Controversial: The Substack Essays, Polemics, 2022-2024

READ A PORTION OF THE BOOK HERE FOR FREE AND THE WHOLE BOOK AS A PAID SUBSCRIBER, OR BUY ON AMAZON

Michael Mohr

May 18, 2025

∙ Paid

Polemics, 2022-2024

All essays originally published on Sincere American Writing

Cover design by Alexander Ipfelkofer

Bio photo by Alexis Silver (A. Silver Photography)

This book is dedicated to my wife, Britney, the woman who stood by my side these two years, helping me realize the madness of this time. My best friend, lover and soulmate.

CONTROVERSIAL: THE SUBSTACK ESSAYS

Polemics, 2022-2024

By Michael Mohr

Other books by Michael Mohr

All books are available on Amazon and Goodreads. The Crew and Two Years are both available on Ingram Spark as well as Bookshop.org. The Crew in addition is available on Audible if you prefer to listen.

The Crew

Two Years in New York: Before, During and After COVID

Disgust and Desire

*[Click on any title to go to the original piece published on Substack]

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction…..8

Read a portion of the book here for free; go paid to read the whole book; or BUY THE BOOK HERE ON AMAZON. (Please review!!!)

Part I

Politics

Thoughts on the State of the Nation: The Attempted Assassination of Trump…..14

In Defense of J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy”: But Not in Defense of J.D. Vance…..23

Karl Marx Revisited: Jonathan Sperber’s Book on the Famous Thinker…..36

Part 2

Culture

Book Banning Happens on Both Sides: Censorship is Censorship whether from the right or the left…..55

American Idiocracy: How Did We Become So Stupid? (Or: What happened to Gen Z?)…..60

Adolf Hitler: What Trump is Not…..69

Misunderstanding Alcoholics Anonymous: What AA is and is Not…..93

Being a Free Thinker: Anti-Tribalism: The Case for Critical Thinking…..102

What is a Man?: And What Isn't?.....114

Part 3

Literature and Writing

On Charles Bukowski: Thoughts on the Mad Bard…..122

Henry Miller, Redux: Tropic of Capricorn…..133

Adventures in [Woke] Bookstores: My Search for That Mysterious Thing We Once Called Serious Art…..140

The Case for Jack Kerouac: Nuanced Discussions about Authors We’re Supposed to Hate…..147

Thoughts on Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: A Controversial, Honest Essay…..162

Nabokov’s Ego (Lolita): Letters, 1940-1977…..174

Is It Possible to Write without Bias?: No, and that's OK…..181

On Writing What Scares You: Being Brave as a Writer…..186

George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”: A Revisit of the Classic Essay for 2023…..195

Why I Write: An Unpopular Perspective: Not for Community…..206

The Poison of Identity: Why Identity Is Absurd…..213

Why I Signed the Pro-Free Speech Letter on Substack: This is About Democracy…..222

“Beware of Identity politics. I'll rephrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics. I remember very well the first time I heard the saying ‘The Personal Is Political.’ It began as a sort of reaction to defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones that a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they 'felt', not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of the small difference, because each identity group begat its sub-groups and ‘specificities.’”

—Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

INTRODUCTION

What you’ve got here before you are 21 of my most controversial essays written on Substack since August 21^st, 2022—when I joined the platform—divided into three categories: Politics; Culture; and Literature/Writing.

Rarely do I write simply to shock. Ambitious as I may be—and I am ambitious—my goal in writing has always been to capture some primitive, sometimes perhaps aesthetically sharp insights connected to that vague, supernatural, even controversial notion called capital-T Truth.

Over the years I have read many books on history and politics: Biographies of Hitler, Marx and F.D.R.; polemics by H.L. Mencken and Christopher Hitchens; political books by Gordon Wood, Hayek and Orwell; and many, many more in these and other areas.

When it comes to literature I am in my true domain. All my life I’ve been a reader, and starting around age seven or eight, a writer, too. My mother is an author and growing up I had access to her vast, glorious library stuffed with thick dusty tomes. Books have always played a more or less central role in my life, but it was during COVID, living in New York City, in 2020, that I truly began devouring books like food. It was as if, in order to spiritually survive, I had to read.

Reading anyone from Dostoevsky and Tolstoy to Flaubert and Balzac to Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Nabokov, I’ve put down my thoughts on many of these authors over the past two years in a mad fever of desire, needing to get their themes, voice and ideas down on the page so that I might not forget them, and, hopefully, in the process inspiring new readers to read these books and draw their own conclusions.

As a free-thinker and fierce individual, I have always relied on reading, deep research, discussion with people I trust, trying to understand both sides, and context to grasp complex ideas. Starting around 2013 I also began listening to select podcasts; my first was Sam Harris (his podcast Making Sense), a brilliant intellectual who I still devour to this day. (His ability to criticize both political and social extremes continues to amaze me.) Since then I have added The New York Times Daily, The 5^th Column, Josh Szeps, Bari Weiss’s Honestly/The Free Press, The Ezra Klien Show, Yascha Mounk, The Unspeakable, and The Reason Roundtable. I find these podcasts to be filled with honest, insightful, mature, credentialed and experienced humans willing to criticize both and all sides, including their own when necessary.

Between summer of 2022 and winter of 2024 a lot happened, both nationally and in my own personal life. It was a whirlwind for all of us in some ways: COVID’s continued march in the form of quickly changing variants; the wars in Ukraine and Gaza; all the legal and political drama with Trump; the assassination attempts against Trump and his unlikely yet arguably predictable rise to power again; and much more.

In my personal life it was even harder. My father, sick with cancer for two years, finally succumbed to the disease and died at 4pm on June 2^nd, 2023. I was 39 years old. My mother and I were crushed; we’d cared for him for 23 months. I met and fell in love with my wife, Britney; we were married October 14^th, 2023. In 2021 I’d left New York City not knowing I’d never return. For the first time in nearly 20 years, I lived with my parents again, in their home in Santa Barbara, California for three months, after which I found a nearby apartment. After that I moved in with Britney an hour north in a little agricultural town called Lompoc.

A year later Britney and I are living in Portland, Oregon, going through the immigration process required to move to Spain. We sold my house in the Bay Area which I’d owned since 2015. I turned 40. We traveled to Asia and Africa. My first book (The Crew) was published. Then my second, a fictional memoir about my 2.3 years in Manhattan. And my third, a suspense novel I’d worked on for a decade. (The first book took me 15 years to publish.)

And so here I am now, 2025. These essays are the culmination of many of my thoughts on life, literature, politics, history and culture in this two year span of time. When I look back on August 21^st of 2022—the day I published my first Substack post—I see someone from another spiritual era. At that time my father was dying, I was single and unmarried, and the future, frankly, looked bleak.

Since then, my whole world has opened up.

Each essay includes the title and subtitle, the date of publication, and a link to the piece on Sincere American Writing, my Substack, where the essays were originally published. For this reason I did not include source material in this book; to see all of my sources (almost always exclusively from center-Left places such as The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, etc) type in the link provided for each essay and you’ll be able to click on links in each piece which will link to said source. In addition the essays on my Substack include photos and other perks. If you don’t want to type in the link simply find Sincere American Writing on Substack and in the search bar type the title of the essay and it’ll come up.

I don’t claim to be an expert on any topic. I’m just a deep critical thinker who reads a lot, listens to both sides, and writes down his thoughts.

All of my life—until recently—I have identified as a Democrat. As an angry teenage alcoholic punk rocker I screamed that I “hated the system” and ranted about how “capitalism is evil.” In my twenties I educated myself by reading a lot more and going to various colleges (it took me 11 years and 7 different colleges to finally get my BA in Writing), learning in more depth and complexity the true nature of our American democracy, the nuance of history, and the richness of world literature.

From the age of 18—2001—I have voted, both on the state and federal level, for Democrats. I voted for Kerry in 2004, Obama in 2008 and 2012, Clinton in 2016 (I preferred Bernie) and Biden in 2020. (I did not vote in 2024.) I have never in my life voted for a Republican on any level for any post. I don’t intend to now.

However, after the election of 2016 things started to shift for me. A new illiberalism rose up on the Left: Suddenly free speech was not obvious to my team; people were trying to cancel and “deplatform” speakers they didn’t agree with; lawfare was being corruptly used by the State against Trump (whom I loathed); and far-Left progressives began to get their slick, gross tentacles into the party’s major organs. The midterms of 2018 saw the rise of The Squad, people like AOC who I abhorred and who would never have been elected were it not for the identity politics and extremism of Trump. Now the Left had its own brand of extremism and identity politics.

I have never liked Trump. I still don’t. But, like so many other classical liberals, in 2017, 2018, 2019 I found myself being pushed further and further away from the Democratic Party. And then the summer of 2020 happened. The George Floyd riots. Racism, the liberal media said, was the “real virus” despite having just told a small gathering of Trumpers that them meeting in public together was “killing people.” The hypocrisy grew from there. COVID lies and mismanagement were obvious. Claims of Asian hate were labeled as white supremacy even as we New Yorkers literally saw with our own two eyes all the attacks being perpetrated (and recorded on film) by Black men.

For the first time the media narratives were being so obviously, clearly distorted that it felt like we were living in a fake world. We were being told that our own eyes were lying to us. The Floyd protests were “mostly peaceful.” The China Lab Leak theory was impossible and racist. Crime was not on the rise. You name it: We were being gaslit.

And so, now, in our hyper-partisan, terribly polarized times, I have come to despise both political parties. I am “politically homeless,” as many Americans now are. I didn’t vote in 2024. I was disgusted by both candidates. Mostly, I felt lied to, manipulated by, and brutalized by my old Democratic Party.

These essays are my attempt at coming to terms with this time in history.

I hope you enjoy these essays as much as I enjoyed writing them.

In many ways they saved my life.

Part 1: Politics

Thoughts on the State of the Nation

The Attempted Assassination of Trump

Originally published on Sincere American Writing, July 14, 2024

Substack Link: https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-the-state-of-the-nation

I was reading Dostoevsky’s Notes from a Dead House yesterday when my phone buzzed. I glanced at it; a text from my mom in gray bubble saying, Trump shot!

What?

I immediately set my book down and Googled it. And, sure enough, Trump had been shot at during an open-air rally in Pennsylvania. The shooter was 20 and had never voted and was officially registered as a Republican.

Jesus.

Perhaps this might become our collective “come to Jesus” moment as a nation? The time when we all admit that we’ve all fallen prey to the satirical, glittering distraction of extremism? The time when we pause and sincerely reflect and how far this culture war stuff has actually gone on both sides?

I don’t blame Biden or Democrats for what happened. I think that’s dishonest. It is not within Biden’s character to actually encourage anyone to take out Trump (vile and lying and wholly dishonest as Trump may be.)

And yet. One has to admit, if one is morally and intellectually honest, that the constant drumbeat of “Trump will be the end of Democracy as we know it” certainly doesn’t sound very good at this point. If assholes on Jan 6 could interpret Trump’s words as storming the capital and preventing certification of an election, then it seems eminently reasonable to make the same claim about rabid darts being constantly hurled at Trump by the media, Biden and Dems in general.

Again. Not blame, but just a rational recognition that the temperature in the room—on both sides—is far too high.

Can we look at this shooting as a high-mark of our contemporary culture wars? As a symbol of how detached we’ve become from each other, how polarized, how divided, how bigoted, prejudiced and angry?

Biden now has a very complicated needle to thread, and it requires great precision, care and accuracy. (Not to mention clarity.) I do not know that the octogenarian is up to the job. But Trump can carry a lot of water here, as can his Republican counterparts. How will Trump respond to what happened? He and Biden had a brief phone chat which sounds like it went well. Biden has already publicly condemned the shooting. That’s a good start. Yet some Republicans have already started blaming Democrats for the assassination attempt, fixating on the anti-Trump “democracy is in peril” language. While I don’t fully disagree with them, I’m also not sure how honest and helpful this blame is.

In the end we want all our politicians—regardless of party or perspective—to be protected and safe. Obviously. That shouldn’t even have to be said.

My point here is: This could be an opportunity for both sides to turn the loud angry punk rock music down; to actually attempt to see each other as full human beings again, not as bad ideas, statistics and cliches. I remember when Covid descended and we all thought, Finally, something that will at least unite us. Nope. Not even then. Well, maybe for about a month in the very beginning. And then the knives came out. Everything, boringly, predictably, became yet again somehow about race and ethnicity and gender and which victim groups are getting it worse and who’s voting for whom and why, etc.

Gross, man.

But those of us here now survived all that craziness. It’s 2024. We seem to have more or less reached “Peak Woke” except for in academia and the Arts and the Media, sadly, where Hamas is praised and natal men are women no matter what and Black men are murdered every five seconds by rabid racist white cops, despite the clear and obvious data pointing to a very different and less intense reality.

Could we all possibly use this moment as a portal through which to calm the fuck down?

It sounds largely naïve, I know. In our current environment, I’m just waiting for Republicans to start unleashing the lies and Democrats to start saying it’s too bad the kid missed his target. The wild thing is that this doesn’t even sound out of the question at this point. Everything, literally everything, has been polarized at this point, including a global pandemic. (The joke goes, Global pandemic kills all; Black women hit hardest.)

I’m trying to tease both sides because both sides have become absurd. A total caricature and satire. Mirror images of each other. No, that’s not a “Republican talking point.” (Yawn.) No, it’s not “both-sides-ism.” It’s I-have-my-fucking-eyes-open. No, it’s not a “false equivalency.” Both sides truly believe they are the vanguard of democracy and that “the other side” is inherently immoral and a threat to Democracy. (“I know you are but what am I?”) Both—yes, both!—have been lying to and gaslighting themselves and The American People more or less since Trump rose to power in 2016.

Trump pretended the 2020 election was “stolen.”

Biden’s people told us he was doing backflips and black-belt Karate behind closed doors.

Trump tried to convince Georgia’s governor to “get” him 11,780 votes.

We were told many things by Dems during Covid that turned out not to be correct, true, or scientifically viable. (“Believe the science.”)

Republicans in some states (Florida, say) have begun using the State to ban books.

Democrats have for the past decade been proudly participating in Cancel Culture, removing books, preventing books from being published to begin with, pulling books from the shelves after a Woke Twitter Outcry.

Big Tech colluded with Dems to remove and censor conservative speech online, especially during Covid.

Republicans want to turn public schools into semi-authoritarian Christian camps.

I could go on and on but it’s boring and obvious. Trump tells way too many lies; Biden is way too old. *(And also lies; in his presser a few days ago he claimed there was “no poll which shows me behind Trump.”)

Most Americans don’t even want either candidate. (Me included.)

But we’re stuck with these two for now.

We cannot condone political violence, whether it’s Jan 6, the massive “mostly peaceful” (eyeroll) BLM riots and protests in 2020 devastating whole chunks of American cities, or some whacko kid trying to kill Trump on stage at a rally.

What happened to us? Remember the “good ole days” circa 2014? We used to be normal, at least compared to now. Somehow over the past decade we’ve lost our collective political minds. I do think it “started” with Trump. Trump has been and continues to be an extremist. The pendulum swings, my friends. Extremism begets more extremism. It’s a mirror, a negative-feedback loop. The problem is that neither side wants to be the adult in the room. Again: I know you are but what am I?

Double, triple, quadruple down. Ignore, distort, spin, lie, cheat, steal; it no longer matters. All that matters now is “winning.”

But at what cost exactly? If you use illiberal means to “gain back” liberalism, you’ve already lost the game. Read Orwell’s Animal Farm. Those who feel oppressed next rise up and become the new oppressors. Trump’s words and behavior have often been grotesque in my view. No question.

But look at the far Left. Look what they’ve said and tried to do.

The progressive race-essentialism, making racist, paternalistic claims about “Black people,” calling white people evil white supremacists. Look at how they’ve repeatedly ignored American voters (Black, Hispanic, Asian, White) who, for example, shut down Affirmative Action. Look at the white Woke DAs in cities across America who made crime “legal,” harming non-white working-class locals the most. Look at how hard Leftist media has tried to create a forced, untrue narrative onto us all. (This is why NPR has lost 18 million listeners since 2020 and The Washington Post hemorrhaged $77 million just last year alone.)

And with Republicans: Jan 6; election denial; state-sponsored bills banning books; anti-Woke excesses which only make the problem worse; mirroring the Left by saying that it’s actually Democrats who are the threat to democracy; etc. Watch Fox News for two seconds and tell me that isn’t straight-up political propaganda. Fox—like MSNBC—isn’t telling you honestly what’s going on; they’re trying to tell you what and how to think.

Americans are smarter and better than all of this bullshit.

We can do this, I think. We can let this be The Moment. We can unite. I am not going to embrace Trump. I do not like his ideas and do not want him to win. I also think Biden is too old and untrustworthy at this point. It feels like the whole country sits on the balance of Biden’s ego. I think any other reasonable, moderate Democrat would defeat Trump, if given a chance.

I think we’re all—young and old, Black and white, male and female, gay and straight, trans and non-binary—Americans. You can be proud of this country and also disgusted by some of its legacy and past. We engaged in slavery but, historically speaking, we also ended it quickly and helped to destroy it. There are places in the world where slavery still happens even today. And many nations engaged in slavery—such as Africa—way, way before America was even an independent nation.

It's time to move on. On Bill Maher’s show Real Time the other day, Bakari Sellers (lawyer, former politician, political commentator, about 40 years old) claimed that things were harder for Black men now in America, in 2024, than they were in 1954. This. Is. An. Insane. Statement.

There is so much drama and baggage and exaggeration on both political sides nowadays. If Trump wins he’ll be a Hitlerian dictator and Democracy will crumble. This is bullshit. Trump contradicts himself constantly. He lies all the time. He knows nothing about history. He makes shit up half the time. Are you aware of what Hitler did? Are you aware of the vast differences between 1930s Germany and 2024 America? Are you aware of the robust powers and institutions which would not allow this grim reality to occur?

Trump’s not a dictator. He’s a narcissistic TV host who came to power because Democrats ran a terrible candidate in 2016, and because the Left has lost touch with the working-class and has become hopelessly elite. Progressives are 8% of voters yet they run media, publishing, academia. They have an outsized voice and they shouldn’t.

Similarly, Republicans need to grow a pair and find their way back to some sort of political rational center. Trump or Biden are not the solutions to our problems. We need change. Younger, more diverse, and less extreme.

It’s time to pass the torch. And if for now all we have are these two guys, then we have to at a minimum attempt to find our way back to sanity. Enough of the culture wars; it’s exhausting. We’re all exhausted by it. Horseshoe theory, man. Circling firing squads.

Let’s find our way out of this morass, out of this Rubik’s-cube-like jungle of bullshit. Let’s shake hands again, cross the aisle, express love and honesty and a willingness to hear all sides of a debate. No more censorship. No more shutting down speech. No more gaslighting. No more pretending.

In Defense of J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy”

But Not in Defense of J.D. Vance

Originally published on Sincere American Writing, July 23, 2024

Substack Link: https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-jd-vances-hillbilly

Thirty-nine-year-old J.D. Vance’s 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, has become yet again an instant bestseller and a #1 Netflix hit (the book was made into a film in 2020) recently after Vance was picked as Trump’s VP pick for the 2024 presidential run.

Let me be clear right off the bat: I am not a Vance fan, at least not in 2024. Many reasons for this, but two main ones:

1. He is profoundly anti-abortion, even in the case of rape or incest. Only when the mother’s life is threatened does he budge here.

2. In 2020 he made false claims about election fraud, along with Trump, about the cleanest election in U.S. history.

As is expected in our intense, tribal, polarized moment, many on the left have pounced on Vance, and specifically on his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

I read the memoir for the first time in 2022, when I was caretaking for my father during his terminal cancer. At the time I lived with my parents temporarily, downstairs in their beautiful Santa Barbara home up in the hills with a view of the whole town and the ocean. At the time, the book struck a deep nerve. I’d never read anything like it. Especially during our time of identity politics—on both political sides—it was interesting to read a white man’s account of poverty.

The memoir is about Vance’s upbringing in a poor white family in Eastern Kentucky—Appalachia—and then in Ohio, in the “industrial Northwest.” Vance was born in 1984. (I was born on the last day of 1982, so we’re peers.) He writes about the incredible poverty around him growing up in a bucolic mountain town filled with welfare, section 8, food stamps, drug addiction, violence, fatherless homes, too many kids to take care of, foster care, you name it. Like many low-income Black and Hispanic kids, Vance, and many whites in his milieu, was largely raised by his grandparents. His father split and his mother was a drug addict in and out of rehab and jail.

Eventually, Vance finally gets three years of peace and quiet—away from his toxic mother’s constantly moving wheel of new boyfriends and husbands—living with his beloved grandmother, whom he calls Mamaw. He starts going back to high school classes, does well, and gets into Ohio State for college. (The only one in his family to go to college.) From there he works hard and makes it—unbelievably—into Yale Law School¸ replete with huge doses of financial aid. (He claims it’s actually “cheaper” to go to the Ivy League schools than state schools for poor kids due to massive aid packages.)

Two days ago, thinking about Trump and therefore Vance—the first millennial VP—I decided I needed to reread Hillbilly Elegy. A day and a half later I’d consumed it, complete with new marginalia and highlighting. It’s a fun, solid, easy and enlightening read. I highly recommend it.

What hit me the hardest was the ironic similarities between Vance’s description of poor whites and those of urban Blacks living in inner cities. Ditto Hispanic, Asian, etc. I’ve always felt more on the Bernie Sanders circa 2016 side of things: Towards social class and away from identity politics. As Vance expertly points out: The working-classes of all races and genders have much more in common than people of the “same race” within different classes.

I have found this deeply true personally. I guess it’s fair to say I’m a bit of a class warrior of sorts. I grew up upper-middle-class and white; privileged. I’m much more interested when I encounter someone of roughly my class, regardless of race or gender, than I am of someone who happens to be white but they’re not in my class, roughly speaking. In other words: I am much happier to dialogue about philosophy or literature with a Black writer than, say, a working-class white person or, say, someone I consider to be “white trash.” This has always felt naturally obvious and true for me.

There are a lot of crucial messages in Vance’s memoir. When Trump came to power in 2016 many on the left—AOC I’m looking at you—claimed the reason was obvious and simple: White anti-Black racism. This isn’t surprising, of course: We live in the time of Twitter (X) and TikTok: We like the grotesquely binary and simple versus the human, messy and complex, the nuanced and deeper truths.

Trump-hater as I was back then—and still am—I never bought this argument. As a group the white working-class in the swing states had overwhelmingly voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Trump came to power in 2016 for several different reasons:

1. Democrats had, for the past few decades, started to shift further and further away from the working class of America. Vance tells us in his memoir that for generations his family and Appalachian families like his had voted Democratic. This started to shift in the 1990s and early 00s, when steel mills and coal towns downsized and fled overseas or became taken over by AI. (Enter NAFTA.) Add to that the Democrats’ well-intentioned but paternalistic need to hand out free money to poor people in the form of Welfare—often disincentivizing people from working and keeping them poor and addicted to drugs—and that was enough to switch teams. (Enter the nanny/welfare state.)

2. Democrats have become more and more over the years the party of “Elites,” run by D.C., NYC, and the Left/Right coasts. Journalism morphed from a working-class trade to a rich white trust-fund elite NYC experience where you had to have a degree from the Columbia School of Journalism and believe full-throatedly in leftist identity politics.

3. Democrats ran, of all people, the elite, snobbish neo-Liberal Hillary Clinton, who was completely unrelatable to America’s working classes. She had a terrible message, a bad campaign, and she spent either no or very little time in crucial swing states before the 2016 election. She thought she had it in the bag. She thought it was owed to her.

Now, the more complex truth, of course, is that Democrats weren’t the only ones to fail the working class. Truth was both parties failed. And it wasn’t one party but rather American Progress—ironically—that was hollowing out the industrialized northwest. Both political sides had played a role here for decades. Bigger forces were at work. Globalization was largely to blame: Jobs moving overseas to central and south America and Asia where products were produced for pennies on the dollar and child labor was the norm. AI was on the rise. America hadn’t created a solid social safety net after World War II like the European Union had. Instead it was much more “every man for himself” and “pull yourself up by your boot straps.”

But as I’ve heard many Black thinkers and politicians say as of late, “We didn’t have any boots to pull ourselves up by.” Since the 1970s working-class wages have been slowing and stagnating at the same time millions of jobs have been shipped abroad or eliminated. Meanwhile the cost of things in most places has gone up; a dollar doesn’t buy what it used to even a decade ago. And at the same time as all of this, the working classes, especially white working class people in Appalachia and the rural northwest, have been absolutely destroyed by the ruthless, government-supported opioid epidemic. (People on the left often say, Well what about when HIV and crack hit the Black community in the 80s and 90s? No one gave a fuck about THEM! Reagan did nothing!) I won’t deny this. But: Two wrongs don’t make a right. We should have acted differently back then. We didn’t, and that’s a failure. But we have a chance to change things now.)

Over the past decade—and especially around the Trump era—there’s been this persistent myth from the left that white people are all the same: They’re all rich, they’re all privileged, they all have nothing to bitch about, they’re all racist, they’re all bad and pathetic and stupid. (Except, of course, the “good” Leftists who watch MSNBC and are on the “right side of history.”) The left has a similar paternalistic and racist attitude towards Black Americans: They’re all poor and broken victims of a racist white society, as if all Black people are poor, dumb and victims. (Despite the fact that we have a robust and thriving Black middleclass; despite the fact that we had a Black president for eight years; despite the fact that we now have a Black female VP and a Black female running president; despite that Black voices have risen up profoundly and loudly in film, TV, literature, media, etc etc etc.)

I’ll also add that it’s odd that the left rejected Nikki Haley as being the “first” female and Indian-American governor of South Carolina and the second U.S. female/Indian-American governor in the Republican Party and now the left is calling Vance and his memoir “racist” despite the unifying sentences and themes in his book, and despite the fact that his wife, Usha, is also Indian-American, the first Indian Second Lady. But these facts don’t matter to the white privileged elite left…because, despite their being “of color,” they have the “wrong” politics.

Oh, good ole hypocrisy.

Let’s be clear. Americans are a complex melting pot. Always have been. Most of us came here from somewhere else. We have an array of races, genders, ethnicities, cultures, social classes, backgrounds, etc. This is precisely what makes America so wonderful. Not all Black people are poor, broken victims. Not all white people are rich and privileged. This is something that needs to be drilled into the head of Democrats. Trump won because the Democratic Party failed the working classes. This is why 17-20% of Black Americans are now planning to vote for Trump. Twenty percent!!! One in five. And it’s overwhelmingly Black men. Hispanics are even more so for Trump. (42% as of current polls.) Asians have slid off for Trump as well. Most Black Americans, according to Pew, are center-right of the Democratic Party, not left.

But again, this isn’t really about race; it’s about social class. Vance’s main argument is that yes, there is a systemic function for all working-class and lower-income Americans which has a net negative affect but that—and this is the hard part for Democrats to understand—the solutions in the end are largely based on culture, not government. That’s not to say that Medicaid, social security, Medicare, food stamps and other government payouts are bad. Certainly many people need these. But Vance’s point is that, at the end of the day, what is truly needed—and I’d argue this for non-white working-class and low-income people as well—is internal cultural change.

Vance writes about how Welfare creates an environment which incentivizes not working, being lazy, falling prey to drug addiction, etc.

Many of his white friends and neighbors became “Welfare Queens.” It crosses racial divides. He writes about—and Coleman Hughes has written about this, too, in the Black male community—how amongst working class and low-income white men in Appalachia and the Northwest, education, “being smart” was in his day and still often is seen as being “a pussy” or worse, for Black kids, “being white.” Life for these populations—white, Black, Hispanic, etc—is largely about working hard, fighting to maintain a rigid honor code, and standing tall.

So in other words: We’re back to that placid 1990s idea of needing new and better “role models.”

Look, as I said: I grew up white and privileged. I am NOT one of Vance’s “people.” But I did grow up around blue-collar kids. I always made friends with kids from the “wrong side of the tracks,” to my parents’ consistent chagrin. I don’t know why I liked these kids better; probably it’s my inherent contrarian nature, which I still very much possess. My parents wanted me to be friends with the safe, comfortable rich kids like me: So I rejected that and went the other direction.

One particular friend, who I’ll call Brian, was my best friend. I basically grew up with him from roughly ages 11-18. He and I couldn’t have been more different. We had a big house in Ojai with a pool and a jacuzzi, two cars in the garage, a big front and backyard. Dad was a computer engineer; mom was a nursing instructor. Both had master’s degrees. I grew up in a loving if complex home, getting everything I wanted. I didn’t even have to do chores. I went to private Catholic college-prep high school.

Brian, on the other hand, lived in a family of five in a 1,000 square foot house with three rooms. He started working around the age of 14. He did chores constantly and did not get financially compensated for those chores. Anything he bought had to be with his own money. No one in his family had ever gone to college. Dad was an alcoholic; mom was physically violent. His two sisters were disasters, both becoming addicted to meth early and having kids way too young. Brian himself barely made it out of public high school and immediately went into the trades, working as a plumber.

So you can see here from my personal example: Two “white kids”; violently different upbringings and different life paths available. I was born set-up for success; Brian was not.

Brian was a lot like Vance. It’s been amazing—and disturbing—to watch the left and the Democratic Party generally completely divorce and detach themselves from caring about the working classes, of both white and non-white Americans. Hillary Clinton didn’t try very hard with this demographic—the “deplorables”—because she didn’t think she had to. This is the massive mistake Democrats have made over the past ten years: Switching from the working man to Woke identity politics. And now they’re losing Black, Hispanic and Asians. Affirmative Action was shot down by a majority of voters of all races.

Dems have always seemed mystified by how someone like Trump—a blatant liar, billionaire trust fund baby, and malignant narcissist—could gain the white working class and increasingly the non-white vote. “He lies all the time!!!” I hear from Dems. “He’s a sociopath!” Etc. And look: I agree.

But none of that matters.

A vote for Trump is less so for Trump but against Democrats. The white working class tried Obama twice and Clinton in the 90s and it hasn’t been working for them. Republicans are no better—probably worse; look at Trump’s tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy—but that doesn’t matter: The working class only has one button to push, and that is showing dissatisfaction at the ballot box. Dems for too long have taken non-white and working class voters for granted, and for too long now they’ve lost touch with these people. Ditto Black Americans; there’s a new generation of young Black men who feel slighted by Democrats, who dislike identity politics and who resent being paternally told that they’re victims. They are expressing their anger by using Trump.

Trump is less a man than a symbol. He’s a symbol of inevitable change in the 21^st century, change brought on by American privilege and progress. Globalization, which brings both positive and negative results. The rapid rise of AI. Again, neither political party is to blame for these big-picture changes; this is the nature of our time. But the working class, since the 1970s, hasn’t really heard a solid response to these changes. They’re angry now, sick of being caricatured, denied, not listened to, called racist, called ignorant, called stupid.

Democrats have a real opportunity right now. Biden is out. Trump is looking better and better for many optical reasons (including the assassination attempt) but if we could open up Democrats to someone other than Harris, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, etc, someone who’s a centrist and a genuine unifier, someone who can appeal to people on both political sides, someone who can talk the language of the working classes of all races (especially in the half dozen swing states), then man, I think it just might be possible to gain traction again and win in November.

But Hillbilly Elegy is a searing warning to Democrats: Don’t get mired in identity politics; don’t coronate Harris blindly like you coronated Biden. Give voters a chance to choose who they actually want. Pick someone in the middle, with deep core values, who could actually win. I’d say Michelle Obama—who polls something like 50% to 39% against Trump in a general election—but she says she’s not interested. I’d say Obama, but he’s not going to run. Maybe Dean Philips, the Jewish Democratic centrist. Gretchen Whitmer. Anyone. Everyone.

Obama might have been the last president who understood that winning was all about broad coalition-building. He was very careful when speaking on race to not demonize white people while praising Black Americans and speaking up against injustice. (Just like Martin Luther King Jr.) Because Obama grasped that you can’t alienate one group in favor of another. Race-essentialism does not work; we know that for sure now; the polls are clear. People are sick of the division and polarization of identity politics and boring culture war. There’s a reason Obama won big in 2008 and came into power with a shocking 68% approval rating, winning white blue collar voters in the swing states: He knew how to talk, how to think, how to unite, how to win.

Obama wasn’t perfect. No president is. All presidents have continued some policies which have been an inevitable process of change, wealth, technology and growth. But the age of grievance and victimization isn’t working; it never did work. That’s another thing I like about Hillbilly Elegy: It asks individuals, regardless of race, to take responsibility for their own life choices.

No, not everyone is born in privilege like me. Not everyone has “boots” to pull up. Many are born into environments that are profoundly challenging to overcome. But as Vance argues: What are the parents like? Do they give their kids a free library card and encourage them to read? Do they ask them about school? Do they provide them with love and attention, even if incredibly busy? Are the kids growing up in fatherless homes, or homes where the mother cycles through men every few months? Is there physical abuse going on? Alcoholism or drug addiction?

These are choices, not forces beyond someone’s control. There is so much we cannot control about our lives: When and where we’re born; our race; our social class; whether our parents are loving or not; whether we have a high IQ or not; the culture around us; etc. Just like everything in life, much of the game is all about pure, blind luck. Vance happened to be smart, though poor. He struggled but when he finally had a few years of quiet, living with Mamaw, he was able to excel in high school. That led him to college. Etc. It’s unfair because we don’t even get to choose our genetics, aka our drives, ambitions, desires, laziness or lack thereof, ability to study hard, etc. We can adjust and change some of these things, but only to a degree. But those that come from two-parent stable homes have a much better chance.

As far as Vance himself: I liked the 2016 version of him much better. Back then he was critical of Trump (he called him similar to Hitler, which I think is too extreme but I do see some instinctual similarities), and was much more politically moderate and reasonable. A writer more than anything else. Now he has abandoned his old self and has become Trump’s VP, harshly against abortion rights and spouting off about the election fraud of 2020 without evidence.

What I am saying is: Forget Vance in 2024. Separate the “art from the artist.” (Just like J.K. Rowling getting bamboozled for saying online that she likes Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Lolita. (Read my piece on Lolita here.) His 2016 memoir stands on its own. Read this book. You’ll understand everything you need to know. When I looked Hillbilly Elegy up on Audible it had over 54,000 reviews and a 4.5 rating. I read through many of them. A lot were from people who’d lived the same life as him and they said some version of, Yep. Vance nails it. This is the story of the American working class. This is my story.

We’d be foolish not to listen to this story, not to heed the warning. Democrats especially need to open their eyes. See and think about ALL Americans, not just non-white and the very rich white elites. You’re missing something between these two poles: The rest of America.

Karl Marx Revisited: Jonathan Sperber’s Book on the Famous Thinker

Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life

Originally published on Sincere American Writing, March 8, 2024

Link: https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/karl-marx-revisited-jonathan-sperbers

Recently, I finally finished the 560-page biography of Karl Marx, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life, by Jonathan Sperber (2013). A week or so ago I posted a short essay on this book when I was about halfway through it. Read that here. This will be the expanded, full “book review.” For more of my various book reviews click here.

What I came away with is the overall feeling that, like almost every famous thinker seen through today’s contemporary, exaggerated media prism, Marx was a much more complex and nuanced and intriguing figure in real life than he is portrayed now. He went through many phases and was not a black-and-white thinker, even at the end.

Though I ultimately disagree with his renunciation of capitalism and his full embrace of a violent workers’ revolution, I also understand Marx through the prism—Sperber works hard here—not of 2024 identity politics and “pseudo” revisionist Marxism, but rather through the prism of the mid-to-late 1800s, in Marx’s own time. (Which is how we should strive to see all people; in their own time and not our own.)

Marx was born in a little town in Germany called Trier, in Prussia (northern Germany), in 1818, at a time when Germany was not yet united (that wouldn’t occur until Bismark’s unification in 1870/71), and the nation was instead chopped up into little individual and separate city-states and were ruled by autocratic kings and emperors.

Marx was of Jewish ancestry. His grandfather had been a rabbi. His father—a celebrated lawyer—had converted from Judaism to Protestantism, and Marx himself was baptized into the Protestant faith at the tender age of six. Jews were still discriminated against back then (until well into the middle of the 20^th century and, sadly, are being savaged again today by both political sides, but more prominently on the fringe Left), so converting back then made sense. Protestantism—also a minority amongst the Catholic majority at the time—was the liberal Enlightenment groundwork for Europeans at the time. Marx’s father was left-of-center politically.

Later, Marx went to the University of Bonne and then Berlin, studying law but eventually switching to political economy/philosophy. He became fascinated with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), the famous and back then incredibly popular German philosopher. Particularly Hegel’s Dialectical Method shocked and altered Marx’s thinking. The Dialectical Method analyzed the disruptions, transformations and contradictions in historical processes. This method of thinking—for Marx connected always to capitalism, communism and economics—created the foundation of Marx’s polemics throughout his life.

He joined The Young Hegelians—who attempted to translate Hegel metaphorically in the decade following the philosopher’s death—but after a while broke from the group. The truth was that Marx was a conundrum, a bag of contradictions: Both a believer in capitalism as a first step towards eventual communism and as a violent revolutionary against capitalism; both a believer in liberal Enlightenment progressivism and yet also only as a first step towards socialism and communism; a believer in national independence for all nations and yet a believer that many subjugated colonies of, say, the British Empire (India, for example) were essentially inferior cultures and benefitted greatly from Britain’s western “civilized” society. Marx was arguably both a rabid antisemite and yet also a Jew and also believing in full Jewish civil rights; a hater of “bourgeoise capitalism” and yet in the end very much a bourgeoise capitalist in many ways himself; and on and on, ad infinitum.

In short: He was a full, flawed, complex human being.

When Marx was 20 (1838) his father died and he received a partial inheritance. For the rest of his days until her death in 1863—when Marx was 45—he would battle his mother for continual advances on that inheritance, usually receiving either very little from her or nothing at all. He’d been living in Berlin (in 1841 he received a doctorate in philosophy) but had moved to Cologne and it was there that he’d written for his first newspaper, The Rhineland News. He edited the paper for a while, and wrote numerous columns commenting on political philosophy and economy. During this time he became regionally known as a polemical, and thoroughly scrupulous journalist.

Marx’s thinking, besides Hegel, stemmed from the Utopian vision of the Jacobins during the French Revolution, especially and specifically the initial period of 1789-93. He felt that the French Revolution had basically been a revolution of the bourgeoisie against the nobility. Next, Marx felt, there needed to be a revolution of the proletariat (working classes) against the bourgeois. He understood the history of nations as having shifted from medieval feudalism to the sacrosanct rise of capitalism and private property. Marx wanted to abolish private property, the class structure, and the division of labor. He envisaged all people working as they pleased.

In 1848 revolutions broke out all over Europe. Most importantly, for Marx, were the uprisings in Paris and his local Cologne. He wrote feverish articles during these insurgent times, and called for violent revolution. He also wrote, during and immediately after, The Communist Manifesto, by far his most famous and most popular piece of writing.

The first line is as follows:

“A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.”

Followed by:

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.”

Order was mostly restored by the kings of Europe, including in Paris and Cologne. Therein followed the Cologne Communist Trials. Many fled. Some were expelled from the nation. This was Marx’s fate. He fled to Paris, which had much looser restrictions on liberal notions such as free speech, freedom of religion, free press, etc. Marx, remember, was essentially liberal in his thinking at this time. True, he didn’t think that liberalism was the end goal. Liberalism and capitalism along with it would only be a first but necessary step towards socialism and then communism. But if he hated anything vehemently it was not so much liberalism as 19^th century autocratic rule; aka emperors, kings and czars.

Marx had married Jenny Von Westphalen—ironically from an aristocratic family—at the age of 25 in 1843. She and Marx lived together in Paris for about two years, meeting and intermingling with German intellectual emigres and others from around the globe, enjoying the freedom to think, speak and write openly. Marx became steeped in revolutionary, radical thinking during this time. He felt that capitalism would more or less eventually destroy itself, due to it’s long-term (in his mind) inevitable decline due to a falling rate of profit, and the constant recessions and depressions which had and certainly would continue to strike at the flawed economic system.

The Prussian government went after him, even though he lived outside of Germany now, and eventually the French government expelled him as well. He and Jenny fled to Brussels, Belgium, where they lived for three years, from 1845 to 1848. In 1849—after the revolutions and the publication of The Communist Manifesto—Marx and his wife (and now kids) moved to London.

During all these years Marx was sharpening up his polemical ideas on his communist economics related to “surplus value” and “use value” and the “division of labor,” etc. He was writing about his [hopefully soon approaching] working-class revolution. He’d worked for half a dozen newspapers—The Rhineland News, The Franco-Prussian Yearbooks, The Free Press, Das Volk—and had been editor of many as well. He was gaining a name for himself. He became staunchly anti-Russia (under the czars), anti-Young Hegelians, and anti-private property.

London in the 1850s was a fascinating time for Marx, and a serious financial struggle. England was an intriguing choice and somewhat of a perfect yet ironic one. England was the penultimate Capitalist Nation. The British Empire possessed a massive amount of the globe when you factored in its many colonies throughout Europe, Asia and Africa. The industrial revolution was well under way in England.

Mechanization was making work easier and faster for the owners of the means of production, but also making hours longer and more brutal. Many workers died as a result. (Read Dickens.) Working-class conditions were often atrocious. Capitalist owners made more money than ever while workers’ wages often stagnated or even fell. Soon they’d be partially replaced my machines altogether. Trade unions rose up to fight powerful corporations. Major newspapers such as the London Times, Daily Telegraph and The Economist also rose up during this era.

Marx and Jenny, however, were broke throughout much of the 1850s. Despite her background, Jenny had failed to gain a dowry. Marx had spent his meagre inheritance. In 1842 Marx had met and befriended Friedrich Engels (1820-95), a fellow leftist-socialist and writer/journalist/polemicist. Marx, only two years his senior, nevertheless became the younger Engels’ mentor. They formed a bond which stayed with them until Marx died in 1883 (age 64). Another irony: Engels took on his father’s cotton manufacturing wholesale business. A capitalist enterprise which produced a profit off of the cotton mostly extracted from the slave-produced American South. In turn Engels often supported his revolutionary friend Karl Marx with funds when he was low.

And Marx, often during his life, and especially in the 1850s, was often low on funds. He and Jenny were constantly in debt, sometimes having to sell items at the pawn shop and even write “begging letters” for financial assistance. They had several kids to support. They had to move many times while in London during this period, unable to continue paying the rent. Several children died (they had seven kids), including his son Edgar at age eight of a likely ruptured appendix in 1855. Marx even had some more conventional business opportunities but rejected them in order to continue pursuing his polemical, radical journalism, writing and thought. One might admire Marx’s passionate integrity, yet also severely reprimand him for failing as a man and father financially.

And here was another big irony: The man who was so [theoretically] unconventional, so anti-bourgeois, so anti-capitalist, was taking capitalist money from Engels to survive, was, despite his up and down poverty somehow managing to send his two daughters to private schools, was living a in many ways typical middle-class bourgeois existence as the patriarch of the family, the male head of household, even though he couldn’t always hold things together. There was a clearly defined familial social hierarchy. They lived often in “genteel poverty.” Debt wracked their lives.

Like his contradictory ideas of his own Jewishness, he argued for full civil rights and voting rights for women (and all people everywhere) and yet behind closed doors—with Engels, often—mocked women and firmly believed that revolutionary activity was a man’s job, not a woman’s. Women, in the same way Jews and Russians and inferior “uncivilized” colonial nations, were not fundamentally equal to men. (He also secretly impregnated his nanny.)

One could argue he was a deep antisemite and sexist and racist (he used “The N-word” writing to Engels sometimes when referring to American slaves and Africans), or one could argue that he was a more or less typical European living in the mid-late 19^th century. Antisemitism, racism and sexism were unfortunately and sadly “the norm” at this time in history, both in America and on the European continent and elsewhere. This doesn't excuse Marx or give him a pass, but it does provide some necessary historical context.

There was also some ironic friction between Marx and Engels and the proletariat who they theoretically believed needed to at some point rise up and take down, via violent revolution, the bourgeoisie. Marx once referred to the working-classes as “knotheads,” aka basically idiots, to Engels.

He was often frustrated by what he saw as the proletariat’s intellectual obfuscation, and lack of understanding. The working-classes, for their part, sometimes liked and sometimes loathed Marx. (Working-class union members once even chased Marx and Engels out of a communist meeting.) Many in the proletariat saw Marx as a sort of prophet, but many others saw him as a typical bourgeois who was all theory and no action. Marx was not one of them; he was a soft-palmed middle-class man who wrote articles and books and was supported by an industrialist-capitalist who made profit off the backs of slaves. In short: He was praised and mocked at the same time.

Marx believed economics was the main global driver of social change and social upheaval. This became a biological and mechanistic driver, for Marx, once Positivism took over during the 1850s, which began especially after Charles Darwin's groundbreaking On the Origin of Species in 1859.

Positivism was the idea of moving from a historically backwards feudal society made up of religion and superstition, into a modern capitalist economy underpinned more by rationalism, empiricism and Enlightenment principles of liberalism, science and free thought. (After Darwin’s tract was published some toxic notions of “biological race” also rose up, with the dumb rise of pseudo-scientific “race theory,” which, among other things, saw Jews as a distinct and different biological group; ditto Slavs.)

What Darwin wrote about evolutionary biology became Marx’s creed about social movements driven by economics. (Marx greatly enjoyed, was influenced and inspired by Darwin, but also criticized many of the famous natural scientist’s ideas.) Marx saw social and economic movement as being driven largely by biological realities. Marx believed in Positivism, yes, but also believed in an inherent “inner logic” to movements, individuals and thinking in general.

Marx’s three main social-economic theories rested on this foundation of thought:

1. Productive forces

2. Division of Labor

3. Private Property

Marx saw capitalism as eventually failing due to the falling rate of profit over time, the fact that the owners would gain more and more profit while workers would financially stagnate and struggle as profits rose, thus leading ultimately to violent revolution via the proletariat.

Marx—another beautiful irony—was all about free speech and free press yet, according to many friends and family of the time, he was somewhat of a “personal dictator” who raged when anyone criticized his ideas. While publicly espousing his joy at divergent perspectives, he simultaneously felt angry at anyone who disagreed with him either privately or in print.

Marx—like most [male] thinkers—had an ego the size of Texas. He even challenged enemy newspaper writers and editors to “duels” when he felt attacked. He did this in both young and older age. (This reminds me of Andrew Jackson.)

He certainly felt he was some sort of genius and probably a social and economic prophet. He thought he could see into the future and, in some ways, he could. (He basically foresaw the 1917 Lennin-led Bolshevik revolution in Russia almost 35 years after his death.) Since Marx had too much pride to criticize his own [older, now abandoned] views, he did so by criticizing other revolutionary thinkers who made his own older points; he then claimed he’d never had those views to begin with.

Like the socialist and anti-Totalitarian writer and thinker many years later—George Orwell—Marx fought not only against autocratic emperors and kings (Wilhelm IIII; Napolean III), but also against his “fellow” (seemingly) socialists, communists, syndicalists and anarchists. (He was once friends with Bakunin, the famous anarchist, but later violently broke with him.) When Leftist French socialists in the 1870s started calling themselves "Marxists,” Marx himself said he was “not a Marxist.” Marx even believed in free trade…but again only as a first step towards revolution. (He also wanted, in the future potential revolution, to seize all private property and distribute it among the masses.)

Marx did, it’s true, come up with the lamentable notion of “oppressor versus oppressed,” which has now become en vogue amongst young Millennial and Gen Z so-called [revisionist] “Marxists,” an idea that unfortunately pits various “races” against each other and dismisses class altogether. Marx, of course, was exclusively talking and writing about class during his era, not race.

The German revolutionary émigré (Marx) had many friends but also many public enemies. He fought most of his public battles through newspaper print back and forth, each scoring political and social points for their side. Often he battled The Young Hegelians. He even argued publicly with other socialist and communist splinter groups. There were often secret communist spies who reported back to the emperor.

For a while during the 1850s Marx wrote for the American paper The New York Tribune. (A sizeable portion of the articles by Marx during this time were actually ghostwritten by Engels.) He hoped—but was wrong—that the global recession of 1857 would trigger a revolution. (Which makes me think of Hitler viewing the global stock market crash and ensuing depression in 1929 as a God-Send since it would (and did) push him up finally into horrible power.) He was a regular contributor and wrote, in that decade, hundreds of articles.

When the American Civil War broke out he sided with the Union (the North) and was fervently against slavery. (Many German and other European émigré communists moved to America later and fought for the Union in the Civil War.) Marx was highly knowledgeable about American and in fact European and global history; he read absolutely voraciously. Marx during this period also lost his Prussian citizenship and became “stateless.”

In the 1850s three social upheavals occurred:

1. Crimean War with Russia, 1853-56

2. Britain’s Second Opium War with China

3. Indian Uprising against British Empire

Marx wanted to know what these occurrences as well as the 1857 global recession meant for global capitalism. Yet another irony: Contrary to *some* (but definitely not all) capitalists in the early 1850s, Marx *wanted* the western powers (Britain, France, Prussia) to go to war against Russia. (Marx was pro-Ottoman Empire, which was the empire weakened and therefore threatened by Russia.) He saw Russia as the biggest threat to global liberalism and the next stages leading to communism.

The Russian czar needed to be eradicated. Some capitalists Marx called “peace mongers” because these capitalists did *not* want to go to war for any reason. (He also, as I said in my previous Marx essay, felt that colonialism was flawed but in the end a net good for the colonized [especially] Asian countries since they were financially lifted up and brought into western “civilization.” He also saw Asian nations as “ideal” in terms of theoretical communism because they lacked private property and instead had property owned and run by the State.)

However, despite being “pro-imperialism” and “pro-colonialism” as it were, he also contradictorily believed in the national unity of nations such as Italy and Germany and Ireland.

Often he spent 12-hour days reading in the British Royal Museum library. He was obsessed with knowledge. He devoured Rousseau and John Stuart Mill and read (another irony, due to their classical liberal capitalist views) Adam Smith and his disciple David Ricardo. He studied ancient Greek history and thought (as he’d done in college and had written about his doctoral thesis, considering ancient Greek thought from a Hegelian Dialectical perspective), and read contemporary novels as well. He loved Balzac. He cherished Shakespeare. Goethe. Dante. Cervantes. Pushkin.

In 1864, Marx and Engels formed the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA), which was a loose affiliation globally of communists, left-wing liberals, socialist, anarchists and others who created an international correspondence, formed trade unions, and generally wrote and fought for the class struggle against the prevailing autocratic power structure. Marx labeled the IWMA the First International and headed the establishment.

The 1860s saw more European upheaval: Revolutions, strikes and uprisings around the continent (including Spain, Italy, France, Austria, Romania, Ireland), not to mention two wars: Prussia against Austria (1866) and Prussia versus France (1870). Bismark—seen by Marx as a conservative reactionary leader—surprised everyone by calling for war with Austria and for the national unification of Germany. Bismark even tried to get Marx to work for the State as a financial newspaper columnist; Marx declined. Bismark abolished the guilds and instituted freedom of movement and even shortened children’s working hours. Liberal reforms.

In 1870 Prussia defeated France in war; the remaining French National Guard rebelled and formed, for two months, a revolutionary government. This was called The Paris Commune. The French people fought for a republican government. They formed a new National Assembly, just like in the French Revolution of 1789. Ultimately the Commune made Marx and others (and revolution in general) look bad, a la nasty street violence. And yet at the same time the Paris Commune made Marx internationally famous.

Marx throughout the 1870s was writing the three massive volumes of [Das] Kapital, his gigantic treatise on economics. Unlike many famous contemporary authors—say, Stephen King or Jonathan Franzen—Marx did not have solid writing discipline. (Can you blame him with half a dozen kids, crushing debt 80% of the time, and his physical ailments?) Yet he wrote massive tomes, and hundreds of newspaper articles. His writing was not routine, nor regular. He often pumped prose for seven, ten, twelve hours straight at seemingly random times, often in the middle of the night. It was strange, erratic and wild.

During this time, 5-8 years before his death in 1883, there was a battle to the [metaphorical] death over the IWMA between Marx and his arch-nemesis, the antisemitic anarchist Bakunin, a one-time friend when younger. In 1872, Marx attended his first IWMA meeting in person. He fought hard for the IWMA and won, afterwards ironically (or not) dissolving the organization. Part of his legacy was dissolving it instead of allowing it to be manipulated in Bakunin’s hands.

Marx was still at this point strongly anti-Russian (under the czar). He was even pro-Tory, pro-Conservative when it came to being anti-Russia. Yet he increasingly began to view Russia as fertile ground for a people's revolution. The Russo-Turkish war of 1878 increased this feeling. The 1870s, as in the previous two decades, saw more recessions and economic downturns, yet no mass working-class revolution. The global colonial fight began amongst the major nations, especially over control of Africa.

Marx was against cooperatives and even state-sponsored free public education. He did not support farming and living collectives. After Marx died the ideology of “Marxist Revisionism” began. Lenin (1870-1924), the first revolutionary to actually implement (in theory) Marxist ideas, was a fervent “deviationist,” a propaganda peddler of his own unique brand of Marxist revisionism which served his exclusive purposes. Lenin used, abused and bent Marx’s ideas for his own rather dictatorial arc.

In America and abroad—but especially in America—the social, cultural and political ruptures of the 1960s changed things, particularly in academia. Since Marx’s time there’d been, in the United States, strong minority strains of Marxism, socialism and communism. We saw a lot of it during the 1930s under the era of FDR and the Great Depression, and again in the 1950s when it was largely (but not entirely) exaggerated by Joseph McCarthy.

But it was the magical, wild, Utopian 1960s and the post-war Baby Boomer generation who culturally embraced a revisionist form of “Marxism.” Since then, Marx’s ideas have been more and more bastardized, until they were finally “purified” completely of almost all class issues—Marx’s entire argument—and replaced with racial, gender and other [superficial] identity issues. And then the term “Marxism” was mostly erased altogether and replaced by the broader term “progressive liberalism.”

Yet Woke identity politics has little to do with liberal Democratic values. In fact these two are diametrically opposed on most issues. Culturally, the Democratic party has been captured by this young [mostly] white fringe element who dominate media. Somehow, it’s become the mostly elite rich white Millennials and Gen Z who oppress the working-class of all races in their fight “against” global capitalism (while they tweet their rage on their iPhone 15s).

It's become an absurdist joke, something out of a satirical Mark Twain or Orwell novel. I am not a Marxist. But I do see *some* basic value in *some* of Marx’s original ideas. Ultimately I disagree with Marx on his most fundamental notion: That capitalism is just a first step towards eventual communism, a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Marx forgets one key, crucial and frankly obvious reality when he theorizes about his ideas: He loses sight of the axiom of Human Nature. Humans, like our closest animal allies (genetically speaking), the chimps, are intrinsically hierarchical. We just are. It’s in our nature. It’s in the nature of all animals. It’s natural, normal and organic. You see it in the chimp community. You see it in almost all indigenous tribes. You see it in man going back to first hominids and later to the earliest agricultural villages 10,000 years ago. Capitalism is certainly far from perfect. Look no further than the history of the British Empire, the legacy of slavery, or the history of the American CIA around the globe, not to mention imperialism and colonialism in general.

But we saw the results in the twentieth century of communism: The Soviet Union; Cuba; Venezuela; China; North Korea; etc. The results were devastating. We need civil rights, such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the balance of powers, constitutions, self-determination.

While capitalism has historically had some evil sides, it also signaled the quick (historically-speaking) end of slavery (begun in non-western nations such as Africa itself long before the rise of Western Democracies), the crushing in the middle of the twentieth century of the terror of totalitarianism (Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini), the ability for anyone anywhere to come to America (hopefully legally) and make a better life, global trade and defense agreements, a globally connected world, the rise of industry and technology, etc.

No political or economic system is perfect. No group or movement or individual is perfect. Like Marx wanted, we have to use a dialectical method of reasoning, between the extreme poles of humanity and politics, to end up finding the safe and healthy middle ground. Roughly speaking—and yes, even despite Donald Trump and this current polarized moment—this is, I still very much think, the ideal goal.

In some ways Marx had the right idea…at least when he was younger. Later his views became rigid and plastic. He grasped that liberalism was where we needed to build a foundation from. He was just wrong about moving “beyond” that foundation. We don’t need to move beyond it. We simply need to honor it and protect it and always work to improve it.

I think, generally speaking, we're doing that.

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