Capitalism Destroys Traditional Family Values
You're not conservative, Walter, you're just an asshole.
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In her book, These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs — and Wrecks — America, Gretchen Morgensen describes what happened to a small community in Missouri after a stable, long-time aluminum smelter called Noranda Aluminum was bought out by New York-based private equity company Apollo Global Management. Noranda was a very profitable aluminum company, and one of the few remaining aluminum smelters in the U.S. still offering high-quality product despite China’s ascendance. Located on the banks of the Mississippi, the smelter was well-placed to provide it’s products throughout the Midwest and to the rest of the country. At one point, Noranda provided thousands of well-paying union jobs with good benefits to Marston, Missouri and the surrounding area. “Everyone in the region — you can’t throw a stone without hitting someone who either works there or who is raised by checks that come from there,” said Aaron Ragan, a journeyman electrician at the plant. “I was raised on a Noranda check.” In 2013 alone, Noranda provided the region with $95 million in payroll.
That all changed after Apollo acquired the aluminum company and saddled it with $1 billion in debt. “This was a company that did not have a lot of debt,” Morgensen explains, “so it didn't have enormous interest costs.” Soon after, Apollo, having put all the debt onto the aluminum company itself, not onto their private equity firm, sold off all of their stake in the company, making three times their investment, and leaving Noranda to languish. With this new debt load it had to pay interest on, and with a downturn in the aluminum business that Noranda normally would have been able to weather, the company filed for bankruptcy in 2016. Having already made three times the amount of their investment cost, Apollo then tried to keep Noranda afloat by negotiating with the state’s electric utility to lower the company’s energy bill. The state granted the lower energy bill for Noranda, but what this meant was that every other ratepayer in the state, mostly regular people, needed to make up that sizeable deficit.
Meanwhile, Apollo forced the company to fire hundreds of people and ravaged their pension funds. “The Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation had to come in and bail out three Noranda pensions because of the bankruptcy,” Morgansen explains. And because of the bankruptcy, $3.1 million in taxes that the local school district was relying on from Noranda disappeared overnight. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported the school district asked staff to cover 20 percent of their health insurance premiums. They also froze salaries and “offered an incentive to prod eligible teachers into retirement.”
Years later, in early 2024, now employing only a fraction of its original workforce, Noranda said it would finally close its doors for good. “This is devastating news for Missouri and the Marston community,” said James Owen, executive director of Renew Missouri. “The smelter provided a lifeline to the entire community, providing both good union jobs and taxes to the local economy.”
Morgensen puts a fine point on it:
This was a perfect example of the circle of pain that these people create when they make all of the money for themselves — three times their investment. But they harmed rate payers, they harmed school teachers and school children, they harmed workers, and they harmed pensioners. That's what we're talking about.
This is what capitalism does. It tears communities apart. Private equity and venture capital firms like Apollo are not mere aberrations of an imperfect but useful economic system, something to be corrected to get us back on track. They are inherent to capitalism’s profit motive and will always crop up no matter how much our (woefully un)regulated state capitalism tries to play whack-a-mole.
Given this reality, it is a curious thing to live in such a world where the conservative champions of traditional values clasp their hands together and cast their eyes up toward a system that robs those very traditional values of means to live. Modern-day “conservatism,” particularly in the United States, frequently invokes the defense of traditional family values as a core component of its political philosophy. From opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion, to the promotion of strict gender roles within the nuclear family structure, the conservative movement presents itself as a bulwark against the perceived moral decay brought about by liberal, progressive forces. But there is a profound contradiction embedded within this ideological framework: capitalism is the most significant force undermining the traditional values conservative’s seek to preserve. Self-proclaimed conservatives defend an economic system that is, at its heart, not about traditional values, but about usurpation, the constant overthrowing of all traditions in service of wealth — the endless, corrosive accumulation of wealth, and an attendant glorification of the wealthy’s celebrity status.
If you want to defend capitalism, while remaining honest, you also have to count its costs. If you call yourself a conservative, you must understand that the inherent costs of capitalism are a wasting disease for you and your fellow conservatives’ ability to actually live your lives in peace and abundance.
But I am not concerned here with why what passes for conservatism in the U.S. chooses to defend capitalism with a kind of religious fervor (the reasons for which are many, not the least of which is a deep and profoundly effective corporate propaganda system that conceals basic facts from a mystified populace). I’m not trying to litigate the “What’s the matter with Kansas?” question, the idea that rather than confronting the consequences of capitalism head on, conservative elites have instead shifted attention toward cultural issues, framing the dissolution of traditional family structures primarily as a moral failing of society or an issue of individual responsibility. This ideological sleight of hand allows the dislocations and alienations of the capitalist system to continue unchecked as conservative voters give power to the Republican Party, or “vote against their interests” (as if voting for Democrats would be in their interests).
Rather, in this piece I simply want to demonstrate to conservatives, and to those leftists who wish to communicate more effectively with those on the right, that America’s cherished economic system is anathema to some of conservatism’s most cherished values — a stable family life, strong community ties, freedom of association, local autonomy, individual liberties, self-development, fair markets, thrift, moderation, the rule of law, being rewarded according to your work ethic, being modest, the ability of women to be stay-at-home mothers, and old time religion. Each of these, and much more, are every day degraded by capitalism.
Before we get into the specifics of how this plays out, some quick definition of terms is in order. I refer here to conservatism as it is commonly understood in the modern U.S. context, to people who claim to hold the above values, and to a generalized — albeit grossly — working-class sensibility, but not to the radical ideology of neoconservatism, that movement exemplified best by the George W. Bush administration’s cast of venal characters — Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Karl Rove, Bill Kristol, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, and the like. Those figures dressed up their project of mass surveillance, endless, expensive, expansionist wars, the continued offshoring of manufacturing jobs, and unmitigated support for Wall Street with the language of patriotism, Christian duty, and working for the common man. Neoconservatives have little to do with economic moderation and preserving individual liberties. As Noam Chomsky described their ilk:
These guys are statist reactionaries. They’re Bolsheviks, basically. They believe in a very powerful state which intervenes massively in the economy, and is extremely violent and totally lawless, and it’s a welfare state but for the rich. That’s what’s called conservatism. Call it what you like, it’s unfair to tarnish the good name of conservatism with that view.
The good name of conservatism Chomsky refers to is more in line with that of the classical conservative Edmund Burke, defender of storied institutions and traditional bonds against the ravages and Jacobian excesses he saw in the violent French Revolution. But putting that historical definition aside, I think most people understand the distinction between an American working-class conservatism and an elite, faux-conservatism. It is the former political project that I refer to here and its adherents which I speak to. So let’s begin.
In 1791, Thomas Paine, the soul of the American Revolution, wrote in his Rights of Man that everyone “wishes to pursue his occupation, and to enjoy the fruits of his labours and the produce of his property in peace and safety, and with the least possible expense.” Paine, along with Adam Smith, much beloved by capitalist economists, was the standard bearer of classical liberalism’s conception of human freedom, of a new horizon for human flourishing that would rise out of the antiquated authoritarianism of hereditary monarchies. Smith articulated an economic vision of how that freedom could be maintained through the marketplace. These ideas of the Revolutionary War era have been used ever since by those looking to defend capitalism with a valence of American-style democracy. But looking at today’s landscape, I defy anyone to argue that the freedom of individuals in capitalist societies is much less taxed than it was in Paine’s and Smith’s time. Instead, we live under a system where, as Paine described his contemporary despotism, “the resources of a country are lavished upon kings, upon courts, upon hirelings, impostors and prostitutes; and even the poor themselves, with all their wants upon them, are compelled to support the fraud that oppresses them.” Capitalism’s staggering iniquities of today could scarcely be fathomed by Paine or Smith, and hardly dreamed of by the worst despots from centuries ago.
Capitalism, in its essence, is a system that relentlessly dismantles individual autonomy, destroys traditional modes of living, erodes familial bonds, and commodifies every aspect of human life. Labor, love, culture, religion — all of these are repackaged as products for consumption. The conservative defense of capitalism, rooted in the preservation of freedom, hierarchy, morality, and community, stands in contradiction to the actual dynamics of capitalist production, which is predicated on the disintegration of these very values in favor of everlasting destabilization and unrelenting profit maximization.
To understand this contradiction in modern conservatism, you have to go beyond the superficial argument that the free marketplace is the sole wellspring of individual liberty. “Early admirers of the market — Adam Smith for example — believed that selfishness was a virtue only if it was confined to the realm of exchange,” writes historian and social critic Christopher Lasch. “They did not advocate or even envision conditions in which every phase of life would be organized according to the principles of the market. Now that private life has been largely absorbed by the market, however, a new school of economic thought offers what amounts to a new moral vision: a society wholly dominated by the market, in which economic relations are no longer softened by ties of trust and solidarity.”
Crucially, what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels revealed about capitalism was not just an economic insight, but a moral one. It is not merely that capitalism exploits the worker and concentrates wealth in the hands of a few. It is that capitalism infects all social relations, from top to bottom. It degrades human relationships, and leads to the collapse of all the institutions — family, church, and nation — that conservatives claim to cherish. “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society,” they wrote.
Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
All that is holy is profaned.
So let us more closely examine capitalism’s profanities, its disturbances, taking in turn its degradations of 1.) individual liberties 2.) stable communities 3.) traditional family values 4.) the rule of law, and 5.) religion.
Individual Liberty
Adherents to capitalism place their faith in the so called “free-market,” using it to exalt our globalized capitalist system as one which offers a world free from tyrannical government regulation, and therefore one which offers the greatest freedom of choice to consumers. And who wouldn’t like a system that allows for maximum economic freedom? However, today’s system of capitalism is effectively an inversion of the sort of labor equality utopia that classical liberal writers such as Adam Smith and Thomas Paine championed in their works. Those thinkers’ version of a free market economy at the time stood in opposition to the feudalism, oligarchy, and social hierarchies of lords, nobles, kings and wealthy merchants. The classical liberal instead envisioned the majority of the labor force working for themselves and not for wages. Skilled artisans with at most only a few employees would ply their trades and sell their goods and services on equal standing with everyone else within that market. In short, the market would be a site of democracy.
That vision does not in any way resemble our current system of small groups of ultra-wealthy capitalists hoarding wealth and power, controlling the systems of government and international law, and monopolizing huge sections of the economy to the point where most workers have little opportunity to be self-employed or to sell their labor elsewhere for better conditions. And yet the system is still defended using the outmoded ideology of pre-industrial liberal economists. As Elizabeth Anderson put it in Private Government: “People continue to deploy the same justification of market society — that it would secure the personal independence of workers from arbitrary authority — long after it failed to deliver on its original aspiration.”
Here it is important to make a distinction within the category of individual liberties between political liberties and economic liberties. By concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a few, capitalism limits the ability of individuals to participate in self-governance in either the political or economic realm. In the political realm, most of us have an acute understanding that we have little to no say over how the show is actually run. When obscene amounts of money buy access to power and policy and relegate everyone else to irrelevance, when corporations partner with the criminal justice system and military apparatus in order to protect their own interests, and when the courts consistently favor companies at the expense of individuals and labor movements, then it cannot be said that we live in a democracy. Dropping a ballot in the box every two or four years to pick between one of two money-anointed puppets is not political freedom. Such a degradation of our politics was foreseen by the trenchant analysis in Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville back in 1835 where he wrote:
It is vain to summon a people, which has been rendered so dependent on the central power, to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity.
This is all by design, of course, which has been admitted to by the elites for a long time. In the late 1800’s with the rise of the American Populist movement, a movement which championed the rights of both rural farmers and urban workers to have more power over the economy, the capitalist elites threw a fit and denounced such ideas as feeble, immoral, and dangerous. “A capitalistic system has been adopted,” wrote historian and Harvard professor Henry Adams (descendant of the Adams presidents) in response to the Populists, “and if it were to be run at all, it must be run by capital and by capitalistic methods, for nothing could surpass the nonsensity of trying to run so complex and so concentrated a machine by southern and western farmers in grotesque alliance with city day-laborers.”
Later adding to such disdaining vitriol was Robert Lansing, Secretary of State to Woodrow Wilson, who expressed great fear at the prospect of anti-capitalism taking hold in the U.S., as it was posed to do by a radical and muscular American labor movement before WWI-era purges destroyed it. The project of the left was “to make the ignorant and incapable mass of humanity dominate the earth,” Lansing wrote [emphasis mine], and “to overthrow all existing governments and establish on the ruins a despotism of the proletariat in every country.” Using the usual exhortations of individual responsibility and meritocracy against such undeserving leftists, Lansing called them “a class which does not have property but hopes to obtain a share by process of government rather than individual enterprise. This is of course a direct threat at existing social order in all countries.” And, like Adams and the other anti-populists before him, Lansing couldn’t help but call into question the intelligence of the lower classes, saying that leftism “may well appeal to the average man, who will not perceive the fundamental errors.”
This tendency of the capitalist elite to constantly justify their status to those beneath them is a constant theme. American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1932 that “[s]ince inequalities of privilege are greater than could possibly be defended rationally, the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from, and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.” This itself was merely a recapitulation of Engels and Marx, who wrote in The German Ideology that “each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.”
This has profound implications for our political system. As Sheldon Wolin argues in Democracy Incorporated, capitalism has fundamentally altered the nature of American democracy itself, turning it into what he calls a "managed democracy" or "inverted totalitarianism." In this system, the economic and political elites exert far more influence over the lives of ordinary citizens than the democratic institutions meant to safeguard individual freedoms. Wolin’s critique is devastating: under the guise of “democracy,” American society has become a corporate oligarchy in which true political power lies not with the people but with multinational corporations and the state apparatus that serves their interests. Instead of political deliberations being held within a “free market” of ideas, where the best and most popular ideas win out, be they conservative or liberal, we have a system which privileges ruling class ideas, and those ideas are anything but good for conservative values.
For Wolin, the erosion of individual liberties is directly tied to the corporate dominance that underpins capitalism. Rather than fostering an environment in which individuals are free to make meaningful choices, capitalism creates a system in which individual lives are shaped by the imperatives of the market. The promises of freedom and liberty are hollowed out as economic pressures — job insecurity, wage stagnation, and the erosion of social safety nets — bind individuals into a state of constant struggle. These economic forces create an environment in which citizens are too distracted and burdened by the demands of survival to participate meaningfully in democratic governance. As political power is concentrated in the hands of those who control capital, ordinary citizens have little real power to influence the course of their lives.
So okay, maybe we don’t have any meaningful political liberties in this system. But what about those economic liberties capitalists are always going on about? Our ability to be good little consumers? Well, there’s a lot wrong with that assumption. Firstly, the consumer today has fewer and fewer meaningful options to choose from. “There is no denying that our economic system does try to produce the maximum quantity of goods,” writes John Ralston Saul in Voltaire’s Bastards, “But it is not interested in exploiting the variety of tastes which exist in the population. Nor is it particularly interested in the quality of goods.” Rather, Saul says, “modern capitalism has inverted the purpose of practical competition. The drive to create different products which compete, thanks to various qualities, for the public’s attention, has been replaced by the drive to differentiate virtually identical products in the public’s eye through a competition between appearances.”
We see this play out everywhere. From the extreme, unregulated corporate consolidation that has been the norm since the Reagan administration, where only a handful of corporate entities control a majority of farming, agriculture, grocery, information technology, finance, and media industries, to our corporate controlled, innovation-destroying patent system, where everything from biomedical technology to entertainment is monopolized for generations, our list of novel products is shrinking and the ones we do have are becoming shittier in order to justify the purchase of the next shitty model. By constricting the economy, corporations have destroyed competition and thus their main motive for producing things that are actually worth buying. They have in fact restricted choice in order to maximize profit.
One of the main victims here, besides consumers, is small business owners, that class of people which both conservative and liberal politicians constantly say they are the best friend of. The capitalist elites, Saul writes, “have created both market conditions and regulations which discourage private ownership and small businesses, while favouring the growth of large, anonymously owned companies. Those who do create companies find it difficult in the current atmosphere to grow beyond a certain size without ceding to the buy-out opportunities offered by the large corporations circling around them.” And more than this, the industrious ethos of small businesses has been spurned by the elite, Saul writes, where it has “become unfashionable. The hundreds of thousands of small businesses in which owners labour to make real money are looked upon by financial institutions, corporations and bureaucrats with superior bemusement.”
In response to such problems, an old conservative exhortation is to “Vote with your wallet!” Such a mentality is extremely dubious on its face as a means to change things. It simply doesn’t work under our current system. Where can a critical mass of people actually move their money to that isn’t controlled by corporate giants? As Zephyr Teachout writes in her book, Break ‘Em Up, organic agriculture has been the most successful movement in this regard, and yet it has utterly failed “to make a meaningful dent in the way food is created.” Teachout writes that despite 75 percent of all people in the U.S. using local, organic options, despite nearly 90 percent of people saying that they want locally grown food, and despite “the fact that food is where people have the peak amount of leverage…only 5% of all farms are organic, and only 0.3% of total farm sales are direct-to-consumer sales. Monsanto may be widely reviled, yet Monsanto's power keeps rising. Consumer choice simply cannot get us to a world where most farmers and farmworkers are treated better.”
But, of course, there is more to life than consumer choice. It has long been a leftist critique that a conception of individual liberties and human rights which is narrowly framed as everyone having the equal opportunity to be good little capitalists is in fact a deeply impoverished conception of freedom. And it seems to me consistent with traditional conservatism to make the same critique. As Christopher Lasch trenchantly put it back in 1978:
The logic of demand creation requires that women smoke and drink in public, move about freely, and assert their right to happiness instead of living for others. The advertising industry thus encourages the pseudo-emancipation of women, flattering them with its insinuating reminder, 'You've come a long way, baby,' and disguising the freedom to consume as genuine autonomy. Similarly it flatters and glorifies youth in the hope of elevating young people to the status of full-fledged consumers in their own right, each with a telephone, a television set, and a hi-fi in his own room.
What kind of conservatism is that? What kind of conservatism endows rights, not to human beings, but to corporations? Where is the value of the individual in such a system? Where are our individual freedoms in an economy controlled by unassailable corporate entities? The individual does not flourish under capitalism, the individual is instead subordinated to organized capital accumulation. How could you support such a thing and dare call yourself a champion of traditional values? These are not traditional values, they are radically dehumanizing.
Conservative monarchist Simon-Nicholas Henri Linguet, who was guillotined during the French Revolution for defending the royalty, nevertheless understood the woefully debilitating affects that selling oneself for wages has on the individual. He wrote in 1767, long before Marx ever came along:
It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him. ... These men, it is said, have no master — they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence.
What is the meaning of individual liberty in a system that deprives people of their basic needs in order to force them to work inside of corporate structures which are inherently tyrannical? Marx was incisive about the ways in which specialized wage labor reduced humanity to something akin to slavery, writing that it “mutilates the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrades him to the level of an appendage of a machine, makes his work such a torment that its essential meaning is destroyed…”
In our globalized economy, brought to us by NAFTA and other “free-trade” agreements, workers now compete internationally in a race to the bottom. In every sector, workers have been robbed of their bargaining power by the lowest paid wage earners in a different country. This is a kind of freedom alright. Freedom for everyone all over the world to all get equally fucked.
And what if you refuse? What if you want something different for you and your family? Well, with an anemic social safety net such as ours, workers are terrified of demanding something better for risk of losing their job. Workers cannot be said to have any market power or economic independence when the costs of withholding their labor or selling it to a different employer are prohibitively high. People living paycheck to paycheck can’t just quit their shitty job any time they please in order to find a different but equally shitty job. The resultant loss of income can be ruinous. People cannot participate in a supposed free-market economy when they’re too sick or too old to work anymore. Adam Smith and Thomas Paine would be appalled at the lack of freedom enjoyed by the modern American worker and how little socioeconomic power they have in relation to the elites in the society. And the sorts of social safety net programs that Paine argued for, by way of interpreting John Locke’s philosophy on natural rights, in order to provide “for the instruction of youth and the support of age” — such as public education, disability payments, survivor benefits, and old-age pensions — are constantly attacked as being too socialist by those defending free-market ideology.
There is no free economy when everything is monopolized, patented, and controlled by unseen hands. We are relentlessly pressed upon by the debilitating effects of the “free market”, unable to compete with its immense, cloistered power, forced to choose under constant threat of poverty and death — no choice at all. We do not have free relations with each other. Our associations are not solely at our discretion, but rather of the market. Workers do not have equal standing with their employers. Enormous corporations dictate the shape of the economy and write their own laws giving them special privileges over everyone else. Billionaires constantly make sure that the market is anything but free so as to tip the scales entirely in their favor and keep workers voiceless, powerless, unfree, dependent upon their insecure wages, and utterly shut out of any meaningful democratic process. Wendell Berry, the so-called “prophet of rural America,” wrote that as all of this gets worse, “the mutual, free helps and pleasures of family and community life will be supplanted by a kind of displaced or placeless citizenship and by commerce with impersonal and self-interested suppliers. ... Thus, although we are not slaves in name, and cannot be carried to market and sold as somebody else's legal chattels, we are free only within narrow limits. For all our talk about liberation and personal autonomy, there are few choices that we are free to make.”
Community
I want to talk about Flint, Michigan.
The water in Flint, Michigan is still poisoning people. The water in Flint, Michigan is still poisoning people. The water in Flint, Michigian, over 10 years after the crisis began, is still poisoning people.
To this day, no one has gone to jail for the many crimes that were committed in this scheme to line the pockets of the rich. As investigative reporter Jordan Chariton has doggedly reported throughout this time, almost singlehandedly and with no attention from the mainstream media, the people of Flint had their water poisoned with bacteria, lead, and other toxins because of the deliberate and secretive actions of the capitalist state. In order to “save the city money,” unelected officials appointed by a private foundation came up with the idea of privatizing Flint’s water service and building a new pipeline to pump raw, untreated water to the woefully understaffed and antiquated Flint water treatment plant. “Most of the water in this new pipeline was not actually going to be for residents, it was going to be for business,” Chariton told Current Affairs. “This new pipeline was going to be raw water… Well, what do you need a lot of raw water for? Fracking. The governor of Michigan was fracking the hell out of Michigan.”
The Flint River, which the city’s water system was switched to, was where “General Motors, Dow Chemical, DuPont and every corporate criminal you could think of had been dumping their waste in for a hundred years,” Chariton says. In violation of the law, the city did not even test the water before piping it into people’s homes. Despite a subsequent outbreak of the deadly Legionnaire’s Disease and vocal concerns from residents, the city assured Flint citizens that the water was safe to drink. The mayor’s office intimidated local media outlets from reporting the story. The cover-up worked. Barack Obama came and drank the water, left town, and nobody went to jail. Chariton puts a fine point on all of it: “So what you have here is politicians, Wall Street banks who issued the bonds to help fund this construction, a private foundation, and the Republican governor and his unelected cronies, basically create a cabal to indebt Flint, and basically use the residents as guinea pigs for a totally unnecessary, privatized water system.”
People are still dying. “I was just there two weeks ago,” Chariton said in October of 2024. “People are still showing me rashes they're getting from the water on their skin. People are still showing me images and video of brown water coming out of their taps. People have cancer. Cancer is through the roof right now in Flint. Some studies are showing certain types of cancer are up 300 percent, compared to before the water switch. So this is not, as the media described it, some tragedy from the past that's now in recovery. It's an ongoing disaster, and it's an ongoing cover-up.”
“We all need water to live,” Chariton says. “Conservatives need it, liberals need it, progressives need it, and people without labels need it.”
I want to talk about East Palestine, Ohio.
The 2023 East Palestine train derailment and explosion, which covered the small Ohio town in a deadly toxic cloud of chemicals, happened because of the deliberate deregulation of the railway industry by the capitalist state. The small, largely conservative community was torn apart as neighbors with differing views on the disaster began to turn on each other. “Before this happened, the town was your model town. It was very closely knitted; people look after their neighbors…it’s not quite like that now,” said East Palestine resident Chris Albright. “It’s not as neighborly. There’s a lot of accusations from different sides.” Albright’s wife, Jessica, said that people who haven’t experienced health issues from the toxic explosion are telling others to “just suck it up and move on.” After the explosion, the government-run EPA downplayed and covered up the extent of the toxicity in the water and in the air, telling people it was safe to return to their homes. “My daughter’s nose bleeds every time she goes in the house,” Jessica Albright said. Instead of paying to make the residents of East Palestine whole, railroad company Norfolk Southern has spent nearly $2 million lobbying congress to avoid passing stricter railway regulations. No one has gone to jail for this.
I want to talk about the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster.
In the early 1930s, an estimated 764 workers died from inhaling silica dust when drilling a tunnel in West Virginia for Union Carbide, though likely many more perished in the years after. Company doctors lied and said the sicknesses were not due to the dust. Management forced sick workers, paid only a few dollars a day, to continue working in the toxic environment at gunpoint. The capitalist state never brought charges against the company. The byproducts of the company’s dividends were cadavers.
Just in the past few years, multiple instances of slavery have been documented in the U.S., with agricultural workers locked in cages while not at work and forced to work without pay under threat of deportation.
How are your traditional family values doing when your child’s blood vessels are bursting from exposure to toxic chemicals? What are your prospects for having respectably conservative grandchildren when your gonads are shot through with lead from a contaminated water supply? What does it mean to believe in individual liberty when your lungs are dissolving from silica dust? Does freedom equal slavery?
I want to talk about these sacrifice zones, the communities of people that have been destroyed, marked down as mere externalities in the capitalist’s logbook, left to die, and quickly forgotten. I want to talk about them because these are the costs that never get counted by capitalism. They aren’t counted because capitalism is not obligated to pay for them. “There is so much damage that is done by one of these catastrophes,” says law professor Jon Hanson, “to the people and their view of themselves, their identity, their sense of control, how depressed they are, how much stress they're under, substance abuse. All these things that are connected with the dislocating and disempowering effects of these kinds of explosions that just aren't going to be picked up.” And once the outrage is over and the crimes are swept aside, the catastrophe is forgotten. East Palestine, Hanson says, “will be another footnote to add in a series of footnotes, of moments in which the public attention was galvanized long enough to say, ‘There’s something wrong there.’ But there will be another sports event coming up soon.”
Again, these consequences of capitalism are not aberrations. They are inherent to a system that protects its supreme motive of capital accumulation at all costs, including the murder of workers. If you want to extol the virtues of one of the most cruel and capricious economic systems the world has ever seen, then you also need to count its costs, if not actually remediate them. Count them, catalogue them, weigh them. I assure you, that weight is unbearable, and it’s getting worse. You cannot ignore capitalism’s victims because, as George Orwell wrote, “they exist in tens and hundreds of thousands; they are one of the characteristic by-products of the modern world. You cannot disregard them if you accept the civilisation that produced them.”
In Robert D. Putnam’s seminal work, Bowling Alone, Putnam demonstrates the ways in which American society has experienced a significant breakdown in what he terms “social capital.” By examining data on civic engagement, volunteerism, religious participation, and other forms of social involvement, Putnam argues that, over the past several decades, Americans have become increasingly disconnected from their communities. People are “bowling alone,” because the kinds of social bonds that once held communities together have been weakened. The middle-class dream of stability and community has been replaced by a frantic, consumer-driven existence in which social bonds are no longer prioritized. In the wake of these disruptions, we see the crumbling of traditional family structures, as families struggle to maintain any sense of collective identity amidst the constant upheavals of capitalism.
The rise of global capitalism and the attendant decline of stable, unionized jobs have fundamentally altered the social fabric of American life. Workers, once able to rely on long-term jobs that allowed them to build strong community ties now find themselves in precarious employment situations where work schedules are irregular, benefits are limited, and job security is a distant memory. As a result, families are torn between the demands of work and the need to nurture and participate in their own communities. Social bonds that once allowed individuals to live rich, fulfilling lives have been strained by economic forces beyond their control.
Key to stable communities for the conservative is the nuclear family. Much can be criticized about the nuclear family, and indeed there is a long tradition of literature on the subject across the spectrum, including from feminist, utilitarian, and objectivist viewpoints. The traditional family unit, especially within the isolating confines of modern suburbia, can be a stifling environment of abuse, loneliness, stress, and instability. It can lock people into sad, quarrelsome little lives, and then make them harshly judge themselves as unworthy failures for not being able to make such a life last. But if, as a conservative, you nevertheless hold up the nuclear family as the best available form in which to raise a child, to impart shared values from generation to generation, then perhaps you also ought to fight for an economic system which allows the nuclear family to flourish, not languish as it does under capitalism.
There was a time in the U.S. when a father could be reasonably expected to support his wife and children, own a house, and save for retirement on his income alone. Needless to say, that reasonable expectation no longer exists but for the rich. The worsening insufficiency of a single income for a family has been coupled with the (mostly modern feminist) notion that a woman, a mother even, ought to find fulltime meaning and success in the workplace, just as any man. Since the industrial revolution first forced many women into the dreaded factories, this mass movement of women into the workforce has never been attended by an equally massive shift in material support for women, or men for that matter, to be able to rest, take time off for pregnancies, and actually spend time raising their children at home. Outside of public schooling, little to no support has been given to parents for them to secure childcare while they are at work. If both parents have to work fulltime to survive, if there is no guarantee of paternity leave nor subsidization of childcare, then tell me where is the time and the energy left for parents in a nuclear family to impart their traditionalist values to their children? The work of raising a child in this society, perhaps the most important thing a person can do, is left unpaid, and therefore is not valued under capitalism.
If you, as a conservative, are more concerned with queer people fucking each other and trying to carve out some dignity for themselves in this life than with the fact that no one besides the rich can comfortably raise a family in this society, I promise you that your priorities are severely fucked. And even if you lean more on the libertarian side and are fine with other people raising their children as they see fit so long as they don’t impugn your own conservative values, the capitalist system exerts immense stressors on the ability of any family, regardless of their political persuasion, to merely survive, let alone thrive. The lives of two caring parents, small potatoes on the economist’s balance sheet, are callously driven asunder in favor of profit maximization. This is capitalism’s cold maxim: no family is worth what the system could make from them by destroying them.
So many of us are now living precarious lives. As Matthew Desmond describes it in Poverty, by America: “Poverty isn’t a line. It’s a tight knot of social maladies. It is connected to every social problem we care about — crime, health, education, housing — and its persistence in American life means that millions of families are denied safety and security and dignity in one of the richest nations in the history of the world.” Denied is the key word. By a complex web of dispossession, those with power within capitalism are able to consolidate their wealth and privilege by exploiting us, depriving us of the means to live healthy, fulfilling lives, and terrorizing any attempts to change our conditions. “Living in poor neighborhoods remains almost always a high-risk factor for disorder, suboptimal parenting, and adverse child development,” Putnam writes, and “parents in poor neighborhoods are more likely to experience depression, stress, and illness…”
As private equity vulture capitalists run roughshod over our communities, buying out public services and driving them into bankruptcy to make a quick buck, as economic precarity becomes a reality for more and more workers, and as poverty itself becomes more and more criminalized, our belief in better lives and the will to secure this for ourselves and our children is driven out of us through intimidation, learned helplessness, and terror.
So what if you’d like to drop out and form your own conservative community somewhere that’s free from the immoral, destructive forces of capitalism? A haven for traditional values? Well, cloistered utopias will not work! They’ve been tried throughout all of U.S. history. They didn’t work for the Transcendentalists, the Shakers, the rationalists, the hippies, the lesbian communes, the Branch Davidians, the left or the right. The dominant capitalist system sees to it that such communities will either remain small and ineffectual, or else it will actively invade and destroy them as has been done with various cults and militia groups. Capitalism always comes knocking or kicking.
Instead, what must be achieved is a transformation of the whole society from within, a revocation of power from those private tyrannies that hold it currently, and a redistribution of that power into the hands of the people. You know, something like democracy.
Traditional Family Values
Family values have been hijacked by a market-driven ideology that values fame, the worship of wealth, and the elevation of those few who happen to control the flow of capital. “The mass media, with their cult of celebrity and their attempt to surround it with glamour and excitement, have made Americans a nation of fans, moviegoers,” writes Christopher Lasch. “The media give substance to and thus intensify narcissistic dreams of fame and glory, encourage the common man to identify himself with the stars and to hate the ‘herd,’ and make it more and more difficult for him to accept the banality of everyday existence.”
The capitalist profit motive amplifies the sick pathologies found in celebrity culture, television, and social media. The cult-like followings these platforms cultivate generate billions of dollars every year. Millions of people vaunt entertainers, billionaires, and, “influencers” — people like Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, and Beyonce —becoming their faraway sycophants. We pervert our own sacred, private lives in efforts to emulate what we see the famous do on our screens. Instead of the family being the source of emotional fulfillment and meaning, we are inundated with ceaseless images from corporate advertisers telling us that true purpose is found in wealth, fame, and intrigue. The free market values, Lasch writes, which have been inculcated into the masses have “altered the balance of forces within the family, weakening the authority of the husband in relation to the wife and parents in relation to their children. It emancipates women and children from patriarchal authority, however, only to subject them to the new paternalism of the advertising industry, the industrial corporation, and the state.” This is a profoundly sick society, not a conservative one. It is a gross disfigurement of humanity. A conservatism which admires soul-sapping decadence such as this, under the banner of admiring a rich person’s supposed hard-won fruits through capitalism, is a sad excuse for conservatism indeed.
This is the moral degradation of capitalist maxims. We are all over compelled to value what the market tells us to value. Any values that used to be imparted through familial tradition and communal bonds have been usurped by mercantile values dropped down on us from the high stories of executive offices. And this has infected all of our institutions. “We have a profound hatred of the weak and the poor,” Matt Taibbi writes in The Divide, “and a corresponding groveling terror before the rich and successful, and we’re building a bureaucracy to match those feelings.”
Generations ago, we invited the sources of this degradation right inside our homes. As novelist Russell Banks put it:
Historically, we’ve always been able to slam the door in a salesmen’s foot. And the home had a kind of sanctity to it with regard to the so-called free economy: the consumer driven, hucksterism of our economy, which is amoral and turns everybody into customers and doesn’t deal with them as human beings. So we’ve always had the home to exclude that, to use the home to protect the weakest members of our society who are least able to resist the blandishments of the huckster — until we invited the television in.
There is now no limit to the reaches of consumerism, no place to hide from the advertisers, no sacred place to be the kind of person and the kind of family that you want to be, free from the influence of these forces. As such, people’s sense of innate self-worth has gone totally down the toilet. 27 million plastic surgeries and other cosmetic procedures were performed in the U.S. in 2023, and have steadily been increasing year over year. Such procedures are performed, as journalist Chris Hedges writes, because “in America, most human beings, rich and poor, famous and obscure, have been conditioned to view themselves as marketable commodities. They are objects, like consumer products. They have no intrinsic value. They must look fabulous and live on fabulous sets. They must remain young. They must achieve notoriety and money, or the illusion of it, to be a success. And it does not matter how they get there. … Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality.”
I happen to know some “traditional” parents who aren’t so keen on one of their daughters being gay, but apparently they’re perfectly okay with their other daughter starring in The Bachelor, where she is literally selling her body to amoral television producers in service of a crude, tawdry affair that entertains millions of people who have no qualms about watching a vapid, corporate-funded product that they themselves call “trash TV” without apology. That’s your conservative values. That’s your traditionalism. That’s your American way. What a fucking joke. I suggest you instead start living by that old American adage: “Only fools’ names and fools’ faces are seen in public places.”
Now look, If you want to be an atavistic authoritarian asshole in your own home, go with God! I can’t stop you. I think you’re going to royally fuck up your kids that way, but it’s not my place to command what you do in your own home, and neither, critically, is it a capitalist’s place. That’s what I’m trying to make clear. Capital’s power to influence your daily private life goes far beyond anything a lefty has the power to do.
But what about the trans agenda! What about those immoral books that I don’t want my children to read in school! What about those nihilistic Gen Z kids being radicalized on TikTok! What about antifa marching in our streets! What about the terrorists at our doorstep! What about these woke politics being shoved in my face all day, every day! Fair points, to which I would say: those are all things that ought to be deliberated within a healthy, democratic, locally-minded, civic society. You know what destroys the ability for people to intelligently participate in a healthy, civic society? Capitalism.
As professor Wendy Brown, using the framework of Max Weber, eloquently explains in this lecture, our capitalist society, organized entirely around capitalist principles, chiefly inculcates mercantile values, and thus, political nihilism results. All that matters anymore is individualized, commodified, nihilistic self-affirmation. Brown says that this widespread nihilism manifests, among other ways, as a “mass withdrawal into the trivial, immediate, and personal,” and in “unprecedented popular indifference to consistency, accountability, even veracity in political leaders.”
The quest for and deliberation of what our values ought to be have been divorced from the realm of politics and replaced with shallow, cultural distractions. Our capitalist society is only too happy to commodify every conceivable thing, thus perverting our innate human faculties and transforming political action into a quest for personal capital expansion. The things which ought to be fought for using the realm of politics are transmuted into little more than self-branding opportunities. On the right, you can buy a Trump t-shirt! Put a thin blue line flag on your truck. Put an American flag decal on your AR-15. For the left, get a pride flag! Change your profile picture on a tech giant social media company to say that Black Lives Matter. Get one of those yard signs that says everyone is welcome here. Never mind that any corporation would be happy to display the same symbols if they thought it helped their bottom line, and would just as swiftly take them down as soon as that wasn’t the case, because they literally don’t care about your morality. This moral nihilism, this loss of traditional meaning that is inherent to capitalism, is precisely what you are defending when you defend capitalism.
You cannot have your supposed free-market virtues without their disgusting consequences. This isn’t conservatism you are fighting for, it’s decadence. This isn’t traditional values, it’s wanton greed. This isn’t Protestant austerity, stoicism, and moderation — it’s uncaring waste of human life, and it is evil.
The Rule of Law
What was done before — exploiting the poor, sending the young to war, and putting troublesome people in dungeons — is still done, except that this no longer seems to be the arbitrary action of the feudal lord or the king; it now has the authority of neutral, impersonal law.
— Howard Zinn
The United States is a lawless society. In its domestic affairs where those with money are given preferential treatment in the criminal justice system, and in international affairs where the U.S. constantly violates international laws in service of its and its allies economic and military hegemony, the U.S. cannot be said to be governed by the rule of law, but rather by the rule of powerful, kingly men.
In his book, With Liberty and Justice for Some, journalist Glenn Greenwald goes through example after example of the ways in which our political and criminal justice systems have been radically corrupted to serve those who exploit the most under capitalism. One of the most egregious examples in the book was when Congress bestowed retroactive immunity onto telephone companies for knowingly violating the law when they handed over their customer’s communication records to the George W. Bush administration for surveillance. He writes:
It is difficult to overstate the extent to which congressionally bestowed retroactive immunity represents a profound departure from basic norms of justice. Ordinary Americans are sued every day and forced to endure the severe hardships and sometimes ruinous costs of litigation. When that happens, it is the role of the courts alone to determine who is at fault and whether liability should be imposed. The Constitution vests “the judicial Power of the United States” in courts, not Congress. … The very idea that Congress would intervene in such proceedings and act to protect ordinary Americans from lawsuits is too outlandish even to entertain. But when the wealthiest, most powerful, and most well-connected financial elites are caught red-handed violating the privacy rights of their customers and committing clear felonies, their lobbyists call for a new law that has no purpose other than to declare that the old laws do not apply to them. That is the living, breathing embodiment of our two-tiered justice system — a lawless Wild West for elites in which anything goes.
Critically, Greenwald argues that such a consistent culture of naked lawlessness undermines the citizenry’s faith in the rule of law, and therefore its faith in the entire republic. When the rule of law loses any coherent, consistent meaning — because it is rightfully seen as illegitimate — there’s not much cause to believe in our purported “democracy” either.
Another essential work on this topic is Matt Taibbi’s book The Divide, where he uses his reporting on the 2008 financial crash to show how the government has totally abandoned any precepts about punishing crime if that crime was committed by wealthy capitalists, while still strictly enforcing laws targeted against the poor. “For a country founded on the idea that rights are inalienable and inherent from birth,” Taibbi writes, “we've developed a high tolerance for conditional rights and conditional citizenship. And the one condition, it turns out, is money.”
Taibbi found cases of big banks committing wholesale fraud in the housing market for years, with no criminal consequences, whereas people on welfare who made errors on their applications were sued into oblivion and imprisoned. He writes:
When the state brings a fraud case against a welfare mom, it brings it with disgust, with rage, because in addition to committing the legal crime, she’s committed the political crime of being needy and an eyesore. Banks commit the legal crime of fraud wholesale; they do so out in the open, have entire departments committed to it, and have employees who’ve spent years literally doing nothing but commit, over and over again, the same legal crime that some welfare mothers go to jail for doing once. But they’re not charged, because there’s no political crime. The system is not disgusted by the organized, mechanized search for profit. It’s more like it’s impressed by it.
Taibbi is withering in his critique. The rule of law, he says “has slowly been replaced by giant idiosyncratic bureaucracies that are designed to criminalize failure, poverty, and weakness on the one hand, and to immunize strength, wealth, and success on the other.”
In the international realm, the violations are too myriad to list, but are the most consequential. For the most recent and troubling examples, the U.S.-Israel relationship provides plenty. The U.S. has violated its own domestic laws by giving weapons to Israel despite Israel blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza. The U.S. has been violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) for decades by giving weapons and other monetary aid to Israel since the treaty specifically bars any nation from giving support to a nuclear-armed country if that country is not a signatory to the NPT, which Israel is not (it gets around this by pretending that it doesn’t have nuclear weapons when everybody knows that they do). Likewise, every U.S. president has violated the War Powers Act since it went into effect in 1973. The law makes clear that only congress can approve the country going to war. To get around this, presidents simply don’t declare war but nevertheless engage in hostilities. The war on terror was signed off with the Authorization for the Use of Military Force. Intended to target the perpetrators of 9/11, it has instead been overbroadly interpreted to give cover to any and all military engagements that the president has seen fit to carry out for the last 23 years, so long as they can be painted as targeting terrorism (a very useful boogeyman). I could go on and on and on with examples such as this, they are not hard to find.
When the capitalist state violates international laws, treaties, and the sovereign rights of nations by engaging in wars of aggression, when it violates its own constitution by waging war without congressional approval, and this war causes the death and injury of millions of people, then who is imprisoned? What law officer stops the state from continuing its murderous rampage? How may the victims of these crimes seek and gain restitution? The rule of law applies only to the lowly citizenry of the state, most particularly to the mass of poor and working-class citizens. The rule of law does not apply to the state itself or its capitalist owners.
This rank corruption, what Thomas Paine, when referring to the despotic French monarchy, described as “the Augean stable of parasites and plunderers too abominably filthy to be cleansed, by anything short of a complete and universal revolution,” degrades the soul of our society and renders the principle of the rule of law into a cruel joke. The capitalist class is full of flagrant scofflaws, of adherents to the most brazen project of organized violence and dispossession the world has ever seen. The naked corruption, fecklessness, and moral decrepitude of the political, economic, and media elite, all of whom are beyond the reach of the same laws which are levied so harshly against the great mass of us, leads to prevalent cynicism, apathy, political and civic dislocation, and collective rage. The conservative paeans to the importance of the rule of law ring quite hollow under this system.
The Christian Religion
“In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.”
- President Jimmy Carter
Modern Christian conservatism has become a tool for justifying a system that rewards the rich and punishes the poor, turning the Church from a voice of prophetic resistance against power into a mouthpiece for neoliberal economic policies. The result is a Christian community that is deeply out of sync with the moral imperatives of the gospels. The teachings found in the life of Jesus — the call to care for the poor and the meek, to speak truth to entrenched power, to offer universal salvation through sacrifice — becomes perverted into a faith that sanctifies wealth accumulation, serves as an unofficial branch of the nation-state, exalts narcissistic success, and protects illegitimate hierarchies. Christianity, at its best, is a transcendental force that challenges worldly, ossified institutions. Capitalism, on the other hand, is a force that resists such challenges, where the sin and suffering that are embedded into the very fabric of society are exacerbated and exploited for profit.
This corporatized Christianity is theological reductionism, reducing the richness of the Bible to a mere set of guidelines for personal behavior and a justification for the status quo, an ideal expression of those ruling, “dominant ideas” that Marx talked about. The transcendence offered by faith is no longer a call to confront the absurd meaninglessness of human existence or to engage with the numinous. It instead becomes just another tool for rationalizing a world where meaning is only found in economic success, commodifying the spiritual life and turning faith into a product.
The effects of this degradation are almost too much to stomach. The “prosperity gospel,” as described by Chris Hedges in American Fascists — this rancid concoction of greed and positive thinking dressed up in religious rhetoric, this “get-rich-with-Jesus” scheme — has taken hold like a cancer in Christianity. “The callousness of the ideology,” Hedges writes, “the notion that it in any way reflects the message of the gospels, which were preoccupied with the poor and the outcasts, illustrates how the new class has twisted Christian scripture to serve America's god of capitalism and discredited the Enlightenment values we once prized.” It’s a theology of wealth and privilege, telling the poor and downtrodden that their misery is the result of a lack of faith and that the rich are blessed from above. Capitalism is God-breathed and God’s word is good. These so-called Christians are just as much about protecting corporate profits as they are about protecting "traditional values." They have no concern for justice. They have no concern for the marginalized, the oppressed, the voiceless — because even if the voiceless happen to be a downtrodden conservative family, their lowly status is itself justification for their suffering. They’re not praying hard enough.
And here’s the thing. This isn’t some fringe group we’re talking about. Corporatized Christianity has become an institution in American politics, a massive force that has no problem cozying up to Wall Street and defending policies that perpetuate poverty and environmental destruction. The pastors of the largest churches have personal fortunes in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. As Hedges documents, this corrupted religion has placed its adherents at all levels of the capitalist government — federal, state, and local — through organizations such as the Federalist Society and AIPAC. These heretics are “bankrolled by huge corporations such as Tyson Foods, Purdue, Wal-Mart and Sam's Warehouse,” Hedges writes. “The only thing the ruling oligarchy truly cares about is unfettered exploitation and profit. They, like the industrialists in Nazi Germany, will happily make an alliance with the Christian fascists, no matter how bizarre and buffoonish, and embrace the blood sacrifices of the condemned.”
Modern American Christianity would rather get on its knees to suck a billionaire’s dick than weep at the feet of a crucified loser like Jesus Christ. But there is an older, wiser, simpler, more down-to-earth kind of Christianity that exists in the American memory, something closer to the heart of the gospels. You can catch glimpses of it in our histories and literature. In the words of radical abolitionist John Brown, perhaps the most earnestly religious man the American republic has ever seen, and one of its most severe: "While material interests gained something by the dedication of pure selfishness, men and women lost much by it.” The Christian religion is “based on broad, generous, self-sacrificing principles,” Brown told his followers, and no man should ever allow himself “to be tempted by any consideration to acknowledge laws and institutions to exist as of right, if his conscience and reason condemned them.” Hear, hear. The kind of religion that spurs a man to lead a ragtag group dedicated to murdering slaveholders is my kind of religion. The kind of religion that leads Father Daniel Berrigan to break into government offices to steal and burn draft cards. The kind of religion that incenses a man with righteous indignation against oppression. As Peter De Mott wrote of his religious transformation:
The Catholic Worker taught me many things I’d never heard before: pacifism, nonviolence, voluntary poverty, personal responsibility for contemporary injustice, and service to Christ in the person of the victims of military and corporate violence and greed. … Christ tells us that if we wish to be His disciples, then we must deny ourselves, take up the cross, and follow Him in faith and obedience. The cross represents both the lot and the glory of those who nonviolently resist systemic, institutional injustice, and then experience the retribution of the high and mighty as a consequence. Jesus commands us to love one another, and He tells us that no one has greater love than a person who lays down his or her life for a friend. Every act of civil disobedience (which is equally aptly termed “divine obedience”), performed in a spirit of love, helps to restore humanity to a communion of solidarity, unity, and mutual aid.
That right there is not radical. It is a traditional defense of Enlightenment values, using the symbology of Christianity, but also borne of a direct reading of scripture. The scriptures are not dead unless you treat them so. They live and breathe through people like De Mott. The truly radical position is to contort the scriptures into shallow documents of how best to exploit your fellow man under capitalism. That’s not being a traditionalist, a conservative, or a patriot. That is instead to be besotted by a cold, calculating system which degrades and profanes everything it touches in service of capital accumulation. The words of the savior Jesus Christ are clear and emphatic: “You cannot serve both God and money.”
Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. … You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves for the day of slaughter.
Today’s Christianity, far from being the defender of traditional family values, has become an instrument of ideological control, using the symbols of the faith to justify a system of oppression and moral vapidity. Until this unholy alliance between Church and Capital is broken, the true message of the gospels — sacrifice, radical love, justice, and solidarity with the suffering — will remain buried.
It cannot be more plain. All over the world, for generations now, capitalism has won. Institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank assiduously enforce a global scheme of corporatized oligarchy. Transnational corporations have extended their tentacles into every facet of our lives. As journalist Vincent Bevins writes in his book The Jakarta Method: “[W]e do not live in a world directly constructed by Stalin’s purges or mass starvation under Pol Pot. Those states are gone. … We do, however, live in a world built partly by US-backed Cold War violence.” With the collapse of the Soviet Union over 30 years ago, there has been no major impediment to capitalism’s march. “As for the victors of the anticommunist crusade,” Bevins writes, “it’s clear that as a nation-state, the United States has done enormously well since 1945. It is an extremely rich and powerful country. But if we look at individual Americans, or break down the analysis along class and race lines, it’s clear that the spoils of that global ascendance were shared extremely unequally. More and more of the flows coming in from other nations have accumulated at the very top, while some US citizens live in poverty comparable to life in the former Third World.”
The main story of the 20th century is one of capitalism’s rising hegemony and ultimate victory. The only existential crisis that capitalism experienced in the West in that time was the Great Depression. It did spur some positive change. As Putnam writes, “the utter devastation of the Great Depression gave renewed force to the ideals of social solidarity instead of naked individualism, even among Republicans like Herbert Hoover.” In response to the crisis, the elite, begrudging as they were, had enough foresight to institute some modest reforms to the system in the form of the New Deal. These reforms, now being largely rolled back, kept capitalism somewhat bearable to those in the West. But besides this major bump in the road, capitalism has remained a formidable force and done nothing but entrenched its power with every new crisis. What conservative can survey capitalism’s rise to such economic supremacy and honestly say that traditional family values are in a better place now in 2024 than they were in 1950? By any metric that matters, traditional ways of living have been utterly broken.
Capitalism is homelessness — a life devoid of meaning, the rupturing of social bonds, a family member dying cold, drugged, and alone. It is the exploitation of labor — the destruction of generational family farms, the evaporation of small businesses, the child in the slaughterhouse. It is the rending of public places — the empty union hall, the closed community center, the understaffed library. It is the degradation of education — the adjunct professor, the underfunded humanities department, the grad student with no job prospects. Capitalism is endless expansionist war — the weapons manufacturer at your job fair, the next reactionary terror attack, the drunk divorced veteran at the local dive bar. It is the death of innovation — the monopolization of patents, the inability to repair what is yours, the unaffordable medication, the cease-and-desist order. It is the total corruption of the state — the dark money given to politicians, the well-paid strike breaker, the factory moved overseas, the police surveilling your private communications. It is the whoredom of the church — the divine promise of worldly wealth for being a devout Christian, the pastor who flies in private jets, the impoverished congregant giving away their last dollar for pie in the sky, the prostitution of the body, mind, and soul.
Those who choose to go on believing in this system have succumbed to the magical thinking of corporatism, a subservience to the almighty undemocratic free market, and an illusion so grand as to exalt snake oil salesmen, turning them into our final saviors. I suggest that we, all of us, left and right alike, instead come to grips with the reality of our situation and shake off this yoke. For capitalism, “[w]e should feel hate beyond words,” China Mieville writes, “and bring it to bear. This is a system that, whatever else, deserves implacable hatred for its countless and escalating cruelties.” It is a “hateful and hating and hatemongering system of cruelty, that exhausts and withers and kills us, that stunts our care, makes it so embattled and constrained and local in its scale and effects, where we have the capacity to be greater.”
We have the capacity to be greater.
If you call yourself a conservative, with any kind of serious pride, you’d better oppose this radically evil world we live in, and do something to change it. You’d better make it your project to conserve what is transcendental and good in this life, to sew the seeds of human flourishment, to make a social movement that everyday people would be proud to be a part of. Otherwise, there will one day be nothing left for any of us to be conservative about.
Very interesting and surprising . I wish I could get my evangelical Christian friends to read it ! But probably they would reject any criticism of US 'born again' type Christianity . They also would not like any suggestion that Catholics could be Christian at all .
Oh, yeah, in the US we've always tolerated capitalism that's redder in tooth and claw than almost everywhere else in the world. But we worship at the altar of Progress and creating the Next Big Thing, and capitalism is one tool for serving our gods.