Review

The Odyssey Challenges the Right-Wing Myth of a “Golden Past”

The new film pushes back against MAGA attempts to use a fetishization of the ancient world to legitimizing bigotry.

By Nicholas Powers , 

Truthout

July 25, 2026

The cast of The Odyssey attends the premiere of the film on July 14, 2026, in New York City.

Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Universal Pictures

Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens with a shot of the bard Demodocus — played by rapper Travis Scott — hitting a staff on a table for a beat. The movie then cuts to Sinon, an Achaean soldier in front of the Trojan Horse, who is played by transgender actor Elliot Page. Later, the hero, Odysseus (a somber Matt Damon) confesses that he is a war criminal. The blood on his hands stopped him from coming home.

The new film, which turns Homer’s epic into a critique of the West, started drawing the ire of right-wing critics before it even hit the screens. This version of The Odyssey calls out racism. It calls out patriarchy. It exposes the human cost of war and denounces the military machismo that Homer and the modern right-wing “manosphere” celebrate. It corrects the failure of empathy in the 8th century BCE epic. We are lucky to have a version of the Odyssey that portrays the real conflict within the story: how a scared and wounded man tries to heal his humanity so he can come home.
Don’t Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth

In the film, Trojan soldiers on horseback gallop across a beach to the Trojan Horse, a giant statue, half-buried in sand. They see the scared soldier Sinon, who says the Trojan Horse is a peace offering. Hardened by war, they kill Sinon but wheel the statue into the city. In its belly, Odysseus and his men wait for nightfall to open Troy’s gates for their army to bring death and destruction.

Nolan’s The Odyssey cuts back and forth across time. In this way, Nolan is loyal to the structure of Homer’s poem, which tells scenes in flashbacks. The center of gravity is Odysseus, long-bearded, trapped on an idyllic island by the nymph Calypso (played by an ethereal Charlize Theron). She drugs him with a lotus flower that causes amnesia. Bit by bit, he remembers his journey after the Trojan War. He recalls his arrogance at guiding his men on a quick sail home. He got them lost and killed. Struck by guilt, he eats more of the memory-erasing lotus.

Memory is key in this movie. Memories of war are how a son, Telemachus (a stoic Tom Holland), learns of his father, Odysseus, and in turn learns how to “become a man.” Memories of war are also how Odysseus accepts the blood on his hands. At the high point in the film, the effects of the lotus fade. He remembers the sacking of Troy. Fire eating stone. Soldiers hacking people like butchers working sides of beef. Odysseus wanders around, stunned at the gore and death. Finally, he snaps out of it, and says to Calypso, “I didn’t want to go home.”


Is There a Future Without Incarceration? Abolitionist Art Shows Us One.
Prison abolitionist art creates a future to briefly live in, and from that place, turn and look at our present. By Nicholas Powers , Truthout May 23, 2026

I read Homer’s Odyssey. I taught Homer’s Odyssey. I can tell you that however soul-stirring and epic it may be, it is written for the elite ruling class.

Nolan’s The Odyssey centers the inner conflict of a war veteran struggling with trauma. When Damon’s Odysseus returns to his castle in Ithaca, disguised as a beggar, he talks with his wife about the horror of war. Nolan’s focus is not original; in 2024’s The Return, actor Ralph Fiennes also played an Odysseus wracked by grief and guilt. Fiennes said in an interview it was “an antiwar film.” In that version, Penelope (played by a steely Juliette Binoche) yelled at him, “How many men did you kill? How many women, raped?”

I read Homer’s Odyssey. I taught Homer’s Odyssey. I can tell you that however soul-stirring and epic it may be, it is written for the elite ruling class. Homer’s Odysseus in no way shows how violence maims men’s souls. But as Damon’s Odysseus walks numb while Troy burns, you can imagine it not as Troy but as Tehran after U.S. and Israeli attacks, or Baghdad during Desert Storm, or Ukraine after Russian missile strikes.
Make Patriarchy Gross Again

In this new recasting of The Odyssey,feminist critiques also abound. The film shows the pressure of patriarchy on women characters such as Penelope (an embattled Anne Hathaway), Circe the witch (a haunting Samantha Morton), and also the unnamed women cut down by soldiers. The tragedy is that the film’s critique can only go so far to the degree that it remains loyal to the source material. Homer’s original, beginning to end, reaffirms male supremacy.

Mother and son fight over the future. Telemachus urges Penelope to marry. He pleads with her that this way, he can maneuver to the throne. She snarls at him, “I have sat on the throne for years! I have experience but none of it matters as much as the bristle on your beard.” She storms off, the point made that she is the most capable leader, but in a patriarchy, her young son has more authority than she does.

The sharpest feminist critique comes at the hands of a witch. During a flashback, Odysseus remembers sailing to island. His men are hungry and spot a farm house. They run to it and the grey-haired Circe, a witch in disguise, feeds them meaty broth that casts a spell. In a deliciously lurid scene, she reshapes each man into a pig, like a sculptor working wet clay. When Odysseus comes, he knows she is a witch. She accuses men of being animals, led by “base instincts” who rob and rape and kill. Only after Odysseus threatens to kill her sister, whom she transformed into a raven, does she reverse the spell, changing the pigs back into his soldiers. Bitterly, she says, “Back into your disguises.” Male self-image is a mask hiding their animal nature.

The Right-Wing Freak Out

Right-wing critics ripped their hair out over this film before it even hit theaters. They hated that Nolan actively diversified the cast. They saw it as evidence that this was a “woke” Odyssey. Once again, their argument goes, liberals stole another piece of culture from them and ruined it.

Exhibit number one: the rumor that Elliot Page would play Achilles. (Not true —again, he played Sinon the soldier.) MAGA critics discovered that Page was cast and got it into their heads that he was Achilles, the most famous warrior in all of literature. Achilles was played like a beefcake calendar model by Brad Pitt in 2004’s Troy. The idea of a transgender actor supposedly “desecrating” Achilles masculinity drove them to create AI videos showing Page as Achilles getting easily killed or stumbling over his shield.

Meanwhile right-wing critics also derided the casting of Black actor Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy as historically inaccurate. Really, they were grasping for an excuse to vent racism. Elon Musk called her casting an “insult.” Right-wing personality Matt Walsh posted on X: “Not one person on the planet actually thinks that Lupita Nyong’o is ‘the most beautiful woman in the world.’” Again, the racist AI videos came, one showing Black actor Samuel L. Jackson as Helen of Troy, implying Nyong’o was ugly.

The fight over who owns history is the fight over legitimacy. Whoever owns the past owns the future.

What spurred this right-wing freak out? A fetish for a “golden past.” Seen through the right’s political lens, the past is a time of law and order, in which natural roles in gender and class were strictly observed, which led to social harmony. In this illusionary past, the best ruled and the inferior obeyed. Professor Curtis Dozier dissects the right’s obsession with antiquity in his 2026 book, The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate. He argues that the ancient world is a mirror in which racists can see themselves, legitimized by academic prestige, and that history reflects their values. He summarized the right’s use of history in a New Books Network interview:


Look, this society, ancient Greece and Rome, which you respect and believe is a high point in human civilization, they excluded foreigners from citizenship. They excluded women from political rights. They regarded outsiders as a dangerous threat. They practiced eugenic measures. Plato said if any deformed infants are born, they should be taken away and put into a dark place and never seen again.

The fight over who owns history is the fight over legitimacy. Whoever owns the past owns the future. It is a fight you see in the reactions to Zack Snyder’s 2006 movie 300 compared to Nolan’s 2026 The Odyssey. Snyder’s Spartan warriors, lean and muscled, were idealized men. 300 became the war cry of the MMA-glorifying, manosphere-participating, testosterone-advocating MAGA man. Like Dozier said, it gave their male fantasies a fake Ph.D. in history. It gave them license to attack empathy and women’s rights and diversity.

Home, Sweet Home

The reaction to Nolan’s The Odyssey gives me hope. Yes, it’s flawed. Yes, Nolan’s loyalty to the text forces him to miss more daring interpretations. Yes, the theme of trauma as the obstacle to Odysseus coming home is overwhelmed by the spectacle of violence. In the end scene, it’s obvious the film relishes in Odysseus massacring the suitors. Even so, at the end, the old king exiles himself so his son Telemachus can rule Ithaca with clean hands, saying that Zeus’s Law (basically, the Golden Rule) means Odysseus must leave again, so that peace can come.

In part, Odysseus chooses exile because earlier in the film, he realizes that he was wrong. Everywhere he stopped, he was told about the “people from the sea” who came and stole and killed and ravaged. They broke Zeus’s Law. They brought darkness. Odysseus, in a moment of clarity, says: “We were the sea people. We were.”

In a time of war and poverty and global warming, we need this version of The Odyssey. We need to see a war veteran learning how to heal in order to belong again. The U.S. has committed so much violence in its short 250-year history. We have suffered from it and also sometimes caused it, and we feel lost. But we can get home. We have to recognize our complicity in the chaos we decry. We have to see the blood on our hands, clean it off, and then hopefully, when we reach out for forgiveness, we’ll receive it.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Nicholas Powers
Nicholas Powers is the author of Thirst, a political vampire novel; The Ground Below Zero: 9/11 to Burning Man, New Orleans to Darfur, Haiti to Occupy Wall Street; and most recently, Black Psychedelic Revolution. He has been writing for Truthout since 2011. His article, “Killing the Future: The Theft of Black Life” in the Truthout anthology Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? coalesces his years of reporting on police brutality.

Long overlooked and newly energized, Black Buddhist studies challenges US Buddhist history

(RNS) — Buddhism is an American religious tradition that intersects meaningfully with African American religious history, experts in the emerging field of Black Buddhism say.

“Race, Caste, and the Challenge of Karma” conference, organized in conjunction with the Black Buddhist Faculty Project, April 4-5, 2025 (Photo courtesy of Frank Wojciechowski)

Chloe Landen

July 24, 2026 

RNS

(RNS) — When Pamela Ayo Yetunde began hospice volunteering with an organization that utilizes mindfulness to help patients confront their own deaths, she was already far removed from her Methodist upbringing and on a quest for “peace of mind.” At the same time, she was reading the book “Touching Peace” by the influential Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh. Shortly thereafter, she began sitting for meditation retreats.

Those introductions to Buddhism changed the trajectory of her life. Yetunde has now been a Buddhist for 24 years and is an accomplished pastoral counselor, educator and author of several works, notably contributing to “Black and Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us about Race, Resilience, Transformation, and Freedom.”

Yetunde told RNS that many Black people are increasingly drawn to deeply practiced Buddhism, in part because it lacks the “guilt and shame”-based practices and beliefs common in Christian traditions.

Long overlooked and newly energized, “Black Buddhism” is emerging as a movement and academic field to rewrite the history of Buddhism in the U.S. — a history that has overlooked the role of Black practitioners and intellectuals for more than a century, scholars argue.

In early August, Princeton University will host a four-day Black Buddhism Faculty Training workshop that aims to “foster generative conversation among scholars of African American religion and Buddhism” and develop resources to teach about Black Buddhism in their classrooms. The workshop is sponsored by Princeton’s Black Buddhism Faculty Project (BBFP) launched in 2023. The initiative draws attention to the growing study of Black Buddhism, which it describes as “a boundary-crossing field” in its bridging of scholars across Buddhist Studies, American Religions, African American Studies and Comparative Literature and Philosophy.

Adeana McNicholl (Photo courtesy of Frank Wojciechowski)

Black Buddhism as a self-identified movement emerged in the ’90s and accelerated after the 2020 Black Lives Matter reckoning, when some Buddhists began engaging in conversations about race and karma and held meditation retreats specifically for people of color, said Adeana McNicholl, an assistant professor of religious studies at Vanderbilt and part of Princeton’s BBFP. 

Most historians trace the origins of Buddhism in the U.S. to the mid-19th-century Gold Rush, when Chinese laborers and immigrants arrived on the West Coast and in Hawaii. Buddhism’s national presence only expanded in the late 19th century with the arrival of Japanese immigrants. But scholars say that isn’t the whole story. 

“Black people have been engaging with Buddhist thought and ideas for nearly as long as Buddhism has been in the United States,” said McNicholl, who is writing a book about her research on the history of Black Buddhism and “Afro-Asian Solidarity.”

RELATED: Online forum helps Asian Americans find their way in Americanized Buddhism

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Jonathan C. Gold, a professor of Buddhist Studies and the director of Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society and Religion, of which the BBFP is a part, said those behind the initiative hope to strengthen academic knowledge of Black Buddhism. The faculty contend Buddhism is fundamental to American religious history and intersects meaningfully with African American religious history.

Ralph H. Craig III (Photo courtesy of Frank Wojciechowski)

Buddhist ideas, figures and tenets — particularly the commitment to nonviolence — played an important role in the long Civil Rights movement, spanning from the end of Reconstruction to the late 1960s, said Ralph H. Craig III, an assistant professor of religion at Whitman College who is involved in Princeton’s project. Influential Black thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Howard Thurman and Bayard Rustin engaged with various Eastern philosophies and Asian anti-colonial movements.

Notably, Black Civil Rights leaders meaningfully interacted with Hindu leader Mahatma Gandhi, who drew inspiration from the Buddha’s approach to nonviolence and transformed it into a tool of political resistance. Later, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. developed a close friendship with Nhất Hạnh, the Buddhist monk, who once told King that some referred to him as “a bodhisattva, an enlightened being.”

Buddhist ideas trickled down to broader African American public spaces, influencing Black newspapers, the musical world of jazz, new religious movements and other cultural products, Craig said.

“It’s not necessarily just because they happened to pick up a book in a bookstore and it blew their minds, right? There is a kind of circulation of ideas that’s happening,” Craig added. 

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RELATED: In upcoming anthology, Asian American feminists critique mainstream Buddhism

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By the end of the 20th century, Buddhism had become more familiar to Americans and was promoted by many celebrities, including the “Queen of Rock ’n’ Roll,” Tina Turner.

Despite its historical presence and popularity, only 1% of U.S. adults identify as Buddhist today. Of that population, a majority were born outside the U.S. and nearly 60% are Asian, a quarter are white, and only 3% are Black. Yet McNicholl cautioned against taking survey results at face value. “It’s limiting if we just assume that religious identity is equivalent to formal professions of faith or attendance,” she said, adding that those who engage in practices like Buddhist meditation but wouldn’t necessarily call themselves Buddhist get left out.

Black Buddhists like Yetunde say the tradition continues to grow and is appealing to many Black Americans in its offering of a radical acceptance not easily found within other U.S. religious traditions. “You can be a Black woman, you can be a Black trans woman, trans man, queer and … you can still be a leader within Black Buddhist traditions and Buddhist traditions,” she said. 

Princeton’s BBFP has partnered with and received support from the Numata Foundation, Lion’s Roar and the Initiative for Black Buddhist Studies. Since its inception, the BBFP has established a digital library, held three workshops and begun developing teaching resources and curricula that bring together scholars and practitioners. 

For now, Gold measures the initiative’s positive impact by the growing confidence among those who defend Black Buddhism’s distinctive contributions to contemporary Buddhism. Gold cited several recent panels related to Black Buddhism at the annual American Academy of Religion meeting as examples.

Keynote lecturer Dr. Larry Ward speaks at the “Race, Caste, and the Challenge of Karma” conference in April 2025. (Photo courtesy of Frank Wojciechowski)

Nonetheless, McNicholl acknowledged that persisting within Buddhist studies is “a lingering sense that what counts as real Buddhism is Buddhism in Asia, and not necessarily Buddhism in the United States,” she said. Even further removed are Black Buddhists, because “they’re not Asian, they’re not white, which is sort of like the predominant demographics of the academy of Buddhist studies in the United States,” she added.

“American Buddhism, Buddhism in the West, is up for debate,” Craig told RNS. And claims to authentic Buddhism are not limited to the academy. Craig noted that in addition to Asian Buddhists and Black Buddhists, there are also alt-right, white supremacist Buddhists. 

Tenets like karma also remain topics of meaningful and contested discussion. Last year, the BBFP hosted a conference called “Race, Caste, and the Challenge of Karma” that examined how it can be “difficult to reconcile traditional Buddhist approaches to karma with projects to counter systemic injustice.” The discussion was spurred by the work of Rima Vesely-Flad, who wrote “Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition” and created the Initiative for Black Buddhist Studies.

Vesely-Flad became interested in karma after one of her students at Union Theological Seminary, a 70-year-old Black woman enrolled in the school’s Buddhism program, asked a visiting monastic how he explained the suffering of Black people. His response was, “You suffer because of your karma.”

“She left the Buddhism program after that,” Vesely-Flad told RNS.

Karma is a central Buddhist doctrine. “We can’t pretend it doesn’t exist,” Vesely-Flad said, adding that Buddhists must acknowledge it has been weaponized against subjugated people to blame them for their own oppression. Yet Vesely-Flad also remains interested in how karma has been used to confront harm.

The term “Black Buddhism” is similarly contested. Vesely-Flad, for instance, distances herself from the term, which she claims flattens the nuance that Black practitioners are a part of a variety of Buddhist lineages with distinct practices and interpretations. Instead, she prefers terms like “Black Buddhists” and “Black Buddhist thought.”

McNicholl noted that the field of Black Buddhist studies is growing around the juncture of America’s 250th, as the country is thinking about how “we tell the story of religion in the nation,” she said.

“Uncovering this history of Black Buddhism allows us to see the diversity of religious life in the United States” and to recognize that Buddhism has been a part of the national fabric for much of the nation’s lifespan, she added. 

 

The Contradictions of America 250

A socialist perspective on the semiquincentennial

By Peter Shapiro

July 3, 2026

Source: The New Liberator

Black Lives Matter protest, Chicago, 2020. Photo: Joshua Mellin, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Major anniversaries of the Declaration of Independence have a way of coming at inconvenient times. When the bicentennial took place, the United States had suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam, Congressional investigations had revealed massive FBI spying on US citizens, and Richard Nixon had just resigned in disgrace. Public confidence in the government was at a low ebb.

The centennial in 1876 was even worse. The federal government was about to abandon its commitment to Reconstruction, pulling troops out of the South to bribe Florida electors into voting for a Republican presidential candidate who had, in fact, lost at the polls. Nearly a century of Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, lynchings, and Klan terror would follow. In the South, a brief experiment in biracial democracy abruptly ended; in the North, robber baron capitalism was in full swing. Within a year, a largely spontaneous railroad strike prompted pitched battles across the country between federal troops and street protesters enraged by the depredations of the railroad barons.

The 250^th anniversary of the Declaration is a few days away. For many, the current occupant of the White House bears a striking resemblance to the sniveling monarch in the hip-hop musical Hamilton. The real King George was supposed to be ruling by Divine Right; Donald Trump seems to think he is as well, turning his ICE brownshirts loose on city streets, using his office to enrich himself and his family, flouting laws, and starting wars on a whim only to become bored with them weeks later. Despised by much of the population, he clings to his diminishing mass base with naked appeals to white racism and male supremacy. He plasters his name on every public venue he can think of and honors the nation’s founding with a cage match on the White House lawn.

So what are we supposed to celebrate? The men who signed the Declaration were hardly heroes. Most were wealthy merchants and/or slaveholders. They had an agenda that reflected their class interests. The revolution they led left slavery intact, accelerated the dispossession and outright murder of Native peoples, and reserved political power for a narrow slice of the population. After 250 years, we are still dealing with these contradictions.

But revolutions, even conservative ones, have a way of taking on a life of their own. The American Revolution could not have succeeded without the support of ordinary people whose interests did not neatly align with those of the Founding Fathers. And once the revolution was over, the Declaration’s afterlife exceeded the intentions of its authors. Its promise that “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed” and its assertion that “all men are created equal” would be taken up, again and again, by people the founders would never have imagined as political equals: enslaved Africans, workers, women, and anti-colonial revolutionaries around the world.

Founding Fathers, or Deadbeat Dads?

The contradictions that confronted colonial society on the cusp of the revolution were real enough, but nowhere near as momentous as Thomas Jefferson’s soaring rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence would suggest. “No taxation without representation,” the battle cry of the revolution, hardly seems like the sort of demand that would arouse the masses. Measured against the popular grievances in British colonies like India and Ireland, where the economic stakes were greater and the human cost far higher, the “long train of abuses and usurpations” cited by Jefferson look like small potatoes.

But the leaders of the revolution, Jefferson among them, had class interests to protect that distinguished them from most colonists. They saw British trade and taxation policies as detrimental to their businesses, and many of them feared that Crown-appointed colonial administrators lacked the resources and the wherewithal to protect them should the masses of people show any signs of restiveness.

Jefferson identified with the philosophers of the European Enlightenment, who challenged hereditary rule by royal families and a landed aristocracy. For them, and for much of this country’s revolutionary generation, political power properly flowed not from bloodlines but from property. The Declaration’s famous line about governments “deriv[ing] their just powers from the consent of the governed” is widely seen as a call for democracy, but it was also a defense of private property—including property in slaves. Significantly, there was already a growing debate in England about the morality of the slave trade, and American slaveholders regarded it with deep unease.

Jefferson himself was deeply ambivalent. Born into the Virginia aristocracy, Jefferson disliked the idleness and self-indulgence of the planter class; he believed that slavery not only robbed enslaved people of their natural rights but also corrupted the slaveowners. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” he would write in 1782. But he was too burdened with debt to consider freeing his own 600 slaves—even after he fathered several children with one of them. And politically, abolishing slavery outright was a bridge too far. A denunciation of slavery in the original draft of the Declaration was left on the cutting room floor, replaced by a specious claim that King George had “forced” it upon the colonists.

The “chosen people”?

If Jefferson thought the Southern planters were morally compromised, he pinned his hopes on the white yeoman farmers whom he considered “the chosen people of God.” He envisioned a democracy of small producers and hoped that the settlement of the frontier would allow their emergence as the dominant social class in the new nation. They already made up a majority of the population of colonial America.

But wealth in the colonies was concentrated in the hands of a few whose fortunes were tied to transatlantic trade, mainly shipowners and large planters growing crops for export. For anyone else, the largely unsettled west held out the best hope of an independent livelihood.

Lacking access to markets in the coastal cities, farmers in the interior produced mainly for their own use. What business they engaged in was apt to involve barter with their neighbors. If taxes imposed by the Crown affected them, it was because without access to currency they had no way to pay them. Tax collectors on the frontier sometimes came in for rough treatment.

What really rankled, though, were British restrictions on settlement west of the Appalachians. After a long, grinding war, Britain had wrested formal control of the area from the French, but it was still wilderness, and for all practical purposes it remained Indian land. Occupied with expanding and defending its empire in other parts of the world, Britain had no stomach for colonizing the Mississippi Valley, much less policing it. But people still defied the British ban on settlement, and they resented that the government would not protect them from Indian resistance, or even provide them with authorization and resources to protect themselves.

It was an issue that united hardscrabble yeoman farmers of the West and wealthy land speculators from the East. In deference to their interests, Jefferson would include the Second Amendment when he drafted the Bill of Rights 10 years later. The “right to bear arms” enshrined by our current Supreme Court was originally about Indian removal, a process that would continue a century longer as the nation expanded westward.

Black lives mattered

Yet if the Declaration meant property rights and political independence to the founders, and land and local autonomy to frontier settlers, its promise of equality took on a very different meaning in Black hands.

The much-quoted passage in the Declaration that “all men are created equal” seems truly revolutionary even today. With a few exceptions, the Founding Fathers never suggested that the Declaration’s embrace of equality applied to Black people. But that did not stop Black people from acting as though it did. The Declaration actually served as an inspiration for Gabriel’s revolt, an aborted slave rebellion that occurred in Virginia 25 years later. The abolitionist movement repeatedly invoked it. In a famous Fourth of July speech in 1858, Frederick Douglass excoriated white America for betraying its promise. In the Gettysburg address, Abraham Lincoln—his own racism notwithstanding—said the Civil War was being fought to defend it. Every struggle against racism in this country, every effort to extend democracy in the face of capitalist power, has found the idea indispensable.

By the same token, antebellum slaveowners found it increasingly hard to swallow. At the time of the Revolution, they typically defended slavery as a necessary evil and viewed their slaves mainly as a source of cheap labor. But as the abolitionist movement gained steam, drawing strength and moral authority from Frederick Douglass and others who had escaped bondage and fled North, they stopped apologizing and started justifying their ownership of human property as a good thing, indispensable to civilization’s survival. In the South Carolina low country, where Blacks outnumbered whites by as much as eight to one, the perceived threat of rebellious slaves loomed as large in the minds of slaveowners as the fabulous wealth being wrested from their labor.

In 1822 a well-organized conspiracy led by a free Black carpenter named Denmark Vesey probably would have seized control of Charleston had it not been betrayed at the last minute. Nine years later, in tidewater Virginia, Nat Turner led a bloody slave uprising and remained at large for weeks until he was finally caught and executed.

The Southern slaveocracy concluded that any talk of abolition was a menace and had to be stopped, lest it encourage further rebellions. South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, their leading voice in Congress, took the Senate floor to declare that the Declaration’s assertion of equal rights was “the most false and dangerous of all political error.” Other spokesmen for the planter class insisted that slavery was not simply a labor system, it was “the step-ladder by which civilized countries have passed from barbarism to civilization.”

After slavery was finally abolished, Jim Crow laws were justified with the same language of social control, though the term “separate but equal” paid cynical lip service to the Declaration. In 1896 the Supreme Court offered its blessing to the charade in Plessy vs. Ferguson. Nearly six decades—marked by often bitter struggle—would have to pass before the high court finally acknowledged that segregation and inequality were functionally related.

Consent of the governed?

The Declaration of Independence has another abiding message today: its affirmation of the right of revolution. The mere fact that the American revolution occurred encouraged a succession of anti-monarchical and anti-colonial uprisings in Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean that were more socially transformative and often far bloodier. In 1946, when the people of Vietnam had defeated Japanese occupation and were preparing to resist recolonization by the French, the Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh would draft a national constitution taking entire passages word for word from Jefferson’s text.

At a time when too many politicians reflexively talk about the “right to exist,” it’s worth noting a central premise of the Declaration: states derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” No government possesses an inherent right to exist, independent of popular will. Governments do not have rights; people do.

Jefferson believed in the rights of the individual and insisted that there are some areas of our lives where the government has no business going. This tradition has yielded important gains. Jim Crow laws that dictated where Black people could live, work, and go to school have fallen. More recently, movements have challenged the state’s ability to dictate whom people can marry, whether women should have children, or how people live their private lives.

But the right of revolution goes beyond rejecting government intrusion in our personal lives. It’s not only about how we are treated as individuals, but about our collective destiny.

The Black liberation struggle—indeed, the struggle of any oppressed people—is all about making that distinction. Martin Luther King Jr. famously observed that the right to sit at a desegregated lunch counter doesn’t mean much if you can’t afford the price of a hamburger; he spent his last years challenging the class contradictions that kept people from affording it. Malcolm X didn’t pontificate about a “color-blind” society; he called for an end to white people’s power over Black people. The Ten Point Program of the Black Panther Party didn’t demand equal treatment and an end to discrimination; it demanded “the power to determine the destiny of our Black community.” A Latino leader of the Third World strike at San Francisco State College in 1968 summed it all up nicely: “We don’t want equality, we want self-determination.”

Implicit in the call for self-determination is Jefferson’s argument that governments that rule without “the consent of the governed” should be overthrown. He spoke of “the tree of liberty being watered with the blood of tyrants” and at one point mused about the need for a revolution every 20 years.

Mao Tse-tung, who pinned his hopes on the rising national liberation struggles in the Third World, believed that their fate was inextricably linked to that of the Black liberation movement in the United States. He pointed out that colonialism and imperialism had their roots in the African slave trade, and the capitalist system grew and flourished on the backs of enslaved African American labor. Viewed in that light, Black people’s confrontation with the ambiguous language in the Declaration of Independence is truly a global one.

For 250 years, Americans and people around the world have been fighting over the meaning of 1776. They still are. The Declaration of Independence has always contained profound contradictions. Simultaneously a defense of slavery and an inspiration for slave revolts, a justification for settler expansion and a touchstone for anti-colonial liberation, the Declaration remains contested terrain.

Revolutions may be defined by the class outlook of those who lead them, but they invariably hold out the promise of something bigger, a vision of human liberation. When they fall short, they inspire us to keep struggling—in ways that no cage match can contain.

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Peter Shapiro is a longtime labor activist living in Oakland. Many years ago he studied US history at UC Berkeley. More recently, he wrote Song of the Stubborn One Thousand: The Watsonville Canning Strike 1985-87 (Haymarket Books).

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This article was originally published by The New Liberator; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.

How Dissent Shaped America

By Ralph Young

July 3, 2026

Source: Barn Raiser

Protester holds a placard saying, ''All power to the workers'' during a rally. Photo by Karla Cot

Dissent is one of this nation’s defining characteristics. Every decade since the earliest days of colonization, Americans have protested for just about every cause imaginable, and every time they did, defenders of the status quo denounced the protesters as unpatriotic and in more recent times as un-American. But protest is one of the consummate expressions of “Americanness.” It is patriotic in the deepest sense.

Even before the United States was conceived, there was dissent. During the 17th century religious dissent played a significant role in the planting and development of the English colonies. In the 18th century political dissent led to the open rebellion that resulted in the birth of the United States. In the 19th century dissenters demanded the abolition of slavery, suffrage for women, fair treatment of Native Americans, and the banning of immigrants. And they protested against the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War (on both sides), and the Spanish-American War. In the 20th century dissenters organized to prohibit alcohol but also demanded workers’ rights, women’s rights, African American rights, Chicano rights, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ+ rights. They also protested against every war (declared and undeclared) fought by the United States. In the 21st century dissenters have protested against abortion, NAFTA, globalization, the Iraq War, the PATRIOT Act, the National Security Agency, bank bailouts, and out-of-control deficits. Most recently dissenters have mobilized to protest against systemic racism, sexual harassment and assault, and Congress’s inability (or refusal) to enact meaningful legislation to address climate change and gun violence. And then there are those who, despite their real grievances, having fallen for the widespread disinformation circulating on untrustworthy internet sites, raise their voices in protest on the basis of conspiracy theories, lies, and a distorted view of American history. Clearly, dissent has many faces.

On the broadest level, dissent is going against the grain. It is speaking out and protesting against what is (whatever that is), most often by a minority group unhappy with majority opinion and rule. However, history has shown that dissent is far more complex, that it comes from all political perspectives and in a variety of categories: mostly religious, political, economic, and cultural/social. Religious dissent is the insistence that everyone be allowed to worship according to the dictates of conscience and not according to the rules of an established religion. Although most religious dissent occurred during the colonial period, when individuals insisted on religious liberty, and during the early national period, when the new nation endorsed the principle of separation of church and state, the demand for religious autonomy persists to this day. Religious dissent was expressed when new sects such as the Shakers, the Mormons, or the Branch Davidians were formed, and it is still being expressed on a different level in the debates over school prayer, intelligent design versus evolution, abortion, capital punishment, and the right to die.

Political dissent is a critique of governance. As the United States grew from a fledgling nation into a world power, political dissenters expressed dissatisfaction about the way those who were in charge governed, and usually (but not always) they provided a plan or recipe for redressing what they perceived as wrong. Most often they used the nation’s founding documents as the authority to legitimize their protest. Antebellum abolitionists demanded the end of slavery, declaring that holding persons in bondage was contrary to the principle that “all men are created equal.” In recent years hundreds of thousands of Americans protested the decision to invade Iraq, proclaiming that doing so transforms the United States into an aggressive imperial power and that by embracing imperialism the United States is renouncing its democratic birthright.

When the economy crashes, economic dissent comes to the fore. People take to the streets protesting economic injustice and inequality. And as distress and suffering expands from the lower classes to the middle class, so too does protest. One thinks of the Richmond bread riots during the Civil War, the violent labor disputes of the 19th century, the Bonus Army’s encampment at the Capitol in 1932, the militant labor activism during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s liberal presidency, the tax revolts of the 1970s, the occupation of Zuccotti Park in 2011.

Cultural and social dissent is a rejection of the predominant attitudes, beliefs, and behavior of mainstream society. Utopian groups in the 19th century defied the conventional values of their time and established communities where all men and women would be treated equally. “Beatniks” and “hippies” in the mid-20th century rejected the conventional middle-class morality of their time, urged their fellow Americans to “do their own thing,” and influenced millions to reevaluate their views of race, gender, and sexuality.

But this is only part of the story. There is significant and frequent overlapping of religious, political, and cultural/social dissent. For example, many dissenters, such as temperance activists in the early 20th century and the Christian right today, can be labeled as political, religious, and social dissenters. The 1960s counterculture’s challenge to American values was also intricately tied up in the political protests against the Vietnam War and the struggle for racial equality. Furthermore, there are economic and psychological factors that often play roles in dissent movements.

There are some decades that are relatively quiet dissentwise and others when significant problems intensify so rapidly that tens of millions of people get involved in the discussion to find solutions. During these periods we see a sharp rise in dissent, and that dissent can take many forms as different groups propose different solutions. Some dissenters are reformers who wish to fix the problems through a process of reform. Some are reactionaries who seek to address the problems by returning to the policies that existed before the problems arose. Some are radicals or even revolutionaries who propose to solve the problems by smashing the system and starting over. The debate over slavery and the events leading to the Civil War, the Progressive era, and the 1960s, and the present day are periods when dissent, in all its diverse forms, exploded.

There are several levels or stages of dissent. At the beginning individuals might simply disagree with a policy or a law or an issue. Perhaps they are willing to tolerate a wrong or an injustice for a while, but when it becomes less tolerable, the next step is to become active. Individuals might write a letter or an article, give a speech, lead a protest march, or conduct a demonstration. Dissent and protest carried to a higher level entails resistance, civil disobedience, breaking laws, or even participating in a riot or insurrection.

The methods and forms of dissent are wide-ranging. Many protesters express dissent through petitions and protest marches. Some use music or art or theater or comedy to articulate their message. Some engage in acts of civil disobedience, willfully breaking laws to put pressure on the system to force those who have political and economic power to acknowledge and address the issues. They are often marginalized individuals and groups that lack power but have a legitimate grievance against the way things are. Most times these types of dissenters have criticized the United States from the left. They have sought more equality, more moral rectitude, more freedom. They have demanded that America live up to what it had committed itself to on paper at the Constitutional Convention. Many of these dissenters have viewed the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as binding contracts between the people and the government and protested when they believed the government was not fulfilling its part of the contract.

Dissenters often have a keen sense of history and build on the experiences and methods of earlier dissenters. It is not unusual to see dissenters quote those who have gone before as well as draw on the successful tactics and strategies of earlier dissent movements. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s employed many of the tactics of the labor movement of the 1930s, while antiwar activists adopted the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement in their protests against the war in Vietnam and later the Iraq War. Dissenters with a vision for the future look to the past for inspiration.

But there are some dissenters who have a sketchy understanding of American history who want to return to an imagined past that never existed. For example, those who protest against immigration in order to keep America white, not realizing that the country has always been a nation of diversity, peopled by immigrants of all ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds. The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s opposing anyone who was not “One Hundred Percent American” and the Unite the Right protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 chanting “You will not replace us!” are examples of this.

Individuals and groups that protest against the protesters are also expressing dissent. Reactionaries have frequently resisted change and fought to maintain the special privileges and supremacy of their class or race or gender. Some have wanted to maintain the status quo and prevent change, while others have sought to turn back the clock to a “simpler,” more “trouble-free” time. When abolitionists denounced slavery, antiabolitionists argued just as passionately to preserve the institution. When women demanded equality, millions of Americans reacted with hostility and formed antisuffrage associations.

Although most dissent springs from those who lack political power, there are instances when a dissent movement is part of the power structure—the temperance movement and the Know-Nothings of the 19th century; the anti-tax ideologues of the 20th and 21st centuries. There are also notable individuals who fought entrenched interests from a position of political power—Senators Robert M. La Follette and Margaret Chase Smith, for example, spoke out against what they believed was a usurpation or misuse of power on the part of the federal government.

Over the years dissenters achieved varying levels of success. Some got in trouble. Some were arrested. Many were beaten. Some were killed. But they kept hammering away at the powers that be until those powers began to listen. As a result, public opinion was swayed, laws were enacted or repealed, slavery was abolished, unions were organized, women got the right to vote, the Jim Crow laws were invalidated. In fact, many dissenters who were maligned, vilified, and even demonized as unpatriotic and anti-American by their contemporaries are now considered heroes. Some dissenters never achieved the change they were seeking, but though their goals were dismissed, they raised new questions and had an influence on the political discussion.

For the most part dissenters have embraced lofty ideals and have a moral purpose. And most of them believe they are acting to ensure that the United States lives up to its promise to secure Americans’ natural rights. But there are dissenters whose goals are not well-intended or virtuous and who use questionable means to attain their goals—they are not in it to grant equal rights to a downtrodden minority but to restrict rights or to promote their own narrow interests at the expense of others.

During times of heightened passions—the Antebellum period, the Progressive era, the Great Depression, the Vietnam War—dissenters have protested from liberal, conservative, and radical standpoints. In the debates about the war in Vietnam, for example, there were those who believed that America was acting as an imperial power and that the capitalist system should be toppled. There were those who opposed the war primarily on ethical grounds because the United States was acting immorally. And there were those who opposed the war simply because the United States was losing it and thus argued that if the government was not going to go all-out in its effort to destroy communism in Vietnam, then there was no point in being there. In the end, for completely different reasons, radicals, doves, and hawks all came to protest the war in Vietnam.

Obviously not all dissenters are created equal. Nor are the consequences of their efforts necessarily positive or socially useful. There is a difference between dissenters whose goal is to create a more just society by expanding the rights of the disempowered, and those who are self-aggrandizing troublemakers interested only in disrupting society or denying rights to others. Historian Eric Foner, in The Story of American Freedom, points out that “freedom” is a “contested concept.” So too is “dissent.”

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Ralph Young

Ralph Young is Professor of Instruction in History at Temple University. He is the author of Dissent: The History of an American Idea, and the editor of Make Art Not War: Political Protest Posters from the Twentieth Century and Dissent in America: The Voices That Shaped a Nation.