Jacobins

The Jacobins are the book’s emblem of revolutionary intelligence and decisive collective power. They are invoked not simply as a historical faction of the French Revolution, but as a political template for breaking the cultural, economic, and ideological dominance of the Ownership Class and the modern right wing. Against a politics of minimal government, inherited privilege, and passive obedience, the Jacobins stand for a state willing to act in the name of the General Will, the Commonwealth, and the Common Good.

Historical Model and Revolutionary Method

The book treats the Jacobins as the decisive force that understood political transformation could not be achieved by persuasion alone. In its account, society cannot change until the right wing is broken, and the Jacobins provide the precedent: during the French Revolution, they executed thousands of right-wing leaders and fought what the text describes as a merciless war against reactionary and counter-revolutionary priests and peasants, including forces encouraged by the Roman Catholic Church. Their importance therefore lies less in institutional detail than in the example of organized revolutionary force overcoming a social order defended by violence, hierarchy, and religious authority.

This historical model is set against the book’s portrayal of the French and Anglo-American right wings. It argues that even the French far right has retained overtly socialist policies and hostility toward banking, corporate elites, and global capitalist schemes, whereas the United States has never developed a genuine left wing and remains marked by the influence of Protestant extremists with ultra-right-wing views. The Jacobins consequently function as a counter-history: they represent a revolutionary break that the book believes the United States never completed.

Meritocracy, Positive Liberty, and the State

The Jacobins are explicitly connected with Jacobin meritocracy, described as the only means of smashing rule by the rich. The book calls for people in the White House who serve the General Will, the Commonwealth, and the Common Good rather than inherited wealth or private power. This program belongs to the book’s broader defense of positive liberty and social capitalism, a system designed for the 99% rather than the 1%.

The Jacobin state is therefore the opposite of the minimal state defended by the contemporary right wing. The book presents positive liberty as the willingness of public authority to intervene decisively against exploitation, inherited privilege, and social domination. It contrasts this with the Confederate and modern Republican philosophy of negative liberty: minimal government, maximum profit, weak regulation, and the preservation of private property even when people themselves are treated as property. The Jacobins symbolize the state’s capacity to abolish such conditions rather than allowing those who benefit from them to veto reform.

The inheritance principle sharpens this contrast. The book identifies Donald Trump as a classic beneficiary of inherited wealth and argues that a 100 percent inheritance tax would have prevented the reproduction of dynastic elites, including Trump’s rise. Against this hereditary order, Jacobin meritocracy promises a political system in which office and influence serve collective purposes rather than passing through wealthy families. The organization thus becomes the imagined institutional weapon against plutocracy, not merely an emblem of popular anger.

Contemporary Political Recasting

The book repeatedly turns the Jacobins into the supposed army of a modern radical left. It describes Donald Trump’s victory as the greatest gift ever handed to the radical left because it placed hard-left positive liberty, meritocracy, and social capitalism on the political agenda. The unresolved question is whether the left possesses sufficient will to power to use intelligence as a weapon and actually change the system. In this formulation, the Jacobins are not a memory but a test: they embody the strategic will that the contemporary left is accused of lacking.

The invitation to join the Jacobins is presented in openly militant terms. The reader is urged to come over to the radical left, oppose big business, despise corporations and banks, reject the rich elite, and abandon mainstream religions in favor of a rational, transformative order. The Jacobins are called the Army of Reason, and the reader is told to pick up the torch of Maximilien Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, identified as heroes of the Revolution. Their torch signifies a program that seeks to immanentize the eschaton, establish a thousand-year Empire of Reason and Logic, maximize human potential, and trample predatory free-market capitalism and mindless consumerism into the dust.

This language makes the Jacobins the organizing center of a political myth. They are associated with reason, purification, historical rupture, and the destruction of a corrupt order. Their imagined mission is not gradual adjustment but a decisive reordering of society. The book’s rhetoric transforms their revolutionary violence into evidence of seriousness and resolve, especially when contrasted with opponents characterized as servile, deluded, or incapable of acting against domination.

The Jacobins and the American Civil War Analogy

The Jacobins also appear within the book’s attempt to recast contemporary American politics as an unfinished civil war. Donald Trump’s insurgency is labeled “The Confederacy: The Sequel,” a return to far-right conservative rule based on racism, white supremacy, and ultra-plutocracy. The same argument describes the present Republican Party as the successor to the Confederate philosophy of negative liberty, minimal government, maximum profit, social injustice, opposition to unions and collectivism, and the preservation of ancient forms of domination.

Against this New Confederacy, the Jacobins occupy the ideological side of the Union. Abraham Lincoln is presented as the American president most identified with positive liberty because he used state power to end the slave trade and pursued the total defeat of the Confederacy despite the inevitability of civil war. The book calls for another Lincoln who could defeat the right wing not only as a physical force but as a mental and cultural one. In that anticipated struggle, the Jacobins provide the revolutionary energy that Lincoln’s state power would require.

The culture war is defined in the same binary terms: Confederate culture represents the right wing and negative liberty, while Union culture represents the left wing and positive liberty. The physical Civil War gave the Union victory, but the mental Civil War remains unfinished. The book therefore calls for an “Abraham Lincoln of the Mind” and identifies Jacobin-style intervention as part of the decisive victory needed to end the cultural Confederacy. The Jacobins are the historical precedent for refusing compromise with an ideology that the book regards as structurally continuous with slavery and predatory capitalism.

Opposition to Submission and False Consciousness

The Jacobins’ political meaning is reinforced by the book’s account of domination and submission. Drawing on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s master–slave dialectic, the text describes the Ownership Class as willing to take greater risks and use greater force, while the 99% are characterized as wanting masters and preferring the security of submission to the struggle for power. The book interprets support for a billionaire plutocrat as evidence that the dominated actively sustain their own domination.

This diagnosis is applied directly to Trump’s supporters. They are said to be consumed by ressentiment, but their resentment is directed downward rather than against the elite. The book argues that white conservatives tolerated rule by a wealthy elite so long as racial hierarchy placed Black and Hispanic people beneath them. Trump’s promises to restrict nonwhite immigration, build a wall, support the police, and restore an idealized 1950s order are interpreted as dog whistles that allow white followers to feel elevated within a hierarchy they do not control.

The Jacobins are positioned as the antithesis of this arrangement. Whereas Trump’s supporters are described as loving and revering the elite and longing to be led by figures such as Donald Trump, the Jacobin ideal demands the destruction of the social conditions that make elite rule possible. The book’s sharpest contrast is therefore between a politics of chosen submission and a politics of collective emancipation enforced through public power.

Revolutionary Significance and Limits of the Analogy

The motto “Live free or die” is used to underline the Jacobins’ symbolic role. Although the phrase is associated with General John Stark’s 1809 toast and with a popular French Revolutionary motto, the book insists that it was in fact the motto of the ultra-left-wing Jacobins and therefore the direct opposite of American right wingers. The irony is central: language commonly associated with American individualist conservatism is reclaimed as revolutionary rather than reactionary.

The book’s Jacobins are thus less a neutral historical organization than a weaponized memory. They are made to stand for meritocratic selection against hereditary power, positive liberty against negative liberty, state action against voluntaryism, reason against religious and commercial mystification, and revolutionary solidarity against racialized hierarchy. Their image is also deliberately fused with Robespierre, Saint-Just, Lincoln, the Union, and the radical left, producing a single narrative of unfinished emancipation.

That construction gives the Jacobins considerable force within the book’s argument, but it also reveals its dependence on extreme historical analogy. Trump is equated with a return of the Confederacy, modern right-wing politics with Confederate ideology, and the Jacobins with the necessary revolutionary response. The analogies are used to create moral urgency and to make contemporary politics appear as the latest phase of an old struggle between domination and liberation. The Jacobins matter, finally, because they allow the book to imagine that the prevailing order can be broken: not through accommodation with the elite, but through an organized, rational, and coercive movement prepared to complete the revolution.