Even as politics and economics are continuously transformed by various forces, the categories used to understand it are remarkably unalterable. People are still calling one another, and even themselves, socialists, communists, liberals, fascists and nationalists. These terms originate in radical and labor movements of the 19th century as reactions to rising capitalism and nationalism, and then reactions to these leftist movements themselves. Even as they occasionally switch sides (recently, on questions about the size and scope of government power), the factions continue to be called “right” and “left,” categories that emerged during the French Revolution, and which had no purchase in the US until late-19th-century immigration brought European radical movements to the US.
Currently, people are back to yelling “communist” and “fascist” at each other, as the right (whatever that means now) accuses the left (ditto) of “cultural Marxism” and communism, and the left compares the rise of Trump to the rise of Hitler. The terms are anachronistic; they pertain above all to economic circumstances that no longer obtain.
The spectrum, conceived as stretching from Marxist communism on the left to fascism on the right, extends from totalitarianism to totalitarianism, with statist authoritarianism in between; this way of conceiving the spectrum leave only with a choice among oppressors, if it leaves any choices at all. Or maybe it conceives of economies on a range from pure free markets to pure state command systems, neither of which has been seen since 1870 at latest. Or it depends on an incomprehensible yet vicious opposition between the individual and the collective.
The arrival of European forms of radical egalitarianism short-circuited or superseded a profound, and profoundly American, tradition of reform, an indigenous radicalism that developed in the period before the Civil War. This homegrown movement for social transformation boasted enthusiasts among the great literary figures of the period, including Emerson and Thoreau, Whitman and Melville. The abolitionism of Frederick Douglass and the feminism of Elizabeth Cady Stanton emerged in this tradition. It included reformers as pure and visionary as any the world has known, figures such as William Lloyd Garrison, Samuel J. May (Louisa May Alcott's grandfather), Lucretia Mott, Maria Weston Chapman, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, and Nathaniel Peabody Rogers (a figure whose essays I’m working on transcribing and who was Thoreau's hero as a writer and as a political activist).
Many aspects of the belief systems of people like that could be endorsed by today's reformers and younger leftists. They endorsed the immediate abolition of slavery, uncompromised and uncompensated, in language that has come to be echoed in movements to for prison abolition, for example. The movement for the equality of women, so far as it was expressed in the US—at the Seneca Falls Convention—came from this tradition. Garrison, Rogers, and Chapman, among others, created one of the first broad peace movements in history, and opposed all war and violence, even on defensive grounds. Garrison's absolute pacifism was directly influential on Tolstoy's, whose advocacy non-violence was in turn fundamental to Gandhi's movement and hence to King's.
In addition, all of these people, including Emerson and Thoreau, were extreme skeptics with regard to state power. They endorsed anarchism. "What is government," asked Nathaniel Rogers in 1843, "but an armed battery? What is its voice, but the report of cannon—its sanctions, but the bayonet and halter?" A few years later, Thoreau asked the same questions in "Civil Disobedience."
Garrison, Rogers and Mott, for example, directly inferred that, because violence is wrong and government rests on violence, government is wrong too. Mott said that she’d never advise anyone to vote in a situation such as the present one, in which government rests on violence, but that if men had the right, women must also have it. At a minimum, government proceeds by violating the self-sovereignty of individuals. Slavery had shown, they thought, that people couldn't own other people. One way to put this is that each person is the owner of themselves. It's that thought that leads directly to the feminism of Stanton and Margaret Fuller.
From the point of view of the left-right spectrum, their positions appear incoherent or incomprehensible. They were radical individualists, emerging in the context of American Protestant Christianity, and American libertarianism emerges in proximity, among figures such as Lysander Spooner and Josiah Warren. But that Garrison was an individualist and an evangelical Christian was perfectly compatible with the fact that he was the most radical and visionary American reformer of his era. He can't possibly be considered to be on the left or the right.
The idea that the political spectrum ranges from individualism on the right to collectivism on the left, and that this entails free market capitalism on the right and state socialism on the left is shown by these figures to be raw confusion. There’s every reason for people who think that the human individual is fundamental or has rights, or is a thing of infinite value, to endorse equal rights for women, anti-racism, and anti-nationalism. Race and nation, as well as class, are collective identities.
And on the basis of the infinite value of the human individual (which is compatible with individuals being socially-connected or even socially-constituted), many of these figures rejected not only slavery, but the condition of wage labor in emerging industrial capitalism in New England. Sounding like Marx, but writing three years before the Communist Manifesto, the individualist and anti-statist Rogers said this in his New Hampshire newspaper the Herald of Freedom: "The overthrow of slavery must involve the doing away of the oppressions practiced by institutions on the white poor. The black laborer it enslaves outright in this country. White labor is all but enslaved among us. It is the slave of capital. Capital buys it at auction… It is impossible for labor to get rich or free. I mean labor generally. The institutions of capital will exhaust labor's means, and keep it down."
Rogers, like Marx, rejected the institution of private property entirely.
One doesn’t have to directly or entirely or uncritically accept the anarchism, pacifism, and anticapitalism of these figures. But one does have to acknowledge that their positions are radical, coherent, and don’t land anywhere on the left-right spectrum. They’re inspiring, but have nothing to do with socialism or fascism. They’re also "anti-liberal" or "postliberal," emerging in part from a critique of the American constitutional system. Even if you can't endorse the positions, you should see there are many political possibilities that’re obscured by the left-right spectrum and our contingent and incoherent categories of political possibility.
We should be interested in the possibilities obscured by the emergence of the left-right spectrum and the emigration to North America of European political taxonomies. The work of re-envisioning political categories or opening new political possibilities might begin with the work of recovery of American traditions.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell