Union (American Civil War)

Union (American Civil War) is not treated merely as a wartime coalition or a vanished political entity. In the book’s argument, it becomes the name of positive liberty: the capacity of the State to intervene against private domination, defeat slavery, and prevent property claims from overriding human rights. Its victory over the Confederacy supplies the central historical analogy through which the author interprets contemporary American politics, including the demand for a renewed “mental Civil War” against the ideology associated with the modern right wing.

Definition and Historical Function

The Union is defined through its opposition to the Confederacy’s account of government and property. The Union declared slavery wrong and insisted that it had to be stopped, whereas the Confederacy claimed that the State had no right to intervene in business, interfere with private property, or obstruct moneymaking. Because enslaved people were treated as private property, the dispute was not simply over administrative power. It concerned whether capitalist ownership could place human beings beyond the reach of public morality and collective authority.

The book therefore casts the American Civil War as a conflict over the nature of capitalism: what kinds of capitalist behavior should be considered permissible and what kinds must be prohibited. The Confederacy is presented as defending slavery as a method of maximizing profit by reducing costs, while the Union represents the principle that government may regulate economic power when private ownership becomes a system of domination. In this account, the Union’s cause is inseparable from the rejection of a social order that converts people into property, labor instruments, or beings with minimal rights.

Abraham Lincoln and Positive Liberty

Abraham Lincoln is described as the American president most closely identified with positive liberty. He recognized the absolute wrongness of the slave trade and took decisive State action to end it, despite understanding that Civil War would be the inevitable consequence. His significance lies in his refusal to treat nonintervention as neutrality. For the book, government action was morally necessary because leaving slavery untouched would have preserved the power of private masters over enslaved people.

Lincoln’s political achievement is defined by completion rather than hesitation. He did not merely condemn the Confederacy or announce the Union’s principles; he saw the task through to the total defeat of the Confederacy as a physical entity. The book invokes this victory as a standard for later political action. It argues that another president of Lincoln’s kind would be required to defeat the right wing as a mental entity, just as Lincoln defeated the Confederacy in territorial and military form.

Lincoln’s own language of perseverance is used to reinforce this model of political endurance. The promised victory depends on standing firm: wise councils may accelerate it and mistakes may delay it, but the outcome remains certain if the cause is maintained. Within the book’s framework, the Union’s historical force is thus both institutional and psychological. It is the State acting against entrenched domination, and it is also the conviction that justice requires persistence through the crisis that resistance produces.

The Union and the New Confederacy

The book claims that the American Civil War has never truly ended. It describes the modern Republican Party as having adopted what it calls the Confederate philosophy: negative liberty, minimal government, maximum profit, opposition to unions and collectivism, and the preservation of old arrangements even when those arrangements produce severe injustice. This produces a historical reversal in which Lincoln’s party is said to defend the ideology of the Confederacy.

The same argument identifies contemporary right-wing resistance to government taxation and regulation with the Confederacy’s resistance to the Union government. Under the right-wing Non-aggression principle, property owners are portrayed as entitled to use extreme violence to defend their possessions. The book compares this reasoning with the Confederate claim that resistance was justified because the Union threatened to deprive slaveholders of their property. Its conclusion is that the Confederates were not victims of tyranny but the tyrants themselves, because their property system depended on enslaving other human beings.

This comparison is extended into the present through the claim that right-wing hostility to government permits people to do whatever they like to others, including enslaving them. The book calls modern supporters of the Republican Party “New Confederates” and argues that their actions are designed to thwart the State. It also attacks voluntaryism, particularly the idea that slavery could be abolished only if slaveholders volunteered to end it, as an extreme consequence of treating nonintervention as a moral principle.

From Physical War to Cultural War

The Union’s defeat of the Confederacy is presented as incomplete because the Confederate outlook allegedly survives economically, politically, and culturally in predatory free-market capitalism. The book identifies the modern culture war as a conflict between Confederate culture, associated with right-wing negative liberty, and Union culture, associated with left-wing positive liberty. The physical Civil War was won by the Union, but the mental or cultural Civil War remains unresolved.

This unfinished conflict is expressed through the recurring image of a divided house. The book argues that the “Phony War” must end, that the New Confederacy must cease to exist, and that a decisive Union victory is required in the cultural sphere as well as the military one. Its proposed figure is an “Abraham Lincoln of the Mind,” someone capable of dismantling the ideological structure that continues to justify unrestrained economic power.

The book also links the Union’s historical mission to the continuing existence of slavery in altered form. It calls every capitalist employee a slave and describes “employee” as capitalism’s euphemism for “slave,” with employers occupying the roles of masters, owners, and slavers. In this expanded usage, the Union stands for the positive-liberty State that must intervene wherever economic relations reproduce subordination, while the modern Confederate position treats such intervention as an illegitimate assault on ownership.

Contemporary Political and Cultural Reappearance

The book applies the Union–Confederacy opposition to the Trump insurgency, which it describes as a return to far-right conservative rule based on racism, white supremacy, and extreme plutocracy. It calls this political development “The Confederacy: The Sequel” and compares it to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged made real. The analogy turns the Union from a closed historical chapter into a framework for interpreting current political conflict.

A similar transformation appears in the discussion of They Live. The film is described as depicting a shadowy elite that engineers economic collapse, ruins the working class, and brings it near enslavement by the rich. Its subliminal signal creates false consciousness, conceals the elite’s true nature, and prevents the masses from recognizing reality. The underground Resistance seeks to hack the signal and awaken the population. The book emphasizes that John Carpenter associated the film’s aliens not with Jewish control of the world but with yuppie followers of Ronald Reagan and with unrestrained capitalism. The Union’s struggle therefore receives a cultural analogue: political liberation requires exposing the hidden messages that make domination appear to be freedom.

The French Revolution and the Jacobins provide another comparative model. The book presents the Jacobins as having broken the right wing by executing thousands of right-wing leaders and waging war against reactionary and counter-revolutionary priests and peasants. This example is used to support the claim that a society cannot be changed until the right wing is decisively defeated. Historical memory is consequently mobilized as a political weapon, with the Union’s victory serving as the preferred American precedent for a similarly uncompromising transformation.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Union (American Civil War) functions in the book as a moral vocabulary rather than only a location or historical side. It gathers together abolition, public authority, collective responsibility, positive liberty, and the rejection of absolute property rights. Against it, the Confederacy signifies a politics in which minimal government and maximal profit permit human beings to be reduced to commodities. The Union’s importance lies in the claim that freedom sometimes requires coercive public action against those who invoke freedom to preserve domination.

The book’s rhetoric is deliberately totalizing: it treats the historical struggle between Union and Confederacy as an unfinished structure reproduced in the conflict between collective rights and predatory capitalism. Its analogies are therefore interpretive and polemical rather than a neutral account of historical continuity. By naming modern political opponents “New Confederates” and calling for a second, mental version of the Civil War, it converts the Union’s past victory into an imperative for present action. The decisive significance of the Union is its status as the victorious precedent that the book believes must be consciously reactivated until the Confederate ideology has been defeated in both material institutions and public consciousness.