suliman's blog

People often talk about what radicalized them on podcasts and whatnot and ever since reading Pirate’s radicalization moment (in the left direction) a few months ago, I’ve been thinking about my own moment which I believe I’ve finally identified: It was the start of the current Palestinian genocide. My belief in the universalism of human rights (that they would apply to me) was shaken occasionally by the “Suliman, the terrorist” jokes, but those were just jokes, right? Whereas the genocide presented a rupture for me. I’ve (crudely) written about the response to it in the former Nazi countries on the first anniversary of the genocide here which felt daring at the time—abstract as it is. Yet here I am, three years in, and still writing about the machinery of White and Jewish supremacy because it hasn’t ceased crushing people who look like me under its gears for the grave crime of being Arab or, worse, Palestinian. I’ve started my political journey in my teenage years as a social democrat, meaning a liberal who believes in a welfare state under capitalism, believing liberal democracy to be the optimal peaceful mechanism to turn political attitudes into power and the court system to settle disagreements mostly justly, but what completely shattered my world and the belief in some sort of secular justice from existing institutions was seeing people who resembled me, my father, and my brother be rhetorically built up as the worst the human mind can imagine, deserving of unspeakable cruelty across generations with no grace for what kind of reaction that inevitably conjures. One of the obstacles to getting a Westerner to question the validity of a settler-colony claiming dominion over a native population is that they would consequently have to question the validity of most of the states in the so-called New World because (almost) all of them are settler-colonies claiming dominion over native populations they have since decimated. It would shake up their entire conception of themselves and their privilege. It would mean that the majority of their societies’ relative wealth was attained, contrary to Max Weber’s Protestant work ethic, through expropriation,1 ethnic cleansing, genocide, and slavery. It would make them contend with the various forms of apartheid that plague their societies. And they cannot handle that. Victims of violence have to conform to an expectation of how victimhood is to be performed before they’re considered legitimate victims. From gender-based and state-sanctioned violence under so-called democracies to resistance of colonialism and slavery, there is a set of shifting expectations of how a real victim is ought to be or behave and anyone outside the confines of this conception is a liar or, if they’re Arab, a terrorist. When the recent genocide in Palestine began, there was a rush in pro-Palestinian circles to center child, elderly, and female suffering because those were viewed as untainted by the Palestinian man’s bloodlust—or rather what the Palestinian man is considered capable of. Soon enough, after the women were demonized by accusing them of using their children as “human shields,” activists shifted to mainly centering child suffering, as absurdly futile as it seemed given the discursive position of the adults in their lives. But the best Westerners in power could give in response to news of orphaned and/or mutilated children were empty words of grief for child suffering as they were signing off on bombs to be delivered to the entity causing their suffering whilst affirming Israel’s “right to exist” and “right to defend itself.” In the meantime, all kinds of genocidal proclamations were being made by Israelis across the political spectrum because Zionism is a far-right ideology indistinguishable from German National-Socialism or Italian Fascism in its drive for homogeneity, racial supremacy, authoritarianism, and brutality. You may have left-wing fascists who want more public spending on social services for their citizens and a secular government, and you may have right-wing fascists who are against abortion and for the Scripture’s primacy. But at the end of the day, the fascist will believe in their variety of fascism and they will want to realize its goals. The Zionist state can’t ensure its Jewish character (the aesthetic of Jewishness) if more than half the population on the land it currently claims for itself is not Jewish and absolutely subservient,2 despite the fact that most of them are functionally slaves and the reason for Israel’s prosperity (like all prosperous states maintain underclasses within or without them). Whatever their views on other “issues,” the Zionist will always seek out purifying and cleansing the land from the terrorist Arabs. But I digress. The Palestinian man is an irredeemable devil. He dares to fight back and that’s a sign of the dark forces within him. He commits acts of terrorism that are only terrorism because he’s Arab. If his oppressor Israel commits them, it’s called self-defense. We wouldn’t want history to start at any other time than when the oppressed react to their oppression. Any other timeline would be antisemitic and blood libel! Any other human being wouldn’t react the same way under the same circumstances that Palestinians, especially those living in Gaza, have been living under for 78 years of a never-ending, ongoing calamity, of course. It becomes habitual or even progressive to paint “terrorism” as an Arab pathology that the Arab man needs to be cured of instead of seeing the acts of a desperate people with no peaceful avenues for making themselves heard for what they are—desperate actions. Once the oppressor is gone or indefensible, liberals will have always been on the side of the oppressed. Pointing out the hypocrisy of labeling one side’s acts as terrorism while the other’s are self-defense assumes that we are dealing with equal parties in—as the West loves to call it—“the conflict.” The power imbalance has never been greater. A Zionist expressing support for Israel is not brave. They’re preaching to the institutional choir. The anti-Zionist, on the other hand, is accused of being genocidal because they want a brutalized people to be seen as humans worthy of dignity. The Zionist backs an entity that possesses nuclear bombs while the anti-Zionist backs a people fighting tanks with Molotov cocktails, makeshift rifles, and pebbles. The anti-Zionist, which for the longest time mostly meant “the Arab,” is held to a standard that no Zionist, or White person, is ever held to. But it’s only our love for barbarism that drives us to behave this way. Civilized people drop bombs on and incarcerate children whereas savages like us throw pebbles. What would be the cure for our barbarism? Nobody would think that ending apartheid and abolishing the settler-colony would be part of it. No, the Palestinian man simultaneously doesn’t exist and is the biggest threat to the settler-colony for inexplicable reasons. His mere existence makes Israeli civilians and Zionist Jews in Brooklyn scared! That’s the extent of the satanic powers within him. It’s unclear why the Southern Lebanese man feels such impassioned and vitriolic hate for the Zionist who occasionally occupies his land, surveils everybody he knows with buzzing drones, and massacres his people for fun. It’s also incomprehensible why the Syrian man expresses such solidarity with the Palestinian plight. The Zionist entity hasn’t occupied a part of his country for half a century at all and definitely hasn’t expanded its so-called buffer zone up to the capital despite the sham government expressing commitments to non-aggression and cooperation shortly before that. The Zionist entity doesn’t bomb the fuck out of his people’s cities for no reason other than bloodlust and the expansionist compulsion to make Greater Israel a reality. No, the Arab man must be a terrorist who hates the only Jewish state on the planet. He must be a Hitler-worshiping antisemite with an annotated copy Mein Kampf! Antisemitism allegations are a timeless tool for silencing us, especially the ones living in the West and they start with us young. They accuse us of antisemitism as if antisemitism isn’t a product of European racialization of the Other of which we are a part of. Germans and Austrians in particular carry a “guilt” for their barbarity that they now instrumentalize our lack of participation in their “guilt” circlejerk as a weapon in their arsenal to ensure we know that we don’t belong here—for the crime of not wanting them to wash themselves off their “guilt” at our expense. We are treated as if we committed the Holocaust and are even punished for it with a settler-colony dispossessing our people of their homes. What’s worse, we are treated as if our words of hatred for the actions of the self-proclaimed Jewish state and its ideology could lead to a second Holocaust as if the Zionist project hasn’t been genocidal in practice since its inception and literally involved in the Final Solution to the century-old Palestinian Question as we speak. As if we have the means to be genocidal against a nuclear power even if Levantine Arabs actually wanted to pursue a genocide. Our words receive more persecution than the bombs they drop on our families. The Palestinian children throwing stones at the Zionist tanks receive more media attention than the tanks crushing them do. Even Edward Said, academia’s Arab darling, wasn’t spared from this. Why do we even coddle the Zionists in their absurdities? Why should we shut down antisemitism allegations for opposing Israel’s existence just because it chooses to legitimize its every action with Jewish divinity and defines itself through Jewish aesthetics? As I wrote that rhetorical question, I found myself rhyming together parallels with equivalent, White Christian occupations of our lands, but I had to stop myself right there: I’m not playing that game. Whether Israel is Jewish or Hindu doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s a state with the resources and aims to eradicate us and our identities, and push us out of our ancestral, indigenous lands. The Western ambition to maintain a military base in the Levant doesn’t override our connection to the land. I’ve long found myself seeking legitimacy for my decolonial politics in Jewish activists and intellectuals instead of emphasizing the people actually being erased by the Zionist machinery. It is beyond a doubt that a coalition with Jews who have a spine by coming out against this form of White supremacy is extremely valuable. But it gets to a point where we start seeking out a White person’s validation of our reality as if they’re impartial or more trustworthy than us who have “skin in the game.” Nobody is impartial in war or any political conflict whatsoever, so why should their voices carry more weight than the Brown people who have been risking their lives to get the word out for close to a century now? It’s racism shrouded in concern over “objectivity.” It’s the age-old racism that we are too backwards to understand our oppression or resist it politely. And maybe we are. If this is what polite society is capable of, then we should want no part in it. Let’s proudly be the savages we are either way! Yes, we have made progress in terms of awareness of the Palestinian plight and Israel’s aggression. Now I don’t have to assume that nearly everyone I meet—who is roughly my age—is going to justify genocide and ethnic cleansing in cold blood at some point in our relationship. But will a seminar or lecture about this topic at a university not discuss “the conflict” between bad “both sides” of which the Palestinian one is worse? Naturally. Not to speak of any material consequences for standing up for this issue. But any persecution I might experience pales in comparison to what a Palestinian endures on a daily basis, especially in Gaza. Things have gone too far, even by Israeli standards. Staying silent on this for personal benefit is deplorable at this point. How can anyone shrug this off unless they’re a monster? If even mutilated children are impure and future HAMAS bombs, how can we three-dimensional humans compete? Evidently, we will never be the perfect victims that the establishment wants us to be. We must be subservient to their occupation because anybody who doesn’t want to standby as they’re being dispossessed, dehumanized, and eventually annihilated is a savage and a terrorist, or a terrorist/Islamist sympathizer if they happen to be White. No amount of degrees or genteel respectability will save any of us from the eventual slip-up that will be our professional end (for the privileged among us) or literal end (for those who depend on foreign aid which top donating countries have now gutted anyway). At the end of the day, every Arab is a terrorist, a terrorist farm, or a terrorist-to-be. Polite society may phrase it differently or avoid saying it outright at all, but the end result is all the same. 1. ‘If I Don’t Steal [Your Home] Someone Else Will’↩ 2. Or White. Ask Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jews about their experience of living in the “only democracy in the Middle East.”↩

My last post what is political? led not only to Shades of Purple deleting their post, but their entire blog which is such a shame. I always archive people’s posts before replying for the off-chance that they delete them so that if someone finds my post, they can check the archive to read the full conversation. This time it was prescient thinking on my end, even though I had genuinely not expected the outcome, having intentionally made myself nicer than what I was feeling writing that post. But clearly these types of people that present themselves as the “voice of reason” don’t stand the scrutiny their reasoning may receive. This interaction reminded me of a text that I shouldn’t have forgotten about (considering that I cited it in a post two weeks ago) which is French political philosopher Chantal Mouffe’s own theory of the political. Mouffe uses Schmitt’s theory as a building block to go against his understanding of the political: Instead of seeing conflict as a weakness that needs to be solved through “harmonizing” public discourse, it must be seen as the strength of a democracy. She criticizes liberal democratic systems and “democratizing democracy” theories by the likes of Jürgen Habermas for putting such a big emphasis on consensus because it positions conflict as something to be overcome and not the catalyst for deliberation. I find this best understood against the backdrop of their time. Jürgen Habermas’ democracy theory as well as Chantal Mouffe’s (and her husband’s) were written around and after the ’68 student protest movement that sparked a public debate on how to make democracy more democratic. Thinkers like Jürgen Habermas proposed a hypothetical system that he named “deliberative democracy” in which conflict would be a necessary evil that needs to be overcome through public deliberation. Mouffe counters that conflict is, evidently, an omnipresent element in a democracy that produces necessary change to satisfy the conflict participants. So why view it as a necessary evil and not the accelerator it is? Moreover, the “how” in Habermas’ model for instance is very murky because somehow “reason” would ultimately always persevere. However, Mouffe disagrees that political deliberation must necessarily be rational either. Political beings (us) are emotional, so when we build political systems that assume we won’t be, we are shooting ourselves in the foot by betting on the best-case scenario. She asks: Why not harness political momentum, spurred by emotional attachment to a cause, to pull more people into politics rather than keeping politics the affair of some elite? Remember, this all happens in the backdrop of the ’68 movement’s dissatisfaction with what is officially called democracy in the Western world. In turn, what this reminded me of is the conflict in one of my favorite novels The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin in which Shevek, a physicist, lives in a utopian anarchist society on the moon of a capitalist planet. The anarchists have abandoned their planet Urras to live out their martyr-philosopher Odo’s teachings because they can’t do so at home despite their best efforts. Within a set time frame, people can choose to go to Anarres, the moon, but after that contact with Urras is to be kept at the barest minimum (for exchanging raw metals for complex industrial items). Two hundred years later, the way people on Anarres live is taken for granted and there is no conflict to speak of. Any spark for a conflict is shrugged off so as not to disturb the stability they’ve come to know. He sees the way his society is becoming culturally stagnant and its values of constant revolution and freedom abandoned in favor of stability and conflict aversion. When he proposes to exercise his right to live his life as he chooses by going after his curiosity, Urras—where he expects to meet the physicists he’d been exchanging letters with—, everybody reacts with revulsion and calls him a traitor for wanting to intermingle with the capitalists. By intentionally challenging the taboos around Urras, Shevek and his group show that even an anarchist society that comes to view conflict and change as an inconvenience at best and avoidable evil at worst would inevitably become authoritarian. Stirring up conflict turns out to be a good idea to remind his kin what they abandoned everything they had known for and reignite the spirit of their revolution. So what people like the “voice of reason” I mentioned in the beginning really want is to live in ignorance and stasis, and they want us all to live the way they want because anything else would infringe on their freedom, but—paradoxically—not ours. Wanting to live or speak without outside input is a valid wish, although it remains a wish nonetheless. Being free doesn’t mean choosing what to become aware of, but rather that one can ignore it once one becomes aware of it. And live with the consequences. Part of living among other individuals necessitates criticism and pushback with whom you can disagree with as you please, but what you cannot disagree with is the mechanism through which our society exists as something beyond a mere agglomeration of individuals. I hope Shades of Purple can grow out of this reactionary mindset for their own good. But one can only hope. ## bibliography Mouffe, C. (2007). Die Politik und das Politische (N. Neumeier, Trans.) [PDF]. In Über das Politische: Wider die kosmopolitische Illusion (1. Auflage, pp. 15–47). Suhrkamp. (Original work published 2005) Schmitt, C. (1932). Der Begriff des Politischen (pp. 20–45).

Reading "Everything Is Political" by Shades of Purple reminded me of the contested delimitation of the realm of the political that many have tried to define, yet no one definition has become the scientific consensus. One of the definitions that I’m most familiar with is Carl Schmitt’s who was a Nazi lawyer and philosopher that provided the philosophical and legal legitimacy the Nazis needed to carry out their atrocities. It just so happens that this is also one of the more popular definitions that Shades of Purple is reproducing, whether knowingly or unknowingly. Carl Schmitt argues that what becomes engulfed in the political must have been politicized beforehand. Any aspect of life that people don’t care about and take for granted is therefore outside the political, while what is a matter of debate is politicized through conflict and is therefore political. To Schmitt, the core of the political is conflict. We become political beings by defining ourselves against one another. If enough people go by the same definition and band together, they become a political community. Therefore, politics is primarily adversarial and ceases to exist without an adversary or opponent.1 Because liberal democracy emphasizes political competition and opposition, he considered it to be a weakness of the nation which is why he made an argument for “harmonizing” public life and politics (Gleichschaltung in Nazi parlance). Feminist, queer, and disability activists have long resisted this definition because they consider indifference to their oppression to be itself the product of political choices and therefore within the realm of the political. All that aside, assuming that oppression (in the private sphere) never faced opposition by the oppressed and was taken for granted is a fantastical belief that fascists like Schmitt share and propagate because their entire political agenda is based firmly in a mythological past they want their society to return to. Even the split between the private and public sphere itself was the product of a reactionary movement from the 17th and 18th centuries in response to the growing feminist movement. What the private-public schism required of women was to be wholly delegated to the private sphere while men, the only individuals capable of being political beings and therefore present in the public sphere, are to occupy the public sphere. Shades of Purple argues that the State has no authority over the private sphere and any interference would be authoritarian. What this view ignores is that injustices in the private sphere are put in place, enforced, and guarded by the State either way. Politicizing the private sphere is an act of defiance by those confined to it to get justice for themselves. It was a political choice that confined them to it and further political choices robbed them of their autonomy. The only logical response is activism that politicizes that political choice to reverse it. What is appalling is calling politicizing what is private authoritarian when it leads to the State lessening of its instituted injustice. It follows a logic that deems equality, meaning a loss of relative advantage over others, as oppressive because one’s privilege was politicized and reduced. The tone in Shades of Purple’s post seems to imply that what I just described was acceptable when it happened—now, in hindsight, of course—, but it seems they consider equality or justice to have been achieved and therefore any further politicization of the private sphere to be an overreach. This comes off as a very privileged position to hold when matters of female bodily autonomy in European countries2 like Austria and Germany are still matters of public decision-making. Abortion in both of these countries is handled by their respective penal codes with exceptions to punishment if the procedure is performed within twelve weeks of pregnancy or when the mother’s life is in danger. Likewise, we’re living through a right-wing backlash to LGBTQ+ rights in terms of denying trans people’s right to gender-affirming care. Both of these issues—just from the top of my head—are matters of the private sphere and yet the State takes no issue in restricting them when they should be wholly the affected person’s prerogative. So is the political engulfing the private sphere acceptable as long as it is oppressive to disadvantaged classes but is unacceptable when it serves a liberatory function? Lastly, I’m not sure where to place the “everything is a statement these days”-statement in reality. And by reality, I mean outside of social media. You live in a society surrounded by people who have opinions that will make them known to you when the chance presents itself. If you want to live your life without people commenting on your choices, you might want to clarify that you’re not interested in the alternative or the discussion. If they keep raising the issue, then you have a personal problem that you must deal with how you see fit. Disagreement is not oppressive, rather it’s part of a healthy political environment. But if voicing disagreement with your lifestyle choices is already an overreach, you might want to consider moving into a secluded cabin in the woods. To conclude, as a consequence of living in a society organized by jurisprudence and legislature, everything becomes political because we have different needs that might diverge from the legal norm and therefore need to be politicized. Finally, the separation of the private and public sphere, one of which the law or public debate is shunned out of, serves to exempt the privileged from accountability to those their choices affect. For this reason, it should be opposed. ## bibliography Pateman, C. (1988). The Sexual Contract [EPUB]. Polity Press. Schmitt, C. (1932). Der Begriff des Politischen (pp. 20–45). 1. He still exempted war from the realm of the political because it doesn’t follow reason, as he argued. It shouldn’t be hard to see how this legitimizes atrocities in war that would otherwise be unacceptable in polite society.↩ 2. I need to emphasize that since they, as a European, were contrasting their views to what is relevant in the other political arena in the world worth discussing—the USA.↩

We’ve been kind of sleeping on the book club lately, but now it’s back with the great Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig that I was surprised hooked me in so much. Usually, I need some foreplay with a book like knowing some things about the author or what it is about to get into it, however, with this one, I went into it mostly blind and I wasn’t prepared for the writing style or setting at all. I’ve been trying to read more nonfiction lately, but that gets dry after some time. I don’t always want to read about the topics I’m interested in, funnily enough. Least of all before bed. So having this one chosen for this month came in clutch when I realized that my TBR list was 90% nonfiction. I typically read one or two nonfiction books alongside a fiction book to keep myself engaged, but it just so happens that I get through fiction much faster which tilts my book balance in favor of nonfiction. For example, I finished this book in two days one week apart. Puig wrote this novel as a dialogue between two inmates in an Argentine prison in Buenos Aires during the neoliberal dictatorship of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Molina, a trans woman sentenced to eight years in prison for “endangering minors” is incarcerated together with a Marxist revolutionary named Valentín. It takes a moment to identify who is who since the dialogue isn’t labeled, but you get there quickly enough. Most of their conversations are about movies that Molina finds glamorous or, as she puts it, divine, mostly in the evenings after lights out to help Valentín sleep after a long day spent studying. The retelling would often be interrupted and we would casually learn more about the characters’ understanding of the world, their problems, fears, who they are, who they left behind outside, and why they are in prison. Later on in the book, we learn from prison reports that Molina is a well-behaved prisoner and Valentín is not. Reading that, I thought that they put them together because Molina’s good behavior could allow them to dangle before her the prospect of a pardon in exchange of slowly worming herself into Valentín and collecting intel on him for the warden. But V-Coding, as Ava points out, could also have been the goal since they have sex together towards the end, although it was all consensual. Anyway, the warden would ask to speak to her under the guise of receiving a visit from her lawyer and mother who would be the ones bringing her groceries for all Valentín knows. In reality, it’s the bribery she knows she can ask for from the warden for her services, naturally framed as tools necessary to get closer to Valentín. V-Coding or not, Molina grows attached to Valentín, and I’d go as far as to proclaim that she never intended to rat out her cell-colleague because all the care she showed him appeared genuine until the exposé halfway through the book broke the illusion. She might’ve thought that prisoners typically are bad people and betraying them way okay, but she probably learned soon enough that this can’t be generalized. She repeatedly insists on him not telling her anything about his revolutionary activism for fear that the warden could order torturing that info out of her. Eventually and before her release—intended to find out whether she’s now working for Valentín’s group because she never relayed the warden anything—, she relents and lets him tell her how to help him from the outside which would be by relaying his sabotage plan that he came up with to his comrades. He teaches her how to detect surveillance and tells her how long she can expect to be surveilled after her release. Both of which fail her because she gets killed in a shoot-out between the secret service and the revolutionaries. While Molina is outside, they monitor her phone calls, her movements, and her relationships—all of which is detailed in the form of a timestamped log. What cracked me up was just how stupid the secret service agents were. This is a queer person hanging out with queer people living queer culture which is obviously beneath the secret service to know of even for their own benefit. They think her inside jokes and using character names at random with Lalo is a cryptic language until they fail to decode it. In another instance, she receives a phone call to meet up with her two female friends who use female pronouns but have a pre-transition male appearance and voice. When they show up, the person on the phone the police identifies as male is present with another “man” as a companion that they expected to be a woman. What the secret service agents think isn’t that this is just a trans woman pre-transition, but that this must be a secret plot to deceive them. They are so fucking incompetent! They see a plot where there is none because they’re too incurious to consider that maybe a culture unfamiliar to them is being performed here. Molina’s death trying to relay information to the revolutionaries was probably only possible because whoever was surveying her recognized that she longed to be with Valentín from her routine of standing at her window on the third floor in the afternoon looking in the direction where the prison is. Additionally and crucially, Molina appears to be preparing for the possibility of her death or leaving the country by withdrawing all her savings and leaving them at the notary’s for her mother which the police learn of. From that, the police deduce that her model citizen behavior was just to throw off her scent so she could fulfill her promise and hopefully see her—now—lover again. One of the exceptions to her killers’ stupidity. After her death, the scene changes back to the prison where we learn that Valentín is being brutally tortured from his trembling one-word answers to the infirmary nurse’s questions. Against what seems to be protocol, they give him morphine and Valentín descends into a fever dream in which he mistakes Marta, his first real love, for Molina. We can tell because Marta would speak to him of things only Molina would know and say. To me, this signifies that towards the end Marta and Molina were about equal to his heart and that Molina truly meant something to him if his subconscious was merging the other woman who meant so much to him. What a tragic love story that ended in delirium! One of the reasons why I like reading fiction a lot is seeing the world through a character’s eyes with whom I have little in common, and then filling in the blanks from my own storage of biases. I like to imagine where they are, how they look like, and how they say things. When it’s a book written as a dialogue, you get to imagine it all yourself without sifting through descriptions of their world. It’s like listening to two friends entertain each other and discuss their ridiculous experiences while you’re on mute in a voice chat. That’s exactly how reading this book felt like. I grew attached to the characters like they were my friends and then a third voice hopped onto the call to tell me how my friends died so it hurt to put the book down at the end. Hence, I would recommend friends to read this book because it’s an easy and honestly enriching read. While it’s not sold where I live and I depended on pirated, badly formatted ebooks, I enjoyed it a lot. That’s all from me!

My conversations with friends often revolve around politics, which should not be surprising given that I am me, and we often come to a point where someone asks “why is it so hard to push leftist projects forward?” or “Why are they always so half-assed when the (Far-)Right can ruin lives so easily?” You can make the argument that destruction is significantly simpler than creation, but I don’t think that is the only explanation. In situations like that, I’m having a hard time holding back the knee-jerk response of “Just read the Federalist Papers!” because it isn’t immediately clear why the Federalist Papers would explain anything— especially since they were written to promote a constitution that isn’t ours. However, every political revolution in the West—their body of thought spreading to the Global South through colonialism—was directly or indirectly inspired by the American one1 and its ideals, which means that understanding the muse may shed light on the final work. I’m writing this mostly for future reference once the issue comes up again, though I hope this is of use to others out there. The Federalist Papers were written to support a constitution that protects private property—seen as the foundation upon which civilization is built—, civil liberties through the rule of law, and some public accountability to an electorate. Who composed the public and what public control this constitution affords the public is beyond the scope of this blog post. Going forward, I want to focus on private property instead. Since the so-called Glorious Revolutions in 17th century Britain, the idea of defining freedom through ownership of the self began dominating the public discourse around reimagining the social contract. The idea was that a slave was unfree, owned by someone else, and could buy themselves out of slavery, hence freedom meant that whoever was free owned themselves. The demand for ownership of the self and freedom were radical for feudal Britain because they demanded a rewriting of the social contract and the economy. It was an affront to their lords’ claim on them and the land they lived on as property.2 So they “reached”—through force—a compromise: the people owned themselves, but the economic relationship between the feudal lord (later the capitalist) and his laborers would persist. While the lord cannot force his laborers to work for him, their economic disadvantage changed little of their day-to-day life. They still needed their lord’s permission to work on the land he never stepped foot on to survive. This “compromise” traveled across the Atlantic with the settlers and was beloved by their elites by the time of the so-called American Revolution. A core tenant of the American constitution championed by three members of the American elite—Hamilton, Jay, and Madison—was private property and by extension the accumulation of wealth through rent. If wealth begets wealth, then one person can more easily acquire more than one property—consequently creating a class of owners and a class of renters through the scarcity of land to be owned—, and if one person can own more than they squat in, then the state needs to ensure the property relation through laws and their enforcers. Since private property and its guarantee were seen as the foundation for civilization (an idea popularized in part by social contract philosopher and political abomination Thomas Hobbes), any danger to it by the majority of the population comprising the working class, who were way further left on the political spectrum than the constitution’s authors, needed to be neutralized. Their fear was that if the propertyless could vote and they outnumber the propertied, they’d favor what we call today socialist politics. The fear that an egalitarian system would empower the poor to redistribute wealth is the source of the authors’ fear of the Tyranny of the Majority. Therefore, they had to implement “checks and balances,” comprised of layers upon layers of institutions that can stand in the way of an unfavorable change, to ensure largely nothing changes.3 What this produced was a system made by reactionary conservatives (only slightly further left from British royalty at the time) made to conserve itself from any meaningfully left-wing and democratic politics. The Federalist Papers’ authors were honest about this as well, at least Madison was: The United States of America was to be a republic4 modeled after the Roman Republic of old, in which the propertyless were just as disempowered. They even made holding property a requirement for voting for a very long time, and excluded women and racialized minorities from the vote! The populace would receive only an illusion of choice because all candidates would have to abide by a constitution that economically disempowers them in a system engineered to produce as little change from George Washington’s status quo as possible. And if it does, it’s incremental and slow so as to grind plenty of the disadvantaged under its gears before it stops. Reversing any progress is easy because ruthlessly cracking down on resistance in this system protects wealth and wealth affords one the power to lobby for preserving this wealth against popular support otherwise. This is why any candidate or party promising a democratic socialism or even a watered-down, more “realist” version of it will always be fighting an uphill battle in these systems. For future European governments, this experiment’s trickery of faking freedom was like a lottery win. They could feign freedom and self-determination for the masses while preserving their social standing as beneficiaries from feudalism—or later its cousin capitalism—under the guise of democracy. Representative democracy, of course; entrusting the masses with even the choice of candidates or parties was risky enough already. Many European countries may have proportional voting systems producing a multiparty system, but again, the choice is an illusion. Literally, every party sitting in the German and Austrian parliaments (five each) is capitalist. They cannot endanger core tenets of their constitutions like private property or they’ll be banned from standing in elections more swiftly than the AfD (let alone the FPÖ) for being a neo-Nazi party. So why are progressive politics so tiring? At the risk of sounding like a broken record (Can’t you hear me through the screen?): It’s because we live in systems engineered to be this way. They were rulesets put in place to proclaim justice while enacting injustice, leaving out the fact that they were built and sustained on injustice itself (colonialism and slavery). While not every hurdle standing in the way of progressive politics can be traced back to the Federalist Papers, knowing of the body of thought that led to them and what their influence on future constitutions meant is essential to understanding why representative democracy is failing in the face of a polycrisis, responding with the reactionary politics of segmentation and scapegoating instead. 1. It wasn’t really a revolution, more like an uprising and an act of state-making. But I digress.↩ 2. It is important to note that property until not so long ago meant explicitly land. When more radical peasants demanded a propertyless society, they basically demanded a land reform that made land a public common for anyone to use instead of private property controlled by its owner.↩ 3. If I were to read their aims of preventing autocracy charitably, I’d still have to wonder why the US’ autocratic backlash to anti-war efforts throughout the last hundred years was so vicious and not stopped by their “checks and balances.”↩ 4. Whereas “representative democracy” is an anachronism some political scientists came up with in the 20th century because the concept of democracy was so popular with the masses. Inventing this new term and slapping it onto existing, undemocratic systems was their clutch.↩