Union

Union is both the victorious side in the American Civil War and the book’s principal symbol of positive liberty: the capacity of collective political power to end domination that private property and unrestrained markets would otherwise preserve. Its historical defeat of the Confederacy is treated not as a closed episode but as an incomplete settlement whose ideological conflict survives in modern American politics, especially in the author’s identification of contemporary conservatism with a “New Confederacy.”

Historical Identity and Political Principle

Union is defined in opposition to the Confederacy’s claim that the state had no right to interfere with business or private property. The book presents the central wartime dispute as a conflict over whether slavery could be protected as property. Union answered that slavery was wrong and required decisive government intervention; the Confederacy treated enslaved people as private property and regarded federal action against slavery as tyranny. In this contrast, Union represents positive liberty, while the Confederacy represents negative liberty detached from social equality.

The book therefore credits Union with using state power to abolish a system that voluntary consent could never reliably dismantle. Because slaveholders would not voluntarily surrender slavery, coercive public action was presented as morally necessary. The argument explicitly links this historical issue to the right-wing non-aggression principle, which is said to permit violence in defense of property and thereby reproduce the Confederacy’s justification for armed resistance. Union’s intervention exposes the contradiction: property claims cannot automatically override the humanity and freedom of the people subjected to them.

Victory in the Civil War

Abraham Lincoln is presented as the president most closely identified with Union’s positive-liberty mission. He recognized the wrongness of the slave trade, accepted that decisive state action would make civil war unavoidable, and pursued the conflict through the total defeat of the Confederacy. Union’s victory consequently has two meanings in the book. It was first a physical military victory that ended the Confederacy as a political entity; it was also a precedent for using public power against an economic order built on human subordination.

The book insists that the Civil War was fundamentally a war about capitalism: not whether profit mattered, but what capitalist behavior a society could permit. For the Confederacy, slavery reduced labor costs and maximized profit, making it a legitimate capitalist mechanism. Union’s position denied that profit could legitimize ownership of human beings. The resulting opposition is framed as a choice between regulation capable of protecting human freedom and a system of minimal government in which people could be reduced to property, machines, or instruments of accumulation.

The Unfinished War and the New Confederacy

The book argues that the Civil War has never truly ended because the ideology defeated in the nineteenth century has reappeared economically, politically, and culturally. It identifies the modern Republican right as a “New Confederacy” defending negative liberty, minimal government, maximum profit, opposition to unions and collectivism, and the preservation of inherited social arrangements even when those arrangements produce severe injustice. In this formulation, Union is not merely a historical army but an unfinished political project.

Donald Trump’s political insurgency is described as “The Confederacy: The Sequel,” a return to far-right rule grounded in racism, white supremacy, and ultra-plutocracy. The book’s contrast between Union and the Trump movement also turns on class deception. Trump is identified as a member of the billionaire Ownership Class, while his supporters are portrayed as people persuaded that an economic elite could somehow serve as an enemy of the political elite. Union’s opposing principle is collective emancipation rather than the substitution of one elite faction for another.

Cultural and Ideological Struggle

The physical defeat of the Confederacy is said to have left its mental form intact. The book calls for a new Lincoln who could end the Confederacy as a mental entity by defeating the ideology of unrestrained predatory capitalism. This proposed victory would have to reach beyond military institutions into economic assumptions, political loyalties, and cultural common sense. Union culture is defined as the culture of positive liberty, set against Confederate culture as the culture of negative liberty.

The same framework is extended to the culture war, which the book describes as a mental Civil War requiring a decisive Union victory. Modern capitalism is portrayed as preserving slavery in transformed form, with “employee” functioning as capitalism’s euphemism for “slave,” and employers occupying the roles of masters and owners. Union thus becomes the name for a social order in which state action, communitarianism, civil rights, and collective institutions restrain private power rather than treating every market relation as voluntary.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Union serves as the book’s moral and historical counterweight to the right wing. The French Revolution and the Jacobins are invoked as another example of a movement willing to break reactionary power, but Union remains the most important American precedent because it joins political authority to the defeat of slavery. The book argues that society cannot be changed until the right wing is broken, and that the destruction of elite rule is necessary before a meritocracy based on equal opportunity can exist.

This use of Union is deliberately expansive and polemical. It turns a nineteenth-century military alignment into a recurring emblem of emancipation, regulation, and collective power, while treating contemporary conservatism as the afterlife of the Confederacy. The analogy generates the book’s sense of urgency, but it also compresses distinct historical periods and political formations into a single moral opposition. Within the work’s rhetoric, however, that compression is the point: Union’s victory remains incomplete until the ideology of plutocratic domination has been defeated in the present.