ErikAG59 But Even Wordier

For many liberal readers, these sins make populism the maximum danger, the singular emergency. But as Trumpism has flailed and failed, it hasn’t consolidated the kind of authoritarian power anticipated by its most alarmed opponents. At the moment, Trump 2.0 has no great popularity, no legislative capacity, no policy legacy that a Democratic successor can’t easily roll back. The president himself might still be a dangerous figure, there might be darker forces waiting in the wings — but I don’t think that justifies making anti-populism the measure of all things.

Especially when you consider the alternatives. First, there is what remains of the center-left establishment, some of whose vices look less serious in light of Trumpism — self-satisfied technocrats might be preferable to self-dealing hatchet men — but that remains culpable for the mistakes that led to populism’s rise and at sea amid changed political conditions.

Ross Douthat leaving the New York Times and trying to figure out who he notionally opposes now; I'm always a little sceptical of the notion of blaming Biden for Trump or Weimar for the nazis or whatever, like yes they failed to keep them out, they clearly could have done better, but you're gonna lose an election occasionally (hopefully!) and the Republican party being completely taken over by scammers and cretins is the problem when you have a two party system.

A century later, a second oligarchy emerged, the robber barons. They were men who amassed fortunes through their railroad, steel, oil, and financial empires — men such as J. Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Andrew Mellon. They ushered the nation into an industrial revolution that vastly expanded economic output. They also corrupted government, brutally suppressed wages, generated unprecedented levels of inequality and urban poverty, pillaged rivals, shut down competitors, and made out like bandits — which is why they earned the sobriquet “robber barons.” World War I and the Great Depression of the 1930s eroded most of these robber barons’ wealth. And most of their power was eliminated after the elections of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. For the next half-century the gains from growth were more widely shared, and democracy became more responsive to the needs and aspirations of average Americans. Although America created the largest middle class the world had ever seen, there was still much to do — civil rights and voting rights for Black Americans, wider economic opportunities for them and for women and Latinos, protection of the environment. Yet by almost every measure the nation was making progress. A third American oligarchy emerged starting around 1980. Since then, the share of the nation’s wealth owned by the richest 400 Americans has quadrupled (from 0.8 percent to 3.7 percent).

Gosh! What*ever* could have happened in 1980 that caused all of the rich people to morph into the Oligarchy/Epstein Class? 🤔

The New York Times published an essay that urges us to rename the Civil War.

I know. I rolled my eyes too.

A recent New York Times guest essay by Anthony Conwright argues that the conflict of 1861–65 should be known by an older and less housebroken name: the Slaveholders’ Rebellion.

My first thought was that this sounded like the sort of argument history graduate students begin after six shots at their favorite off-campus dive bar, when everyone is brilliant, nobody is listening, and the person who has recently discovered Foucault is becoming a problem.

I expected to finish the article, recognize that several intelligent points had been made, and go on calling the Civil War the Civil War.

Instead, the damned thing followed me home.

The conflict is more than 160 years in the rearview mirror, and we are still arguing about what to call it. Perhaps that is only fair. It left more than 600,000 Americans dead, destroyed slavery, preserved the Union, and began the country’s long, slow, torturous climb toward making good on its claim that everyone deserves a seat at the American table.

Black Americans initially received little more than freedom itself—freedom without land, safety, or durable political power. Reconstruction briefly opened the door. White terrorism slammed it shut. Nearly another century passed before the country made a sustained effort to recover rights promised after Appomattox and then abandoned. Even now, the seat at the table remains an approximation: real, hard-won, and never entirely secure.

So perhaps this is not merely an argument about the label pasted onto an old war. The conflict determined whether the United States would survive and raised a question we have spent the years since failing, fitfully, and occasionally heroically trying to answer: Who gets to be fully American?

Conwright’s argument is that “Civil War,” while accurate, has become too clean. It describes the category of conflict but conceals the people who caused it and the institution they intended to save. Slaveholders lost an election, rejected the constitutional result, seized federal property, formed a rival government, and went to war rather than accept a future in which slavery might no longer enjoy unlimited national protection.

They did not leave their motives for future historians to decipher from tea leaves. They wrote them down.

That was when the argument stopped feeling like graduate-school barroom sport. If a historical name should identify not only what happened but who did it and why, then “Slaveholders’ Rebellion” was not liberal wordplay. It was more informative than the bloodless compromise we inherited.

And somewhere in the middle of thinking about 1861, another name arrived with the force of an unwelcome bar tab.

January 6.

We call it by a date, which is a peculiar way to name an attempt to overturn an American election. A date tells us when something happened. It does not tell us who did it, what was attempted, or why.

The better name came to me with irritating clarity: Trump’s failed election coup.

Not because January 6 and the Civil War are comparable in scale. They are not. But the same rule of historical naming applies to both: a useful name should identify the action, the responsible actor, and the purpose.

That is why “Slaveholders’ Rebellion” is stronger than “Civil War.” The conventional name tells us what kind of conflict followed. The older name tells us who broke the country and what they were trying to save.

The evasion came later, when national reconciliation required cleaner language and softer memory. “War Between the States” was the Confederate version, laundering rebellion into a dignified quarrel among sovereign equals. It turns treason into federalism with artillery.

“Civil War” became the compromise version: technically correct, emotionally survivable, and quiet about cause.

Compromise found its compromise language.

The Lost Cause offered the former Confederacy a heroic version of defeat. National reconciliation offered the North a sentimental version of victory. Both pushed slavery toward the edge of the frame. American memory filled with gallant officers, fluttering flags, and aging veterans shaking hands at Gettysburg, while four million emancipated people were treated almost like extras who had wandered onto the wrong movie set.

Names direct our attention. “Civil War” points toward battles, generals, and divided loyalties. “Slaveholders’ Rebellion” points toward agency, causation, and the society the Confederacy was created to defend. The first invites us to admire the struggle. The second makes us explain it.

Calling the conflict the Slaveholders’ Rebellion is not a modern effort to rewrite history. It takes the secessionists at their word. The rewriting came later, when “states’ rights” was detached from the right being demanded, Confederate nationalism was dressed up as regional loyalty, and reunion among white Americans became more important than Black citizenship.

Putting slavery back into the name is closer to restoration.

There is a danger in this reasoning. Once we decide inherited names conceal uncomfortable truths, it becomes tempting to attach the hottest available moral label to every historical wrong. That can clarify history, but it can also flatten it.

Consider “Native American genocide.” The term fits particular massacres, forced removals, bounties, and policies backed by evidence of genocidal intent. It is less useful as one explanation for the catastrophic Indigenous population decline across two continents and several centuries, much of it caused early on by diseases carried into populations with no acquired immunity.

The result was apocalyptic, but catastrophe and genocide are not synonyms. Genocide requires intention.

Then there are the smallpox blankets. At Fort Pitt in 1763, British officers gave Indigenous representatives articles taken from a smallpox hospital in an apparent effort to spread the disease. Whether it worked remains uncertain; the moral distinction does not. Disease can travel without intention. A blanket taken from a smallpox ward and handed to an enemy cannot.

That is the test. A better name restores information the inherited term conceals: the actor, the purpose, the nature of the act, or the people erased from the conventional account.

The point is not to make the past sound uglier. The point is to stop making it sound cleaner than it was.

That returns me to January 6.

The riot was real, but it was not the whole event. It was the violent climax of a larger effort by a defeated president to remain in office: pressure on election officials, fake electors, attempts to enlist the Justice Department in invented fraud claims, demands placed upon the vice president, and a final effort to stop Congress from certifying the lawful winner.

Calling all of that “January 6” is like naming a bank robbery for the Tuesday on which the gunmen arrived.

“Trump’s failed election coup” is uglier. It is also more useful. It identifies the central actor, the objective, and the outcome. Trump attempted to overturn an election he lost and retain the presidency. He failed.

History may settle on another name. It rarely reaches a final vocabulary while witnesses, participants, and apologists are still fighting over what occurred. But notice what happens when we retreat into the safety of a date. The coup becomes a riot. The riot becomes an unfortunate day. The attempt to overturn an election disappears behind the spectacle of the crowd.

Faulkner wrote that the past is never dead; it is not even past. He might have added that the past survives under assumed names. Some are chosen by the people who make history. Others are negotiated afterward by people who need to live together. Still others are manufactured by those who lost the struggle but won the campaign over how it would be remembered.

The Times essay began as an argument about a war 160 years in the rearview mirror. It left me wondering whether we have already begun softening the history through which we are still living.

The Slaveholders’ Rebellion caused the Civil War.

Trump’s failed election coup culminated on January 6.

Jack Wheatley and Zachary Pleat at MMFA:

Right-wing media launched a tirade of Islamophobic attacks against Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed both leading up to and following his win in the August 4 Democratic primary.  Right-wing media figures have latched onto El-Sayed’s faith and ethnicity. Trump ally and self-proclaimed “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer has called El-Sayed a “jihadist” and an “open supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson called El-Sayed a “parasite” and a “rat,” while conservative commentator Ben Shapiro has stated El-Sayed is a “radical advocate for Muslims, including terrorists.” Conservative media figures have also falsely labelled El-Sayed, who was born in the United States, a “foreigner.”  On August 5, The Associated Press called the primary race for El-Sayed. His opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, released a statement conceding the election and throwing her support behind El-Sayed.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/06/sin-is-when/#you-treat-people-as-things

I'm sure that working in social media – dealing with people as mass statistical abstractions – is a cognitohazard, the sort of thing that could make anyone a little solipsistic, convinced that everyone else is a kind of stimulus-responding automaton lacking the interiority that you yourself experience.

But when it comes to Mark Zuckerberg, I'm increasingly convinced that he didn't acquire his worldview through the self-inflicted brain damage of his long exposure to the back-end of a vast social media system. I think the causal arrow points in the other direction: I think that Zuck founded Facebook because he doesn't really believe that other people are truly real, at least not as real as he is.

We see this in Facebook's very earliest days, as we see it today, as we see it at every critical juncture in Facebook and Zuckerberg's history.

Consider Facebook's origins, founded by a young Zuckerberg in his dorm as a means to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of his fellow Harvard undergrads:

https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-lying-about-facebook

The boy Zuck was delighted and surprised that so many of his fellow students entrusted him with their data but even then, he had no inkling as to why they would do so. Privately, he jeered at his users for trusting him, calling them "dumb fucks":

https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2010/05/14/facebook-founder-called-trusting-users-dumb-fcks/294365

Zuck has since prosecuted history's most ruthless war on privacy, a surveillance campaign that would put the Stasi to shame and make Orwell scoff at the hacks butchering his work with over the top absurdities.

Zuck doesn't think you deserve any privacy, but boy does he ever value his own. This is a guy who bought the four houses surrounding his San Francisco home and left them empty in order to form a buffer zone:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/us/mark-zuckerberg-palo-alto.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3VA.4Avp.cVm3LUnvajRK&smid=url-share

When a single candid photo of Zuck and his family in their kitchen leaked (from Facebook!), Zuck, his lawyers, and his operatives treated it as a three-alarm fire:

https://abc7news.com/archive/8933289/

Zuckerberg's acquired a vast Hawaiian acreage and left most of it undeveloped, fenced off and patrolled by guards to prevent anyone from catching a glimpse of his private life. In order to acquire this acreage, Zuck exploited a dirty legal tactic called "heirs property," which leverages the informal basis of indigenous land claims by locating a single person with a colorable claim to their distant relatives' territory in order to force an auction of the ancestral land:

https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-secretive-hawaii-compound-burial-ground/

If Zuck thought other people are as real as he is, he wouldn't spy on them in ways he himself could never tolerate. He certainly wouldn't pay fancy white-shoe lawyers to steal their land out from under them. At heart, Zuck is a billionaire solipsist to beat all other examples of the form – a billionaire social media solipsist who sees others as manipulable collections of statistical abstractions, and not as people at all:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

When Zuck is forcibly reminded that other people do indeed exist, he takes it very badly. He's insisted that Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former FB exec turned whistleblower, must pay him $111,000,000 as punishment for her excellent tell-all memoir Careless People. His lawyers say that Wynn-Williams violates the non-disclosure and non-disparagement "agreement" of her old Facebook employment contract merely by standing motionless and silent for an hour on-stage:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/27/zuckerstreisand-2/#autodisparagement

Once you realize that Zuck doesn't really think other people exist, "the metaverse" starts to make a lot more sense. Why would Zuck light $61b on fire in a bet that we will all stand still while he converts us and everyone we love into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters that he imprisons in a virtual world he stole from a 25 year old satirical dystopian cyberpunk novel? It's easy to understand if we're all non-player characters – if that's true, then the metaverse is surely our native habitat.

For Zuck, people aren't co-equals with needs that are as real and important as his own. For Zuck, people are problems to be solved. He embodies Terry Pratchett's maxim (voiced by Granny Weatherwax) that "sin is when you treat people like things."

Nowhere is this sin more on display than in Zuck's relationship to the social connections that bind together the users of his platforms. Zuck has benefited enormously from the fact that you love your friends more than you hate him, but (because hell is other people), you can't all agree on when to leave and where to go next, so you stay put on Facebook and Instagram:

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-hell-is-other-people/

For Zuck, the fact that you and your friends have trapped one another in a mutual hostage-taking is maddening, because those friends who've tied you to his platform refuse to organize their social contact with you to "maximize your engagement" with Facebook and Insta, which would let him maximize the number of ads he shows you. Rather, these friends just want to be your friends, which means that they don't want to get into stupid endless fights to keep you replying or stage little entertaining skits to keep you scrolling.

The way Salima found out that Boulangism had gone bankrupt: her toaster wouldn’t accept her bread. She held the slice in front of it and waited for the screen to show her a thumbs-up emoji, but instead, it showed her the head-scratching face and made a soft brrt. She waved the bread again. Brrt.

“Come on.” Brrt.

She turned the toaster off and on. Then she unplugged it, counted to ten, and plugged it in. Then she menued through the screens until she found RESET TO FACTORY DEFAULT, waited three minutes, and punched her Wi-Fi password in again.

Brrt.

Long before she got to that point, she’d grown certain that it was a lost cause. But these were the steps that you took when the electronics stopped working, so you could call the 800 number and say, “I’ve turned it off and on, I’ve unplugged it, I’ve reset it to factory defaults and…”

There was a touchscreen option on the toaster to call support, but that wasn’t working, so she used the fridge to look up the number and call it. It rang seventeen times and disconnected. She heaved a sigh. Another one bites the dust.

The Boulangism cloud had burst and that meant that there was no one answering Salima’s toaster when it asked if the bread she was about to toast had come from an authorized Boulangism baker, which it had. In the absence of a reply, the paranoid little gadget would assume that Salima was in that class of nefarious fraudsters who bought a discounted Boulangism toaster and then tried to renege on her end of the bargain by inserting unauthorized bread, which had consequences ranging from kitchen fires to suboptimal toast (Boulangism was able to adjust its toasting routine in realtime to adjust for relative kitchen humidity and the age of the bread, and of course it would refuse to toast bread that had become unsalvageably stale), to say nothing of the loss of profits for the company and its shareholders. Without those profits, there’d be no surplus capital to divert to R&D, creating the continuous improvement that meant that hardly a day went by without Salima and millions of other Boulangism stakeholders (never just “customers”) waking up with exciting new firmware for their beloved toasters.

She tried to search her fridge for “boulangism hacks” and “boulangism unlock codes” but appliances stuck together. KitchenAid’s network filters gobbled up her queries and spat back snarky “no results” screens even though Salima knew perfectly well that there was a whole underground economy devoted to unauthorized bread.

The first was that each of us had attacked at least one of the others in print. I had dissed Eco’s book. Umberto had criticized Mario for being too right-wing. Mario had criticized me for being too left-wing.

The second discovery was that we all got on like a house on fire.

It was Umberto who suggested we should now call ourselves The Three Musketeers. (This, remember, was the time of the Three Tenors, Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras.) I remember asking, “Why Musketeers? Why not, for example, The Three Stooges?”

“No,” Umberto insisted. “It has to be Musketeers, because first we were enemies and now we are friends.”