The widespread emergence of national republics at the turn of the 19th century coincided with the separation of church and state. Modern republics like the U.S. proclaimed a “freedom of conscience” in which theological belief would be separated from politics. The isolation of religious belief achieved a neutralization of religion in politics and a gradual decline in religious enthusiasm. Over time, however, states asserted authority over scientific and historical truth, and in the process political parties have evolved into warring sects (“parties”) of the national churches that we call “nations” today. Nation states use law and police force to require conformity with tenets of political ideology (the state), economic theory (the economy), and increasingly, medical ethics (the body). In America, political parties emerged immediately following the Revolution, to the bitter consternation of many founding fathers like President Washington, who regarded them as inimical to republican government, having a higher loyalty than the State, which religion had also previously been. In closeted denial of their factionalism, virtually all the Founding Fathers separated into ideological factions, some shamelessly concealing their Federalist and Republican scheming by writing under pseudonyms: Hamilton’s Phocion, and Madison’s Publius. If democracy had been hindered by allegiance to Church, now it was hindered by a cloistered and fanatical allegiance to Party. A deceitful new form of treason against the General Will of civil society had in fact been present at the birth of the new State. The death of religion as a political power had thus immediately coincided with the birth of ideology. Reason, at its moment of triumph, had surrendered to a new, Godless form of belief. Propaganda is the word we have given to a reincarnated cultural form: state religion. And while our government claims to respect a freedom of religion, it does not include a freedom of ideology. Fetter of conscience The birth of ideology, growing from the American Revolution to the Cold War, signaled the futility of stamping out belief per se, and introduced the social archetype of madness, viewed anthropologically, as a new threat to politics in the Age of Reason. The treatment of “mental illness” was born during the revolutionary era. Madness was a creation of modern democracy, the sickness of “unreason” distinguished against the Reason of political enlightenment. Thus, the post-Revolutionary era in both America and France witnessed the proliferation of insane asylums. The modern idea of madness began with the French Revolution. The zoologist Philippe Pinel and “father of modern psychiatry” the chief physician of the Salpêtrière by 1794 at the execution of Robespierre and the end the Reign of Terror, famous for his system of classification, dividing lunacy into melancholia, mania, mania with delirium, dementia, and idiotism, was repeatedly depicted as having “liberated” the lunatics in the Salpêtrière from their chains, using “moral” or psychological treatments to draw patients out of their “alienation.” What had been a theological judgement was now medically diagnosed. The famous critique Madness and Civilization, and defenses of the psychological profession against Michel Foucault have disputed the meaning of this transition: whether positively as a humane reform, or negatively as intensified social control. What is indisputable is their concomitancy: that madness is to democracy what the Devil had previously been to God. The medical concept of madness is associated with the modern sociopolitical construct, given the Age of Reason that the revolutions had proclaimed for both science and politics. Irrationality presents a foil and challenge to theorists of modern democratic political economy. If people are “normally” mad, then what is democracy? By inventing madness as a treatable disease, psychiatry manufactured a standardized secular concept of mental health through a taboo system that made people fear madness the way they had previously feared being evil, spiritually. Internalizing the paranoid self-surveillance of protestant predestination from Protestantism, as described by Max Weber, psychology “colonized” the emotions and thoughts of all people in a personal relationship with Reason. The modern self is paranoid. Signs of madness are to be avoided and shunned as potential bellwethers of a secret flaw. Conversely, ever-changing conventions of normalcy both anticipate and make mockery of a future perfect State. The herding effect toward self-surveillance, self-repression and, ultimately, imitation, is discernible in this archetype. Bad thoughts must be avoided: managed, privately, or with a professional stranger, such as my father, the psychologist and playwright Don Frederick Fenn, who said it is reminiscent of the Catholic confessional of old. Implicit in this very modern secular behavior is the notion that people may be conditioned to avoid madness, and that each of us should condition ourselves therapeutically to be psychologically “healthy.” Ironically, paranoid self-management as a normal way of being profoundly undermines democratic civil society. Cultural self-policing deprives reason of liberty, reducing it to a mechanism of mass conformism. It also empowers ideology and the political party into mechanisms of culture war and theocratic power: a struggle over what is defined as normal and permitted versus abnormal or pathological, dressed in the bunting of science. Therapeutic selves do not make reasonable citizens capable of civil discourse, nor possesses the real-time perspicacity required for competent, honest democratic participation. The profoundly antidemocratic culture I describe here has in turn led to the crisis of the “extreme center” in U.S. politics: Democrats, alongside Republicans becoming a Party of endless war, surveillance, and censorship. Liberal repression of illiberal political opinions recast as “hate,” “violence,” and potentially as “terror.” While no national ideology has escaped this paranoid logic, liberalism embodies it most ironically, shamelessly and powerfully. An entirely negative power prevails. In America the normalization of madness is exemplified by the development of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders “DSM V,” a constantly revised and expanded taxonomy of mental disorders used by both psychologists and public institutions like public schools, that has grown to describe, in many ways, most American citizens. Widespread self-diagnosis and consensual use of prescribed psychotropic drugs to control feelings and behavior, particularly among school children, 40% of whom have identified mental health condition by age 18. This has led to the cultural conflation of psychopathology with individuality and self-diagnosis with individuation. Medicalization of madness resulted in a socialization of madness: a “hypernormalization”. Moral failings are supplanted by self-diagnosis: “I am A.D.D..” In politics, Democrats say President Trump is insane, which is now more compelling than saying he is evil. Biden was described by Republicans as mentally incompetent rather than corrupt. In England, Jeremy Corbyn (with thousands of his supporters in Labour Party) was accused by his opponents within the Labour Party of hating Jews - was purged as a closet hater, rather than being honestly debated in the merits of his positions on Palestinian rights: with impunity. Medicalization giveth, and medicalization taketh away There is no anchor to medicalized public discourse. Modern civil society has forfeited its political quality to a scientism of morals. Reason has been replaced by belief: Religion rears its ugly head once again, laundered by the putatively rational state as ideological hygiene: therapeutic authority to diagnose and involuntarily confine holders of political opinions: organized ideophobia. Normalization of madness is being manipulated by the wealthy to control politics, to terrible effect. Secretive madness is vulnerable to phantasms projected by media billionaires to stir fear of others throughout the general population. Untethered, public discourse has veered off the Enlightenment’s rational course into spectacles of pogroms, witch trials, lynchings, catharses. This is manufactured culture war designed to divert public attention from a collapse of legitimacy: the “polycrisis” of Endless Wars, unprecedented inequality, uncontrolled climate change, global mass displacement, and societal disintegration. The Republic has been decapitated. “Representation” has been reduced to a war of values: commentaries on Religion. From it comes the inability to govern: “policy collapse.” Given the mounting urgency of many crises brought about by the power of Reason outside the political sphere, consideration of more fundamental questions and actions about the nature of democratic government and the “economy” is urgently required. Failed Revolutions and Public Madness The French Revolution not only attacked the authority of Catholic Church, executing nuns and priests and seizing Church lands, but sought to replace Christianity entirely. The state-sponsored “Cult of Reason” determined upon the perfection of mankind through Truth and Liberty, ordering that all crosses and statues be removed from graveyards, and that all cemetery gates must bear only one inscription—”death is an eternal sleep.” The official nationwide Fête de la Raison in 1793, demonstrated the new republican religion when churches across all of France were redesignated Temples of Reason, most notably the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, carving “To Philosophy” over the entrance doors, replacing the altar with an “Altar to Liberty, upon which was displayed a “Goddess of Reason.” In 1794 at the apotheosis of the Reign of Terror, Robespierre executed the leaders of the Cult of Reason and replaced them with the more moderate “Cult of the Supreme Being” - Deistic, and so not denying the existence of the Christian God but merely asserting that he had absconded from this world. The proto-communist, proto-anarchist economic proposals of the Left in the French Revolution attempted a total transformation of economic relations. Gracchus Babeuf, one of those executed for the Conspiracy of Equals, a failed coup against the French Directory in 1796, proposed in the “Manifesto of Equals” that political rights be given only to farmers, fisherman, mechanical and manual work, retail trade, carriers and coachmen, the military, and sciences and instruction: that none other shall have political rights. Babeuf proposed that the idle be subject to forced labor and property confiscation, that all property must be given by law through an official; that a people’s commune would provide all with clothes, laundry, light, heat, food and drink; that all members of a commune (town) would eat all meals together; that taking payment for work would be punished: and finally, under punishment of perpetual slavery, money abolished, debts cancelled, and trade conducted only by public officials. While the term “Left” was born in the French Revolution, it did not survive it. The socialist and anarchist Left was born in the early 19th century based upon a profound and widespread disappointment with the French Revolution’s failure to bring about an economic corollary to political revolution. Before the French National Constituent Assembly brought Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration, the British Second Protectorate “Rump” Parliament had brought the dictatorship of Cromwell, and the Stewart Restoration. The increasingly nationalistic, jingoistic tendencies of 19th century republicanism took root among newly created republics, starting around 1820. The abolition of labor guilds and the displacement of peasants from long-held feudal tenures into exploitative factory jobs were 17th century sins that displaced ancient civil societies. The “constitutional obsession” of the democratic revolutions – a system defined by rights and limited to contractual relationships - proved mere chimeras or distractions from governing economic reality, which was enclosed for the wealthy who threw the people off the land and seized the reins of government in a bourgeois revolution. The “great transformation” of the sturdy farmer of Tudor England into the sturdy beggar of the Glorious Revolution demanded further change outside the narrow envelope of voting rights: this never came. instead, the Republican Revolutions inaugurated the democratic farce of representative government that has since become known as The West. We have been here before. In the heat of the English Revolution, the Diggers of the New Model Army, sought an original agrarian socialism, forming a “colony” on enclosed former commons in Surrey, tearing down enclosures building communal houses, and inciting people to follow their example, and calling for the general right to farm on common land. “True freedom lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation,” wrote Digger leader Gerrard Winstanley. But he and the Diggers were driven from their collective farms, they were prosecuted as criminals, and Oliver Cromwell crushed them: a tragedy for England, as the enclosures continued, the farmers driven from their land, the artisans degraded into factory workers, the Revolution’s philosophically incoherent leadership brought back Charles II in the Restoration, and a Whig class trained to hypocrisy embraced both empire and the slave trade for the next century, creating the spectacle of degenerated humanity witnessed in London and other cities by Tobias Smollett in the 18th century and Charles Dickens in the 19th. Merry Olde England was no longer. England had its Cromwell, and France its Napoleon. Following the Revolutions philosophers and activists worked to “fix” the economic systems created by the Revolutions. In England, Robert Owen famously reorganized the massive Cotton Mill factory at New Lanark according to cooperative principles, eventually exporting his new model to the United States, most famously the communal living/working community called New Harmony in Indiana. Similarly, following the French Revolution, philosophers sought to reorganize exploitative capitalist enterprises according to cooperative principles, Charles Fourier setting up his utopian cooperative communities known as Phalanstères or “grand hotels” - four-story apartment complexes with the wealthiest on the top floors and the poorest below, work was assigned based on interests, pay incentives for undesirable work. In a similar vein, Etienne Cabet proposed the creation of worker cooperatives, also moving his utopian colony to America, resulting in communities in Illinois, Texas and California. In a similar vein, the French politician, journalist and historian Louis Blanc proposed to use the national government to create worker cooperatives for the urban proletariat. All recognized the limitations of a bourgeois revolution that had failed to replace the feudal society and economic system it had so mercilessly, fanatically destroyed. But, as Alexander Herzen pointed out in the 1850s, the efforts of these utopians to realize the failures of the Revolutions outside of government could not compete with the wars of Napoleon: “Napoleon had no system, and for others he neither wished wealth nor promised it: wealth he desired only for himself, and by wealth he understood power. Now see how feeble Babeuf and Owen are compared with him! Thirty years after his death his name was enough to get his nephew recognized as Emperor. What was his secret? Babeuf wished to enjoin prosperity and a communist republic on people. Owen wished to educate them to a different economic way of living, incomparably more profitable for them. Napoleon wanted neither the one nor the other; he understood that Frenchmen did not in fact desire to feed on Spartan broth and to return to the morality of Brutus the Elder, that they were not very well satisfied ‘that on feast-days citizens will assemble to discuss the laws and instruct their children in the civic virtues.’ But - and this is a different thing - fighting and boasting of their own bravery they do like. Instead of preventing them, or irritating them by preaching perpetual peace, Lacedaemonian fare, Roman virtues and crowns of myrtle Napoleon, seeing how passionately fond they were of bloody glory, began to egg them on against other peoples and himself to go hunting with them. There is no reason to blame him: the French would have been the same even without him; but this identity of tastes entirely explains his people’s love for him: he was not a reproach to the mob, for he did not offend it by either his purity or his virtues nor did he offer it a lofty, transfigured ideal. He was neither a chastising prophet nor a sermonizing genius. He belonged himself to the mob and he showed it its very self elevated into a genius and covered with rags of glory. That is the answer to the enigma of his power and influence; that is why the mob wept for him, lovingly brought his coffin over and hug his portrait everywhere.” The setting for the reclamation of a civil society under the modern republic has been repeatedly sought within the capitols of Europe and in the wildernesses of the American frontier. In neither place has it been found. It is as though no other place were imaginable. Two centuries after the English Revolution, in the decades between the French Revolution and the Revolution of 1848, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon put forward his elegant legislative program to help a nation of proletarianized urban Frenchmen reclaim the rights of mutualism in revolution in economics. In both his newspaper, The People’s Representative, and in direct legislation, Proudhon proposed two great steps for the national Constituent Assembly to transform the desperate economic conditions of a nation of expropriated and impoverished Frenchmen on the verge of violent tax revolt. First, the nation should legally redefine rents as mortgage payments, meaning all renters would eventually become owners of the homes they occupy. As for the landlords, their losses would be covered by French national bank refinancing at interest rates below those offered by private lenders. Proudhon’s idea would have eliminated class war between landlords and renters, in theory eliminating the need for the protection of property by police. Under his gradualist, peaceful 30-year scheme, every family would in the end own its own dwelling, with neither landlord nor renter harmed. Commercial lenders, however, would be obsoleted. Second, having eliminated its primary function - protection of landlords against renters, the state would commit suicide, voluntarily defunding and dismantling itself. A new society would emerge consisting of voluntary regional economic cooperation and be free to form without political coercion based on voluntary, contractual relationships, the defense function of government replaced by federation. Corruptio optimi pessima Corruption of the best is the worst. Both the Diggers of England and the Mutualists of France were exposed to the violence of their enemies by the demurs of bourgeois allies settling for strictly political revolution. The Diggers were a faction of the Levellers, who, settling for extended suffrage, equality before the law, and religious tolerance, rejected the Diggers’ economic radicalism. Isolated as a faction, Diggers either retired from political life or were driven into exile. Ultimately the Levellers’ compromise was for naught, and proving no less tolerable to Cromwell and the aristocratic Generals of the New Model Army, they too were crushed. Proudhon was also betrayed by bourgeois allies who, when pressed by crisis, turned on him. At the height of crisis in 1848, resenting his popularity among the dispossessed proletarian rabble, The General Assembly condemned his “odious attack on the principles of public morality, that it violates property, that it encourages scandal, that it makes appeal to the most odious passions.” As punishment for calling on a levy on the wealthy to provide tax relief to the poor, the Constituent Assembly voted unanimously (with only two dissentions) to strip him of his immunity from prosecution as a Member of the Assembly, deliberately exposing him to the violence of a dictator. Proudhon was soon arrested “for insulting the President,” Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte: imprisoned for three years, censored from publishing, and forced into exile for much of the remainder of his life. During the Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune (1871), the leading ideas to “realize” the revolutions were startlingly radical but also remarkably practical and nonviolent. Before the dominance of Marxist communism, Proudhon’s anarchism proposed a gradual suicide, rather than a dictatorship, of the state. First, the state should orchestrate a gradual transfer of housing equity to the dwellers based on rent payments. Then the state would liquidate itself: police no longer required to protect property from the propertyless; municipalities and unions would contract for goods and services locally. This was as detailed as Proudhon’s scheme ever got, and this got him prison time. His early death left the stage open to Marx’s albatross, which his goaded International Workingmen’s Association gradually and reluctantly accepted: the Babeufian centralized model of revolution that has since held firmly the Left’s strategy of social transformation. Europe, and America, have been trapped in centralized state political ideology ever since Proudhon died. The slow demise of the traditions of native Revolutions of 1649, 1776 and 1789 amidst the worldwide republican revolutions starting around 1820, are revealed over the course of the July Revolution of 1830, the February Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. These spectacles of domestic politics were circumscribed by the imperial competitions of the European nation states largely in response to the rise of the United States as a massive new imperial power - a fact that overwhelmed the domestic stage of European society as its imperial governments turned their guns on each other, breaking the Concert of Europe but also causing the philosophical and moral collapse of Leftist political movements, which proved unable and unwilling to resist their militarism as World War I approached. This profound failure of the European revolutionary tradition in 1914 both echoed the debacle of the Reign of Terror and set in stone the empty idealism of Western political life to this day. The nation, this idol of transformation inherited from Hegel, tossed from Left to Right, first suppressed its predecessor - anarchism - as brutally as any fascists. Like the economic radical vanguard (e.g. the Diggers, 1649) of the English Revolution, they were ejected from politics and assumed a strictly cultural, utopian form, as with the Quakers of the late seventeenth century, who themselves subsequently rejected politics to became “quietists” - strictly spiritual or social innovators (such as pioneers in the “moral treatment” of madness) in the early nineteenth century. Since the American and French revolutions, the modern world was left with two choices: nation-based socialism or nation-based capitalism. Outside this choice was the choice to opt-out of politics entirely. In the poverty of these philosophies, capitalism has triumphed in the sclerotic grip of a dismal alternative. The rise of public madness was a key factor in the dissolution of radical Western politics prior to the Great War. Specifically, the crisis of revolutionary socialism, exemplified by turn-of-the-century Fabians in England, Eduard Bernstein’s revisionism in Germany, and Benjamin Tucker’s “individualist anarchism” in America, was provoked by the fateful decision of Karl Marx, at a private conference of the First International in London during the Summer of 1871 following the suppression of the Paris Commune, to form a political party and call for participation in representative Parliamentary politics, his control of the movement having been threatened by an Anarchist majority led by Mikhail Bakunin in the membership. Socialism as a movement was not German, but French, and its core tradition, like the French Revolution, the American Revolution, and the English Revolution, was anti-authoritarian. Marx, as a state centralist, was a carpetbagger to a French Movement in the tradition of Rousseau, led by the simpler moral, localist philosophies of Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Louis Blanc and Gustave Blanqui. From the time of the formation of the First International, Marx had been an infiltrator covering another country’s active revolutionary milieu with an enervating lead blanket of political eschatology laced with trendy scientism. “Nothing has corrupted the German working, class so much as the notion that it was moving with the current,” reflected Walter Benjamin in 1940 shortly before his suicide while escaping the Nazi Gestapo of Vichy France: in other words: their biggest mistake was listening to Marx. Until the end an outsider gradually losing ground to native Anarchist forces of the French, Marx’s position in the working class movement, which had from the beginning been centered in France, had always been tenuous, and his ability to control the First International was an uphill battle that ended in his controlled demolition of the organization by summoning a congress at the Hague, expelling the Anarchist leadership (e.g Bakunin) on spurious grounds, and moving the organization wholesale to the political backwater of the United States - New York City - the following year, in 1872. Where it died in 1876. Marx had willfully destroyed the First International in order to prevent the Anarchist majority in the International, led by Bakunin, from taking it over. This was a fateful decision as it set in place the formation of a national political party - the SPD - under the internationalist theory of Marxism. Though Marx had long distinguished his “revolutionary” thought in contrast to German labor movement founder Ferdinand Lassalle’s Hegelian vision of a centralized “people’s state,” the two opposing philosophies were now made to endure a shotgun wedding. As with many contradictions, the SPD was popular, and once the German Empire’s (Bismarck’s) Anti-Socialist Law ban on such associations was lifted, quickly grew into the largest left-wing political party in the world, growing up to three million members. In the process, a political party professing an anti-war revolutionary philosophy that had been specifically hostile to “bourgeois” parliamentary politics was drawn by its success at the ballot in the 1890s into bourgeois politics: first into a liberal political agenda, and then into Russophobia and ultimately voting to fund the German military to start WWI. The emergence of the trade unionism movement, in particular, undermined the SPD’s intellectual leadership. Leftist intellectuals in the SPD were no match for blue collar workers become union leaders who were immune to Marx’s obtuse doctrine. The SPD lacked credibility with the unions, having become a massive party bureaucracy, paying the wages of its elected officials, funding and controlling local socialist newspapers, reorganizing the social lives of its membership: and suppressing dissent within its ranks. Marxist holdouts in the party were gradually pushed out of leadership by centrists. Rosa Luxemburg’s “false consciousness” worker re-education program to convert workers from anti-immigrant views simply failed. Numbers are numbers, and the bullies took over where the wimps left off. The Left embrace of representative government led immediately to a profound disruption of socialist party leadership throughout the West. Pervasive worker racism and anti-immigrant sentiment in the trade unions the SPD had sought to assimilate ultimately led to a jettisoning of revolutionary leaders and their revolutionary goals by socialist parties during their formative rise to parliamentary power in the 1890s. Political success meant philosophical failure. Remarkably, the SPD’s failure to oppose World War I over the dead bodies of Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the stalwart Spartacist holdouts against imperialism, was a moral failure of the SPD leadership that set in place the subsequent disappearance of transformative left politics and the rise of Nazism in Germany: a phenomenon mirrored throughout the European nations that invited WWI and WWII. As the left-wing movements of the nineteenth century were the only vestiges of political enlightenment to survive the revolutions that created national republics around the world following the French Revolution, the failure of the international socialist movement to resist WWI spelled the end, functionally speaking, of the Enlightenment itself. All socialists fell into the nationalistic traps of their governments, Germans activated by a manufactured fear of Russians, and Frenchmen activated by a fear of Germans. The most fundamental principles of international class solidarity were forgotten, and Socialist leaders of all European countries called on the workers to march under their flags against their brother workers marching against them. It was the death, really, of political philosophy itself, with one exception. The only exception were the Anarchists: the most reviled of all political philosophies since that day. In blind fury against the barbarism of all statist ideologies arose the obscure figure of the terrorist and “propaganda of the deed” - of the anarchist “martyrs” François Claudius Ravachol, Johann Most, Emile Henry, Czolgocz, Lingg, and Alexander Berkman: the enemies not merely of oppressors, but of a triumphant bourgeois, imperialist society and its hypocritical moral code. In a sense, the Illegalists, forming after the police repression that followed the Paris Commune, were the New Men of the twentieth century: the first political existentialists to recognize the hopelessness of all political systems and their corresponding political parties. Turning inward the an “Individualist Anarchism” of the Intransigents of London and Paris, the Ortiz Gang, the Workers of the Night, and the Bonnot Gang, they like the Quakers of the English Revolution turned to an anti-politics, of Quietism: but this Quietism an aggressive Nietzschean transformation of values against property and all political and social authority, a revolt manifest in the direct action of crime and terrorism. It was a militant idiocy based on the rejection of politics as a meaningful path of action that led the “Era of Attacks” and continues to inspire occasional acts of terror today. It is a biting irony of WWI that its only true opponents were enemies of the state and society - and that they have been totally erased from history. This is not a coincidence. When all are guilty, all join together to erase all evidence of the truth. Today, we suffer from the moral bankruptcy that results from maintaining ideals we cannot act upon except through destruction of ourselves and others. Hitler did not create National Socialism. It was created decades before Hitler rose to prominence, in the vacuum of leadership created by Marx’s suppression of anarchism, the incorporation of Marx’s SPD into an instrument of German militarism, its subversion of the Anarchist factions within socialism to oppose WWI through revolution, and the turning even of some anarchists, such as Kropotkin, to nationalism and war under the threat from Germany. The Enlightenment’s house of cards had collapsed. In truth, National Socialism was born from disillusionment with the philosophical bankruptcy of the Marxist SPD leadership having stolen and poisoned the role of stewards of a rising civilization.