Joshua Doss begins, that most Americans now fear running out of money more than they fear death. In this keynote, researcher and political strategist Joshua Doss draws on nearly a decade of public-opinion work, focus-group transcripts, and American economic history to examine how older arrangements of labor and status continue to shape who feels economically hunted today. His lecture asks what genuine solidarity actually requires when the same pressures bear on working people across lines of difference, and it does so with unusual clarity and empirical grounding. It is a serious contribution that rewards close attention. Then I provide my observations about contemporary demands towards White people that challenge attitudes behind much of the contemporary “white liberal guilt” phenomenon and performative self-criticism, moving beyond civilizational indictment.
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INTRODUCTION
NOTHING HAPPENS IN ISOLATION, AND ONE NEEDS THE THOUGHTS OF OTHERS to build upon other thoughts, and I thought of Doss’s lecture in relation to my project in recovering the civic republican tradition, paving a way for myself that others will certainly not pave for me. In my life, I have mostly always faced resistance to my thinking and solutions, so I have not known praise as well as others, but I do not merely bring to you research, I believe I have things to say from my perspective. In my articles, “Civic Friendship and the Common Good” and “Classical Republicanism and Stoicism refutes Racial Hierarchies,” it is insisted that individuals are the primary moral agents, that racism is a violation of equal citizenship that the republican tradition’s own resources (Declaration principles, amendments, equal protection, civic education) can address, and that frameworks treating the constitutional order as constitutively racist invite replacement rather than internal correction.
PRAISE AND OBSERVATIONS
I believe that Joshua Doss’s lecture takes economic precarity and oligarchic concentration seriously. This tracks longstanding republican worries about dependence, public debt, the creditor interest, commercial society unbalanced by property or independence, and the erosion of the citizen’s capacity. I tried to demonstrate this in the arguments of Harrington and Jefferson, and in my essays on civic economy and the unfinished quarrel between agrarian law and the division of labor.
It refuses a purely abstract “class only” analysis, to insist on naming particular historical patterns of domination and status. The republican tradition has always attended to concrete sources of arbitrary power rather than slogans. W.E.B. Du Bois’s “psychological wages of whiteness” (from Black Reconstruction) described a specific late-nineteenth-century Southern mechanism that divided white and Black workers of nearly identical economic interest. Doss’s attention to status compensation and resulting grievance is therefore a legitimate diagnostic tool. The empirical base, which I liked because I am taking Intro to Stats, is his emphasis on polling, repeated focus groups and the 2008 crisis sequence is stronger than most contemporary commentary. Shared vulnerability across racial lines is a real fact the tradition’s concern for the common good can recognize.
However, the framing of capitalism as essentially originating in and sustained by anti-Black racial exploitation risks the diagnosis that I reject, which is that the American republican order (mixed constitution, property, commercial society, federalism) is constitutively racist and therefore requires systemic replacement rather than correction through equal protection, individual agency, Reconstruction amendments, and civic capacity. This task is a very hard task, no doubt, but has not been seen through. The foundation of our political tradition and system treats historical failures (slavery, Jim Crow) as violations of its own principles of equal standing, and not proof that the principles were never available.
“Anti-racist anti-capitalism” as the required solidarity tends to displace the citizen with class or racial categories. Socialism is a displacement of the citizen (vanguard, class, Commune) and liberalism was a revision of that tradition that thins non-domination into mere non-interference. Republican remedies on the rotation of office, ward or municipal liberty, education for civic capacity, mutual-aid and cooperative independence, limits on public debt and creditor power, the duty of protection under the Fourteenth Amendment — these all receive less weight than causes for systemic racial-capitalist overhaul.
Credible research complicates the strongest claims. Du Bois’s psychological wage was context-specific, and later scholarship (including work revisiting Black Reconstruction) notes that he treated it as secondary to material labor-market competition and that broader generalizations about white workers’ motives remain contested. The origins of commercial society and capitalism are multi-causal (European commercial republics, finance, legal institutions, division of labor) rather than reducible to American chattel slavery as “original capital.” Modern economic insecurity has additional drivers (globalization, technology, fiscal and monetary policy) that cut across racial lines even while historical inequalities persist. Neo-republican scholarship (Pettit on non-domination, Skinner) generally seeks robust institutional protections against domination within reformed market orders rather than their abolition as primarily racial constructs.
His lecture’s emphasis on racial and class axes might reinforce the modern left-right seating arrangement, as a contingent post-1789 binary that poorly maps onto the older republican vocabulary of mixed government, civic virtue, and perpetual accountability of the powerful, that modern leftism adopts and tries to claim for itself without naming it, or recounting the history.
The lecture is praiseworthy for its seriousness, data, and refusal of shallow class reductionism. From my standpoint, its diagnosis of shared economic vulnerability and status-based division is useful, while its preferred remedy, in explicit anti-racist anti-capitalism as the path to solidarity, risks subordinating equal citizenship, civic friendship, and institutional balance to permanent racial and class accounting. “White people” will not sit eternally for that, and this leads to a zero-sum game with no end, or revolt. In our day, one would wax non-poetically as to how another people ought to treat them, but in the end, the people sit for the lecture then go away back to their ways.
ON CONTEMPORARY DEMANDS AND INDICTMENTS
What is rarely stated plainly is the structural mismatch between contemporary demands and the incentives of ordinary White majorities who still hold residual institutional and cultural power. From inside that position, even among those whose prejudices are mild, residual, or purely stereotypical, the posture that treats every disparity or historical continuity as proof of collective White guilt, that indicts the broader Anglo-American and European civilizational inheritance as essentially evil, and that then requires those same majorities to reorganize their thinking, speech, institutions, and sense of the past according to an external moral script, registers less as an appeal to shared standards than as a claim of permanent victim-status that seeks to rewrite the rules of the game. It appears unconvincing and weak precisely because it rests on the expectation that a population will voluntarily dismantle or revalue the systems that continue to organize its own security, status, and continuity, while being told that its history is mainly a record of domination to be overcome. Such a demand does not persuade. It invites defensive consolidation. It appears unconvincing and weak precisely because it rests on the expectation that a population will voluntarily dismantle or revalue the systems that continue to organize its own security, status, and continuity, while being told that its history is mainly a record of domination to be overcome. Such a demand does not persuade. It invites defensive consolidation.
This is sharply distinct from the early Black Atlantic republican practice. Figures in that lineage, operating within the same language of natural liberty, constitutional right, civic capacity, and moral accountability that the surrounding Anglo-American and European cultures already professed, positioned Black people as co-partners competent to uphold, extend, and correct the civilization rather than as a class whose primary political role was to indict it and demand its replacement. They claimed the tradition’s own resources (equal standing under law, the duty of protection, the capacity of the citizen) and treated the work of reform as internal to those resources.
The dominant form that now presents itself as the voice of contemporary Black political thought often claims that lineage selectively yet shows little interest in the distinctions or the drift that has occurred. It further collapses the tradition into the later party-switch narrative, as though the republican resources of equal standing, capacity, and non-domination were always and essentially the property of one faction. That reduction is false, as the republican lineage and its practice of partnership within the civilization had nothing to do with parties or factions. By ignoring the deviation and substituting partisan history for the actual tradition, the contemporary claim forgoes the only form of persuasion that historically carried weight, that is the demonstration of co-partnership on the civilization’s own terms of capacity and accountability and replaces it with a factional demand that the earlier practice never required.
The contemporary pattern begins from the premise of systemic evil and proceeds by collective indictment and system-replacement and therefore sits outside that earlier republican remedy. It converts a claim of partnership into a claim of moral supervision, and in doing so forgoes the only form of persuasion that historically carried weight inside the cultures it addresses: the demonstration that Black citizens can and will sustain the civilization on the same terms of capacity, accountability, and non-domination that the tradition already recognizes.
Furthermore, that contemporary Black political expression that claims continuity with the early Black Atlantic republican tradition without ever naming it because it constricts it to the party-switch narrative to strengthen a factional claim, has not, to the degree expected of any people who would uphold a civilization as co-partners, returned to those original foundations or instructed other Black people in them beyond the patterns of leftist and far-left ideology, of socialism, etc. This seems to not be understood well, or ignored. The earlier practice claimed natural liberty, civic capacity, and equal standing inside the shared resources of the tradition; but the dominant political form of recent decades that led to the Trump administration and burgeoning of far-right groups across Europe, has largely substituted systemic indictment, group grievance, and external demands for moral reorganization and ethnic-territorial reclamation. The Paleo-conservative movement that I observed since elementary give way to the Birthers, Tea Party, “Post-Right,” and ethno-nationalist currents have, over these same decades, already mounted a sustained critique of precisely those ideological habits and patterns. Strengthening the very habits under critique does not challenge them, but it supplies the reaction with continuous evidence that the earlier republican partnership has been abandoned.
Majorities retain the capacity to decide, today or tomorrow, to turn more aggressively against Black people. Collective fate therefore depends on a civic understanding of the republican tradition and its philosophy of government on equal standing under law, non-domination, the formation of citizens competent for the common thing, and the internal resources for correction, rather than on the expectation that indictment will compel voluntary submission. There are other ways to address real disparities, failures of capacity, and sources of dependence besides the permanent announcement that White people are the problem.
Yet the reciprocal question of what problems exist among Black people is treated as illegitimate on its face, or rude and racist to mention. The result is not dialogue within a shared tradition but reaction against an indictment that cannot be answered on equal terms. A return to the original foundations would require us as Black people to teach one another the older practice of co-partnership, capacity, and accountability inside the civilization, critiquing capitalism from within that tradition, rather than the newer habit of demanding its revaluation from outside.
I think that much of contemporary Black thought in the dominant political and social line of rationale is blinded by commitments to study European histories merely to find fault in it. Even the early Black republican lineage, that used the history as a weapon for claiming equal standing, would not always and permanently and so thoroughly see the European histories with blind eyes to only demonize another people’s history and ancestors. It leaves them incapable of seeing remedies already from within those histories and cultures. That is important to tackle, as we have not proven ourselves masters of the foundational tradition, to then say in reverse, that their prejudices make White Westerners blind to what Africa or Islamic civilizations contribute. The rapport has not been built, nor given enough uninterrupted time to build that civic friendship and trust on a solid foundation. The foundation of the modern is to conduct this through identity attachments and factional loyalties, but this does not work.
Early Black Atlantic and American republican writers treated European and Anglo-American histories, texts, and principles as usable instruments. Equiano, Cugoano, Wheatley, and Douglass read the same classical, Christian, and constitutional sources as their contemporaries, extracted the language of natural liberty, equal moral standing, and civic capacity, and turned those resources against the specific practice of slavery and exclusion. Their engagement was selective and adversarial where necessary, yet it was not organized around the permanent premise that the histories themselves were mainly a record to be demonized. They could therefore locate remedies through abolitionist argument, constitutional interpretation and claims of citizen competence, inside the tradition rather than outside it.
Much of the dominant contemporary line proceeds differently. European and Western histories are studied primarily as sites of structural fault, original sin, or inherent complicity. The methodological commitment is to uncover and indict; and the corresponding habit is to treat positive inheritance, internal critique, or reformist resources within those histories as secondary, suspect, or unavailable. Once that stance hardens, the practical result is the remedies that would have to be drawn from inside the same civilizational stock (equal standing under law, the duty of protection, the formation of civic capacity, the older republican insistence on individual agency rather than group destiny) become harder to see or to recommend without appearing to dilute the indictment.
The early lineage did not require permanent blindness to every fault; it required the capacity to use the history as a weapon for inclusion while still recognizing that the same history contained the standards by which inclusion could be claimed and sustained. When study is narrowed in advance to fault-finding alone, that dual capacity is lost. The tradition then ceases to function as a shared reservoir of remedies and becomes only an object of external judgment. That is a genuine and consequential departure, which we want to remedy.
In order to do this, it is important to understand the perspective provided here challenges the attitudes behind much of the contemporary “white liberal guilt” phenomenon and the associated performative self-criticism. The book title Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals) captures a real pattern: white liberals are uniquely willing, relative to other groups, to express lower ingroup favoritism or even outgroup preference, and a subset engages in public displays of historical or racial self-reproach. That pattern intensified in the 2010s. It is not a timeless feature of liberalism; earlier liberal and republican currents did not require it.
The connection runs through the shift in how European and Anglo-American histories are treated. Those early Black Atlantic republican writers used those histories and their principles as instruments for claiming equal standing and civic capacity. They could criticize hypocrisy and exclusion without organizing their entire engagement around permanent demonization of the inheritance itself. When the dominant line instead studies those histories primarily to establish structural fault or original sin, it supplies a continuous demand for acknowledgment of collective guilt. Some white liberals meet that demand with public self-criticism, privilege confessions, or distancing from their own civilizational stock. The performance functions, inside certain professional and academic milieus, as a status signal of heightened moral awareness. Outside those milieus it often reads as self-abasement or as a moral hierarchy in which atonement is available only through ongoing indictment of one’s own group.
This is dishonorable of any people, and that dynamic sits poorly with an emphasis on equal moral agency and civic friendship. Treating an entire population as the carrier of a historical pathology and eternally requiring its members to demonstrate innocence through self-reproach, subordinates individual accountability to group destiny. It also recreates an asymmetric relationship: one side is positioned as permanently in need of supervision or absolution, and the other as the supplier of moral judgment. Early Black republican practice did not require this of white interlocutors. It required consistency with the stated standards of natural liberty and equal standing. The performative version, by contrast, can become self-reinforcing. Because reciprocal discussion of problems internal to any group is treated as illegitimate when directed at the designated victim side, the only available response to indictment is either further self-criticism or defensive reaction. Neither produces the co-partnership inside shared resources that the older tradition treated as the workable path.
The result is alienation, because many white liberals dislike the posture even while participating in or accommodating it, because it converts a claim of shared principles into a demand for permanent group self-denigration, and because it leaves little room for the ordinary civic expectation that every population must be capable of internal correction without external moral supervision. The perspective that insists on returning to the earlier practice of using the tradition’s own resources for equal standing, rather than treating those resources as mainly a record of fault, therefore undercuts both the permanent-indictment approach and the white liberal response of performative self-hatred. It treats both as departures from the conditions under which civic friendship and non-domination can be sustained across groups.
