GOP becoming a cult of know-nothings

November 28, 2021·

Supporters of former President Trump are seen the North Carolina Republican Party Convention on June 5

The Republican Party is becoming a cult. Its leaders are in thrall to Donald Trump, a defeated former president who refuses to acknowledge defeat. Its ideology is MAGA, Trump's deeply divisive take on what Republicans assume to be unifying American values.

The party is now in the process of carrying out purges of heretics who do not worship Trump or accept all the tenets of MAGA. Conformity is enforced by social media, a relatively new institution with the power to marshal populist energy against critics and opponents.


What's happening on the right in American politics is not exactly new. To understand it, you need to read a book published 50 years ago by Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, "The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970." Right-wing extremism, now embodied in Trump's MAGA movement, dates back to the earliest days of the country.

The title of Lipset and Raab's book was chosen carefully. Right-wing extremism is not about the rational calculation of interests. It's about irrational impulses, which the authors identify as "status frustrations." They write that "the political movements which have successfully appealed to status resentments have been irrational in character. [The movements] focus on attacking a scapegoat, which conveniently symbolizes the threat perceived by their supporters."

The most common scapegoats have been minority ethnic or religious groups. In the 19th century, that meant Catholics, immigrants and even Freemasons. The Anti-Masonic Party, the Know Nothing Party and later the American Protective Association were major political forces. In the 20th century, the U.S. experienced waves of anti-immigrant sentiment. After World War II, anti-communism became the driving force behind McCarthyism in the 1950s and the Goldwater movement in the early 1960s ("Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice").

The roots of the current right-wing extremism lie in the late 1960s and 1970s, when Americans began to be polarized over values (race, ethnicity, sex, military intervention). Conflicts of interest (such as business versus labor) can be negotiated and compromised. Conflicts of values cannot.

You see "the politics of unreason" in today's right-wing extremism. While it remains true, as it has been for decades, that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to vote Republican (that's interests), what's new today is that the better educated you are, the more likely you are to vote Democratic, at least among whites (that's values, and it's been driving white suburban voters with college degrees away from Trump's "know-nothing" brand of Republicanism).

Oddly, religion has become a major force driving the current wave of right-wing extremism. Not religious affiliation (Protestant versus Catholic) but religiosity (regular churchgoers versus non-churchgoers). That's not because of Trump's religious appeal (he has none) but because of the Democratic Party's embrace of secularism and the resulting estrangement of fundamentalist Protestants, observant Catholics and even orthodox Jews.

The Democratic Party today is defined by its commitment to diversity and inclusion. The party celebrates diversity in all its forms - racial, ethnic, religious and sexual. To Democrats, that's the tradition of American pluralism - "E pluribus unum." Republicans celebrate the "unum" more than the "pluribus" - we may come from diverse backgrounds, but we should all share the same "American values."

One reason right-wing extremism is thriving in the Republican Party is that there is no figure in the party willing to lead the opposition to it. Polls of Republican voters show no other GOP figure even close to Trump's level of support for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. The only other Republican who seems interested in running is Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, who recently criticized "Trump cancel culture."

If Trump does run in 2024, as he seems inclined to do, can he win?

It all depends on President Biden's record. Right now, Biden's popularity is not very high. In fact, Biden and Trump are about equally unpopular (Biden's job approval is 52 to 43 percent negative, while Trump's favorability is 54 to 41.5 percent negative). Biden will be 82 years old in 2024. If he doesn't run, the Democrats will very likely nominate Vice President Harris. When a president doesn't run for reelection, his party almost always nominates its most recent vice president, assuming they run (Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Walter Mondale in 1984, George H.W. Bush in 1988, Al Gore in 2000, Joe Biden in 2020). Democrats would be unlikely to deny a black woman the nomination. There is also some talk of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg running if Biden doesn't.

The 2024 election could be a rematch between Trump and Biden. Or a race between Trump and a black woman. Or between Trump and a gay man with a husband and children. Lee Drutman, a political scientist at the New America think tank, recently told The New York Times, "I have a hard time seeing how we have a peaceful 2024 election after everything that's happened now. I don't see the rhetoric turning down. I don't see the conflicts going away. ... It's hard to see how it gets better before it gets worse."

Bill Schneider is an emeritus professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and author of "Standoff: How America Became Ungovernable" (Simon & Schuster).

How the 19th-Century Know Nothing Party Reshaped American Politics

From xenophobia to conspiracy theories, the Know Nothing party launched a nativist movement whose effects are still felt today

Lorraine Boissoneault

January 26, 2017

Anti-immigrant cartoon showing two men labeled "Irish Wiskey" and "Lager Bier," carrying a ballot box. Everett Collection Historical / Alamy Stock Photo

Like Fight Club, there were rules about joining the secret society known as the Order of the Star Spangled Banner (OSSB). An initiation rite called “Seeing Sam.” The memorization of passwords and hand signs. A solemn pledge never to betray the order. A pureblooded pedigree of Protestant Anglo-Saxon stock and the rejection of all Catholics. And above all, members of the secret society weren’t allowed to talk about the secret society. If asked anything by outsiders, they would respond with, “I know nothing.”

So went the rules of this secret fraternity that rose to prominence in 1853 and transformed into the powerful political party known as the Know Nothings. At its height in the 1850s, the Know Nothing party, originally called the American Party, included more than 100 elected congressmen, eight governors, a controlling share of half-a-dozen state legislatures from Massachusetts to California, and thousands of local politicians. Party members supported deportation of foreign beggars and criminals; a 21-year naturalization period for immigrants; mandatory Bible reading in schools; and the elimination of all Catholics from public office. They wanted to restore their vision of what America should look like with temperance, Protestantism, self-reliance, with American nationality and work ethic enshrined as the nation's highest values.

Know Nothings were the American political system’s first major third party. Early in the 19th century, two parties leftover from the birth of the United States were the Federalists (who advocated for a strong central government) and the Democratic-Republicans (formed by Thomas Jefferson). Following the earliest parties came the National Republicans, created to oppose Andrew Jackson. That group eventually transformed into the Whigs as Jackson’s party became known as the Democrats. The Whig party sent presidents William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor and others to the White House during its brief existence. But the party splintered and then disintegrated over the politics of slavery. The Know Nothings filled the power void before the Whigs had even ceased to exist, choosing to ignore slavery and focus all their energy on the immigrant question. They were the first party to leverage economic concerns over immigration as a major part of their platform. Though short-lived, the values and positions of the Know Nothings ultimately contributed to the two-party system we have today.

Paving the way for the Know Nothing movement were two men from New York City. Thomas R. Whitney, the son of a silversmith who opened his own shop, wrote the magnum opus of the Know Nothings, A Defense of the American Policy. William “Bill the Butcher” Poole was a gang leader, prizefighter and butcher in the Bowery (and would later be used as inspiration for the main character in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York). Whitney and Poole were from different social classes, but both had an enormous impact on their chosen party—and their paths crossed at a pivotal moment in the rise of nativism.

In addition to being a successful engraver, Whitney was an avid reader of philosophy, history and classics. He moved from reading to writing poetry and, eventually, political tracts. “What is equality but stagnation?” Whitney wrote in one of them. Preceded in nativist circles by such elites as author James Fenimore Cooper, Alexander Hamilton, Jr. and James Monroe (nephew of the former president), Whitney had a knack for rising quickly to the top of whichever group he belonged to. He became a charter member of the Order of United Americans (the precursor to the OSSB) and used his own printing press to publish many of the group’s pamphlets.

Whitney believed in government action, but not in service of reducing social inequality. Rather, he believed, all people “are entitled to such privileges, social and political, as they are capable of employing and enjoying rationally.” In other words, only those with the proper qualifications deserved full rights. Women’s suffrage was abhorrent and unnatural, Catholics were a threat to the stability of the nation, and German and Irish immigrants undermined the old order established by the Founding Fathers.

From 1820 to 1845, anywhere from 10,000 to 1000,000 immigrants entered the U.S. each year. Then, as a consequence of economic instability in Germany and a potato famine in Ireland, those figures turned from a trickle into a tsunami. Between 1845 and 1854, 2.9 million immigrants poured into the country, and many of them were of Catholic faith. Suddenly, more than half the residents of New York City were born abroad, and Irish immigrants comprised 70 percent of charity recipients.

As cultures clashed, fear exploded and conspiracies abounded. Posters around Boston proclaimed, “All Catholics and all persons who favor the Catholic Church are…vile imposters, liars, villains, and cowardly cutthroats.” Convents were said to hold young women against their will. An “exposé” published by Maria Monk, who claimed to have gone undercover in one such convent, accused priests of raping nuns and then strangling the babies that resulted. It didn’t matter that Monk was discovered as a fraud; her book sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The conspiracies were so virulent that churches were burned, and Know Nothing gangs spread from New York and Boston to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Louisville, Cincinnati, New Orleans, St. Louis and San Francisco.

At the same time as this influx of immigrants reshaped the makeup of the American populace, the old political parties seemed poised to fall apart.

“The Know Nothings came out of what seemed to be a vacuum,” says Christopher Phillips, professor of history at University of Cincinnati. “It’s the failing Whig party and the faltering Democratic party and their inability to articulate, to the satisfaction of the great percentage of their electorate, answers to the problems that were associated with everyday life.”


Citizen Know Nothing. Wikimedia Commons

Phillips says the Know Nothings displayed three patterns common to all other nativist movements. First is the embrace of nationalism—as seen in the writings of the OSSB. Second is religious discrimination: in this case, Protestants against Catholics rather than the more modern day squaring-off of Judeo-Christians against Muslims. Lastly, a working-class identity exerts itself in conjunction with the rhetoric of upper-class political leaders. As historian Elliott J. Gorn writes, “Appeals to ethnic hatreds allowed men whose livelihoods depended on winning elections to sidestep the more complex and politically dangerous divisions of class.”

No person exemplified this veneration of the working class more than Poole. Despite gambling extravagantly and regularly brawling in bars, Poole was a revered party insider, leading a gang that terrorized voters at polling places in such a violent fashion that one victim was later reported to have a bite on his arm and a severe eye injury. Poole was also the Know Nothings’ first martyr.

On February 24, 1855, Poole was drinking at a New York City saloon when he came face to face with John Morrissey, an Irish boxer. The two exchanged insults and both pulled out guns. But before the fight could turn violent, police arrived to break it up. Later that night, though, Poole returned to the hall and grappled with Morrissey's men, including Lewis Baker, a Welsh-born immigrant, who shot Poole in the chest at close range. Although Poole survived for nearly two weeks, he died on March 8. The last words he uttered pierced the hearts of the country’s Know Nothings: “Goodbye boys, I die a true American.”

Approximately 250,000 people flooded lower Manhattan to pay their respects to the great American. Dramas performed across the country changed their narratives to end with actors wrapping themselves in an American flag and quoting Poole’s last words. An anonymous pamphlet titled The Life of William Poole claimed that the shooting wasn’t a simple barroom scuffle, but an assassination organized by the Irish. The facts didn’t matter; that Poole had been carrying a gun the night of the shooting, or that his assailant took shots to the head and abdomen, was irrelevant. Nor did admirers care that Poole had a prior case against him for assault with intent to kill. He was an American hero, “battling for freedom’s cause,” who sacrificed his life to protect people from dangerous Catholic immigrants.

COUNT THE STEREOTYPES

On the day of Poole’s funeral, a procession of 6,000 mourners trailed through the streets of New York. Included in their number were local politicians, volunteer firemen, a 52-piece band, members of the OSSB—and Thomas R. Whitney, about to take his place in the House of Representatives as a member of the Know Nothing Caucus.

Judging by the size of Poole’s funeral and the Know Nothing party’s ability to penetrate all levels of government, it seemed the third party was poised to topple the Whigs and take its place in the two-party system. But instead of continuing to grow, the Know Nothings collapsed under the pressure of having to take a firm position on the issue the slavery. By the late 1850s, the case of Dred Scott (who sued for his freedom and was denied it) and the raids led by abolitionist John Brown proved that slavery was a more explosive and urgent issue than immigration.

America fought the Civil War over slavery, and the devastation of that conflict pushed nativist concerns to the back of the American psyche. But nativism never left, and the legacy of the Know Nothings has been apparent in policies aimed at each new wave of immigrants. In 1912, the House Committee on Immigration debated over whether Italians could be considered “full-blooded Caucasians” and immigrants coming from southern and eastern Europe were considered "biologically and culturally less intelligent."

From the end of the 19th century to the first third of the 20th, Asian immigrants were excluded from naturalization based on their non-white status. “People from a variety of groups and affiliations, ranging from the Ku Klux Klan to the Progressive movement, old-line New England aristocrats and the eugenics movement, were among the strange bedfellows in the campaign to stop immigration that was deemed undesirable by old-stock white Americans,” writes sociologist Charles Hirschman of the early 20th century. “The passage of immigration restrictions in the early 1920s ended virtually all immigration except from northwestern Europe.”

Those debates and regulations continue today, over refugees from the Middle East and immigrants from Latin America.

Phillips’s conclusion is that those bewildered by current political affairs simply haven’t looked far enough back into history. “One can’t possibly make sense of [current events] unless you know something about nativism,” he says. “That requires you to go back in time to the Know Nothings. You have to realize the context is different, but the themes are consistent. The actors are still the same, but with different names.”

Lorraine Boissoneault | | READ MORE

Lorraine Boissoneault is a contributing writer to SmithsonianMag.com covering history and archaeology. She has previously written for The Atlantic, Salon, Nautilus and others. She is also the author of The Last Voyageurs: Retracing La Salle's Journey Across America. Website: http://www.lboissoneault.com/

THE WEIRDEST POLITICAL CONSPIRACY THEORIES IN 19TH CENTURY AMERICA

THE GRUNGE

Though it may seem like a modern plague, conspiracies have been with us for quite a long time. Generations of humans have been worrying about mysterious cabals and shadowy yet powerful figures for ages. In fact, strange conspiracy theories have been bubbling in the human consciousness for millennia, stretching back to ancient Romans fretting over who started the fire that burned much of their capital city in A.D. 64 (via Memory Studies). And, as Lapham's Quarterly notes, Jewish people in medieval Europe could be killed by mobs fueled by false rumors of a well-poisoning conspiracy, all supposedly put in place to eliminate the Gentiles. Around the same time, many also fretted about the specter of a secret yet immensely powerful network commanded by the Knights Templar, while others were constantly on the lookout for an as-yet-unrevealed Antichrist whose appearance had been prophesied in the Bible (per USC News).

When it comes to American history, conspiracies had a serious heyday in the 19th century. It makes sense given the nation was rocked by political parties constantly jockeying for power and increasingly dire tensions over the issue of slavery. Even after the nation had begun its recovery from the Civil War, conspiracies still lingered, pointing to hidden actors in the nation's political system. As so often happens with unfettered speculation over time, things could get pretty strange. These are some of the weirdest conspiracy theories in 19th-century American politics.

19TH CENTURY POLITICAL CONSPIRACIES DIDN'T COME OUT OF NOWHERE

American politics have nearly always been mired in some sort of conspiracy theory. Less than a decade after the American Revolution drew to a close in 1783, political parties were already volleying claims of backroom deals at one another.

The trouble began in the last decade of the 18th century. According to TIME, Massachusetts minister Jedidiah Morse seemed to be the source of the trouble, at least on American soil. In his sermons, Morse began to claim that the "Bavarian Illuminati" had infiltrated American society with the aim to upend both the newly-formed government and Christianity itself. He pointed to the revolution that was at the time tearing France apart, taking particular note of the atheistic Jacobins who were busy closing French churches and promoting a secular way of life. The Illuminati, he claimed, was also ready to promote a lurid way of life that laughed at notions of fidelity, chastity, and social order.

Morse went even further to tie in the future president Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican party. Morse was a devoted Federalist, counting himself among the political opponents of the Democratic-Republicans. Soon enough, others fell in line with Morse's alarmist thinking, including the president of Yale. As the new century dawned, the conspiracy fell out of favor but never fully went away. Even today, some Americans still fear that the mysterious Illuminati are running things toward evil, despite a considerable lack of evidence.

CATHOLICISM BECAME LINKED TO POLITICAL CONSPIRACY

In the early decades of the 19th century, American nativists were fighting for their rights against the invaders. Only these nativists were not American Indians indigenous to North America. Instead, as Smithsonian Magazine reports, they were members of a quasi-secret society who purported to be of "pure" Anglo-Saxon heritage. And the invaders? Well, Catholics, of course.

The society in question would eventually come to be known as the "Know Nothing" party, so called for its members' habit of feigning ignorance of the group when questioned. Though the political party would grow in power, its main fears centered on the notion that immigrants from majority Catholic nations, such as Ireland, were undermining the fabric of American society.

The United States in the 1840s was indeed accepting a wave of Irish Catholic immigrants, as Politico reports. According to this conspiracy theory, these Catholics were not true Americans, instead holding allegiance only to the Pope, who was set on destroying Protestant America. To that end, Catholic representatives were said to be guilty of lurid misdeeds, such as murdering infants and kidnapping young women. Never mind that no evidence of such crimes was ever uncovered. In response to the accusations, the Know Nothings and other nativist political groups helped pass laws that limited alcohol consumption and restricted immigration. This made it all the more difficult for new arrivals to participate in civic life or even find employment in their new home.


THE KNOW NOTHING PARTY THRIVED ON CONSPIRACY

The Know Nothing party first took shape as a secret society, originally called the Order of United Americans, then the Order of the Star Spangled Banner. According to Smithsonian Magazine, the order eventually became an organization of powerful players, established its own political party, and reached its apex of influence in the 1850s. Know Nothings became governors and legislators throughout the nation, briefly becoming a serious force in American politics. They were elected largely because of their conspiratorial view toward immigrants, who they argued were intentionally destroying the American way of life. It wasn't just Irish Catholics who loomed unnaturally large in the political imagination. The Know Nothings positioned German immigrants and women's rights suffragists as equally nefarious groups. People became so riled up by these opportunistic political conspiracies that they burned churches and formed violent gangs.

The Know Nothings rose to prominence by playing on the fear and rage of their fellow Americans. But this was not a strong enough foundation and the group soon crumbled. As time wore on, it became more and more difficult for the party to ignore the issue of slavery, which it had tried to avoid. Furthermore, devotees of the party may have also realized that its vision of a United States peopled only by "pure" white Protestants was ridiculously unattainable.

ANTEBELLUM SLAVEHOLDERS FEARED A BLACK REPUBLICAN CONSPIRACY

In the lead-up to the American Civil War, political conspiracies became widespread and widely believed, according to "Plots, Designs, and Schemes." They also became more and more focused on what was surely the most divisive issue at that point in American history: slavery.

In the South, slave owners became convinced that agents from the North were infiltrating their communities and wreaking havoc to undermine their way of life. During the 1830s, one of the prevailing theories was that abolitionists were actually being directed by the British, who were intent on destroying rebellious American democracy (and economic competition). Others argued that the call was coming from inside the house and that bigwigs in the Republican Party were engaged in a conspiracy to outlaw slavery. They became known as "Black Republicans."

Some kernels of truth inflamed these conspiracies further. As The Guardian reports, Abraham Lincoln (himself a Republican), referred to the "ultimate extinction" of slavery in 1858. Although the party did work to limit the expansion of slavery, pre-Civil War Republicans did little to actually stop the practice or roll back the institution of slavery as it had been entrenched in the South. For some Southern leaders, those details didn't matter. William Harris, who advocated for the secession of Mississippi, wrote that his state "will never submit to the principles and policy of this black Republican administration." Though it wasn't true, the conspiracy clearly had some very real effects.


ABOLITIONISTS HELD THEIR OWN CONSPIRACY THEORIES

While Southern slave owners were becoming alarmed at the idea of outsiders actively working to disassemble their culture and economy, anti-slavery abolitionists had their own suspicions. The "slave power" conspiracy alleged that slave owners had already infiltrated all levels of the government and were working to make their way of life the norm for all (via "Plots, Designs, and Schemes").

Though abolitionists on their own may not have been able to make it all the way to the Emancipation Proclamation, "Plots, Designs, and Schemes" notes that they were given a boost by the "slave power" conspiracies and similar suspicions. Northerners who were previously indifferent to slavery or who even held some seriously racist beliefs began to believe that maybe, just maybe, the Southerners really were worming their way into too much power. Some even alleged that it went all the way to the top, with the president himself either one of them or too weak to resist the "slave power" conspirators.

Though there was no evidence ever uncovered to support this — in fact, that would have been diametrically opposed to the conspiracies popular in the South — the "slave power" suspicions seem to have united many disparate groups in the buildup to the Civil War. Scholars even argue that, strange as it may have sounded to some, this particular conspiracy led to the rise of the Republican Party in the 19th century.

SOME STATES SECEDED BECAUSE OF CONSPIRACY

While some American political conspiracies may have seemed laughable in the first decades of the 19th century, they became harder to ignore as time went on. Tensions over the issue of slavery grew, as did fights over just how states were supposed to handle the issue. Eventually, things reached a breaking point. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union. According to the National Park Service, this and the following secessions were touched off by the 1860 election of Republican Abraham Lincoln. Yet a closer look at secession declarations shows that conspiracies played their role in the breakup, too.

In its declaration of secession, Texas was convinced the North had sent emissaries to wreak havoc in its territory. This didn't just involve undermining the culture of the South or spreading fear and doubt in the minds of Southerners. The purported misdeed also included more obvious crimes, including such nefarious acts as poisoning the water supply of communities and committing arson in towns throughout the state. According to The Atlantic, other states made similar claims, arguing that Lincoln and his allies wanted not only to upend their way of life but to simply kill Southerners. Given Lincoln's recorded intent to reconcile with the South after the Civil War ended — to the point where even his allies thought he was being too soft on the rebels (via History) — this seems all the more unbelievable.

REAL SLAVE REBELLIONS WERE WARPED INTO FEAR-MONGERING CONSPIRACIES

In the 19th century, American slave owners thought the threat of a slave rebellion loomed largely. Could enslaved people have grown so tired of their inhumane treatment that they were planning a large-scale revolt? The idea makes sense. According to Britannica, the Haitian Revolution concluded in 1804 after a rebellion ousted the French and established the first country to be run by former slaves. Was it such a stretch to imagine that a similar thing might happen on U.S. soil?

As The Atlantic points out, slave rebellion did occur in the U.S. So too did conspiracy theories abound of organized slaves on the threshold of revolution, perhaps helped along by the abolitionists. It didn't help that John Brown actually did attempt to encourage an armed uprising amongst slaves in 1859 Virginia. Never mind that his attack fizzled and Brown himself was executed later that year. For some, this was enough evidence to confirm a widespread slave rebellion plot, with a few indulging in fantastical tales of vicious, well-organized people who wanted nothing more than bloody revenge. It was only a short step from that to believe that emancipation would be nothing less than the end of all white people. However, as the rest of United States history after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation has made clear, no such thing ever happened.

NEWSPAPERS TIED LINCOLN ASSASSINS TO A LARGER PLOT

On April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln's outing at Ford's Theater ended in his assassination by actor John Wilkes Booth. According to History, Booth had assembled a small group of conspirators to first kidnap Lincoln. When that plan failed, they decided instead to murder the president.

But was the assassination really the work of only a few people? As Ford's Theatre reports, some thought that the plot was beyond the abilities of some second-rate actor and his friends. Almost immediately after Lincoln's death, newspapers began hinting that the president's demise was the work of a larger, more organized group of Southern rebels.

The roster of potential masterminds behind the supposed plot included Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin. Old religious prejudices came into play, with some arguing that Benjamin (who was Jewish) was influenced by a larger network of anti-Lincoln European bankers. Or was it the Catholics? After all, weren't some of the Booth conspirators devout followers of the Pope? Could Irish-Americans, who had largely opposed the war and rioted against a Union draft, be behind it? Heck, the murder might even have been ordered by Union officials who weren't keen on Lincoln's soft approach to the former Confederacy. However, Ford's Theatre points out that none of these conspiracies were ever proven true. Instead, the consensus remains that the assassination was in fact the work of Booth and a few of his associates.


SOME CONSPIRACISTS LIED TO THE PRESIDENT HIMSELF

When it comes to conspiracies, one of their reliable throughlines is that they're usually bunk. For many, most conspiracy theories are utterly ridiculous, like the idea that we are ruled by lizards or that the Earth is flat. Yet, every once in a while, conspiracy theories turn out to be true, like when the Iran-Contra affair really was a conspiracy to sell weapons and fun a Nicaraguan rebellion, as reported by NewScientist.

In the 19th century, one conspiracy theory fooled even the president. But those involved believed they were doing it for a good reason, given that the president was dying. According to The Washington Post, it all began with an assassination attempt. On July 2, 1881, Charles Guiteau — himself the victim of a conspiratorial thought that had him believing he was a political force and not a mentally ill nobody — shot President James Garfield at a train station. Garfield's doctor attempted to find the bullet lodged in his body by digging around in the wound with unsterilized equipment and hands. The president lingered for weeks before dying of a massive infection on September 19. Before that, his doctors issued cheerful reports to the newspapers, saying that he was "sleeping sweetly" or that "his eyes have regained their old-time sparkle." This was apparently an attempt to bolster the confidence of both the American public and Garfield himself, though eventually even the doctors had to admit their lie when the president finally died.


THE CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT WAS BASED ON CONSPIRATORIAL THINKING

By now, it's probably painfully clear to everyone that, wild as they may be, conspiracy theories can have some very serious consequences in the real world. They've been used as excuses to start wars, gain power, and sell newspapers. Even when a conspiracy isn't quite poised to tear a nation to pieces, it can be used to alienate an entire group of people for no reason other than the fact that they are "different."

In the post-Civil War world of American politics, that concept may have reached its zenith with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which seriously restricted immigrants based on Chinese racial background. According to History, the act didn't come out of nowhere. It followed years of increasing worries that Chinese workers, who entered the country to work in the mining and construction booms of the mid-19th century, were going to bring society and the economy down. Real economic downturns, increasing labor competition, and concerns about "racial purity" led to the passage of the act.

Proponents of the act, such as San Francisco mayor James D. Phelan, alleged that Chinese immigrants weren't just somehow simultaneously barbaric and "cunning", but part of a larger force that would devastate America through disease and erosion of the much-beloved, vaguely-defined American way of life. This anti-Chinese sentiment, tinged with hints of conspiracy, sadly came to light again in the U.S. with the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic .

BY SARAH CROCKER

OCT. 4, 2022 

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THE NEW KNOW NOTHINGS

Republican calls for economic ‘shut down’ while accusing Biden of Marxist agenda

David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement
May 21, 2024

Victoria Spartz (Photo via AFP)

U.S. Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-IN) is calling on Congress to "shut down" the U.S. economy over the southern border, while accusing President Joe Biden of Marxist policies and denouncing his border legislation that Donald Trump ordered killed months ago.

Congresswoman Spartz on Tuesday spoke to Fox News Business host Maria Bartiromo in a rambling interview on the Senate bipartisan border bill that Donald Trump ordered killed. Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is one again trying to pass it.

Rep. Spartz said, "we need to get them back, you know, to really put pressure to control the border. So I just don't see anything else left there because no one wants to shut down the economy, unfortunately. We should really for such a serious issue, but Republicans are not gonna do it. And, and you know, and we're not just going to let Democrats have messagings bill with lots of loopholes. There are way more loopholes in that bill than people even realized."

The economy is a top issue for 2024 presidential election voters.

READ MORE: ‘Not an Accident’: Trump’s ‘Unified Reich’ Video Alarms Historians and Fascism Experts

After calling to shut down the economy, which economists for months have shown is doing extremely well, she then falsely accused President Joe Biden of socialism and enacting "socialist policies by Karl Marx."

"I think we need to have a serious discussion what really Bidenomics is and how it resembles socialist policies by Karl Marx where it's not just, you know, Biden administration had failed policy in a lot of fronts with its supply chain, whether we're dealing with energy, but also they've been subsidizing corporations very close to the government in trying to control financial markets, in order in essence control the means of production and financial markets. That's what socialism really is."

The Biden administration fixed the supply chain crisis created during the Trump administration, improved the supply chain, and continues to massively invest in it.

"And now they are trying to use you know, the government power to pick losers and winners and you know, this, winners are going to be people who can pay, give campaign contribution to Biden's reelection campaign, and losers are going to be all of us. And this is a serious discussion we need to have because this level of spending and subsidy cannot continue, it's destructive and inflation is going to destroy the middle class and people low income."

Donald Trump recently asked top oil and gas executives to donate $1 billion to his campaign in exchange for lower taxes and a rollback of President Biden's climate and environmental protections

Watch the videos above or at this link.

The Origin of American Conspiracy Theories

Americans are fascinated with conspiracy theories, in fact they generate the majority of them. Along with religious revivalism, conspiracy theories are second nature in the body politic of America.

Here is a fascinating thesis that shows that the conspiracy theory meme began in America with its founding during the revolutionary war. And since then conspiracy theory has dominated American politics.

Be it in the religious revivalism of the 1800's, the anti-Masonry movement, or the later Know Nothings, through out the history of American politics conspiracy theories have abounded, and have had major political impact. They are as American as apple pie.

This is a PhD. Thesis and is a full length book available for download as a PDF.

Conspiracy Theory and the Society of the Cincinnati, 1783-1790


At the same time, I became aware of a tradition of radical political dissent in
modern America, an abundance of conspiracy theories that also extended into popular culture. It was the time of Timothy McVeigh and the militia movement, of Waco, Ruby Ridge, Pat Robertson, and the X-Files. Suddenly conspiratorial explanations for current and historical events seemed everywhere. From Richard Hofstadter’s writings I realized that conspiracy theories occurred in episodic waves throughout American history, and from Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood I learned that the founding fathers believed in a secret English plot against American liberty. I decided to investigate, but soon became aware that other scholars were already writing on conspiracy theories in post-World War II America. Clearly, I had to look off the beaten path for a case study in American political “paranoia.”

It was then that I remembered a somewhat obscure document from my studies
on the Connecticut ratification debates. Just before the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, Dr. Benjamin Gale, an eccentric physician from Killingworth, wrote a long letter to Erasmus Wolcott.

In this diatribe, Gale complained about the machinations of the Society of the Cincinnati, a veterans organization of officers of the Continental Army. Gale charged that all the talk about the weakness of the Articles of Confederation was merely a smokescreen for the treasonous ambition of the Cincinnati. According to Gale, this society planned to establish a military dictatorship or monarchy and assume the mantle of hereditary nobility for themselves. Gale was obviously an Antifederalist, one who not only attacked the movement for a new Constitution as unnecessary and dangerous, but who felt it was the result of a deliberate conspiracy against American freedom.

I had found my topic. Apparently, a conspiracy theory existed in the 1780s, the
very period when the political culture and system of the United States was taking
shape, and it accused the leaders of the Continental Army of anti-republican subversion.

Small wonder then that such discourses of radical suspicion surfaced periodically
over the course of American history. If some American revolutionaries felt that even George Washington and Henry Knox could be traitors, we should not be surprised that so many Americans question the report of the Warren commission or distrust the federal government and the United Nations. The Deepest Piece of Cunning is a journey to the origins of conspiracy theories in the United States. It should shed some light on the political controversies of the 1780s as well as the persistence of conspiracy theories in American political culture.

Abstract

In May 1783, the officers of the Continental Army of the United States of America
organized themselves into the Society of the Cincinnati. Soon after, the veterans
organization became the focus of an elaborate conspiracy theory which falsely accused the officers of trying to establish a hereditary nobility and subvert the young republic.

Over the course of the mid-1780s, prominent revolutionary politicans such as John Adams and Elbridge Gerry joined in the outcry. The conspiracy theory became a major political controversy, and even impeded efforts to reform the Articles of Confederation.

However, despite their frantic tone and lack of a factual basis, the accusations were not merely a fringe phenomenon created by political crackpots. Instead, the conspiracy theory was deeply embedded in American political culture. When the political and economic problems of the 1780s threatened to disrupt the republican experiment, many revolutionaries looked for a threat that might explain the crisis. They found that threat in the Cincinnati, whose military background, federal organization, and aristocratic trappings made them suspect.

See:

1666 The Creation Of The World

Once More On the Fourth

Conspiracy Theory or Ruling Class Studies

Bilderberg

Conspiracy Theory

Conspiracy

Ruling Class

Freemasons



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Bllderberg Redux

GREEN PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES
Greens Issue Wrap-up On Bilderberg Conference
"Any meeting in which U.S. government leaders are gathering with other nation's leaders, corporate honchos, political thinkers, and other powerful world leaders needs to be reported in the media," said Bob Levis, Green candidate for Congress in Wisconsin (5th District) >. "If the major media refuse to report on Bilderberg because they're part of the same cabal, then something truly ominous is taking place. This isn't conspiracy theory. It's conspiracy."

It appears that as I predicted when you fail to report on secret meetings of secret societies then the American tendency is to cry 'conspiracy'.It's in their blood, they have seen conspiracies since the founding of the Republic. In fact as a conspiratorial political culture they can't help themselves. They know the conspiracy exists because they used it to overthrow the British. After that each fundametalist Protestant religious revival in America created its own conspiracy of Anti-Masonic, Know Nothing, Nativists. A phenomena that gives rise to fascism. Pearsall's Books: Religious Revivalism and Lower-Middle Class Man


See:

Secret Society Not So Secret

Bilderburger

Conspiracy Theory or Ruling Class Studies

Conspiracy Theories




secret-societies, ruling-class, executives, corportations, Sutton, Davos, Trilateral, Bilderberg, NWO, Conrad Black, CCCE, Media, conspiracy, conspiracies, Secret society, WTO, Kanata, CFR, Bilderberg Group, Biderberg 2006, Bilderbergers
bilderburger, Green-Party, Fascism, Know-Nothings, Religious-Revivalism, 19thCenturyAmerica, Anti-Masonic-Party, Nativist, Nativism, Anti-Masonic, Baptsit, Protestant

'Did you actually watch the movie?' JD Vance's reference to 'Gangs of New York' backfires

Kathleen Culliton
August 16, 2024 

Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) speaks during a campaign rally at Middletown High School on July 22, 2024 in Middletown, Ohio. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Sen. J.D. Vance's (R-OH) attempts to justify past comments linking rising crime waves to Irish immigrants raised eyebrows from film buffs who said he used the wrong Martin Scorsese movie to defend himself.

Donald Trump's running mate addressed questions about his 2021 comment on immigration and crime during a campaign address to the Milwaukee Police Association in Wisconsin on Friday.

"Has anybody seen the movie 'Gangs of New York?'" Vance said in response. "That is what I'm talking about; we know that when you have these ethnic enclaves in our country, it can lead to higher crime rates."

Vance was attempting to contextualize a recently resurfaced Skype interview in which he made a similar claim.

"You had this massive wave of Italian, Irish and German immigration, and that had its problems, its consequence," Vance said during the interview. "You had higher crime rates, you had these ethnic enclaves, you had inter-ethnic conflict in the country where you really hadn't had that before."

Washington Post analyst Philip Bump took issue with Vance's characterization of the 2002 film starring Daniel Day Lewis as the notorious anti-Irish gang leader William Poole, or Bill the Butcher.

"The irony here being that the most brutal, vicious killer in that movie is the nativist who loathes immigrants," Bump replied.

"Poole was a thug, a thief and a celebrity, leader of a Christopher Street gang which morphed and coalesced with others to become one of the most terrifying group of criminals in New York — the Bowery Boys," according to the New York City history podcast that draws its name from the group. "The Bowery Boys were an instrument of the Know Nothings, a nativist movement which violently rejected the Irish newcomers."

In 1846, as the Irish potato famine blighted the Emerald Isle's primary crop in a catastrophe that would claim up to 1.5 million lives — and send another 1.5 million fleeing the starving nation — the New York Daily Herald reported Poole was gouging out a foe's eye in the street.

This led national security attorney Bradley Moss to question whether Vance had ever seen the film.

"Did you actually watch the movie?" asked Moss. "Did Bill the Butcher strike you as a nonviolent person?"


Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow with the Media Matters watchdog group, added, "'Bill the Butcher was correct' is a very interesting take on that film."

Political analyst Drew Savicki struck a satirical note by mimicking Vance's comment but changing the movie.

"Has anybody seen the movie 'Toy Story?'" Savicki wrote. "This is what I'm talking about, with these dangerous toys, it can lead to higher crime rates."

Moss was quick with a response.

"Has anybody seen the movie 'Despicable Me?'" Moss replied. "This is what I'm talking about, with people speaking languages no one has ever heard of, it can lead to someone trying to steal the moon!"

PRIVATIZED FIRE FIGHTERS BATTLE OVER WHO PUTS OUT FIRE

Vivek Ramaswamy Indulges the Republican Base’s Paranoid Style

Vivek Ramaswamy is rising in part because he's simply telling the Republican Party's conspiracy-loving base what it wants to hear.

BY ARIF RAFIQ

AUGUST 24, 2023

Kathleen Sebelius, a former advisor to Ramaswamy's companies, has called him "sort of a Music Man." (Image Credit: Gage Skidmore)


At the first Republican presidential debates last night, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy claimed that climate change is a “hoax.”

“Climatism,” he’s often said, is one of America’s new secular, “cult-like” religions replacing the country’s Judeo-Christian foundation.

But just months ago, Ramaswamy told CBS News that climate change is “real” and acknowledged a rise in global surface temperatures “in part due to human activity.”

Ramaswamy has flip-flopped on a range of other issues. It’s an inconsistency that not only makes him just as much a politician as his rivals, but also reflects a broader pattern of shamelessly indulging the new Know-Nothings of the Republican Party.

Ramaswamy and the Paranoid Style

The Paranoid Style has consumed the Republican Party’s base. The right’s conspiracy theories have evolved from depictions of Barack Obama as a Communist-Islamist Manchurian candidate. It’s now taken on a full anti-establishment turn with claims that the January 6th insurrection was an FBI false flag operation.

A wealthy polemicist, Ramaswamy has little to lose by simply telling the Republican Party base what it wants to hear.

The most egregious example of Ramaswamy’s indulgence of far-right denialism is on the 9/11 attacks. When asked by The Blaze earlier this month whether the attacks of September 11 were an “inside job,” Ramaswamy could have easily said the clear and obvious truth that it wasn’t. Instead, he replied, “I don’t think the government has told us the truth,” and then pivoted to generic commentary on skepticism of what governments say.

First, Ramaswamy clarified that he was referring to a long-classified FBI report on official Saudi connections to the 9/11 hijackers. Then, in a recently published interview with The Atlantic’s John Hendrickson conducted in July, Ramaswamy veered even closer to 9/11 trutherism, insinuating the attacks were either an inside job or that the U.S. government at least had forewarning of them.

He said: “I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers. Maybe the answer is zero. It probably is zero for all I know, right? I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero.”

On a host of other issues, Ramaswamy has adopted a persona on the campaign trail at odds with his statements and actions before his presidential run.

Ramaswamy — a former pharmaceutical industry executive — has questioned the safety of COVID vaccines. But his physician wife told The Atlantic that the entire family is vaccinated. He also paid a Wikipedia editor to remove references in his bio to his relationship with Douglas Melton, who helped develop the mRNA vaccine.

Before his presidential run, Ramaswamy also described the January 6th insurrection as a “disgrace” perpetuated by an “angry mob of rioters.” Now he suggests there were “government agents” involved.

Vivek the ‘Music Man’

Ramaswamy’s malleability has led to questions over his authenticity. A DeSantis Super Pac sees it as a potential vulnerability, recommending in a pre-debate memo to “take a sledgehammer” to Ramaswamy and depict him as “Fake Vivek” or “Vivek the Fake.”

Ramaswamy acknowledges that he’s in many ways an anomaly. In his book, “Woke, Inc.,” Ramaswamy depicts himself as a “traitor” to his class — a “truth-teller” on climate, ESG, transgender issues, and affirmative action, which he hyperbolically calls a “cancer on our national soul.”

What’s clear is the Ohio native is a skilled debater who’ll do what it takes to convince or win the target audience.

Kathleen Sebelius, a former advisor to Ramaswamy’s companies and Obama administration health secretary, has called him “sort of a Music Man.”

The New Yorker provides a vivid account of how Ramaswamy feels the pulse of his audience and indulges anti-Zelensky, pro-lab leak, and other conspiratorial sentiment:

“[Ramaswamy] asked for audience members’ names and agreed with what they said, even when it pulled him nearer to conspiracy; in response, the crowd rose and applauded, and moved nearer to him, too.”

What Does Vivek Ramaswamy Believe?

Given his record of flip-flops, what can we say for sure about Vivek Ramaswamy?

I think it’s clear he’s a big believer in America and capitalism.

He also appears to have been a libertarian for some time. Ramaswamy has expressed affinity for Rand and Ron Paul. And his unchoreographed comments on cutting aid to Israel reflect a Paulian libertarian foreign policy.

Two, Ramaswamy takes his religion seriously. His childhood was marked by summer trips to India, including regular pilgrimages to holy Hindu sites. And unlike many other Indian-origin politicians on the right, he’s remained a Hindu and has openly discussed it on the trail.

(It should be noted that paid edits to Ramaswamy’s Wikipedia entry indicate an initial ambivalence in disclosing his belief in Hinduism right before declaring his presidential run. And while Ramaswamy has publicly expressed his Hindu beliefs in ways that make it seem like just another Abrahamic religion, that may simply just be the way that he — as someone who attended Catholic school in the Midwest — came to understand his own tradition.)

As former Vice President Mike Pence’s opening salvo against Ramaswamy made clear, scrutiny of the fast-talking Ohioan will increase. But what he actually believes may be a moot issue.

We’re in an era in which vibes matter more than ideas. And Ramaswamy is resonating with a new generation of extremely online conservatives: the Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk types. Ramaswamy was the most popular candidate in a panel of Republican voters in Iowa convened by CNN after the debate last night, especially among the younger participants.

While the race for the Republican nomination is Donald Trump’s to lose, Ramaswamy’s rise in the polls is clearly more than just a temporary fluke. He probably won’t win the race, but he could be the face of the conservative movement’s multiracial, anti-establishment future.


Arif Rafiq is the editor of Globely News. Rafiq has contributed commentary and analysis on global issues for publications such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the New Republic, the New York Times, and POLITICO Magazine. He has appeared on numerous broadcast outlets, including Al Jazeera English, the BBC World Service, CNN International, and National Public Radio.

What Trump's win really means for America

Thom Hartmann
November 9, 2024 


Stephen Miller, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner listen as Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks onstage following early results from the 2024 U.S. presidential election in Palm Beach County Convention Center, in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., November 6, 2024. REUTERS/Carlos Barria


We just elected a guy who’s fine with the planet melting down, kids getting shot in school, insurance companies going back to denying coverage for preexisting conditions, and wanting to weaponize the federal government in a way dictators do.

What happened?

Democrats thought the 2024 election would be all about Donald Trump’s embrace of fascism and the future of our democracy. And abortion.

Pretty much all of us thought that. As did most of the news media and pundits.

But now that the exit polls and research are largely in, we’re finding, instead, that the election was all about who’d be best able to “blow up the system.”

By “the system,” voters didn’t mean democracy (although we may get the end of that); they meant the neoliberal system that Ronald Reagan introduced to replace FDR’s New Deal policies in 1981, which was subsequently embraced by Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama.


In other words, they said, “We want the jobs like we had before Reagan’s neoliberalism, when one person could support a household.”

If that word intimidates or confuses you (as it does most Americans), here it is broken down: Neoliberalism (as I lay out in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America) combines free trade, low taxes, and an end to the power of unions. Neoliberals typically also embrace open borders, as in the world’s most complete neoliberal experiment that’s called the European Union (which is also in trouble now).

The result of Reagan’s version of neoliberalism has been that good jobs (over 20 million of them) and even entire factories (over 15,000 of them) moved to low-wage countries, unions were destroyed, and wealth exploded at the top while the middle class shrank into near poverty.


In the 2016 primaries, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were the first two candidates for either of the two major parties to call for an end to neoliberalism. Americans were enchanted by both.

It’s why people from Joe Rogan to Howard Stern were endorsing Bernie Sanders, and blue-collar workers across the country were taking Trump seriously.

Bernie’s call to end neoliberalism was complete: End the offshoring and bring jobs back, pass Card Check to reinvigorate unions, and raise taxes on the morbidly rich and profitable corporations.


Trump’s call was only partial; while he embraced bringing our jobs and factories back to America, he wanted to keep the neoliberal “reforms” of low taxes on billionaires and an end to union representation. (He went so far as to publicly congratulate Elon Musk on his union-busting/union-preventing activities.)

Sadly, the elders of the Democratic Party had already decided that Hillary Clinton was going to inherit her husband’s neoliberal dynasty so, when voters were confronted with Clinton’s defense of neoliberalism versus Trump’s partial attack on it, they chose the latter. Something’s better than nothing, they seemed to think.

And Trump gave it a shot during his first term, throwing up tariffs in such an incoherent and uninformed way that he provoked an unnecessary trade war with China that cost America hundreds of billions. But at least, voters thought this year, he gave it a shot. Maybe he’ll do better this time around.


Working class people of all races (particularly men) know that neoliberalism sent our jobs overseas, made rich people fantastically rich, and destroyed our unions. Few associate it with Reagan, though, as those policies didn’t really start to bite until the Clinton years.

Still, even not knowing when or where it all started, they hated it. And, we just learned with the outcome of this presidential election, it turns out that voters will tolerate the chance that their kids will get shot, their insurance companies will rip them off, and their government will imprison dissenters in exchange for the promise of the well-paying jobs that come with ending neoliberalism.

Back in 2010, I published a book to guide Democrats through policies that could win the 2012 election. Rebooting The American Dream was a book about how to end neoliberalism (although I never used that wonky word) that Bernie Sanders famously read on the floor of the Senate during his eight-hour filibuster of the Bush tax cuts, and got me an invitation to discuss economics in the Obama White House.


The first two chapters are titled Bring My Job Home and Roll Back the Reagan Tax Cuts, followed by calls for an end to corporate union-busting, free college, Medicare for All, reversing Citizens United, immediate action to stop global warming, an end to predatory foreign policy (Iraq, etc.), genuine immigration reform, an end to corporate personhood, and more widespread employee-owned companies.

Bernie had been a guest on my radio program for an hour every Friday, taking and answering questions from listeners, for a full six years at that time (he ended up doing it for eleven years) and we shared a public disgust for Reagan’s — and then Clinton’s and Bush’s — embrace of neoliberalism.

For the 21 years that I’ve been doing my daily radio program I’ve been arguing that illegal immigration hurts working class people (just ask anybody in the construction industry); that we should bring our factories back home and the fastest way to do that is to return to a gradual and rational tariff-based system; and that we need to raise taxes on the morbidly rich and corporations above 50 percent like other developed nations to cap great wealth and incentivize companies to invest in R&D and their employees.


That call has been largely ignored until the last four years.

In a true American political tragedy, Clinton and Obama were so enthralled by neoliberalism they couldn’t even get around to passing Card Check to bring back unions (although both promised to), much less ending job offshoring or meaningfully raising taxes on the morbidly rich.

Those steps would have taken us back to the era when the majority of American workers could buy a home and a car, take an annual vacation, put their kids through school, and retire with dignity on a single paycheck. The era, in other words, that Trump constantly points to, only this time we’d be able to do it without the racial segregation and gay-bashing.

The great irony here is that Joe Biden has been the first president since Jimmy Carter to reject neoliberalism and embrace Bernie’s and FDR’s New Deal system of government and Keynesian economics:
— He’s kept most of Trump’s tariffs in place and added a bunch of his own.
— He raised taxes on corporations and billionaires significantly.
— He tightened up the border and wanted to sign a major reform of our immigration system.
— He was the first president in history to walk a picket line.


President Biden, in other words, made a real and sincere effort to roll back neoliberalism, and would have done a lot more had Republicans not seized the House two years ago.

He is the true anti-establishment guy, taking an axe to Reagan’s, Bush’s, Clinton’s, Bush’s, and Obama’s embrace of the policies that have impoverished much of the American middle class.

The problem was that nobody knew Biden had so explicitly repudiated neoliberalism and taken such extraordinary and successful steps forward that, even in the face of a massive interest rate increase by the Fed, we did not have a recession. Our economy is doing better than any president’s economy since John Kennedy's.


If Biden had just stepped out of the White House every day to let the press know what he was doing — like Trump did for four years (but with lies and BS) — and Kamala Harris had explicitly confirmed that she, too, wanted to end neoliberalism, the exit polls tell us today she would have won in a sweep.

But Harris and her team assumed that the message of rescuing democracy from fascism — an abstraction that most American voters don’t even understand — and protecting the right to abortion would beat Trump.

And they ridiculed Trump’s push for tariffs — even though Biden has embraced them — as a “middle class sales tax” when most people living in the Rust Belt know exactly what tariffs are and how they work to bring factories back home. Hell, we studied them in fifth grade civics when I was in elementary school growing up in Michigan.


As a result, voters went to the polls and voted to rescind abortion bans while simultaneously filling in the circle for Trump, thinking he’d bring back the prosperity that neoliberal economic policies stole from them.

As Damon Linker noted at his Notes from the MiddlegroundSubstack (reprinted in today’s New York Times), commenting on how Harris’ embrace of Liz Cheney was a dud:
“Reaganism is now well and truly dead, with no substantial base in either party.”

Similarly, Financial Times US National Editor Ed Luce wrote this morning after quoting Bernie Sanders’ comment that Democrats had lost the working class and citing Trump’s most successful ad that says “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you”:
“Tuesday night strongly reaffirmed that Democrats are no longer the party of the working class. … It would be a big error for Democrats to write off America’s working classes as hidebound know-nothings. Nor should they dismiss the tens of millions of lower income households that voted for Trump as economically illiterate.”

This decisive vote for Trump tells us this is truly one of those “hinge points” of history that I’ve written about over the years.

And the double irony today is that the billionaires who support Trump want more neoliberalism; they want to keep the tax cuts, deregulation, and to keep the unions out of their companies while retaining their offshore manufacturing facilities. But nobody ever told the American public in a way they could hear that that’s what most of Trump‘s billionaire supporters are all about.

Instead, Trump ran on faux populism, saying he’d use tariffs to bring jobs home while cutting taxes on tips and Social Security. To paraphrase James Carville, Trump’s pitch was, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

This is why two days ago Bernie came right out and said it:
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

DNC Chair Jaime Harrison (also a regular guest on my program) reacted with outrage, tweeting on Xitter:
“This is straight up BS… Biden was the most-pro worker President of my life time- saved Union pensions, created millions of good paying jobs and even marched in a picket line and some of MVP’s plans would have fundamentally transformed the quality of life and closed the racial wealth gap for working people across this country. From the child tax credits, to 25k for a down payment for a house to Medicare covering the cost of senior health care in their homes. There are a lot of post election takes and this one ain’t a good one.”

Sadly, Harrison’s message that Biden repudiated neoliberalism isn’t shared by all Democrats, and was barely even mentioned by the Harris campaign. Even significant numbers of Black and Hispanic men were willing to embrace a demagogue who openly hates them in the hope of getting good manufacturing employment that beats inflation.

It’s not enough to just do a good job at governing; you must make sure everybody knows about it. Deep down in their bones. Every day. Month after month, year after year. In that, Biden, Harris, and Harrison all failed, while Trump performed like an Olympic athlete.

If Democrats want a chance to return to power in America, they must — like President Joe Biden largely did — completely repudiate neoliberalism and openly re-embrace FDR’s system, promising to bring our jobs back home, limit illegal immigration, reestablish union power, and raise taxes on the rich.

And make damn sure everybody in America knows it!

Only then can Democrats regain enough of a base across working-class America to credibly campaign on more “esoteric” issues like protecting democracy, tackling climate change, expanding healthcare and education, boosting housing support, and embracing equal opportunity for all.

Democrats must recognize how the winds have changed in America, do the work, spread the word, and let America know what they stand for. If they do, it could be a new day for this country.

Brain Work and Manual Work 

PETER KROPOTKIN

First Published: The Nineteenth Century, March 1890, pp. 456-475
Source: Archive.org

Note: Kropotkin was a frequent contributor to The Nineteenth Century. He was their regular correspondent for science news, and used the journal to issue his book Mutual Aid in serial form, as well as many articles on other topics. Brain Work and Manual Work was later published in lightly edited form as Chapter 8 of Fields, Factories, and Workshops

Transcription/Markup/Notes: by Graham Seaman for MIA, Jan 2021.

In olden times, men of science, and especially those who have done most to forward the growth of natural philosophy, did not despise manual work and handicraft. Galileo made his telescopes with his own hands. Newton learned in his boyhood the art of managing tools; he exercised his young mind in contriving most ingenious machines, and when he began his researches in optics he was able himself to grind the lenses for his instruments and himself to make the well-known telescope which, for its time, was a fine piece of workmanship. Leibnitz was fond of inventing machines: windmills and carriages to he moved without horses preoccupied his mind as much as mathematical and philosophical speculations. Linnæus became a botanist while helping his father — a practical gardener — in his daily work. In short, with our great geniuses handicraft was no obstacle to abstract researches — it rather favoured them. On the other hand, if the workers of old found but few opportunities for mastering science, many of them had, at least, their intelligences stimulated by the very variety of work which was performed in the then unspecialised workshops; and some of them had the benefit of familiar intercourse with men of science. Watt and Rennie were friends with Professor Robinson; Brindley, the road-maker, despite his fourteen-pence-a-day wages, enjoyed intercourse with educated society, and thus developed his remarkable engineering faculties; the son of a well-to-do family could ‘idle’ at a wheelwright’s shop, so as to become later on a Smeaton or a Stephenson.

We have changed all that. Under the pretext of division of labour, we have sharply separated the brain worker from the manual worker. The masses of the workmen do not receive more scientific education than their grandfathers did; but they have been deprived of the education of even the small workshop, while their boys and girls are driven into a mine, or a factory, from the age of thirteen, and there they soon forget the little they may have learned at school. As to the scientists, they despise manual labour. How few of them would be able to make a telescope, or even a plainer instrument? Most of them are not capable of even designing a scientific instrument, and when they have given a vague suggestion to the instrument-maker they leave it with him to invent the apparatus they need. Nay, they have raised the contempt of manual labour to the height of a theory. ‘The scientist,’ they say, ‘must discover the laws of Nature, the civil engineer must apply them, and the worker must execute in steel or wood, in iron or stone, the patterns devised by the engineer. He must work with machines invented for him not by him. No matter if he does not understand them and cannot improve them: the scientist and the scientific engineer will take care of the progress of science and industry.’

It may be objected that nevertheless there is a class of men who belong to none of the above three divisions. When young, they have been manual workers, and some of them continue to be; but, owing to some happy circumstances, they have succeeded in acquiring some scientific knowledge, and thus they have combined science with handicraft. Surely there are. such men; happily enough there is a nucleus of men who have escaped the so-much-advocated specialisation of labour, and it is precisely to them that industry owes its chief recent inventions. But they are the exceptions; they are the irregulars – the Cossacks who have broken the ranks and pierced the screens so carefully erected between the classes. And they are so few, in comparison with the ever-growing requirements of industry — and of science as well, as I am about to prove — that all over the world we hear complaints about the scarcity of precisely such men.

What is the meaning, in fact, of the outcry for technical education which has been raised at one and the same time in this country, in France, in Germany, in the States, and in Russia, if it does not express a general dissatisfaction with the present division into scientists, scientific engineers, and workers? Listen to those who know industry, and you will see that the substance of their complaints is this: ‘The worker whose task has been specialised by the permanent division of labour has lost the intellectual interest in his labour, and it is especially so in the great industries: he has lost his inventive powers. Formerly, he invented very much. Manual workers — not scientists nor trained engineers — have invented, or brought to perfection, the prime motors and all that mass of machinery which has revolutionised industry for the last hundred years. But since the great factory has prevailed, the worker, depressed by the monotony of his work, invents no more. What can a weaver invent who merely supervises four looms, without knowing anything either about their complicated movements or how the machines grew to be what they are? What can a man invent who is condemned for life to bind together the ends of two threads with the greatest celerity, and knows nothing beyond making a knot? At the outset of modem industry, three generations of workers have invented; now they cease to do so. As to the inventions of the engineers, specially trained for devising machines, they are either devoid of genius or not practical enough. Those ‘nearly to nothings’ of which Sir Frederick Bramwell spoke recently at Bath[a] are missing in their inventions — those nothings which can be learned in the workshop only, and which permitted a Murdoch and the Soho workers to make a practical engine of Watt’s schemes. None but he who knows the machine — not in its drawings and models only, hut in its breathing and throbbings — who unconsciously thinks of it while standing by it, can really improve it. Smeaton and Newcomen surely were excellent engineers; but in their engines a boy had to open the steam valve at each stroke of the piston; and it was one of those boys who once managed to connect the valve with the remainder of the machine, so as to make it open automatically, while he ran away to play with other boys. Hut in the modem machinery there is no room left for naïve improvements of that kind. Scientific education on a wide scale has become necessary for further inventions, and that education is refused to the workers. So that there is no issue out of the difficulty unless scientific education and handicraft are combined together — unless integration of knowledge takes the place of the present divisions. Such is the real substance of the present movement in favour of technical education. But, instead of bringing to public consciousness the, perhaps, unconscious motives of the present discontent, instead of widening the views of the discontented and discussing the problem to its full extent, the mouthpieces of the movement do not mostly rise above the shopkeeper’s view of the question. Some of them indulge in jingo talk about crushing all foreign industries out of competition, while the others see in technical education nothing but a means of somewhat improving the flesh-machine of the factory and of transferring a few workers into the upper class of trained engineers.

Such an ideal may satisfy them, but it cannot satisfy those who keep in view the combined interests of science and industry, and consider both as a means for raising humanity to a higher level. We maintain that in the interests of both science and industry, as well as of society as a whole, every human being, without distinction of birth, ought to receive such an education as would enable him, or her, to combine a thorough knowledge of science with a thorough knowledge of handicraft. We fully recognise the necessity of specialisation of knowledge, but we maintain that specialisation must follow general education, and that general education must be given in science and handicraft alike. To the division of society into brain-workers and manual workers we oppose the combination of both kinds of activities; and instead of ‘technical education,’ which means the maintenance of the present division between brain work and manual work, we advocate the éducation intégrale or complete education, which means the disappearance of that pernicious distinction. Plainly stated, the aims of the school under this system ought to be the following: To give such an education that, on leaving school at the age of eighteen or twenty, each boy and each girl should be endowed with a thorough knowledge of science — such a knowledge as might enable them to be useful workers in science — and, at the same time, to give them a general knowledge of what constitutes the bases of technical training, and such a skill in some special trade as would enable each of them to take his or her place in the grand world of the manual production of wealth. I know that many will find that aim too largo, or even impossible to attain, but I hope that if they have the patience to read the following pages, they will see that we require nothing beyond what can be easily attained. In fact, it has been attained; and what has been done on a small scale could be done on a wider scale, were it not for the economical and social causes w4iich prevent any serious reform from being accomplished in our miserably organised society.

The experiment has been made at the Moscow Technical School for twenty consecutive years, with many hundreds of boys; and the testimonies of the most competent judges at the exhibitions of Brussels, Philadelphia, Vienna, and Paris are to the effect that the experiment has been a success.[b] The Moscow school admits boys not older than fifteen, and it requires from boys of that age nothing but a substantial knowledge of geometry and algebra, together with the usual knowledge of their mother tongue; younger pupils are received in the preparatory classes. The school is divided into two sections — the mechanical and the chemical; but as I personally know the former only (it is also the more important in our case), so I shall limit my remarks to the education given in the mechanical section. Well, after a five or six years’ stay at the school, the students leave it with a thorough knowledge of higher mathematics, physics, mechanics, and connected sciences so thorough, indeed, that it is not second to that acquired in the best mathematical faculties of the best European universities. When myself a student of the mathematical faculty of the St. Peterburg University, I had the opportunity of comparing their knowledge with our own. I saw the courses of higher geometry compiled by some students of the technical school for the use of their comrades; I admired the facility with which they applied the integral calculus to dynamical problems; and I came to the conclusion that while we, university students, had more knowledge of a general character (for instance, in mathematical astronomy), they, the students of the school, were much more advanced in higher geometry, and especially in the applications of higher mathematics to the most intricate problems of dynamics, the theories of heat and elasticity. But while we, the students of the# university, hardly knew the use of our hands, the students of the school fabricated with their own hands, and without the help of professional workmen, fine steam-engines, from the heavy boiler to the last finely turned screw, agricultural machinery, and scientific apparatus — all for the trade — and they received the highest awards for the work of their hands at the international exhibitions. They were scientifically educated skilled workers — workers with university education — highly appreciated even by the Russian manufacturers who so much distrust science.

Now, the methods by which these wonderful results were achieved were these: In science, learning from memory was not in honour, while independent research was favoured by all means. Science was taught hand in hand with its applications, and what was learned in the schoolroom was applied in the workshop. Great attention was paid to the highest abstractions of geometry as a means for developing imagination and research. As to the teaching of handicraft, the methods were quite different from those which proved a failure at the Cornell University, and differed, in fact, from those used in most technical schools. The student was not sent to a workshop to learn some special handicraft and to earn his existence as soon as possible, but the teaching of technical skill was prosecuted — according to a scheme elaborated by the founder of the school, M. Dellavos, and now applied also at Chicago – in the same systematical way as laboratory work is taught in the modern universities. It is evident that drawing was considered as the first step in technical education. Then the student was brought, first, to the carpenter’s workshop, or rather laboratory, and there he was thoroughly taught to execute all kinds of carpentry and joinery. No efforts were spared in order to bring the pupil to a certain perfection in that branch — the real basis of all trades. Later on, he was transferred to the turner’s workshop, where he was taught to make in wood the patterns of those things which he would have to make in metal in the following workshops. The foundry followed, and there he was taught to cast those parts of machines which he had prepared in wood; and it was only after he had gone through the first three stages that he was admitted to the smith’s and engineering workshops. Such was the system which English readers will find described in full in a recent work by Mr. Ham,(1) and which has been introduced, in its technical part, in the Chicago Manual Training School. As for the perfection of the mechanical work of the students, I cannot do better than to refer to the reports of the juries at the above-named exhibitions.

The Moscow Technical School surely is not an ideal school. It totally neglects the humanitarian education of the young men. But we must recognise that the Moscow experiment — not to speak of hundreds of other partial experiments — has perfectly well proved the possibility of combining a scientific education of a very high standard with the education which is necessary for becoming an excellent skilled labourer. It has proved, moreover, that the best means for producing really good skilled labourers is to seize the bull by the horns — to grasp the educational problem in its great features, instead of trying to give some special skill in some handicraft, together with some scraps of knowledge in some branch of some science. And it has shown also what can be obtained, without over-pressure, if a rational economy of the scholar’s time is always kept in view, and theory goes hand in hand with practice. Viewed in this light, the Moscow results do not seem extraordinary at all, and still better results may be expected if the same principles are applied from the earliest years of education. Waste of time is the leading feature of our present education. Not only are we taught a mass of rubbish, but what is not rubbish is taught so as to make us waste as much time as possible. Our present methods of teaching originate from a time when the accomplishments required from an educated person were extremely limited; and they have been maintained, notwithstanding the immense increase of knowledge which must be conveyed to the scholar’s mind since science has so much widened its former limits. Hence the over-pressure in schools, and hence, also, the urgent necessity of totally revising both the subjects and the methods of teaching, according to the new wants and to the examples already given here and there, by separate schools and separate teachers.

It is evident that the years of childhood ought not to be spent so uselessly as they are now. German teachers have shown how the very plays of children can be made instrumental in conveying to the childish mind some concrete knowledge in both geometry and mathematics. The children who have made the squares of the theorem of Pythagoras out of pieces of coloured cardboard, will not look at the theorem, when it comes in geometry, as on a mere instrument of torture devised by the teachers; and the less so if they apply it as the carpenters do. Complicated problems of arithmetic, which so much harassed us in our boyhood, are easily solved by children seven and eight years old, if they arc put in the shape of interesting puzzles. And if the Kindergarten — German teachers often make of it a kind of barrack in which each movement of the child is regulated beforehand — has often become a small prison for the little ones, the idea which presided at its foundation is nevertheless true. In fact, it is almost impossible to imagine, without having tried it, how many sound notions of nature, habits of classification, and taste for natural sciences can be conveyed to the children’s minds; and, if a series of concentric courses adapted to the various phases of development of the human being were generally accepted in education, the first series in all sciences, save sociology, could be taught before the age of ten or twelve, so as to give a general idea of the universe, the earth and its inhabitants, the chief physical, chemical, zoological, and botanical phenomena, leaving the discovery of the laws of those phenomena to the next series of deeper and more specialised studies. On the other side, we all know how children like to make toys themselves, how they gladly imitate the work of full-grown people if they see them at work in the workshop or the building-yard. But the parents either stupidly paralyse that passion, or do not know how to utilise it. Most of them despise manual work and prefer sending their children to the study of Roman history, or of Franklin’s teachings about saving money, to seeing them at a work which is good for the ‘lower classes only.’ They thus do their best to render subsequent learning the more difficult.

And then come the school years, and time is wasted again to an incredible extent. Take, for instance, mathematics, which everyone ought to know, because it is the basis of all subsequent education, and which so few really learn in our schools. In geometry time is foolishly wasted by using a method which merely consists in committing geometry to memory. In most cases, the boy reads again and again the proof of a theorem till his memory has retained the succession of reasonings. Therefore, nine boys out of ten, if asked to prove an elementary theorem two years after having left the school, will be unable to do it, unless mathematics is their specialty. They will forget which auxiliary lines to draw, and they never have been taught to discover the proofs by themselves. No wonder that later on they find such difficulties in applying geometry to physics, that their progress is despairingly sluggish, and that so few master higher mathematics. There is, however, the other method which permits progress, as a whole, at a much speedier rate, and under which he who once has learned geometry will know it all his life long. Under this system, each theorem is put as a problem; its solution is never given beforehand, and the pupil is induced to find it by himself. Thus, if some preliminary exercises with the rule and the compass have been made, there is not one boy or girl, oat of twenty or more, who will not be able to find the means of drawing an angle which is equal to a given angle, and to prove their equality, after a few suggestions from the teacher; and if the subsequent problems are given in a systematic succession (there are excellent text-books for the purpose), and the teacher does not press his pupils to go faster than they can go at the beginning, they advance from one problem to the next with an astonishing facility, the only difficulty being to bring the pupil to solve the first problem and thus to acquire confidence in his own reasoning. Moreover, each abstract geometrical truth must be impressed on the mind in its concrete form as well. As soon as the pupils have solved a few problems on paper, they must solve them on the playing-ground with a few sticks and a string, and they must apply their knowledge in the workshop. Only then will the geometrical lines acquire a concrete meaning in the childrens minds; only then will they see that the teacher is playing no tricks when he asks them to solve problems with the rule and the compass, without resorting to the protractor; only then will they know geometry. ‘Through the eyes and the hand to the brain’ — that is the true principle of economy of time in teaching. I remember as if it were yesterday, how geometry suddenly acquired for me a new meaning, and how this new meaning facilitated all ulterior studies. It was as we were mastering a Montgolfier balloon, and I remarked that the angles at the summits of each of the twenty strips of paper out of which the balloon was going to be made must cover less than the fifth part of a right angle each. I remember, next, bow the sines and the tangents ceased to be mere cabalistic signs when they permitted us to calculate the length of a stick in a working profile of a fortification; and how geometry in space became plain when we began to make on a small scale a bastion with embrasures and barbettes – an occupation which obviously was soon prohibited on account of the state into which we brought our clothes. ‘You look like navvies,’ was the reproach addressed to us by our intelligent educators, while we were proud precisely of being navvies — and of discovering the use of geometry.

By compelling our children to study real things from mere graphical representations, instead of making those things themselves, we compel them to waste the most precious time; we uselessly worry their minds; we accustom them to the worst methods of learning; we kill independent thought in the bud; and very seldom we succeed in conveying a real knowledge of what we are teaching. Superficiality, parrot-like repetition, slavishness and inertia of mind are the results of our education. We do not teach our children how to learn. The very beginnings of science are taught on the same pernicious system. In most schools, even arithmetic is taught in the abstract way, and mere rules are stuffed into the poor little heads. The idea of a unit, which is arbitrary and can be changed at will in our measurement (the match, the box of matches, the dozen of boxes, or the gross; the metre, the centimetre, the kilometre, and so on), is not impressed on the mind, and therefore, when the children come to the decimal fractions they are at a loss to understand them;, whereas in France, where the decimal system of measures and money is a matter of daily life, even those workers who have received the plainest elementary education are quite familiar with decimals. To represent twenty-five centimes, or twenty-five centimetres, they write ‘ zero twenty-five,’ while most of my readers surely remember how this same zero at the head of a row of figures puzzled them in their boyhood. We do also what we can to render algebra unintelligible, and our children spend one year before they have learned what is not algebra at all, but a mere system of abbreviations, which can be learned by the way, if it is taught together with arithmetic.

The waste of time in physics is merely revolting. While young people very easily understand the principles of chemistry and its formulae, as soon as they themselves make the first experiments with a few glasses and tubes, they mostly find the greatest difficulties in grasping the mechanical introduction into physics, partly because they do not know geometry, and especially because they are merely shown costly machines instead of being induced to make themselves plain apparatus for illustrating the phenomena they study. Instead of learning the laws of force with plain instruments which a boy of ten can easily make, they learn them from mere drawings, in a purely abstract fashion. Instead of making themselves an Atwood’s machine with a broomstick and the wheel of an old clock, or verifying the laws of falling bodies with a key gliding on an inclined string, they are shown a complicated apparatus, and in most cases the teacher himself does not know how to explain to them the principle of the apparatus, and indulges in irrelevant details. And so it goes on from the beginning to the end, with but a few honourable exceptions(2).

If waste of time is characteristic of our methods of teaching science, it is characteristic as well of the methods used for teaching handicraft. We know how years are wasted when a boy serves his apprenticeship in a workshop; but the same reproach can be addressed, to a great extent, to those technical schools which endeavour at once to teach some special handicraft, instead of resorting to the broader and surer methods of systematical teaching. Just as there are in science some notions and methods which are preparatory to the study of all sciences, so there are also some fundamental notions and methods preparatory to the special study of any handicraft. Reuleaux has shown in that delightful book, the Theoretische Kinematik, that there is, so to say, a philosophy of all possible machinery. Each machine, however complicated, can be reduced to a few elements — plates, cylinders, discs, cones, and so on — as well as to a few tools — chisels, saws, rollers, hammers, &c.; and,however complicated its movements, they can be decomposed into a few modifications of motion, such as the transformation of circular motion into a rectilinear, and the like, with a number of intermediate links. So also each handicraft can be decomposed into a number 6f elements. In each trade one must know how to make a plate with parallel surfaces, a cylinder, a disc, a square and a round hole; how to manage a limited number of tools, all tools being mere modifications of less than a dozen types; and how to transform one kind of motion into another. This is the foundation of all mechanical handicrafts; so that the knowledge of how to make in wood those primary elements, how to manage the chief tools in wood-work, and how to transform various kinds of motion, ought to be considered as the very basis for the subsequent teaching of all possible kinds of mechanical handicraft. The pupil who has acquired that skill already knows one good half of all possible trades. Besides, none can be a good worker in science unless he is in possession of good methods of scientific research; unless he has learned to observe, to describe with exactitude, to discover mutual relations between facts seemingly disconnected, to make hypotheses and to verify them, to reason upon cause and effect, and so on. And none can be a good manual worker unless he has been accustomed to the good methods of handicraft altogether. He must grow accustomed to conceive the subject of his thoughts in a concrete form, to draw it, or to model, to hate badly kept tools and bad methods of work, to give to everything a fine touch of finish, to derive artistic enjoyment from the contemplation of gracious forms and combinations of colours, and dissatisfaction from what is ugly. Be it handicraft, science, or art, the chief aim of the school is not to make a specialist from a beginner, but to teach him the elements of knowledge and the good methods of work, and, above all, to give him that general inspiration which will induce him, later on, to put in whatever he does a sincere longing for truth, to like what is beautiful both as to form and contents; to feel the necessity of being a useful unit amidst other human units, and thus to feel his heart at unison with the rest of humanity.

As for avoiding the monotony of work which would result from the pupil always making mere cylinders and discs, and never making machines or other useful things, there are thousands of means for avoiding that want of interest, and one of them, in use at Moscow, is worthy of notice. It is not to give work for mere exercise, but to utilise everything which the pupil makes, from his very first steps. Bo you remember how you were delighted, in your childhood, if your work was utilised, be it only as a part of something useful? So they do at Moscow. Each plank planed by the pupils is utilised as a part of some machine in some of the other workshops. When a pupil comes to the engineering workshop, and he is set to make a quadrangular block of iron with parallel and perpendicular surfaces, the block has an interest in his eyes, because, when he has finished it, verified its angles and surfaces, and corrected its defects, the block is not thrown under the bank — it is given to a more advanced pupil, who makes a handle to it, paints the whole, and sends it to the shop of the school as a presse papier. The systematical teaching thus receives the necessary attractiveness(3).

It is evident that celerity of work is a most important factor in production. So it might be asked if, under the above system, the necessary speed of work could be obtained. But there are two kinds of celerity. There is the celerity which we see in a lace-manufactory; full-grown men, with shivering hands and heads, are feverishly binding together the ends of two threads from the remnants of cotton-yarn in the bobbins; you hardly can follow their movements. But the very fact of requiring such kind of rapid work is the condemnation of the factory system. What has remained of the human being in those shivering bodies? What will be their outcome? Why this waste of human force, when it could produce ten times the value of the odd rests of yarn? This kind of celerity is required exclusively because of the cheapness of the factory slaves; so let us hope that no school will ever aim at this kind of quickness in work. But there is also the time-saving celerity of the well-trained worker, and this is surely achieved best by the kind of education which we advocate. However plain his work, the educated worker makes it better and quicker than the uneducated. Observe, for instance, how a good worker proceeds in cutting anything — say a piece of cardboard — and compare his movements with those of an improperly trained worker. The latter seizes the cardboard, takes the tool as it is, traces a line in a haphazard way, and begins to cut; half-way he is tired, and when he has finished his work is worth nothing; whereas, the former will examine his tool and improve it if necessary; he will trace the line with exactitude, secure both cardboard and rule, keep the tool in the right way, cut quite easily, and give you a piece of good work. That is the true time-saving celerity, the most appropriate for economising human labour; and the best means for attaining it is an education of the most superior kind. The great masters painted with an astonishing rapidity; but their rapid work was the result of a great development of intelligence and imagination, of a keen sense of beauty, of a fine perception of colours. And that is the kind of rapid work which humanity is in need of.

Much more ought to be said as regards the duties of the school but I hasten to say a few words more as to the desirability of the kind of education briefly sketched in the preceding pages. Certainly, I do not cherish the illusion that a thorough reform in education, or in any of the issues indicated in my preceding papers, will be made as long as the civilised nations remain under the present narrowly egotistic system of production and consumption. All we can expect, as long as the present conditions last, is to have some microscopical attempts at reforming here and there on a small scale — attempts which necessarily will prove to be far below the expected results, because of the impossibility of reforming on a small scale when so intimate a connection exists between the manifold functions of a civilised nation. But the energy of the reconstructive genius of society depends precisely upon the depths of its conception as to what ought to be done, and how; and the necessity of recasting education is one of those necessities which are most comprehensible to all, and are most appropriate for inspiring society with those ideals, without which stagnation or even decay are unavoidable. So let us suppose that a community — a city, or a territory which has, at least, a few millions of inhabitants — gives the above-sketched education to all its children, without distinction of birth (and we are rich enough to permit us the luxury of such an education), without asking anything in return from the children but what they will give when they have become producers of wealth. Suppose such an education is given, and analyse its probable consequences. I will not insist upon the increase of wealth which would result from having a young army of educated and well-trained producers; nor shall I insist upon the social benefits which would be derived from erasing the present distinction between the brain workers anti the manual workers, and from thus reaching the concordance of interest and harmony so much wanted in our times of social struggles. I shall not dwell upon the fulness of life which would result for each separate individual, if he were enabled to enjoy the use of both his mental and bodily powers; nor upon the advantages of raising manual labour to the place of honour it ought to occupy in society, instead of being a stamp of inferiority, as it is now. Nor shall I insist upon the disappearance of the present misery and degradation, with all their consequences — vice, crime, prisons, price of blood, denunciation, and the like — which necessarily would follow. In short, I will not touch now the great social question, upon which so much has been written and so much remains to be written yet. I merely intend to point out in these pages the benefits which science itself would derive from the change.

Some will say, of course, that to reduce the scientists to the rôle of manual workers would mean the decay of science and genius. But those who will take into account the following considerations probably will agree that the result ought to be the reverse — namely, such a revival of science and art, and such a progress in industry, as we only can faintly foresee from what we know about the times of the Renaissance. It has become a commonplace to speak with emphasis about the progress of science during the nineteenth century; and it is evident that our century, if compared with centuries past, has much to be proud of. But, if we take into account that most of the problems which our century has solved already had been indicated, and their solutions foreseen, a hundred years ago, we must admit that the progress was not so rapid as might have been expected, and that something hampered it. The mechanical theory of heat was very well foreseen in the last century by Rumford and Humphry Davy, and even in Russia it was advocated by Lomonosoff.(4) However, much more than half a century elapsed before the theory reappeared in science. Lamarck, and even Linnæus, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Erasmus Darwin, and several others were fully aware of the variability of species; they were opening the way for the construction of biology on the principles of variation; but here, again, half a century was wasted before the variability of species was brought again to the front; and we all remember how Darwin’s ideas were carried on and forced on the attention of university people, chiefly by persons who were not professional scientists themselves; and yet in Darwin’s hands the theory of evolution surely was narrowed, owing to the overwhelming importance given to only one factor of evolution. For many years past, astronomy has been needing a careful revision of the Kant and Laplace’s hypothesis; but no theory is yet forthcoming which would compel general acceptance. Geology surely has made wonderful progress in the reconstitution of the palaeontological record, but dynamical geology progresses at a despairingly slow rate; the theory of the igneous origin of granite and other unstratified crystalline rocks is still taught in the universities, although the field geologists cannot reconcile it with the contradictory facts, and they are abandoning it in Germany and Russia; while all future progress in the great question as to the laws of distribution of living organisms on the surface of the earth is hampered by the want of knowledge as to the extension of glaciation during the Quaternary epoch.(5) In short, in each branch of science a revision of the current theories as well as new wide generalisations are wanted. And if the revision requires some of that inspiration of genius which moved Galileo and Newton, and which depends in its appearance upon general causes of human development, it requires also an increase in the number of scientific workers. When facts contradictory to current theories become numerous, the theories must be revised (we saw it in Darwin’s case), and simple intelligent workers in science are required to accumulate them.

Immense regions of the earth still remain unexplored; the study of the geographical distribution of animals and plants meets with stumbling-blocks at every step. Travellers cross continents, and do not know even how to determine the latitude nor how to manage a barometer. Physiology, both of plants and animals, psycho-physiology, and the psychological faculties of man and animals are so many branches of knowledge requiring more data of the simplest description. History remains a fable convenue chiefly because it wants fresh ideas, but also because it wants scientifically thinking workers to reconstitute the life of past centuries in the same way as Thorold Rogers or Augustin Thierry have done it for separate epochs. In short, there is not one single science which does not suffer in its development from a want of men and women endowed with a philosophical conception of the universe, ready to apply their forces of investigation in a given field, however limited, and having leisure for devoting themselves to scientific pursuits. In a community such as we suppose, thousands of workers would be ready to answer any appeal for exploration. Darwin spent almost thirty years in gathering and analysing facts for the elaboration of the theory of the origin of species. Had he lived in such a society as we suppose, he simply would have made an appeal to volunteers for facts and partial exploration, and thousands of explorers would have answered his appeal. Scores of societies would have come to life to debate and to solve each of the partial problems involved in the theory, and in ten years the theory would have been verified; all those factors of evolution which only now begin to receive due attention would have appeared in their full light. The rate of scientific progress would have been tenfold; and if the individual would not have the same claim on posterity’s gratitude as he has now, the unknown mass would have done the work with more speed and with more prospect for ulterior advance than the individual could do in his lifetime. Mr. Murray’s dictionary is an illustration of that kind of work — the work of the future.[c]

However, there is another feature of modern >science which speaks more strongly yet in favour of the change we advocate. While industry, especially by the end of the last century and during the first part of the present, has been investing on such a scale as to revolutionise the very face of the earth, science has been losing its inventive powers. Scientists invent no more, or very little. Is it not striking, indeed, that the steam-engine, even in its leading principles, the railway-engine, the steamboat, the telephone, the phonograph, the weaving-machine, the lace-machine, the lighthouse, the macadamised road, photography in black and in colours, and thousands of less important things, have not been invented by professional scientists, although none of them would have refused to associate his name with any of the named inventions? Men who hardly had received any education at school, who had merely stolen the crumbs of knowledge from the tables of the rich; men who made their experiments with the most primitive means — the attorney-clerk Smeaton, the instrument-maker Watt, the engine-brakesman Stephenson, the jeweller’s apprentice Fulton, the millwright Rennie, the mason Telford, and hundreds of others whose very names remain unknown, were, as Mr. Smiles justly says, ‘the real makers of modern civilisation’; while the professional scientists, provided with all means for acquiring knowledge and experimenting, have invented little in the formidable array of implements, machines, and prime-motors which has shown to humanity how to utilise and to manage the forces of nature.(6) The fact is striking, but its explanation is very simple: those men — the Watts and the Stephenson — knew something which the savants do not know — they knew the use of their hands; their surroundings stimulated their inventive powers; they knew machines, their leading principles, and their work; they had breathed the atmosphere of the workshop and the building-yard.

We know how the scientists will meet the reproach. They will say:– ‘We discover the laws of Nature, let others apply them; it is a simple division of labour.’ But such a rejoinder would be utterly untrue. The march of progress is quite the reverse, because in a hundred cases against one the mechanical invention comes before the discovery of the scientific law. It was not the dynamical theory of heat which came before the steam-engine — it followed it. When thousands of engines already were transforming heat into motion under the eyes of thousands of scientists, and when they had done so for half a century, or more; when thousands of trains, stopped by powerful brakes, were disengaging heat and spreading thousands of sparks on the rails at their approach to the stations; when all over the civilisational world heavy hammers and perforators were rendering burning hot the masses of iron they were hammering and perforating — then, and then only, a doctor, Mayer, ventured to bring out the mechanical theory of heat with all its consequences; and yet the scientists almost drove him to madness by obstinately clinging to their mysterious caloric fluid. When every engine was illustrating the impossibility of utilising all the heat disengaged by a given amount of burnt fuel, then came the law of Clausius. When all over the world industry already was transforming motion into heat, sound, light, and electricity, and each one into each other, then only came Grove’s theory of the ‘correlation of physical forces.’ It was not the theory of electricity which gave us the telegraph. When the telegraph was invented, all we knew about electricity was but a few facts more or less badly arranged in our books; the theory of electricity is not ready yet; if still waits for its Newton, notwithstanding the brilliant attempts of late years. Even the empirical knowledge of the laws of electrical currents was in its infancy when a few hold men laid a cable at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, despite the warnings of the authorised men of science.

The name of ‘applied science’ is quite misleading, because, in the great majority of cases, invention, far from being an application of science, on the contrary creates a new branch of science. The American bridges were no application of the theory of elasticity; they came before the theory, and all we can say in favour of science is, that in this special branch, theory and practice developed in a parallel way, helping one another. It was not the theory of the explosives which led to the discovery of gunpowder; gunpowder was in use for centuries before the action of the gases in a gun was submitted to scientific analysis. And so on. The great processes of metallurgy; the alloys and the properties they acquire from the addition of very small amounts of some metals or metalloids; the recent revival of electric lighting; nay, even the weather forecasts which truly deserved the reproach of being ‘unscientific’ when they were started by an old Jack tar, Fitzroy — all these could be mentioned as instances in point. Of course, we, have a number of cases in which the discovery, or the invention, was a mere application of a scientific law (cases like the discovery of the planet Neptune), but in the immense majority of cases the discovery, or the invention, is unscientific to begin with. It belongs much more to the domain of art — art taking the precedence over science, as Helmholtz has so well shown in one of his popular lectures — and only after the invention has been made, science comes to interpret it. It is obvious that each invention avails itself of the previously accumulated knowledge and modes of thought; but in most cases it makes a start in advance upon what is known; it makes a leap in the unknown, and thus opens a quite new series of facts for investigation. This character of invention, which is to make a start in advance of former knowledge, instead of merely applying a law, makes it identical, as to the processes of mind, with discovery; and, therefore, people who are slow in invention are also slow in discovery.

In most cases, the inventor, however inspired by the general state of science at a given moment, starts with a very few settled facts at his disposal. The scientific facts taken into account for inventing the steam-engine, or the telegraph, or the phonograph were strikingly elementary. So that we can affirm that what we presently know is already sufficient for resolving any of the great problems which stand in the order of the day — prime-motors without the use of steam, the storage of energy, the transmission of force, or the flying-machine. If these problems are not yet solved, it is merely because of the want of inventive genius, the scarcity of educated men endowed with it, and the present divorce between science and industry. On the one side, we have men who are endowed with capacities for invention, but have neither the necessary scientific knowledge nor the means for experimenting during long years; and, on the other side, we have men endowed with knowledge and facilities for experimenting, but devoid of inventive genius, owing to their education and to the surroundings they live in — not to speak of the patent system, which divides and scatters the efforts of the inventors instead of combining them.

The flight of genius which has characterised the workers at the outset of modern industry has been missing in our professional scientists. And they will not recover it as long as they remain strangers to the world, amidst their dusty bookshelves; as long as they are not workers themselves, amidst other workers, at the blaze of the iron furnace, at the machine in the factory, at the turning-lathe in the engineering workshop; sailors amidst sailors on the sea, and fishers in the fishing boat, wood-cutters in the forest, tillers of the soil in the field. Our teachers in art have repeatedly told us of late that we must not expect a revival of art as long as handicraft remains what it is; they have shown how Greek and mediæval art were daughters of handicraft, how one was feeding the other. The same is true with regard to handicraft and science; their separation is the decay of both. As to the grand inspirations which unhappily have been so much neglected in most of the recent discussions about art — and which are missing in science as well — these can be expected only when humanity, breaking its present bonds, shall make a new start in the higher principles of human solidarity, doing away with the present duality of moral sense and philosophy.

It is evident, however, that all men and women cannot equally enjoy the pursuit of scientific work. The variety of inclinations is such that some will find more pleasure in science, some others in art, and others again in some of the numberless branches of the production of wealth. But, whatever the occupations preferred by everyone, everyone will be the more useful in his own branch if he is in possession of a serious scientific knowledge. And, whosoever he might be — scientist or artist, physicist or surgeon, chemist or sociologist, historian or poet — he would be the gainer if he spent a part of his life in the workshop or the farm (the workshop and the farm), if he were in contact with humanity in its daily work, and had the satisfaction of knowing that he himself discharges his duties as an unprivileged producer of wealth. How much better the historian and the sociologist would understand humanity if they knew it, not in books only, not in a few of its representatives, but as a whole, in its daily life, daily work, and daily affairs! How much more medicine would trust to hygiene, and how much less to prescriptions, if the young doctors were the nurses of the sick and the nurses received the education of the doctors of our time! And how would gain the poet in his feeling of the beauties of nature, how much better would he know the human heart, if he met the rising sun amidst the tillers of the soil, himself tiller; if he fought against the storm with the sailors on board ship; if he knew the poetry of labour and rest, sorrow and joy, struggle and conquest! Greift nur hinein in’s volle Menschenleben! Goethe said; Ein jeder lebt’s — nicht vielen ist’s bekannt.[d] But how few poets follow his advice!

The so-called division of labour has grown under a system which condemned the masses to toil all the day long, and all the life long, at the same wearisome kind of labour. But if we take into account how few are the real producers of wealth in our present society, and how squandered is their labour, we must recognise that Franklin was right in saying that to work five hours a day would generally do for supplying each member of a civilised nation with the comfort now accessible for the few only, provided everybody took his due share in production. But we have made some progress since Franklin’s times, not to say a word of further progress. More than one-half of the working day would thus remain to everyone for the pursuit of art, science, or any hobby he might choose to like; and his work in those fields would be the more profitable if he spent the other half of the day in productive work — if art and science were followed from mere inclination, not for mercantile purposes. Moreover, a community organised on the principles of all being workers would be rich enough to consider that every man and woman, after having reached a certain age — say, of forty or more — ought to be relieved from the moral obligation of taking a direct part in the performance of the necessary manual work, so as to be able entirely to devote himself or herself to whatever he or she chooses in the domain of art, or science, or any kind of work. Free pursuit in new branches of art and knowledge, free creation, and free development thus might be fully guaranteed. And such a community would not know misery amidst wealth; it would not know the duality of conscience which permeates our life and stifles every noble effort. It would freely take its flight towards the highest regions of progress compatible with human nature. But it is not by resorting to such poor means as some training of the hand in a handicraft school, or some teaching of husbandry under the name of Slöjd,[e] that great things are achieved. Great problems must be faced in their full greatness.

P. KROPOTKIN
POSTSCRIPT

Since the above was written I have had the pleasure of visiting the Gordon College at Aberdeen. There I found the system described in the preceding pages had been applied with full success, for some years, under the direction of Dr. Ogilvie. It is the Moscow, or Chicago, system on a limited scale.[f]

While receiving substantial scientific education, the pupils are also trained in the workshops — but not for one special trade, as it unhappily too often is the case. They pass through the carpenters’ workshop, the casting in metals, and the engineering workshop; and in each of these they learn the foundations of each of the three trades, sufficiently well for supplying the school itself with a number of useful things. Besides, as far as I could ascertain from what I saw in the geographical and physical classes, as also in the chemical laboratory, the system of ‘through the hand to the brain,’ and vice-versa, is in full swing, and it is attended with the best success. The boys work with the physical instruments, and they study geography in the field, instruments in hands, as well as in the class-room. Some of their surveys filled with joy my geographer’s heart. It is evident that the Gordon College’s industrial department is not a mere copy of any foreign school; on the contrary, I should permit myself to suggest that if Aberdeen has made that excellent move towards combining science with handicraft, the move was a natural outcome of what has been practised long since, on a smaller scale, in the Aberdeen daily schools.

1. Manual Training as the solution of Social and Industrial Problems, by Ch. H. Ham, London: Blackie & Son. 1886. I can add that like results have been achieved again at the Krasnoufimsk Realschule in the province of Orenburg, especially with regard to agriculture and agricultural machinery. The achievements of the school, however, are so interesting that they deserve more than a short mention.[Back]

2. Take, for instance, the description of Atwood’s machine in any course of elementary physics. You will find great attention to the wheels on which the axle of the pulley is made to lie , hollow boxes, plates and rings, the clock, and other accessories will be mentioned before one word is said upon the leading idea of the machine, which is to slacken the motion of a falling body by making a falling body of small weight move a heavier body which is in the state of inertia, gravity acting on it in two opposite directions. That was the inventor’s idea; and if it is made clear, the pupils see at once that to suspend two bodies of equal weight over a pulley, and to make them move by adding a small weight to one of them, is one of the means (and a good one) for slackening the motion during the falling; they see that the friction of the pulley must be reduced to a minimum, either by using the two pairs of wheels, which so much puzzle the textbook makers, or by any other means; that the clock is a luxury, and the ’plates and rings’ are mere accessories: in short, that Atwood’s idea can be realised with the wheel of a clock fastened, as a pulley, to a wall, or on the top of a broomstick secured in a vertical position. In this case, the pupils will understand the idea of the machine of its inventor, and they will accustom themselves to separate the leading idea from the accessories; while in the other case they merely look with curiosity at the tricks performed by the teacher with a complicated machine, and the few who finally understand it spend a quantity of time in the effort.[Back]

3. The sale of the pupils’ work is not insignificant, especially when they reach the higher classes, and make steam-engines. Therefore the Moscow school, when I knew it, was one of the cheapest in the world. It gave boarding and education at a very low fee. But imagine such a school connected with a farm school, which grows food and exchanges it at its cost price. What will be the cost of education then?[Back]

4. In an otherwise also remarkable memoir on the Arctic Regions.[Back]>

5. The rate of progress in the recently so popular Glacial Period question was strikingly slow. Already Venetz in 1821 and Esmarck in 1823, had explained the erratic phenomenon by the glaciation of Europe. Agassis came forth with the theory of glaciation of the Alps, the Jura mountains, and Scotland, about 1840; and five years later, Guyot had published his maps of the routes followed by Alpine boulders. But forty-two years elapsed after Venetz wrote, before one geologist of mark (Lyell) dared timidly lo accept his theory, even to a limited extent — the most interesting fact being that Guyot’s maps, considered as irrelevant in 1843, were recognised as conclusive after 1863. Even now — half a century after Agassiz’s first work — Agassiz’s views are not yet either refuted or generally accepted. So also Forbes’s views upon the plasticity of ice. Let me add, by the way, that the whole polemics as to the viscosity of ice is a striking instance of how facts, scientific terms, and experimental methods quite familiar to building engineers, were ignored by the scientists who took part in the polemics. If those facts, terms and methods were taken into account, the polemics would not have raged for years with no result. Like instances, to show how science suffers from a want of acquaintance with facts and methods of experimenting well known to engineers, florists, cattle-breeders, and so on, could be produced in numbers.[Back]

6. Chemistry is, to a great extent, an exception to the rule. Is it not because the chemist is so much of the manual worker?[Back]
Additional Notes by MIA

a. Sir Frederick Bramwell, civil engineer and newly appointed President of the British Association, gave a speech in Bath on 5th September 1888 in praise of civil engineering. One of his themes was the importance of the practicing engineer noticing the “next-to-nothing” which had a major effect – such as the doping of conductors with tiny amounts of impurities to improve conductivity. The speech was reported in the Pall Mall Gazette for 6 September 1888 (pp. 11-12).[Back]

b. Kropotkin added a footnote to this essay in Factories, Fields, and Workshops stating: ‘With the reaction which began after 1881, under the reign of Alexander III., this school was “reformed”; that means that all the spirit and the system of the school were destroyed.’ The Institure itself still exists as the Moscow State Technical University, and the original teaching methods developed were influential in the development of in the development of MIT and other American technical schools (see Wikipedia).[Back]

c. James Murray asked the public to submit sample quotations for the Oxford English Dictionary; an early example of crowsourcing, he received up to 1,000 slips a day (see Wikipedia). [Back]

d. Faust, Part 1, Prelude, lines 167-8 “Grasp the life of man complete! Everyone lives, though it seldom is confessed”. [Back]

e. The Slöjd system of education in handicrafts (generally known as ‘Sloyd’ in English) was invented in Finland in 1865 and is still part of the Swedish national curriculum (See: Wikipedia).[Back]

f. Now Robert Gordon University; the original system was based on work done by the local Mechanics’ Institution. Some of the history is available from the university archives.[Back]