Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is presented as the central philosophical interpreter of the relationship between the Ownership Class and the majority it governs. His master–slave dialectic becomes the book’s decisive model: domination begins when two self-conscious beings confront one another, struggle for recognition, and reach an unequal settlement in which one becomes master and the other submits as slave.

Identity and Philosophical Contribution

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is introduced as the German philosopher who supplied the strongest explanation for why a tiny ruling minority can command a much larger population. The book applies his account of an imagined first encounter between two self-conscious beings to the political relation between the 1% and the 99%. In a natural condition marked by danger, the two beings enter a struggle to the death, but the conflict stops before both are destroyed because one surrenders. The victor becomes master; the one who yields becomes slave.

The dialectic is therefore not defined merely by material superiority. Its decisive element is the unequal value each side places on life and power. The master is willing to risk everything, including life itself, in order to win and seize power. The slave fears death more than submission and acts to preserve life. Hegel’s importance in the book lies in making that difference in risk tolerance the foundation of a durable hierarchy.

Mastery, Submission, and the Ownership Class

The book extends Hegel’s distinction from the individual encounter to the structure of class rule. The Ownership Class is said to occupy its position because its members are willing to take greater risks and use greater force than the population beneath them. Their power is described as an appetite for struggle and victory, while the majority is characterized as preferring survival, ordinary relationships, laughter, and the comparatively secure continuation of life to the danger and effort involved in reaching the top.

This interpretation is closely connected with Friedrich Nietzsche’s contrast between master morality and slave morality. The book cites Nietzsche’s claim that the wish to preserve oneself arises from distress and from limiting the deeper instinct toward expansion of power. Within this framework, the slave values will to life above will to power, whereas the master reverses that priority. Hegel’s dialectic thus supplies the basic structure, while Nietzsche’s vocabulary intensifies its psychological and moral implications.

The argument becomes deliberately provocative when it explains the persistence of the 1% through the alleged weakness of the 99%. Because the majority is said to fear domination less than it fears the risks of resistance, it does not overthrow the minority even though its numbers would make that possible. Instead, the majority is portrayed as wanting masters who will direct its life and destiny. The book uses this claim to explain why poor Americans could vote for Donald Trump, a billionaire plutocrat, as their President: the act is interpreted not as rebellion against elite power but as submission to an admired master.

The Dialectic in Political Rhetoric

Hegel’s model is also used to interpret the political illusion that Donald Trump stands outside the elite. Bernie Sanders is quoted as arguing that Trump attracted people who felt abandoned by economic and political elites. The book counters that Trump himself is a senior member of the economic elite and the Ownership Class, while presenting himself as an enemy of other elite factions. The apparent conflict between conservative and liberal elites is treated as a manufactured division that prevents the 99% from recognizing a single ruling class.

The same structure appears in the discussion of the so-called two elites. The book insists that there is one overarching elite, even though political and media institutions stage conflicts between liberal and conservative factions. Donald Trump is described as belonging simultaneously to the general 1% and to the conservative political and media elite. In this reading, his anti-elite posture does not challenge Hegelian mastery; it disguises the master’s identity by encouraging followers to resent one segment of the ruling order while accepting another.

The book further interprets right-wing resentment as a displaced slave revolt. The Trump supporters called Trumpanzees or Deplorables are said to resent cultural elites, but their resentment is redirected toward people beneath them, especially black and Hispanic Americans. Their desired reversal is therefore not the abolition of hierarchy but restoration of a racial order in which white slaves stand above non-white slaves. Hegel’s master–slave relation is consequently recast as a layered hierarchy: the subordinated group seeks recognition from the master while demanding an even lower position for others.

Historical and Ideological Applications

The book applies this logic to its claim that the Trump insurgency is The Confederacy: The Sequel, a return to far-right rule grounded in racism, white supremacy, and ultra-plutocracy. It also compares the political development with Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged made real. These comparisons treat contemporary conservative politics as a renewed form of mastery in which plutocratic power and inherited hierarchy are defended rather than dismantled.

The same argument is extended to capitalism and slavery. The book describes right-wing opposition to government taxation and regulation as a desire to preserve the power of capital over human beings, and calls the employee a capitalist euphemism for a slave while identifying employers as masters, owners, and slavers. Abraham Lincoln’s use of the positive-liberty state to destroy the Confederacy is then presented as a precedent for ending what the book calls the Confederacy as a mental entity: the ideology of unrestrained predatory capitalism.

The book’s interpretation of Hegel is finally connected to its rejection of hereditary rule. A 100% inheritance tax is praised because it would prevent the dead from controlling the living and would interrupt the transmission of power, wealth, and status between generations. Conservatives are accused of defending the Old World Order by preserving the same elite in command. In this context, the master–slave dialectic describes not only personal submission but the historical reproduction of mastery through wealth, family, and political institutions.

Narrative Role and Limits of the Characterization

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel does not appear as an active character in a plotted scene. He is recalled as an intellectual authority whose philosophical abstraction organizes the book’s interpretation of class, political obedience, racial hierarchy, and capitalism. His imagined encounter between two self-conscious beings is repeatedly enlarged into a theory of why domination survives despite numerical inequality.

The characterization is selective and polemical. The book uses Hegel chiefly to foreground the contrast between risking life for power and preserving life through submission, then joins that contrast to Nietzschean language about master morality, slave morality, and will to power. It does not present a neutral history of Hegel’s philosophy; it turns the dialectic into an interpretive weapon against plutocracy and the political supporters who, in the book’s view, mistake loyalty to an elite leader for freedom.

That weapon ultimately supports the book’s call for a new political force capable of ending plutocratic rule. Hegel’s lasting narrative significance is therefore structural rather than biographical: he provides the conceptual grammar through which the book explains how masters become masters, why slaves accept mastery, and how a population can defend the very hierarchy that subordinates it.