other side. Capitalism has generated enormous increases in productivity, technological innovation, consumer abundance, and material living standards. Markets coordinate millions of individual decisions without requiring a central authority to determine what people should produce or consume.

Government intervention can solve problems, but it can also create new ones. Regulation can become bureaucratic. Public programs can become inefficient. Taxation can distort incentives. Politicians can distribute resources according to political incentives rather than social needs.

Some problems attributed to capitalism may actually be failures of policy: restrictive zoning, regulatory capture, insufficient housing construction, monopolistic behavior, or poorly designed government programs.

There is also a legitimate philosophical argument that individuals should retain responsibility for some of life’s risks rather than transferring every risk to the state. That argument deserves to be taken seriously.

But it leaves us with another question: How much individual responsibility is reasonable when the consequences of failure can be catastrophic?

Democratic Socialism Meets Reality

This is where Zohran Mamdani becomes more useful than a political symbol.

His administration is now attempting to turn some of the ideas that defined his campaign into municipal policy. Housing is one example.

Mamdani’s administration has proposed creating 200,000 affordable homes over the next decade, with nearly $5 billion in planned investment over two years. It has also proposed a city-backed housing insurance program intended to reduce insurance costs for affordable and rent-stabilized housing.

His fiscal approach offers another test. The proposed FY2027 executive budget totals $124.7 billion. The administration says it closed a $12 billion inherited budget gap through savings, new revenue, and state partnership while avoiding property-tax increases and preserving long-term reserves.

These are not proof that democratic socialism works. They are not proof that it doesn’t. They are something more useful: a test.

If the movement wants to move from ideology to governance, voters now have the opportunity to evaluate what happens when those ideas encounter budgets, bureaucracy, housing markets, competing priorities, and the practical limits of municipal government.

That is how political ideas should ultimately be judged. Not by the label. By the results.

The Real Political Argument

Maybe this is why the current debate feels different from the old Cold War argument.

The question being asked by many voters isn’t necessarily: “Do you want socialism?”

It is: “Why can’t I afford to live?”

Why is housing so expensive? Why does healthcare threaten financial stability? Why can full-time employment still leave someone economically insecure? Why does an economy capable of producing extraordinary wealth struggle to give ordinary people enough room to absorb an ordinary emergency?

Those questions existed before Bernie Sanders. They existed before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They existed before Zohran Mamdani.

Perhaps the political movement isn’t creating the questions. Perhaps the questions are creating the movement.

We should be careful with that conclusion. Political momentum has many causes, and economic insecurity is not the only possible explanation. But the connection is difficult to ignore.

Gallup’s 2025 polling found that Americans overall still viewed capitalism more favorably than socialism. Among Democrats, however, the balance had flipped: 66% viewed socialism favorably compared with 42% who viewed capitalism favorably.

That is not a socialist revolution. It is something more interesting.

A political constituency is becoming less convinced that the existing economic system deserves to be treated as the unquestioned default.

The Politics of the Commons

The argument over socialism may therefore be less about socialism than we think.

It may be about something much older: What do we owe one another?

Every society answers that question whether it admits it or not. We decide that children deserve education. We decide that roads should exist even when individual roads aren’t profitable. We decide that fires should be extinguished regardless of the homeowner’s income. We decide that libraries should lend books without charging by the page.

During the New Deal, we decided that old age and unemployment should not be entirely private risks. We have repeatedly decided that some things are too important to leave entirely to the market.

The disagreement is over where we draw the line. And that line is never permanent.
  • It moved during the Progressive Era.
  • It moved during the New Deal.
  • It moved during the Great Society.
  • It moved during the neoliberal turn of the late twentieth century.

And perhaps it is moving again. That doesn’t necessarily mean America is becoming socialist. It may mean Americans are reconsidering what they believe the market is actually for.

Markets are extraordinarily useful tools. But tools have purposes. A hammer is excellent at driving a nail. It is terrible at putting out a fire.

Perhaps the question confronting American politics isn’t whether we should choose capitalism or socialism. Perhaps it is whether we’ve spent so long treating the market as the answer that we’ve forgotten to ask what question we’re actually trying to solve.

That is the politics of the commons.

The Illusion of Choice

Posted: July 20, 2026 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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Why Competition Doesn’t Always Mean Freedom

Walk into almost any grocery store, and you’ll see an aisle full of choices. Twenty brands of cereal. Thirty kinds of toothpaste. Rows of bottled water stretching farther than anyone could reasonably compare.

It looks like competition working exactly as promised. Then look a little closer. Many of those brands belong to the same handful of parent companies. The logos multiplied. The owners didn’t.

Once you see that pattern, it’s hard to stop seeing it.
  • Beer.
  • Airlines.
  • Eyewear.
  • Internet providers.
  • Streaming services.

Different industries. The same story. Competition hasn’t disappeared. It has become harder to recognize.

The same question follows us out of the grocery store and into the voting booth. Every election is presented as a battle for the country’s future. Campaigns spend billions. Ads on television and social media become impossible to escape.

Americans are told the choice has never mattered more. The disagreements are real. The stakes are real. Yet generation after generation, the country returns to the same two political parties.

One grocery aisle. One ballot. One question.

When does competition expand freedom… and when does it simply preserve the appearance of choice?

This isn’t an argument about conspiracy. It doesn’t require secret meetings or hidden puppet masters. It asks a simpler question.

What happens when different institutions respond to the same incentives?

Because patterns don’t require coordination. Sometimes they only require rewards that point everyone in the same direction.

More Brands. Fewer Owners.

Modern life offers more products than any generation before us could imagine. That’s real progress.

But abundance isn’t the same as independence.

For decades, mergers and acquisitions have quietly reshaped the American economy. Companies that once fought each other now sit inside the same corporate portfolios. Familiar brands remain because consumers recognize them. Ownership changes because investors reward scale.

The eyewear industry is one of the clearest examples. Brands that appear to compete often trace back to the same corporate ownership. The beer industry tells a similar story. So do airlines. So do meatpacking companies.

Different products. The same direction.

None of this means large companies are inherently bad. Large companies can lower prices, invest in research, and distribute products more efficiently than smaller competitors. Those are real benefits. But every benefit comes with a tradeoff.

Competition isn’t measured by how many logos fill a shelf. It’s measured by how many independent organizations make the decisions behind those logos. History has wrestled with this question before.

When Standard Oil grew so large that it dominated its industry, lawmakers concluded that competition itself needed protection. The Sherman Antitrust Act wasn’t simply about breaking up one company. It reflected a broader principle.

Markets work best when power can still be challenged. That debate never disappeared. It simply found new industries.

Two Parties. One Structure.

Politics isn’t business. Its purpose is representation, not profit. But institutions often reveal themselves through structure rather than purpose. Every presidential election begins with dozens of candidates. By Election Day, almost every path leads to the same two choices. Republican. Democrat.

The parties disagree on issues that genuinely matter.
  • Taxes.
  • Immigration.
  • Foreign policy.
  • Abortion.
  • Regulation.

Those differences deserve to be taken seriously. But they don’t answer a different question. Why has the competitive structure remained so stable for so long?

Political scientists have an answer. Duverger’s Law. In winner-take-all systems, voters eventually gravitate toward two dominant parties because voting strategically becomes more practical than voting ideally.

The rules shape the incentives. The incentives shape the outcome.

Ballot access laws, campaign finance, and debate rules reinforce that structure. None of them eliminate competition. Together, they narrow it. The ballot still offers a choice.

The range of viable choices shrinks long before Election Day. The pattern starts looking familiar.

Consumers choose among brands owned by fewer companies. Voters choose among candidates produced by fewer political organizations.

Different systems. The same incentives.

The Business of Conflict

Markets reward familiarity. Politics rewards loyalty. Media rewards attention.

Those incentives increasingly reinforce one another.

Conflict keeps audiences watching. Audiences attract advertisers. Algorithms learn what keeps people engaged. The cycle feeds itself.

This doesn’t require journalists trying to divide the country. It requires businesses responding to business incentives.

A fight between two sides is easier to package than a conversation involving ten. Complexity loses. Conflict wins.

Why It Works

The final piece isn’t corporate. Or political. It’s human.

Our brains look for shortcuts. We trust familiar brands. We return to familiar news sources. We identify with familiar political tribes.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz argued that more options don’t always make people feel freer. Beyond a certain point, endless choices create fatigue instead of confidence.

Daniel Kahneman showed that our minds rely on mental shortcuts because they have to.

Those shortcuts help us navigate the world. They also make familiar choices remarkably powerful.

The easiest choice to shape…is the one that still feels like a choice.

The Pattern

By themselves, none of these examples prove very much. Together, they tell a remarkably consistent story.

  • Markets concentrate ownership.
  • Politics concentrates viable competition.
  • Media concentrates attention.
  • Human beings concentrate familiarity.

Different institutions. Different histories. The same incentives.

The Verdict

Competition is how free societies distribute power. It disciplines markets. Challenges governments. Rewards innovation.

Without competition, institutions stop earning trust. They begin inheriting it.

That’s why the appearance of competition deserves as much attention as competition itself.

A system doesn’t have to eliminate alternatives. It only has to make meaningful alternatives harder to reach.

The shelf still looks full. The ballot still looks competitive. The debate still looks balanced. Until you begin asking a different question.

Not…“What are my choices?” But…“Who decided these were my choices?”

That’s where institutions become visible.

History rarely announces the moment freedom begins to narrow.

It happens one decision at a time. One merger. One acquisition. One election cycle. One incentive.

Until the boundaries become so familiar that they stop feeling like boundaries at all.

Every institution develops incentives to preserve itself.
  • Corporations.
  • Political parties.
  • Media organizations.
  • Universities.
  • Bureaucracies.

That’s not corruption. It’s organizational behavior.

The responsibility isn’t to eliminate institutions. It’s to keep them accountable.

To make sure competition remains real.To make sure alternatives remain possible.

Because once competition becomes performance…freedom begins shrinking long before anyone notices.

The most powerful systems rarely eliminate choice. They simply become good at deciding which choices remain.

💸 The Trillion Dollar Test 💰

Posted: June 22, 2026 in Excess and Algorithms
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A Civilization Measured by What It Tolerates

“We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” — Louis Brandeis

  • Somewhere tonight, a child will go to bed hungry.
  • Somewhere tonight, a family will sleep in a car.
  • Somewhere tonight, someone will drink unsafe water because there is no alternative.
  • Somewhere tonight, a worker will delay medical care because the bill would be too high.

And somewhere in the same world, one man has accumulated a fortune measured in a trillion. That man is Elon Musk.

In the United States alone, nearly 750,000 people experienced homelessness during the most recent federal count. Across the globe, hundreds of millions of people continue to face chronic hunger. Yet at the same time, we have entered an era where an individual can possess wealth greater than the annual economic output of many nations.

I want to be clear from the beginning: I do not believe any human being should possess a trillion dollars. Not Elon Musk. Not the next visionary entrepreneur. Not the most brilliant innovator in history. Not anyone.

This is not because I oppose success. It is not because I oppose innovation. It is not because I believe wealth itself is immoral. It is because a trillion dollars is no longer a measure of success. It is a measure of concentration. A measure of ownership. A measure of power.

And when wealth reaches that scale, the question is no longer what one individual earned. The question becomes what kind of society allows so much wealth to accumulate in one place while so many basic human needs remain unmet.

When Numbers Stop Meaning Anything

Human beings are terrible at understanding very large numbers.

A million dollars sounds enormous. A billion dollars sounds unimaginable. A trillion dollars belongs to an entirely different category.

A million seconds is about eleven days. A billion seconds is about thirty-one years. A trillion seconds is nearly thirty-two thousand years. The scale becomes almost meaningless.

At that point, wealth stops resembling personal prosperity and starts resembling infrastructure. Many governments operate with fewer resources than the fortune now controlled by a single individual. That fact alone should give us pause.

There is a difference between being wealthy and possessing wealth on a civilizational scale.

I have no objection to people becoming rich. I have no objection to people building successful companies. But somewhere between prosperity and a trillion dollars, something changes.

The discussion is no longer about achievement. It becomes a discussion about power.

Every era has a number that reveals what it worships.

  • Ancient empires measured land.
  • Medieval kingdoms measured bloodlines.
  • Industrial societies measured production.
  • Ours measures valuation.

We are told that a trillion dollars is evidence of genius. Perhaps it is. But it is also evidence of something else: a civilization increasingly comfortable with concentrations of wealth and power that previous generations would have considered alarming.

The Lords Return

Defenders of extreme wealth often argue that today’s billionaires earned their fortunes while yesterday’s kings inherited theirs. Fair enough.

But if the outcome is one individual possessing more economic influence than entire nations, the distinction begins to matter less.

  • Medieval kings controlled land.
  • Modern billionaires control platforms.
  • Medieval lords controlled roads, trade routes, and resources.
  • Modern corporations increasingly control the digital roads through which communication, commerce, information, and culture flow.

History spent centuries dismantling hereditary aristocracies because concentrated power was considered dangerous.

Today we celebrate concentrations of power that medieval rulers could scarcely imagine. The lesson of history was never that wealth creation is evil. The lesson was that power concentrated beyond accountability eventually becomes dangerous.

That lesson has not become less relevant simply because the castles have been replaced with data centers.

We’ve Seen This Movie Before

America has already experienced a version of this story. The late nineteenth century produced industrial fortunes so vast that figures like Rockefeller and Carnegie seemed larger than life.

The era became known as the Gilded Age.

  • Economic growth exploded.
  • Innovation accelerated.
  • Industrial output soared.

Yet so did inequality, labor unrest, corruption, and the influence of private wealth over public institutions.

The problem was never that these men built successful enterprises. The problem was the concentration of power that followed. Eventually the public demanded antitrust laws, labor protections, and reforms designed to prevent private fortunes from eclipsing democratic institutions.

The lesson was not that markets are bad. The lesson was that markets left entirely unchecked tend to concentrate wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands.

Today we appear to be relearning that lesson.

The Machine That Makes Billionaires

Elon Musk did not personally build a trillion-dollars worth of products. No human being could.

A trillion-dollar fortune is not created through labor alone. It emerges from ownership.

  • From financial markets.
  • From automation.
  • From intellectual property.
  • From global supply chains.
  • From algorithms.
  • From systems that allow value to compound at extraordinary rates.

This is where economist Thomas Piketty becomes important. Piketty’s research argues that wealth naturally concentrates when returns on capital consistently outpace the growth of the broader economy.

In simple terms, wealth generates more wealth.

  • Ownership attracts more ownership.
  • Capital compounds.
  • The result is not necessarily a conspiracy.
  • It is a tendency.
  • A machine.
  • A system.

Modern capitalism has become remarkably effective at scaling value. What it has not solved is how to prevent that value from concentrating at levels that begin to rival democratic institutions themselves.

The question is not whether Elon Musk worked hard. The question is why modern economic systems repeatedly produce concentrations of wealth that would have been unimaginable to previous generations.

A Civilization’s Report Card

Imagine a society where every child has enough food.

  • Every family has safe housing.
  • Every community has clean drinking water.
  • Every citizen has access to healthcare.
  • Every worker can meet their basic needs.

Now imagine someone becomes a trillionaire.

We could still debate whether that concentration of wealth is healthy. But that is not the world we live in.

The world we live in still contains homelessness.

  • It still contains hunger.
  • It still contains medical debt.
  • It still contains preventable suffering.

These are not mysteries. They are not unsolvable. They are choices.

The scandal is not that poverty exists. Poverty has always existed.

The scandal is that poverty exists alongside unprecedented abundance.

We have solved the problems of production. We have not solved the problems of distribution.

The Question We Avoid

I believe a trillion dollars is a moral failure. Not merely the failure of one individual. The failure of a society. Because every trillion-dollar fortune exists alongside needs that remain unmet.

We are encouraged to marvel at the size of the fortune. Perhaps we should be asking what the existence of that fortune says about everyone who was left behind.

Economist Joseph Stiglitz has spent years warning that extreme inequality is not only unfair but economically inefficient and politically destabilizing. That should concern everyone regardless of ideology.

Extreme poverty creates instability. Extreme concentrations of wealth create instability.

History repeatedly shows that societies become fragile when ordinary people begin to believe the rules only work for the powerful.

The danger is not that one man becomes rich. The danger is that millions conclude the game itself is rigged.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald has often argued that the central political issue of our time is not left versus right but the concentration of power in institutions that become increasingly insulated from public accountability.

The same concern applies here. The question is not whether Elon Musk is a good person. The question is whether any individual should wield economic power on a scale once reserved for states.

What Happens Next?

Many people will celebrate the arrival of the world’s first trillionaire as proof that the system works.

I see something else. I see a warning light.

Not because success should be punished. Not because innovation should be discouraged.

But because no human being should possess that much wealth while so many struggle to obtain necessities.

A trillion dollars is not merely a fortune. It is a concentration of power unprecedented in modern history.

The real story is not Elon Musk. The real story is the world that made a trillionaire possible. A world capable of producing unimaginable abundance while leaving millions behind.

The question is no longer whether we can create trillionaires. The question is why we keep accepting them.

💸 Controlled Collapse 📉

Posted: June 6, 2026 in Excess and Algorithms
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How Economic Crises Become Engines of Wealth and Power Consolidation

Economic crises tend to arrive with a familiar explanation. A housing bubble bursts, a banking system destabilizes, a pandemic disrupts global supply chains, or inflation spirals beyond expectations. The details differ, but the public narrative usually converges on the same conclusion: the outcome was unavoidable, and no one could have reasonably predicted it.

But the aftermath tends to follow a far more consistent pattern than the causes. Large financial institutions stabilize or expand, political power becomes more centralized, and wealth shifts upward while broad segments of the population absorb long-term losses. After the volatility fades, recovery is not evenly distributed. It reliably flows toward institutions that were already closest to capital, credit, and political leverage.

That asymmetry raises a question that does not depend on conspiracy or intent. It depends only on repetition: why do economic crises so consistently produce the same winners and losers?

The focus here is not whether crises are secretly engineered in advance. The more grounded question is why existing systems appear structurally capable of converting instability into consolidation, often regardless of what triggered the instability in the first place.

The Myth of the Unpredictable Crisis

Economic crises are typically framed as unpredictable shocks, yet the historical record often shows sustained warnings before major breakdowns. Analysts, regulators, and even insiders frequently identify systemic risks long before they materialize, though these warnings rarely alter behavior while conditions remain profitable.

The 2008 Financial Crisis illustrates this clearly. In the years leading up to the collapse, U.S. household debt rose to roughly 130% of disposable income, while the housing market became increasingly dependent on subprime lending and complex financial derivatives. When the system unraveled, more than 8 million Americans lost their homes through foreclosure.

Journalist Matt Taibbi has repeatedly emphasized a structural imbalance in how risk is handled in these systems: gains remain concentrated during expansion, while losses are dispersed broadly once failure occurs. That pattern is not an accident of timing. It is a consequence of incentives that reward risk-taking during growth phases and shift costs outward during collapse.

Disaster Creates Opportunity

Crises do not only expose weaknesses in systems; they expand what becomes politically and economically possible. During stable periods, major structural changes face resistance from public scrutiny, regulatory friction, and institutional inertia. During crises, that resistance weakens as urgency compresses decision-making timelines.

Author Naomi Klein described this dynamic as “disaster capitalism,” a pattern in which shock conditions create openings for rapid restructuring that would otherwise face significant opposition. The mechanism does not require centralized coordination. It requires only urgency combined with unequal capacity to act.

In moments of disruption, institutions with speed, capital access, and political influence are able to shape outcomes while broader populations are focused on immediate survival. The result is not always deliberate design, but it is consistently asymmetric advantage.

The Wealth Transfer Machine: 2008 and Its Aftermath

The post-2008 recovery provides one of the clearest modern examples of crisis-driven consolidation. Between 2007 and 2011, U.S. home prices fell by roughly 30% nationally, wiping out trillions in household wealth. At the same time, foreclosure filings affected over 4 million properties in the United States, with peak annual filings exceeding one million.

While households absorbed the losses, financial institutions stabilized through coordinated intervention. The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) authorized $700 billion in potential support for banks and financial institutions, preventing systemic collapse while stabilizing major actors in the financial sector.

In practical terms, collapse functions as a pricing mechanism: it converts widespread financial distress into discounted access for actors with liquidity.

In the years that followed, institutional investors expanded significantly into housing markets. Firms such as BlackRock and other large asset managers helped drive large-scale acquisitions of distressed single-family homes, converting portions of owner-occupied housing stock into long-term rental portfolios. What appeared as market recovery functioned simultaneously as a restructuring of ownership.

This is where abstraction becomes structure. Crises do not merely erase wealth; they reorganize it under conditions where liquidity determines who can acquire and who must exit.

Pandemic Shock and Small Business Collapse

A similar pattern emerged during the economic disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the United States, more than 200,000 small businesses were estimated to have closed permanently in 2020 alone, with many more experiencing prolonged revenue losses that weakened long-term viability.

At the same time, large corporations expanded market dominance. Between March 2020 and mid-2021, the combined wealth of U.S. billionaires increased by over $1.5 trillion, even as unemployment peaked above 14% during the early phase of the downturn.

Government stabilization programs such as the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which distributed over $800 billion in loans and aid, helped prevent a deeper collapse. However, reporting and subsequent analysis showed that a disproportionate share of larger or better-connected firms accessed relief funding more effectively than smaller independent operators.

The result was economic disruption at the bottom and accelerated accumulation at the top, operating in the same timeframe.

The result was not only economic disruption but structural consolidation. Large retailers, technology platforms, and logistics networks increased market share while many local businesses disappeared permanently, reducing competitive diversity in multiple sectors.

Manufacturing Consent During Crisis

Economic crises are also narrative events. Public perception during instability is shaped by uncertainty, fear, and reliance on official interpretation. Under these conditions, narratives that might otherwise face scrutiny often become dominant by default.

Political theorist Noam Chomsky has argued that power operates not only through coercion but through the management of public consent. In crisis conditions, the acceptable range of discourse often narrows, and alternative interpretations are more easily dismissed as destabilizing or irresponsible.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald has repeatedly pointed out that emergency frameworks tend to outlast their original justification. Temporary expansions of authority frequently become embedded into long-term governance structures, particularly when they are normalized during periods of collective uncertainty.

The result is a feedback loop: crisis reduces scrutiny, and reduced scrutiny allows structural changes that persist long after the emergency fades.

Progress for Whom?

Across different crises and time periods, certain patterns repeat. Markets recover, but unevenly. Institutions stabilize, but often at larger scale than before. Wealth rebounds, but increasingly concentrates within systems that already held disproportionate influence.

This leads to a final set of questions that avoids speculation and focuses instead on outcomes. Who gained ownership of distressed assets? Who expanded market share during periods of contraction? Who received public stabilization or institutional protection? And who absorbed the long-term costs of adjustment?

These are not rhetorical questions in the abstract. They are measurable outcomes that appear consistently across multiple economic disruptions. The concern is not that crises are identical in cause, but that they are often similar in effect.

If economic systems repeatedly translate instability into consolidation, then crises are not external interruptions to the system. They may be one of the mechanisms through which the system reorganizes itself.

The defining issue, then, is not whether crises will occur. It is whether the structure of modern economies systematically channels those crises toward concentrated ownership, centralized control, and unequal recovery.

And if that pattern holds, the next downturn will not simply test the resilience of the system. It will once again reveal who the system is built to serve.

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