Stickin’ It to The (Strong)Man

Dear Reader (especially those of you who don’t take yourselves too seriously),

I’m back from California. It was a great trip. Saw my daughter. Enjoyed the weather. And I got to stick it to The Man by smoking a cigar within 500,000 feet of a carbon-based lifeform. 

“The Man” is an interesting phrase. I don’t think many people use it unironically anymore—at least I haven’t heard people say “stick it to The Man” much. You can still find descriptive uses. A while back the Guardian ran a piece on the “’stick it to the man passion” pervading the Oscars. In 2023, Ms. magazine (which still exists!), ran an essay from a woman titled “‘Stick It’ To the Man!” in which the author boasted of her heroic act of defiance plastering pro-abortion stickers around Florida. I don’t think this usage counts as unironic though. 

It’s funny—if you have never heard the phrase, you’d think it might be a feminist rallying cry because of the pretty obvious patriarchal connotation. It almost begs for a Handmaid’s Tale scene in which the vengeful ladies literally poke a trussed-up dude with a stick (in the porn movie adaptation, The Handmaid’s Tail, that scene would be different).

Anyway, while I’m sure feminists used “Stick it to the Man” from time to time in the ’60s or ’70s, the whole idea of “The Man” doesn’t have much of a feminist pedigree. The Man apparently started as slang for the boss, particularly in the South and especially among blacks. By the 1960s it became the term of art for Jim Crow but also the white establishment and whatnot among black activists. But white dudes co-opted it to decry, well, other white dudes and by extension the whole capitalist system. The Man keeps “us” down—the “us” in question being radicals, free-thinkers, non-conformists, artists, and pretty much anyone with a gripe about “the system.”

As Peter Fonda says in The Wild Angels, “We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by The Man.” John Lennon accused The Man of trying to kick him out of New York City. The singer in “Proud Mary” equates “The Man” with the stultifying oppression of having to work for a living, or something. The Yippies were determined to bring down that Man. 

And, as with nearly all radical concepts in America, they eventually become commodified and co-opted by—guess who?—The Man. Columbia Records launched an ad campaign in 1968 with the slogan “But the man can’t bust our music.” The print ads showed seven mostly white guys in a jail cell. “The Establishment’s against adventure,” read the ad copy. “And the arousing experience that comes with today’s music. So What? Let them slam doors. And keep it out of the concert halls.” 

Decades later, The Man is a joke in movies like Undercover Brother and School of Rock and “news”letters like this one. 

Why am I talking about this? 

Honestly, I set out to write about an interesting lesson of the Canadian election (though Nick Catoggio selfishly beat me to some of the points I wanted to make). So while I was thinking about how to do it, I got carried away with that throwaway line about “sticking it to The Man” (And don’t walk past the wordplay. In the tobacco trade, cigars are routinely called “sticks.”)

It’s okay with me, though. When it comes to this “news”letter, I get to spelunk in any lagomorphic cavern I want, because I am The Man here (and, alas, only here). William Faulkner (and others) may have advised writers to “kill your darlings” but here they are a protected species. Besides, I sometimes like to challenge myself to make my strange self-indulgent digressions relevant to a larger, seemingly, unrelated point. (Question: Can you call the opening of a discussion a digression from the discussion if you haven’t started the actual discussion yet? Discuss among yourselves.) 

So let’s give it a whirl. 

You’re not the boss of me.

This idea that The Man, the system, or the Powers That Be are keeping us down is as old as politics itself. After all, every empire oppressed some group to one extent or another. No doubt countless Celts, Jews, Greeks, et al. said something like “Stick it to the Romans.” Plenty of people wanted to stick it to the Russians, English, Han Chinese, Mongols, Aztecs, Persians, Mali, Lizardmen, Thetans, etc.

But in the modern era, by which I mean the last couple centuries, this idea that the “establishment,” “the system,” or some other euphemism for the ruling power structure, is keeping “us” down and not letting “us” be our authentic selves is closely associated with Romanticism. 

One of the funny things about the Romantic temper is that it tends to be fixated on metaphorical oppression more than the real thing. The Maccabees, the Jewish rabble rousers who rose up against Roman occupation in the second century, weren’t Romantic rebels. They were just, you know, rebels. The Romantic obsession with oppression tends to increase and intensify as actual oppression declines. That’s why the most spoiled and catered-to humans in Western civilization—elite college students—are constantly rebelling against abstractions, imagined oppressions, and other whirlwinds in the thorn tree. Romanticism manifests itself with resentment toward the system and modernity itself. According to the French poet Charles Baudelaire—who coined the term “modernity”—“Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a mode of feeling.”

Romanticism was born as a rebellion against the established order of, variously, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, capitalism, bourgeois culture, even reason itself. The Romantics celebrated personal authenticity, emotion, instincts, and heroic defiance of norms and rules. Conventional morality, grubby commerce, and private property were what later thinkers would call “tools of oppression.” Indeed, this is one reason I’m so unimpressed by a lot of modern radical thinkers. The Foucaults, Derridas, Marcuses, and Saids were simply updating the Romantic critique of “the system” and how it keeps “us” or, really, “me” down. Even Karl Marx, for all his bogus talk of “science,” was an anti-scientific Romantic poet at heart. In the words of the “ecosocialist” scholar Michael Lowy, “Romantic anti-capitalism is the forgotten source of Marx.” 

Any movement based on feelings has to be solipsistic because every adherent starts with their own feelings. Marx summed it up well when he called for, “The revolutionary daring which hurls at its adversaries the defiant words: ‘I am nothing and I must be everything!’”

But I’m jumping ahead. Before there was Marx, there was Jean Jacques Rousseau, the “father of Romanticism.” More than anyone else, he laid the foundation for the modern version of the idea that the “system” is rigged against not just the downtrodden, but the true authentic souls who are kept down by, well, The Man. One of Rousseau’s most famous lines captures the idea. “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” I have no problem with the idea that man is born free, allowing for poetic license. But for Rousseau and his imitators, the chains are any rules, customs, laws, or morals that place limitations on personal freedom. And they are all corrupt. Indeed, Rousseau turned Christianity on its head by rewriting the story of Adam and Eve: He believed we were perfect and perfectly happy in a state of nature and became corrupted only by leaving it (not that the leaving was a result of corruption and original sin). 

In many respects, this a profoundly Nietzschean sentiment, but Friedrich Nietzsche hated Rousseau even though he agreed with many of his critiques of modernity. Nietzsche detested Rousseau because he saw him (rightly) as a decadent moralist who preached the glories of “equality,” and Nietzsche thought equality was garbage because it bred mediocrity (among other things). Rousseau was one of the first practitioners of the “disparate impact” technique, arguing that inequality was prima facie proof of injustice. Nietzsche thought “justice” was just another form of oppression. 

But I would argue that in many ways Nietzsche stood on Rousseau’s shoulders. When you claim that a rules-based order is illegitimate if it results in some form of inequality, you’re opening the door to Nietzschean (im)morality. Capitalism creates inequality. Some people will be more successful than other people, ideally because they deserve to be. But socialism and every other “ism” creates inequality, too. Communist countries are shot through with political inequality—members of the party benefit from the system more than non-members do. Aristocracy and monarchy are obviously inegalitarian. Theocracy, no matter how benign and well-intentioned, will still create winners and losers from someone’s perspective. 

In short, every system is going to reward some people over others according to some standard. In a society that rewards work, the hard-working will do better than the lazy. In a society that rewards cruelty, the cruel will thrive. In a society that rewards piety, the pious or, more likely, the judges of piousness will be the winners. 

This is not an argument for getting rid of rules, it’s an argument for just, universal, and fair rules—i.e. classically liberal rules. 

Nietzsche’s approach was to adopt much of Rousseau’s indictment of Christian and Enlightenment-based rules, while rejecting Rousseau’s utopian idea that a morally perfect society could exist. Instead, Nietzsche privileged only one rule: power. Let the strong, the supermen, make their own rules and enforce them without apology. Rousseau wanted to stick it to The Man, wherever he found him. Nietzsche celebrated The Man, and wanted him to use his own stick as he pleased. 

As I said on that long drive to Vancouver, it doesn’t seem like we’re getting any closer to Canada. But I’m getting there. 

Rousseau was also in many respects the father of nationalism. Indeed, for a long time, when people spoke of nationalism they referred to “Romantic nationalism.” I won’t get too deep into the weeds on this. But the gist of Rousseau’s nationalism was that the nation should come first and that every citizen’s primary allegiance was to the nation. Nations are “organic” beings and the people are mere organs of the whole. “Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will,” Rousseau writes in The Social Contract, “and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.” 

 “True community for Rousseau is not anything arising out of kinship, religion, ethnicity, or language,” sociologist Robert Nisbet writes in The Present Age. “True community lies only within the purview of the state, the state consecrated to the virtue of its citizens, to be sure, but the state, once and for all. The general will, to which Rousseau gives absolute sovereignty, is the collective will purged of all marks of purely individual wills—with their egoisms, avarices, and selfishnesses.” Rousseau’s Social Contract reinvents theocracy as statolatry—worship of the state. This was the heart of the Jacobin project, which was the first modern nationalist project. 

One of the most annoying things about Rousseau is that for all his brilliance and insight, he was a horrible person and a staggering hypocrite. He spoke of virtue but had little to speak of. He wrote brilliantly about how best to raise children but forced his mistresses to put his own babies in an orphanage. One of his mistresses, Sophie d’Houdetot, was, according to Rousseau, the only woman he truly loved. Near the end of her long life, she said of him, “He was ugly enough to frighten me and love did not make him more attractive. But he was a pathetic figure and I treated him with gentleness and kindness. He was an interesting madman.”

But the relevant hypocrisy here is not personal. Perhaps inconsistency is the better word. Regardless, the point is that one of the foremost champions of non-conformity, personal autonomy, and defiance of external rules was also one of the foremost champions of a totalitarian system of government that would, if he had his way, punish non-conformity with the General Will by death or exile. Not all of the nationalisms that flowed from Rousseau’s ideas of the General Will became totalitarian, but many did. 

This is the danger that comes with building a political project that rests on the righteous power of feelings. Nationalism is a feeling, not a philosophy. Emotions don’t have limiting principles because emotions aren’t about principles. All attempts to make nationalism something more than the organization of sentiment, an empire of feeling, requires ransacking the intellectual supply depot for barbed wire or steel bars that can be constructed to contain it. 

Some look to the church and say that the national will must be constrained by God’s will. Nationalists barrel through these arguments all the time. They proclaim Jesus was a nationalist. They incant blasphemously stupid Latin phrases like Vox populi, vox dei! They claim, as Rousseau did, that the church leaders are worldly and corrupt practitioners of priestcraft. 

Some nationalists invoke the rule of law, the Constitution, and other features of classical liberalism. And so long as people recognize the power of these principles, nationalism is indeed kept at bay. But the nationalists bristle at these constraints. They test the bars of the cage, they denounce and mock the guards. Why? Because liberal principles are external to nationalism. They can transcend borders, and sharing across borders is icky to people who invest everything in the nation’s supremacy. The Bill of Rights protects individuals against the deprivations of the General Will, and that makes the champions of the national will whine that the system is rigged against them—and it is! Because the Bill of Rights says that you get to say, worship, defend yourself, etc. in ways that might run counter to the national will. 

If the national will is supreme, then whatever the nation wants it gets. If the authentic desires of the nation define justice, then there is no higher justice to appeal to when the rights of the individual or of minorities are trampled. 

This is why statism is simply applied nationalism. The state is the mechanism for serving the will of the nation. If the nation is an organic being, then the rulers become its head, the army and the police its hands. The pronouncements of its leaders are the voice of the nation. Limits on the state in this vision become unnatural, artificial, inauthentic impediments to the advance of the national will. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that nationalism leads to authoritarianism, because as both a practical and psychological matter, the national will needs to be personified in a figure. It’s the only way to settle competing arguments about what needs to be done for the glory of the nation. The duce, the führer, the leader of men, becomes the avatar of the national will, the father of the organic family that is the nation. This is why nationalism so often adopts moral-equivalent-of-war arguments. The leader is a general and the people—all the people—his army. It’s no accident that Donald Trump is constantly trying to invoke war powers and declare various crises: In times of war, we get to suspend the rules for a Cincinnatus or Caesar. 

This is the spirit of thought and emotion that Trump draws on when he says America is just a “department store” that he runs. It’s why he thinks he should set interest rates and run the Kennedy Center’s programming. When he says the states “are just an agent of the federal government,” he’s not merely expressing his ignorance of the constitutional order, he’s expressing his conviction that the constitutional order should not be an impediment to his agency. 

And here we find the way of reconciling the two strands of Rousseau’s seemingly contradictory views. Romantic nationalism is romantic individualism on a geopolitical scale. The Rousseauian individual rejects the idea that anyone or anything is the boss of him. No rules, no norms, no external constraints should be allowed to hinder the individual’s self-expression. The Rousseauian nation is the plural of the Rousseauian individuals. Rousseau believed that humans in their natural state were perfect. But he also believed that humans could be perfected. Once perfected—through education, coercion, whatever—they would all see their collective interests as indistinguishable from their personal interests. Sticking it to The Man is great, until you become The Man. Then everybody needs to fall in line. 

It’s complete nonsense. But that’s the idea. And that idea is at the heart of nationalism and its various brands, like fascism, Nazism, communism, Juche, Maoism, etc. The soul of a true patriot in the nationalist vision mirrors the soul of the nation itself. Non-conformity with the national soul is definitionally disordered. Those who do not comply are traitors, parasites, disease-spreaders.

Oh, Canada.

So let’s bring this in for a landing. I’ll leave it to others to do the punditry. But I am fascinated by all the bleating about how Trump has screwed Canadian conservatives and is making life miserable for both conservatives and right-wing nationalists in other countries. Unsurprisingly, Trump’s America First agenda is arousing a backlash nearly everywhere, and that backlash is helping incumbent parties and delegitimizing nationalist movements. “There is a rallying around the flag effect, the flag in question being the Progress Pride banner of global progressivism,” writes Ed West. “Rather than aiding a western vibe shift, Trump’s form of American nationalism is weakening the European right – and they know it. 

Eric Kaufman has a useful essay on all of this. He notes that most nationalist conservatives outside of America support Ukraine. They’re appalled by Trump’s unilateral declaration of a trade war with the planet (except for Russia) on the merits, but they’re especially aggrieved by the fact that Trump’s “egocentric nationalism” is undermining their movements at home. 

But this passage caught my eye:

As my doctoral supervisor Anthony Smith once summarized it, the philosophy of nationalism holds that each nation has its own particularity which it should protect and develop, and that a peaceful world order is based on free nations. Those who support principled nationalism oppose imperialist actions such as laying claim to another country, erasing its culture or invading it. Only an egocentric nationalist concerned solely with their own national status would do so.

I get it, but this is what happens when nationalist arguments are allowed to trump all other considerations because, again, nationalism itself has no limiting principle. Nationalism was born of the Age of Reason, but in rebellion to it. So long as it is constrained by things like respect for national sovereignty, respect for the rule of law, the rights of the individual, adherence to free market principles, and open to reason itself nationalism can be a source of civic health and social solidarity. But that’s the point. Those ideas and commitments exist outside of nationalism. They cannot be derived from it. This is why efforts in the past to create a “Nationalist Internationale” or “Universal Fascism” failed. A doctrine of national uniqueness and supremacy is a poor organizing principle for an alliance of equals. It’s like trying to set up a radical anarchist bowling league with strict rules of attendance. 

Our allies in the free world are our allies in large part because member nations of the free world believe in freedom. Not the Rousseauian freedom to do whatever you like, but the freedom of Burke, Locke, Montesquieu, Smith, and the Founders. John Adams famously argued that the American Constitution could work only for a moral people who, by definition, complied with virtuous norms, just laws, and civic restraints. In short, there’s a difference between pure freedom from all constraints and ordered liberty. As “America The Beautiful” says, “Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law.”

The Rousseauian individual is the jackass in the office who nukes his stinky tuna casserole in the microwave and refuses to clean up afterward because he’s a maverick who plays by his own rules. He’s the guy who curses loudly around kids or refuses to wear headphones when watching a loud and offensive movie on a plane. Or someone who rejects the rules of the HOA for herself, but demands compliance for her neighbors. They are the kind of people who cut in line at the movies or grocery store, drink your last beer without permission or apology, and steal petty cash when they can get away with it. 

The Rousseauian nation is the same sort of person on a global scale. That’s how Trump is conducting foreign policy, albeit with a little of Nietzsche’s love of strength and hatred of equality thrown in. Just as the Rousseauian individual has contempt for the rules of society because he thinks those rules are rigged against him, Trump’s Rousseauian nationalism has contempt for the international order of security and trade because he thinks it’s rigged against America. That system has never been perfect, but it is in our interest. Indeed, to a certain extent, we created it out of our own self-interest. 

I believe that there are plenty of decent, liberal-minded nationalists in other countries. But their commitment to decency and the liberal order is derived from ideals outside of nationalism. Scholars of fascism often divide fascists seeking power from fascists in power because once in power, they no longer respect any constraints. A similar dynamic applies to various nationalists, socialists, and other illiberal movements. I’m sure many believe that if they did have power, they’d still play by the rules. But they should keep in mind, that’s what people said Trump would do if he was reelected in 2024. They were wrong. Some of that error has to do with failing to appreciate Trump’s character. But another part of that error is failing to appreciate the character of nationalism itself. Nationalists out of power bide their time by following the rules. Nationalists in power write the rules for their own benefit. 

Various & Sundry

Canine Update: Because I am a servant of my people, I am writing this update on set at CNN on my phone. So please forgive the brevity. Zoë is becoming weirdly clingy with me these days. So my departure for California left her in a funk for about 24 hours, then she just made peace with the fact I was gone forever. Pippa held things down okay in my absence and in my return she is finding a good work-waggle balance. She is also determined to continue the belly rub tariff regime. 

The mid day crew is thriving and I’m particularly excited to announce the addition of Watson to the crew. 

Gracie, meanwhile, is fine. And in important news, Fafoon and Paddington have moved to new accommodations. This is good news because it will make daily pampering requirements easier to fulfill.

Dispawtcher of the Week

Owner’s Name: Mike Tyworth

Why I’m a Dispatch Member: There can only be one reason: I want to be where I can read Kevin D. Williamson.

Personal Details: Like Jonah, I have an affinity for scotch and Star Trek.

Pet’s Name: Dug

Pet’s Breed: Golden Retriever

Pet’s Age: 4 months

Gotcha Story: Dug joined our home in early February. When my daughter and I went to pick our puppy out of the litter, he made the choice easy by crawling into my daughter’s lap and never leaving.

Pet’s Likes: Retrieving (natch), hassling the cat, tug of war, shredding paper, and, well, peeing on the floor. 

Pet’s Dislikes: Being separated from the pack, crate time, not being able to galumph all over every person that comes within range.

Pet’s Proudest Moment: Fetching like a boss.

Bad Pet: Those people will never be found.

Weird Links

Not this week!