General Will

General Will is the book’s central standard for judging political power: government should serve the Commonwealth and the Common Good rather than the Ownership Class. The concept gives the text’s attack on plutocracy a positive destination. It does not merely oppose the rich; it demands a publicly accountable order in which social and economic arrangements are organized for the benefit of all rather than for the permanent enrichment and dominance of a small elite.

Definition and Political Purpose

The General Will appears most directly as the principle that should determine who governs and what government is for. Against rule by super-rich bankers, corporate heads, and inherited billionaires, the book calls for people in the White House who serve the General Will, the Commonwealth, and the Common Good. This proposed standard rejects the idea that private wealth or market power gives an unelected minority the right to control a country’s economy and political direction.

The concept is therefore opposed to the creation of a two-tier society in which a privileged elite establishes permanent hegemony while everyone else becomes a permanent second-class population with no realistic chances in life. The book’s stated objective is to prevent the rich from converting economic advantage into an enduring social and political hierarchy. The General Will names the collective interest that such a hierarchy suppresses.

Meritocracy and Social Capitalism

The book presents Jacobin meritocracy as the means by which rule by the rich can be smashed. Its preferred alternative is not communism, which the text explicitly rejects, but rational capitalism organized as social capitalism. In that arrangement, publicly elected and accountable meritocrats would control the economy in the interests of society rather than leaving it to unelected and unaccountable financial and corporate elites.

This formulation makes the General Will both a political and an economic principle. Capitalism is not rejected simply because it is capitalism; it must instead be run in the interests of all, rather than permitting the rich to become richer without limit. The General Will consequently functions as the criterion separating an acceptable, socially directed economic order from predatory free-market capitalism, whose benefits are described as flowing upward into the hands of the Ownership Class.

Conflict with the Right Wing

The book defines the political struggle around the General Will as a conflict between collective freedom and a right-wing order built on property, hierarchy, and elite power. It identifies the Trump insurgency with a return of Confederate politics: racism, white supremacy, and ultraplутocratic rule. In this interpretation, the movement’s apparent hostility toward elites conceals a willingness to place a billionaire plutocrat in the White House and to preserve the power of the Ownership Class.

The same opposition is expressed through the contrast between positive and negative liberty. Abraham Lincoln is presented as the American president most closely associated with positive liberty because he used decisive state action to end slavery and defeat the Confederacy. The book calls for a comparable political force to defeat the contemporary right wing, which it treats as the Confederacy’s ideological continuation. The General Will belongs to the Union side of this conflict because it authorizes collective action against forms of domination that a minimal-state philosophy would leave intact.

The text extends this historical analogy to the Republican Party, which it argues now defends a Confederate philosophy of minimal government, maximum profit, extreme property rights, social injustice, opposition to unions and collectivism, and the preservation of ancient hierarchies. The General Will is implicitly the principle that reverses this inheritance: human and civil rights take priority over property claims when property is used to reduce people to slaves, machines, or instruments of profit.

Historical and Cultural Struggle

The General Will is linked to the book’s account of social change as an ideological and cultural battle, not merely an electoral contest. The French Revolution’s Jacobins are invoked as a model because they are said to have broken the right wing and destroyed reactionary resistance through revolutionary force. Their example is used to argue that a society cannot be transformed while the political culture of the old ruling order remains intact.

The same framework governs the book’s description of the culture war. Confederate culture is identified with the right wing and negative liberty, while Union culture is identified with the left wing and positive liberty. The required outcome is a decisive Union victory in a mental or cultural Civil War, including the elimination of the ideology of predatory capitalism. The General Will supplies the collective purpose of that victory: government and culture must be redirected toward shared human and civil interests.

This struggle is also represented through the language of consciousness. The Ownership Class is described as maintaining power by producing false consciousness among the majority, persuading many of the 99 percent to support the interests of the super-rich. In the book’s argument, consent to domination is not evidence that domination serves the common interest; it is evidence that the dominant class has successfully shaped the meanings through which people understand their own situation. The General Will thus requires an ideological break with elite-defined common sense.

Narrative Significance

As a concept, the General Will gathers the book’s recurring contrasts into one political demand: elite rule versus popular rule, inherited wealth versus merit, negative liberty versus positive liberty, Confederate reaction versus Union emancipation, and predatory capitalism versus social capitalism. It is the affirmative counterpart to the text’s denunciations. Where the Ownership Class represents concentrated power without accountability, the General Will represents power justified by service to the whole community.

The book’s rhetoric is deliberately uncompromising. It calls on its movement to take risks, stand up, and put the people genuinely in charge for the first time, while treating opponents as allies of the ruling elite. Its Jacobin self-description and adoption of “Live Free or Die” present political action as a struggle requiring courage rather than passive consent. The General Will is therefore not portrayed as a quiet consensus or an abstract constitutional formula. It is a revolutionary claim that collective human interests must overcome the social, economic, and cultural structures that make permanent elite domination appear natural.