C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “We Need More Treason, Not Less” read by Mike Godzina and edited by Nick Ford. Let’s get something straight: The American state is and always has been, regardless of the political party controlling it, the executive committee of the propertied classes who use the state to extract rents from…

One of the more disturbing trends on the American Center-Left (which sees itself, entirely without justification, as “the Left”) is the increasing popularity of the right-wingers as “seditionists” or “traitors” meme. The most notable recent example, in the wake of the racially-motivated massacre in Charleston, is the identification of the Confederate battle flag with “treason.”…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Joel Schlosberg‘s “Crashing the Party of Lincoln” read by Christopher B. King and edited by Nick Ford. A closer look at the party’s history instead corroborates Kevin Carson’s assessment that from its inception, “the Republican Party is the direct heir to a long line of Hamiltonians, all seeking to use state power to promote…

Heather Cox Richardson’s call to “Bring Back the Party of Lincoln” (New York Times, September 3), based on her forthcoming book To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party, demands a package deal that not only never was, but could never be. In Richardson’s fantasy the Republican Party before the ascendance of Reagan “opposed the control of government by…

Lincoln Unbound: How an Ambitious Young Railsplitter Saved the American Dream — and How We Can Do It Again by Rich Lowry (HarperCollins 2013), 390 pages. One of the central themes in James Scott’s Seeing Like a State is the ideology he calls “authoritarian high modernism”: It is best conceived as a strong (one might even say muscle-bound)…