Neanderthals

Neanderthals are used in the book not as an independently developed prehistoric people but as a loaded comparison in its denunciation of the American right wing. The analogy compresses the author’s judgments about intelligence, political consciousness, and submission into an image of supposed evolutionary backwardness, making the term part of the book’s wider rhetoric of class conflict and ideological exposure.

Identity and Appearance

Neanderthals enter the argument when the Ownership Class’s success in securing support from the 99 percent is described as a triumph of ideological manipulation. The book calls right wingers the people with the most spectacular form of false consciousness and compares them to Neanderthals in relation to members of Homo sapiens. The comparison is not supported by biological discussion or evidence about Neanderthal society; it functions as an insult aimed at depicting right-wing adherents as less intelligent and less fully politically conscious than the people the author treats as their intellectual counterparts.

Political and Class Function

The comparison is embedded in an account of a society divided between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. The book argues that the super-rich have managed to brainwash large numbers of ordinary people into defending elite interests, and that right-wing politics represents the most extreme form of that false consciousness. Neanderthals therefore stand for the imagined endpoint of political subordination: people who possess the numerical power to challenge the elite but instead support the arrangements that preserve elite wealth and authority.

This argument is connected to the book’s claim that many poor Americans voted for Donald Trump, a billionaire plutocrat, to become their President and rule over them. The comparison with Neanderthals intensifies the author’s interpretation of that choice as evidence not merely of political error but of a profound incapacity to recognize self-interest. It also supports the broader accusation that Trump’s supporters act as lackeys and puppets of the rich, helping keep the 1 percent in power.

Relation to the Right-Wing Confederacy Analogy

Neanderthals belong to a chain of historical and political analogies through which the book interprets right-wing ideology. The Trump insurgency is presented as a return of far-right conservative rule based on racism, white supremacy, and ultra-plutocracy, described as a sequel to the Confederacy and as a realization of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Elsewhere, contemporary right wingers are cast as Satanic Confederates who resist the State when it prevents capitalists from making people into slaves.

Within this argumentative structure, the Neanderthal image does not establish a historical continuity between prehistoric humans and modern conservatives. Instead, it supplies an evolutionary hierarchy for a political polemic already organized around domination, slavery, and class power. The book’s historical analogies—Trump with the Confederacy, unrestrained capitalism with enslavement, and right-wing consciousness with intellectual primitiveness—are presented as moral indictments rather than as carefully bounded comparisons. Their force comes from accumulation: each analogy makes the same opponents appear more authoritarian, exploitative, and incapable of emancipation.

Consciousness, Authority, and Moral Condemnation

The book also links right-wing politics to submission and authoritarian belief. It argues that the majority wants powerful masters, accepts domination, and resembles Nietzsche’s Last Men rather than the Supermen. In the discussion of Abrahamist religion, obedience to a threatening divine authority is used as evidence that such people are natural submissives who want the strongest and most psychopathic figures to rule them. The Neanderthal comparison consequently participates in a larger portrayal of right-wing supporters as both intellectually deficient and psychologically inclined toward domination.

The same rhetoric appears in the book’s treatment of religion and morality. Right wingers are accused of opposing social justice, merit, and virtue while defending selfishness, greed, nepotism, inheritance, privilege, and anti-meritocracy. They are described as endorsing a satanic inversion of morality and as supporting a political order in which right-wing psychopaths rule. The Neanderthal label contributes to this totalizing picture by presenting the political opponent as not merely mistaken but fundamentally inferior in intelligence and moral understanding.

Narrative Significance and Limits

Neanderthals have no plot trajectory, independent voice, or material agency in the supplied text. They operate as a rhetorical instrument in an aggressively polarized political argument. Their significance lies in how the book converts a contemporary political disagreement into a struggle between enlightenment and regression, human political capacity and supposed primitiveness, liberation and submission.

The comparison also reveals the limits of the book’s method. By treating all right wingers as a single degraded category, it collapses differences among supporters of Donald Trump, conservatives, libertarians, religious believers, and opponents of government. The book simultaneously condemns right wingers for authoritarian obedience and for resisting the State, a tension it resolves through denunciation rather than distinction. Neanderthals thus function less as a subject of inquiry than as a verbal marker of contempt: a compact image through which the author declares that right-wing false consciousness is so extreme that it belongs, metaphorically, outside the boundaries of fully rational political humanity.