19th century

The 19th century functions in the book as a charged political past rather than a neutral date. It appears most sharply in the claim that Donald Trump and his conservative supporters want to take the United States back not only to the 1950s but even to the 19th century. That backward movement is presented as a return to hierarchy, racial domination, inherited wealth, and an economic order in which private power is protected from collective restraint.

The Century as a Political Backward Glance

The book treats conservative politics as fundamentally oriented toward restoration. Conservatives are described as people who live in the past, defend disproven beliefs because those beliefs feel safe, and seek to make an earlier social order govern the present. The 19th century therefore becomes the furthest emblem of a rejected direction: not simply an earlier period, but a model of social relations that modern political life is expected to overcome. The contrast is between a future imagined as the “glory of the ages” and a past that conservatives allegedly want to resurrect.

This temporal argument is tied to inheritance. The proposed 100% inheritance tax is praised because it would prevent the dead from controlling the living by transmitting wealth and authority through family lines. The book connects opposition to such a tax with attachment to the “Old World Order,” in which the same elite remains in command across generations. The 19th century thus represents not only historical time but the persistence of dynastic power into the present.

Capitalism, Slavery, and the Ownership Class

The book places the 19th century within the history of predatory capitalism, describing the early capitalist order associated with the British Empire as one in which workers broadly opposed the Ownership Class. That setting is linked to the emergence of revolutionary arguments associated with Karl Marx, who preached communism and violent insurrection against the ruling elite while living in London, the capital of the British Empire. The period is consequently remembered as a formative arena of class antagonism rather than as an uncomplicated age of progress.

The American Civil War supplies the book’s central historical analogy. It argues that the Confederacy defended slavery as private property and resisted State intervention, taxation, regulation, and interference with profit. On this reading, the conflict was fundamentally about the acceptable limits of capitalist behavior: slavery functioned as a way to reduce costs and maximize profit, while the Union asserted that the State had to prevent such relations. The 19th century is therefore made to stand for a capitalism whose pursuit of profit could openly treat human beings as property.

That interpretation is extended into the present. The book calls contemporary Republican supporters a “New Confederacy,” arguing that their opposition to government, unions, collectivism, and regulation preserves the Confederate philosophy of negative liberty, minimal government, maximum profit, and severe social injustice. It even describes the capitalist employee as a modern slave and the employer as a master, making the 19th century a template through which present-day employment and economic dependence are morally reclassified.

Revolution and the Destruction of Reaction

The 19th century is also connected indirectly to the book’s praise of revolutionary State power. The Jacobins are presented as having broken the right wing during the French Revolution by executing thousands of right-wing leaders and waging war against reactionary and counter-revolutionary priests and peasants. Their example is used to support the claim that a society cannot be changed without first defeating the political forces that defend the old order.

The American counterpart is Abraham Lincoln. He is portrayed as the president most closely identified with positive liberty because he recognized slavery as fundamentally wrong and took decisive State action to end it, accepting the Civil War as the inevitable consequence. His defeat of the Confederacy becomes the historical precedent for a proposed second struggle against the Confederacy as a mental and ideological entity. The book calls for a new Lincoln who would destroy the ideology of unrestrained predatory capitalism in the present, not merely the Confederate state defeated in the 19th century.

Memory, Analogy, and the Present

The book repeatedly turns historical memory into political mobilization. The Trump insurgency is described as “The Confederacy: The Sequel,” and as a realization of the world imagined in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. The analogy links contemporary far-right politics to racism, white supremacy, and plutocracy, while presenting the Republican Party as having adopted the philosophy once associated with the Confederacy. The 19th century is consequently not allowed to remain closed history: it is portrayed as an unfinished conflict whose ideology survives in contemporary institutions and political identities.

The same structure appears in the distinction between Confederate Culture and Union Culture. The former is identified with the right wing and negative liberty; the latter with the left wing and positive liberty. The physical Civil War is said to have produced a Union victory, but the cultural Civil War remains unresolved and requires a decisive victory for the Union. In this framework, the 19th century supplies both the original conflict and the vocabulary for diagnosing its alleged continuation.

The period also enters the book’s reading of popular culture. John Carpenter’s They Live is interpreted as a denunciation of yuppie followers of Ronald Reagan and of unrestrained capitalism. Its hidden signal, wealthy alien ruling class, and awakening resistance are used to represent false consciousness and the concealed domination of ordinary people. The film’s 20th-century setting is thereby connected to the older political pattern attributed to the 19th century: an elite preserves its power while disguising exploitation as freedom.

Significance and Limits of the Historical Frame

The 19th century gives the book a dramatic moral scale. It allows contemporary disputes over taxation, government, capitalism, and political parties to be narrated as repetitions of slavery, civil war, revolution, and counter-revolution. The result is a powerful sense of urgency: the past is not merely remembered but treated as a warning about what returns when inherited privilege and private profit override collective rights.

At the same time, the book’s use of the period is openly polemical. Its equations of Trump with the Confederacy, capitalism with slavery, and modern right-wing politics with a renewed Confederate order operate as high-intensity historical analogies. They foreground shared features such as hierarchy, property claims, resistance to State intervention, and the preservation of elite power, while compressing differences of chronology, institution, and circumstance. The 19th century therefore matters in the book less as a fully differentiated historical object than as a rhetorical battlefield on which the present is judged and a future of positive liberty is demanded.