Moving Beyond Settler Colonialism to Oppose Resurgent Fascism in Ameri(kkk)a
Over a year has passed since the January 6th insurrection in DC and, sadly, it’s unclear what we’ve learned. Shortly after that multifaceted coup attempt, sociologist Waldon Bello warned us as to what was coming. Reflecting on his own experiences of US-backed fascism in Chile and the Philippines, he pointed to their source. “America Has Entered the Weimar Era,” he said, that the insurrection “underlies the face of crises to come.”
Fast forward to today; Newsweek warns of the potential for a violent coup come 2024. Generals in the military warn of their own internal civil war, so their ability to “Choose Democracy,” like many hoped in the case that Trump refused to leave, is now off the table. Despite the chorus of warnings, our supposed left leadership chooses to put their heads in the sand. Instead, we must place revolution back on the table, one at the intersection of Clara Zetkin and Ella Baker.
As Jacobin Magazine editor-at-large David Sirota argued at the end of 2021, “cognitive dissonance is one of the defining traits of American politics.” He wrote that in reference to the Democratic Party’s apparently intentional attempts to “surrender the midterm elections” to the GOP, who he rightly refers to as fascists. For Sirota, who was also Bernie Sanders’ Communications Director and the writer of Don’t Look Up, a new movie on Netflix featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, the Democratic Party is “knowingly creating Weimar-esque conditions for an authoritarian takeover” by the GOP.
As many have pointed out, the January 6th insurrection was a dress rehearsal, but Sirota offered us nothing new. Most still refuse to actually investigate those historical “Weimar-esque conditions” and look beyond the Red Scare for what we must do in order to avoid the mistakes of the German left. People like Sanders and Sirota, as well as much of the broader reformist left, suffer from their own “cognitive dissonance,” furthering the very “Weimar-esque” crisis they claim to oppose. This includes attempts to re-brand social democracy as “revolutionary,” packaged with the same “orthodox Marxism” that failed us back then too.[1]
These politics mirror what dominated the German left and failed against the Nazis during those years of the Weimar Republic. Similar approaches still dominate the progressive left, including the Democratic Socialists of America. In fact, DSA-founder Michael Harrington was critical of the approach of the supposed electoral path to socialism as strategy against the Nazis. People like Bernie Sanders and David Sirota advance a more conservative politic than Harrington himself, at least in his writings and theory up to the end of his life. In fact, one could argue that positions of influence on the left in general rely on the very gaslighting featured in Sirota’s recent movie; a version of Don’t Look Up meant to foreclose any politics to the left of social democracy.
Reformist left leadership remains dependent upon the settler republic’s diminishing electoral avenues and its declining capacity for managed capitalist development.
Similar to this politic against the Nazis, the reformist left leadership remains dependent upon the settler republic’s diminishing electoral avenues and its declining capacity for managed capitalist development. Many cling to middle class privilege and professional-managerial careers as crisis continues to escalate beyond their ability to maintain control. Yet many still gaslight the population as though there is no democratic alternative to this decaying settler colony.
Take political science professor Jeffrey C. Isaac: “It would be absurd to imagine that defending liberal democracy right now must center on carefully parsing out different conceptions of democracy for the mass public,” he wrote for Common Dreams at the end of 2021. Contrast this with what Noam Chomsky argued back in his 1991 book, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda. As he put it then, “liberal democracy” or “progressive democracy” is, in reality, a system managed by supposed professionals meant to protect the republic from the rest of us, i.e., the “bewildered herd.”[2] The settler colony is dying, half-measures are uninspiring, and progressive propaganda is paper thin.
Today, many so-called professionals seem willing to let the country fall to fascism before acknowledging the depths of their own cognitive dissonance. Turning to Noam Chomsky’s 1989 book, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, these supposed left leaders attempt to shape “the bounds of the expressible” to exclude anything to the left of the very social democratic politics that failed against the Nazis.[3] To them, perhaps they see going beyond the bounds of settler Ameri(kkk)a as just as great a threat as fascism itself.
We have to see past these deceptions and not lose hope, while also recognizing the greater genocidal danger posed by the GOP’s potential reconquest of governmental power, what could amount to their own quasi-constitutional coup and the subsequent extinction of life on the planet. Rather than cynically pointing figures of blame though, we would all do well to listen to the late Fred Hampton because, as he put it: “Nothing’s more important than stopping fascism, because fascism will stop us all.”
While this does not mean simply accepting liberal, progressive, and social democratic propaganda, it does mean recognizing the simultaneous necessity and insufficiency of defeating fascists at the ballot box. We can both ground ourselves beyond the bounds of a dying settler colony, while building a united front against fascism.
The following begins with an examination of Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s analysis of Nazi fascism, settler colonialism, and the current climate crisis. It starts with his social democratic political practice around the November 2020 election and January 6th insurrection. He provides an informative example of how the propagandistic bounds of social democracy in settler Ameri(kkk)a fuels resurgent fascism today.
Ultimately, to avoid repeating the mistakes of the German left against Hitler, this will require turning to Jewish voices who experienced Nazi fascism first-hand. Many such historical perspectives still remain largely ignored or even intentionally misrepresented. Their illumination can prove liberating.
Fascism, Climate Catastrophe, and The Cult of Lebensraum
For those unfamiliar, the Weimar Republic was formed after the First World War at the end of 1918. The period that followed came to a head with the Nazi’s quasi-constitutional coup in early 1933, then World War II and The Holocaust, ending May 1945 with the unconditional surrender of Hitler’s chosen successor, Karl Doenitz.[4] Both wars, as well as the years in between, are also considered a European Civil War where the Nazis rose to power amidst capitalist crisis and geopolitical conflict to replace the declining British Empire.[5] Eventually though, the USA would emerge as victor and, with it, the post-WWII “American Century” was born. Today’s resurgent fascism rises from our own particular settler colonial context and the horrors of that American Century, now at its twilight, dying in its “terminal crisis.”
Many hoped the defeat of Donald Trump in the November 2020 elections would strike a critical blow against this resurgent fascism, but raging settler middle classes will not be so easily defeated in their pursuit of an older covenant, one cleansed through genocide and theocracy to now save “The West” in decline. Unlike the British, Dutch, Spanish, French, and Italian empires that rose to power before The US empire, this Eurocentric hegemony now shifts away from the “West” and toward China in a world of multi-polar state and corporate actors; all competing as climate catastrophes yield militarization and barbarism from the growing threat of civilizational collapse.
Despite what many may think, the increasingly desperate settler colonial system still maintains bi-partisan support for the Cult of Lebensraum; a form of barbarity Hitler and the Nazi regime thrust upon the modern world and what we globalized thereafter through an ongoing Red Scare in the name of anti-communism. As liberals, progressives, and social democrats repeatedly warn of the death of “democracy in America,” lessons from farther leftward still remain obscured by that same Red Scare fog. They inadvertently seek salvation for settler Ameri(kkk)a, because a more inclusive colony is but a rainbow-colored mask draped over this the original settler colonial “Aryan” nation that inspired Hitler in the first place.
Similarly, Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s approach to fascism and anti-fascism erases the lives of many Jewish philosophers and revolutionaries who do not fit his narrow worldview, while he simultaneously urges us to remember The Holocaust in order to “preserve humanity.”[6] Looking to one of his colleagues from Yale’s philosophy department named Jason Stanley, this could be described as the very sort of “flawed ideology” that makes it possible for fascist propaganda to proliferate, though Stanley himself does the same thing. Despite the fact that Snyder used the word autocracy instead of fascism after the November 2020 elections shows that he at least recognized the danger of a possible Trump coup.
Nevertheless, to him the threat of a fascist coup meant that ruling class capitalist patriarchs must shore up stability against what Trump might do while in power. To support this end, he and his co-thinkers organized a conference call with some of the nation’s leading executives. With capitalism and the supposedly democratic republic on their side, Trump and fascism presented on the other; Snyder looked to CEOs like the Germans eventually looked to Paul von Hindenburg. Writing in the New York Times just after the January 6th insurrection, Snyder argued that the fascist trajectory was stopped at “pre-fascism” in the “post-truth” era. He reiterated this in an interview for Democracy Now, that the malignancy to our otherwise stabilizing system had been defeated and, though the threat remains, he argued that capitalism and the republic can keep things under control. This has not been the case. Even Canada prepares for our demise.
Be that as it may, Snyder’s 2015 book, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, can help us better understand the relationship between Hitler’s fascism and US-based settler colonialism. He framed this relationship between historical European fascism and that of US fascism within the context of contemporary climate catastrophes, that their ongoing impacts will create conditions of crisis similar to that which led to the Nazi’s conquest of power. “While Hitler was writing My Struggle, he learned of the word Lebensraum (living space) and turned it to his own purposes.” The word embodied a “whole range of meaning that he attached to the natural struggle, from an unceasing racial fight for physical survival all the way to an endless war for the subjective sense of having the highest standard of living in the world.” Snyder points out that the word Lebensraum also meant “household comfort, something close to ‘living room’” and that, overall, it was “a summons to empire, not a military strategy.”[7]
For Hitler, his “circular idea” meant that “there was no difference between an animal struggle for physical existence and the preference of families for nicer lives;” as everyday life entailed a violent struggle for survival. Hitler rejected the possibility of an agricultural revolution for Germany, stating that “the science of what was later called the ‘Green Revolution’: the hybridization of grains, the distribution of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the expansion of irrigation,” i.e. systems that are now at risk of collapse across the globe. Barring this agricultural possibility, and since Germany had lost all its settler colonies in WWI, Hitler and the Nazis looked to the model of the US, and sought to advance settler colonial conquest across Europe. War for territorial expansion, the ghettoization of Jewish communities, even the extermination camps of the Final Solution were undertaken as part of this settler colonialism to make “living space” for what Snyder argued was a Nazi version of the “American Dream.”[8]
As he warned, “climate change as a global crisis might generate the demand for global victims” who would then be systematically exterminated as supposedly responsible for “a corrupt planetary order” to make living space for those deemed righteous and deserving.[9] “By presenting Jews as an ecological flaw responsible for the disharmony of the planet,” Snyder argued, the Nazi’s approach was based on the idea that the “only sound ecology was to eliminate a political enemy; the only sound politics was to purify the earth.”[10] By 2050, the economic impacts of climate catastrophes are estimated to be twice that of Covid-19 on an annual basis, so this fascistic “demand” is only going to grow.
Snyder simplistically misrepresents “the Left” to foreclose a vital history and diversity of perspectives, while he practices a politics that mirrors the very social democracy that failed against the Nazis. This is his attempt to shape “the bounds of the expressible,” excluding most of the German anti-fascist left and the historical struggles many looked to for guidance.[11] He misrepresents the left as just another extreme, like the fascist Right, equating each of them as “German and Austrian traditions of the 1930s.” By doing so, he can discourage further investigations because, in his words, this will supposedly “generate errors that can make future crimes more rather than less likely.”[12] The error, however, is his.
Snyder erases countless Jewish philosophers and revolutionaries who critically engaged with Marxism, for example, entire histories of anti-fascist thought and practice made to disappear. He also obscures key aspects of what about the US settler colonial project inspired Hitler. But by turning to Indigenous perspectives, we can better see beyond those bounds. In doing so, we can better place fascism and settler colonialism within a much longer historical timeline, one rooted in empire going back to the rise of the so-called “West” and human civilization in its entirety.
The American Dream as Settler Nightmare
In the words of present-day Dakota theorist Kim TallBear, we need an alternative to the “multi-cultural and supposedly progressive (always progressive toward greater good) settler state.”[13] TallBear also refers to this as the “delusional state of being” at the core of our “progressive settler-colonial American Dreaming.”[14] Far from a more inclusive settler colony, the alternative would entail communal societies akin to those formed on the front-lines, like what Marcella Gilbert described as having been built at Sacred Stone Camp and Oceti Sakowin Camp among the Sioux and Dakota-led resistance struggles at Standing Rock.[15] “Beyond Settler Sex and Family,” this sort of communal power in every community can “help us abandon the American Dream,” like TallBear encouraged, through a practice of life rooted in kinship as comrades.[16] This is fundamentally different from the cult of Lebensraum and its American Dream as settler nightmare today.
Far from a more inclusive settler colony, the alternative would entail communal societies akin to those formed on the front-lines…[like what had been built] at Sacred Stone Camp and Oceti Sakowin Camp among the Sioux and Dakota-led resistance struggles at Standing Rock.
The cognitive dissonance of settler delusions are deeply ingrained. Fortunately, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's 2014 book, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, can provide us with greater mental clarity and fortitude. Yale historian Timothy Snyder argued, for example, that “The experience of a European empire, so important to Hitler, did have a biological component, but not the one that he imagined.” This was because what supposedly “enabled Europeans to conquer the Americas was not their innate racial superiority but the microbes they unwittingly carried in their bodies.”[17] He makes it seem as though US settler colonialism was somehow not a violent and bloodthirsty “Christian” conquest that utilized an early form of intentional biological warfare over those deemed racially and religiously inferior; against the supposedly sub-human.
Dunbar-Ortiz argued that US settler colonialism is based on a “cult of the covenant,” the idea that the Christian God gave this “land of opportunity” to settlers, their supposed manifest destiny as rooted in the Book of Genesis.[18] Its “founding myth” is that “colonists acquired a vast expanse of land from a scattering of benighted peoples who were hardly using it,” what she also explains as “an unforgivable offense to the Puritan work ethic.”[19] No doubt, this is the oldest Big Lie of the US nation-state. “As Elie Wiesel famously observed, the road to Auschwitz was paved in the earliest days of Christendom,” Dunbar-Ortiz wrote, noting that historian David Stannard’s 1992 book, American Holocaust, “adds the caveat that the same road led straight through the heart of America.”[20] It was the real first Red Scare, one that demonized communal ways of Indigenous life in an attempt to justify mass murder.
Settler society is perpetuated today through a “race to innocence” where “individuals assume that they are innocent of complicity in structures of domination and oppression.”[21] Dunbar-Ortiz refers to a “cross-class mind-set,” what was “the first instance of class leveling based on imagined racial sameness—the origin of white supremacy, the essential ideology of colonial projects in America and Africa.”[22] These settler colonial projects were based upon an idealized mythology of universal white, hetero-normative, monogamous, middle class families rooted in capitalist private property in their supposed land of opportunity, gifted by God. This is the worldview that inspired Hitler, built upon its own blood and soil through an American Dream as both “cross-class mind-set” and “summons to empire” for middle classes in “imagined racial sameness.”[23]
This ongoing cult relies on “a kind of rationalized origin story upon which they fashion patriotism or loyalty to the state.”[24] She argued that “the US Constitution, the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the writings of the ‘Founding Fathers,’ Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, the Pledge of Allegiance, and even Martin Luther King Jr.'s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech are all bundled into the covenant as sacred documents that express the US state religion.” Lastly, she adds that “politicians, journalists, teachers, and even professional historians chant like a mantra that the United States is a ‘nation of immigrants’” and “to be accepted,” she continued, immigrants “must prove their fidelity to the covenant and what it stands for,” i.e., to be model settler colonists.[25]
Practically speaking, this settler cult of Lebensraum can most easily be summarized by looking to a board game called LIFE, also called The Game of Life. In Wikipedia, its summary reads that the game “simulates a person's travels through his or her life, from college to retirement, with jobs, marriage, and possible children along the way.” Proving “fidelity” to the cult of Lebensraum by adopting the settler practice of life depicted in the board game is something nearly all of us undertake. We do so while engaging in an ongoing “race to innocence,” a self-delusion, alienation, or cognitive dissonance, seemingly trapped within the most dangerous cult in the world.
In actual fact though, the nuclear family at the core of this cult is not a stabilizing force in society. It is an energy-intensive, ecologically-destructive, unsustainably carbon-fuming basis of settler society that has always been authoritarian and is now fundamentally unraveling. As David Brooks put it in The Atlantic, “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake.” Yet, if one were to look to David Sirota and his movie Don’t Look Up, all life on the planet will be extinguished before we wake up from this settler nightmare, one where the nuclear family remains at the core of carbon colonialism. We must not let that happen.
Resurgent Fascism through White Covenants
The “cross-class mind set” of “imagined racial sameness” today in the middle class nuclear family is much more inclusive than the original cult of the covenant, but even liberal conceptions of intersectionality are built upon a colonial framework that normalizes this settler practice of LIFE. In contrast to a more inclusive settler colony, resurgent fascism differs in its push for a return to the covenant’s original form, theocracy through genocide for “White Christianity.”
In the words of a member of the Trump-aligned organization, Intercessors for America, settlers “made a covenant with God that this would be a land that would preach the gospel,” which is now a calling for “wartime Christians” to become a “righteous army of God.” This genocidal approach is based on the idea that even a liberal or progressive settler society is too “weak” and that this supposed weakness is the cause of society’s woes, including the hegemonic decline of the US.
Returning to the brutality of settler colonialism and the covenant in its original form is meant to overcome this perceived weakness, while cruelty paves the way for wartime through what the late Jewish historian Norman Cohn referred to as a Warrant for Genocide. Grandiose conspiracies serve, just like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion did for Hitler, as a way for fascists to justify their crimes against humanity. “Those who identified themselves with the ancién regime,” as Cohn put it, referring to the supposedly divine order of Christendom, “had to account somehow for the collapse of a social order which they regarded as ordained by God.”[26]
Like the overarching framework that has come to be known by QAnon, a late September 2021 guest to The Alex Jones Show provided an example of this “warrant” by referencing the apocalyptic, millenarian, end times in the Book of Daniel to inspire that “righteous army” as eschatology, comforted by the promise of heaven after death. Their authoritarian conception of God had supposedly issued “a command—not a suggestion, not even a recommendation” in order to “resist and never comply” with “feminism,” what they otherwise referred to as the “de-masculinization of mankind.” The person continued, saying “That’s what the mask does. That’s what the vaccine does.” Jones replied by saying “Satan conquers us by domesticating us and making us weak” including through what he referred to as the “ritual” inherent in “the transgender deal” where “they go after the testicles.” Though clearly a specifically “Christian” fascism owing to the fact that it is rooted in a particular settler colonial context based upon a “covenant” with God, this cult is actually far older than Jesus Christ.
To understand the deeper historical context of settler colonialism, what became fascism in the 20th Century, and what has returned with a vengeance today in the 21st, we need to turn to the late historian William H. McNeill’s 1963 book, The Rise of the West. His description of ancient Mesopotamia as a process of war-making state formation provides its own historical parallels. We see fascism and settler colonialism as part of “The West” from its beginning, sharing similar barbaric origins with every other supposedly civilized nation on the planet. “A conqueror from the margins of civilized life,” McNeill argued, “might indeed establish an effective central authority; but after a few generations, the conquering group was likely to abandon its military habits in favor of the softer and more luxurious ways of the cities.” This process was within the context of ancient Mesopotamian civilizations ultimately becoming centralized under Babylonian rule. Within this context of threat and vulnerability, both real and perceived, the “relaxation of military discipline and decay of the warrior spirit opened a path for either revolt from within or fresh conquest from the margins.”[27]
This could apply to Hitler’s criticisms of both Germany and our own settler society. During the crisis Germany was faced with after WWI, to Hitler and the Nazis “The Fatherland” was insufficiently white supremacist, hetero-patriarchal, and class oppressive. This was then used to build a cross-class or trans-class movement to seize power for a societal rebirth in barbarism, a “summons to empire” for Lebensraum.
The same is true of criticisms the fascist right has made against broader society today, including against the GOP establishment. Notably, the USA hired Nazis into what became the CIA and then perpetrated crimes against humanity across the globe in the name of the same rabid anti-communism that Hitler practiced. Today though, contemporary fascists argue that even the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US military has “gone soft,” i.e. is insufficiently genocidal for this dying settler colony.
Similarly, though some fail to see today’s fascism as a movement for the centralization of state power, even Steve Bannon’s supposed 20,000 “shock troops,” meant “to take over the administrative state and deconstruct it,” is simultaneously an effort toward bringing police, prisons, and the military more directly under fascist control, away from “emasculated” leadership, toward a concentration of forces in these institutions of settler colonial oppression. These shock troops are “crusaders for Christ.”
McNeill expanded The Rise of the West in two subsequent books. The first was Plagues and Peoples in 1976 where he looked to the impact of “micro-parasites” on the historical path of civilization and the centralization of state power, parasites like COVID-19.[28] In his 1982 book, The Pursuit of Power, he turned his sights on the history of state centralization and its war-making ability, what he called “macroparasitism.” This describes a process leading to the concentration and centralization of power under fewer empires in cyclical fashion over time.[29] To him, the first cycle of this process in “The West” culminated in the centralization of power in ancient Mesopotamia under Babylon. Then, it was from the early days of antiquity to the eventual decline and fall of the Roman Empire, where the ideological role of imperialist middle classes fueled war and conquest.[30]
After the collapse of the empire’s latter Christianized version, this re-emerged from the Dark Ages in a new form, eventually in the Holy Roman Empire, what Elie Wiesel referred to as “Christendom.” Emergent Europe ultimately based itself on ancient Roman law first brought to the land through conquest, though most of the conquerors did not ultimately settler there. This older barbarity would go on to form a foundation for the settler colonial project that inspired Hitler, what became known as the United States of America, with its ongoing cult of Lebensraum.[31] In many ways, European Christian settler colonialism was a continuation of the Roman Empire’s project of expanding so-called civilization, different from Hitler’s project of a Third Reich, but also rooted in a continuation of much of that same barbarous past for the supposed good of a broader population. As such, not all fascists are “Christian,” but all fascists seek a return to the authoritarianism of “Christendom,” i.e., the power of empire against the darkness of chaos.
Against the threat of “fossil–fueled fascism,” today’s non-profit fueled left contains itself within an important fight for a more inclusive society, but it is also within the confines of the cult of Lebensraum, of settler LIFE. This constitutes today’s version of the German social democracy that failed against Hitler and the Nazis, while resurgent fascism threatens to engulf us all. By turning to numerous Jewish philosophers and revolutionaries who experienced Nazi fascism first-hand, we can best see why it is imperative that we avoid conforming to the politics of a more inclusive settler cult. We can look to their insights in order to go further beyond the bounds of settler Ameri(kkk)a before it’s too late.
NOTES
[1] Eric, Blanc, Revolutionary Social Democracy. Working Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882-1917), (Leiden, Boston: Haymarket Books, 2022).
[2] Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1991). P. 12-16.
[3] Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, (Boston: South End Press, 1989). P. 45.
[4] When Doenitz was released from prison in 1956, a sitting member of the Ohio Supreme Court, along with two of his colleagues, began collecting letters from political and military leaders from around the world in his support. Each letter argued against the validity of The Nuremberg Trials themselves, supported the “Nuremberg Defense” each Nazi used as excuse, including Doenitz, but only really because these military and political leaders feared prosecution. After all, most military and political leaders are guilty of crimes against humanity as well, so they latched onto a living Nazi to spread their lies. This collection of letters shows the extent of deceitful opposition to the Trials that remained, one that still remains today. H. K. Thompson Jr and Henry Strutz, Doenitz at Nuremberg: A Re-Appraisal, (California: Institute for Historical Review, 1983).
[5] Enzo Traverso, Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914–1945, (New York: Verso Press, 2016).
[6] Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2016). P. 342.
[7] Ibid., 13-14 & 28.
[8] Ibid., 13 and 325.
[9] Ibid., 327.
[10] Ibid., 321.
[11] Chomsky, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, 45.
[12] Snyder, Black Earth, 338.
[13] Kim TallBear, “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming,” Kalfou, Volume 6, Issue 1 (Spring 2019). P. 34.
[14] Ibid., 29 and 25.
[15] Marcella Gilbert, “A Lesson in Natural Law,” in Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement, edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). P. 281-289.
[16] Kim TallBear, “Making Love and Relations: Beyond Settler Sex and Family” in Making Kin Not Population, Edited by Adele E. Clarke and Donna Haraway, (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018). P. 145; Ibid, “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming,” 25.
[17] Snyder, Black Earth, 321
[18] Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014). P. 45-51.
[19] Ibid., 46.
[20] Ibid., 37.
[21] Ibid., 229.
[22] Ibid., 37.
[23] Historian David Roediger’s 2020 book, The Sinking Middle Class provides an extremely useful quote on the American Dream by former President Barack Obama from 2009 on his Middle Class Task Force, which was chaired by then Vice-President Joe Biden. “And I think I should note that when I talk about the middle class, I'm talking about folks who are currently in the middle class, but also people who aspire to be in the middle class. We're not forgetting the poor. They are going to be front and center, because they, too, share our American Dream. And we're going to make sure that they can get a piece of that American Dream if they're willing to work for it.” This was followed by the definition of middle class used by the Commerce Department for a study they conducted on behalf of the task force. It defined the middle class “around a series of basic goals,” which were; “striving ‘to own a home,’ ‘to save for retirement,’ ‘to provide [their children] with a college education,’ to ‘protect their own and their children’s health,’ to ‘have a car’ for each adult, and to manage ‘a family vacation each year.’” David Roediger, The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History, (New York: OR Books, 2020). P. 88-89 and 186; Brian Montopoli, “Transcript: The President's Remarks On The Middle Class Task Force,” CBS News, January 30th, 2009. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-the-presidents-remarks-on-the-middle-class-task-force/
[24] Dunbar-Oritz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, 47.
[25] Ibid., 50-51.
[26] Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: the Myth of the Jewish-World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, (New York: Harper & Row, 1969). P. 29.
[27] William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965). P. 65.
[28] Ibid., Plagues and Peoples, (New York: Random House, 1976).
[29] Ibid., The Pursuit of Power, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
[30] G. E. M. Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). P. 29-30, 71-72. Importantly, Ste. Croix discourages the comparison between the ancient hoi mesoi or mesoi, but he is specifically speaking of it as particular class formations, not in terms of Timothy Snyder on the “summons to empire” or Roxanne Dubar-Ortiz on the “cross-class mindset” of “imagined racial sameness” at the core of US settler colonialism, i.e. its overall ideological function.
[31] Michael Tigar, Law and the Rise of Capitalism, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). P. 23-34.
Atlee McFellin is a former restaurant worker living in Cleveland, Ohio and originally from Battle Creek, Michigan. He was raised in no small part by his late maternal grandmother who was born into a middle-class Catholic family and grew up in Hitler’s Germany. Atlee’s writings can be found online at rupture.capital.
He is a member of the Cleveland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), DSA’s national Mutual Aid Working Group, and CounterPower, an organization dedicated to, among other things, building a revolutionary commune of communes. Over a decade ago, before becoming disgusted by the non-profit industrial complex, he worked for the Democracy Collaborative on the Evergreen Cooperatives, the American Sustainable Business Council, and Green for All. He was also board co-chair of the New Economy Network and a founding board member of the New Economy Coalition.
