On Oligarchy, Class, and the Forgotten Architecture of Non-Domination.
Leftists keep gaslighting about the influence of socialism, Marxist rhetoric and tactics and Communism. The historical development of these contributed to the loss and displacement of the republican tradition, particularly by arguing to be its superior and next stage of progress.
Marxist theory explicitly framed republican and liberal forms as a transitional stage to be superseded, not perfected. That is not a right-wing invention.
Marx and Engels treated bourgeois republicanism and liberal constitutionalism as historically progressive relative to feudalism, yet incomplete and destined for replacement. Capitalist property relations, representative institutions, and formal equality under law were described as the political superstructure of a temporary mode of production. The next stage, socialism, leading to communism would abolish the conditions that made those institutions necessary. Later variants (Leninist vanguardism, various Western Marxist adaptations, democratic-socialist reformism) retained the progressive teleology even when they rejected the specific Soviet model. Rhetoric about completing the democratic project, expanding rights beyond formal equality, or treating markets and limited government as obstacles to genuine freedom is continuous with that framing.
Empirical record of 20ᵗʰ century implementations is not ambiguous on outcomes for republican institutions: concentrated power, suppression of independent civil society, politicized law, and mass death under regimes that claimed the progressive mantle. That record creates a permanent public relations problem.
Several factors lead to persistent minimization about the popularization of socialism or socialist variants.
No doubt, there is an issue of toxic association management. Full-throated defense of the body count or the explicit abolition of liberal constraints is electorally and culturally costly in open societies. The common moves are: (1) to claim that failed examples are “not real socialism” (or communism), (2) try to hide behind or reduce the discussion to Nordic social democracy while ignoring its market foundations and distance from Marxist property theory, or (3) shift focus to cultural-identity analogs of class struggle so the economic program can be soft-pedaled. These are not neutral scholarly corrections. The tactic functions as reputation laundering.
It also provides progress narrative immunity. Once history is cast as an inevitable march toward greater equality of outcome, any defense of classical republican limits (enumerated powers, property rights, viewpoint-neutral speech, separation of powers) can be labeled reactionary. Admitting that socialist variants repeatedly displaced or hollowed out those limits undercuts its claims to be the next political stage. Hence the reflex to treat the connection itself as illegitimate or McCarthyite.
There are institutional incentives. Large parts of academia, media, and activist networks share a family resemblance of assumptions derived from Marxist or post-Marxist frameworks (class and identity as primary, systemic critique of “bourgeois” institutions, emphasis on transformation over preservation). Open acknowledgment of the lineage invites scrutiny of continuity in tactics such as entryism, language redefinition and moralization of opponents that still appear in contemporary practice. Denial preserves the moral high ground.
Some democratic socialists and social democrats sincerely distinguish themselves from authoritarian communism and favor parliamentary means. You will hear this often when under fire. Others treat the distinction as tactical. The public conversation rarely polices the difference rigorously; and both get folded under progressive branding while critics who note the shared critique of republican constraints are accused of bad faith.
Even though classical republicanism already provides a vocabulary for resisting oligarchy, socialism arose because many thinkers believed republican tools were insufficient for modern industrial capitalism. I reject this view.
Classical republicanism is neither modern conservatism nor progressive democracy, and both the contemporary right and the Democratic establishment have incentives to flatten it into something more convenient.
It is anti-monarchical and anti-hereditary aristocracy, yet also deeply suspicious of pure majoritarianism and of leveling projects that destroy the material bases of independence. It is not a defense of existing hierarchies for their own sake, nor is it a celebration of elite rule detached from accountability. American republicanism added popular sovereignty and written constitutions but retained the filters against simple majority will. This is repeatedly fought against by those who wish it to be something which affirms their own peculiar politics.
Segments of the modern right routinely treat “republicanism” as roughly synonymous with conservatism, originalism, or free-market classical liberalism. That captures important overlaps (constitutional limits, property, suspicion of centralized power) but erases the classical emphasis on civic formation, non-domination, and the mixed constitution. It can make republicanism sound like a status-quo or elite-preservation project when the original tradition was often revolutionary against both kings and corrupt oligarchies.
The Democratic establishment and much progressive discourse routinely frame constitutional republicanism as an elitist, counter-majoritarian device designed to protect the powerful against “the people.” This reading treats the deliberate republican constraints (Senate, Electoral College, judicial review, enumerated powers, bicameralism) as democratic defects rather than as designed protections against faction and majority tyranny. It allows progressive democracy, more direct, more egalitarian in outcome, and more administrative to be sold as the authentic completion of the American project.
Both moves are politically useful. The right gains a usable heritage; the center-left and left gain a narrative in which republican limits appear as obstacles to justice rather than as hard-won protections for liberty.
Large parts of the contemporary left do not need to fly the socialist or Marxist flag to operate inside its conceptual architecture. Explicit economic Marxism is electorally toxic in the United States, so the open program is usually softened or deferred. We have seen several means thinkers are attempting to challenge this toxic association by pushing through the media tactics (mirroring the right’s “lyin’ press” approach), accusing opponents of being stuck in Cold War binaries (true to a degree), deferring to the argument of freedom, or saying “it’s just like Nordic-style social democracy.” Lately, it has veered into outright mockery of anti-socialist sentiment, showing a cultural shift.
The analytical and moral vocabulary, however, remains heavily shaped by it and its twentieth-century adaptations such as (i) systemic rather than individual explanations of disparity; (ii) oppressor and oppressed binaries that treat institutions, language, and culture as sites of domination to be transformed; (iii) equity of outcome prioritized over formal equality or equal rules; (iv) historical progress framed as successive liberations from “structures” that earlier republican and liberal forms allegedly left intact; and (v) moralization of disagreement so that resistance to the preferred transformation is cast as defense of privilege or hierarchy.
These patterns in their tactic are observable, and they are annoying. And it is the gaslighting after the fact and the stupidity of their opponents I react to.
These frames do indeed travel through academic pipelines (critical theory, certain strands of sociology and cultural studies), activist training, and media without requiring anyone to quote Capital. The result is a rhetoric that treats classical republican constraints as incomplete or illegitimate stages rather than as enduring goods. That is continuous with the older Marxist claim that bourgeois political forms must be transcended, even when the speakers reject the Soviet model or the label “communist.”
The left does not need formal socialism to keep advancing that critique. The right and the Democratic center, by misdescribing republicanism as merely conservative or elitist, make it easier for the progressive reframing to look like the only non-reactionary option. The underlying tension remains the same: whether the institutional and cultural architecture of republican liberty is a stage to be surpassed or a hard-won settlement worth defending on its own terms.
But the right and Democratic establishment has managed to help their propaganda by portraying republicanism as a conservative or moderate and elitist philosophy which it is not. The left doesn’t need Socialism or Communism, or Marx yet their rhetoric is thoroughly dominated by its theories and rhetoric. The Democratic Party leaders see the problem as well, but do not know what to do. They are not socialists nor “far-left,” but the Democratic socialists keep insisting that it doesn’t matter what they are called, because the opponent considers them all “Communists.”
The republican tradition of the Founders stressed mixed institutions, civic virtue, rotation in office, suspicion of concentrated wealth as a source of corruption, and the active citizen rather than the passive rights-bearer. It was anti-oligarchic by design, but its remedies ran through constitutional architecture and character formation, not class expropriation.
From the mid-19ᵗʰ century onward, socialist, Marxist, and later communist movements systematically reframed the anti-oligarchic critique in materialist terms. Class became the master category, and “the people” versus “the aristocracy of wealth” was translated into proletariat versus bourgeoisie. Republican language of civic virtue and mixed government was frequently dismissed as bourgeois ideology that masked economic domination. This was not accidental: Marx and Engels explicitly treated earlier radical republicanism as an incomplete, pre-scientific stage. Later parties and intellectuals then treated the republican vocabulary as available raw material to be absorbed or discarded.
The practical effect was monopolization of the radical anti-oligarchic niche. In labor movements, universities, and revolutionary politics, the socialist framing proved more mobilizing because it offered a clear enemy, a theory of history, and a program of structural transformation. Classical republicanism offered institutional caution and moral exhortation, which was less intoxicating to people already convinced that the system itself was the problem.
Now, socialism occupies that rhetorical space. In contemporary Western politics the classical republican record and representation is nearly absent from mass discourse. Constitutional design, civic education, and suspicion of both concentrated private power and concentrated state power have few prominent champions who speak in those terms rather than in progressive, populist, or nationalist idioms. Democratic socialists and various socialist-adjacent currents have filled the vacuum because they still speak fluently about oligarchy, corruption, and popular sovereignty, exactly the emotional and diagnostic space republicanism once occupied. Voters facing stagnant mobility, institutional distrust, and elite insulation respond to the available rhetoric. This is supply meeting demand. Marxist theory supplied a totalizing narrative. Socialist parties built durable organizations. Academic and cultural institutions after 1945 increasingly privileged materialist and later identity-based analyses. Classical republican thought survived mainly in specialized historiography (Pocock, Skinner, Pettit) and in diluted form inside liberal constitutionalism. Meanwhile, actually existing socialist experiments repeatedly produced new forms of oligarchy and domination, which republican theory would have predicted but which did not restore republicanism to the center of radical politics.
The anti-oligarchic radical space has been largely captured by traditions that treat economic class (or its contemporary proxies) as the primary axis of domination. Whether that capture is lamentable depends on whether one judges civic republicanism’s institutional and virtue-centered remedies more or less adequate than socialist ones. The historical record supplies ample evidence for both the force of the socialist critique and the recurring failure of socialist practice to secure non-domination.
The historical pattern of far-left ideologies displacing the civic republican tradition is not accidental, but rather a structured intellectual and political tactic used by socialists, Marxists, and communists to monopolize radical and anti-oligarchic spaces. This is not a right-wing argument. It is an observable historical pattern of competitive displacement through superior organizational and theoretical packaging. Those on the political right are not insane for recognizing these repeated patterns. Their diagnosis is weak and reinforces their own stale patterns built to distort the very tradition they claim to defend. The strategy of the Trump administration is too obvious — baiting a fracturing party into this position, and I can understand why current Democratic strategists are panicking about the emerging competitive wing of far-left, galvanizing voters. But, Democratic leaders and leading strategists fighting, that is your fault, and your failure.
Classical republicanism is the tradition that shaped the American Founders through Polybius, Machiavelli, Harrington, Sidney, Montesquieu, and others, and centers on (i) liberty understood as non-domination, or freedom from arbitrary power, not merely the absence of interference; (ii) mixed or balanced government that checks pure monarchy, pure aristocracy, and pure democracy; (iii) civic virtue and institutional design against corruption and faction; (iv) rule of law that binds rulers as well as ruled; (v) independent citizens (historically linked to property and economic self-sufficiency) capable of self-government.
