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Neo-Feudalism: the Enemy the Left Must Name to Defeat
The only way forward is to complete the unfinished revolution against feudalism—not through reactionary nationalism, but through systemic transformation.
Mar 18, 2025
In 1776, America declared independence not just from a king, but from an entire feudal order. The promise was radical: no more lords and vassals, no more aristocratic monopolies, no more inherited rule. It was a vision of self-governance, economic freedom, and political democracy.
As we know, this promise was deeply flawed from the outset—built atop the brutal reality of chattel slavery, which entrenched a racial caste system even as the revolution sought to break from feudal hierarchy.
Still, the revolutionary spark—that governance should belong to the people, not an inherited elite—set a course for future struggles, from abolition to labor rights to civil rights. The unfinished promise of 1776 has always been to extend that right to everyone, dismantling old forms of domination wherever they persist.
The fight against neo-feudalism must be reclaimed by a left willing to challenge entrenched power at its roots, not merely manage decline.
Yet nearly 250 years later, we find ourselves under the shadow of a system that eerily resembles the one we once revolted against. Power is no longer held by monarchs but by corporate oligarchs and billionaire dynasties. The vast majority of Americans—trapped in cycles of debt, precarious labor, and diminishing rights—are not citizens in any meaningful sense.
We talk around this reality. We call it “money in politics,” “corporate influence,” and “economic inequality.” But these are symptoms, not the disease. The disease is neo-feudalism—a system in which power is entrenched, inherited, and designed to be impossible to escape. And unless we call it by its true name, we will never build the movement needed to fight it.
Feudalism may have faded in name, but many of its structures remain. Today’s hierarchy mirrors the past in ways we can no longer ignore.
- Then: Lords owned the land, and peasants worked it under their control.
Now: A handful of corporations and investment firms own vast swaths of housing, farmland, and industry. - Then: Aristocracies passed power down through hereditary privilege.
Now: Dynastic billionaires and corporate monopolies ensure that wealth remains concentrated in a ruling class. - Then: The peasantry was bound to their lords by custom, debt, and necessity.
Now: Student debt, medical bills, and stagnant wages trap entire generations in perpetual economic dependence. - Then: Political power was controlled by a small elite who ruled by divine right.
Now: The illusion of democracy masks the fact that billionaires fund both parties, controlling policy no matter who is elected.
This is not the free society America was supposed to be. It is a highly stratified system in which the many serve the interests of the few, with no meaningful path to real power. And worse, the establishment left—rather than challenging this order—has come to represent it.
The Democratic Party was once the party of the working class. Today, it has become the party of the professional-managerial elite—the bureaucrats, consultants, and media figures who believe that governing is their birthright.
The establishment left has in many ways absorbed the role of the aristocracy—not just in terms of wealth but in the way it positions itself as the enlightened ruling class. They claim to stand for “equity” and “democracy,” yet do nothing to challenge the real structures of power.
Instead, they manage decline while maintaining their own privilege—careful not to upset the donor class that sustains them.
As newly elected Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin put it, “There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money. But we’re not taking money from those bad billionaires.”
Pronouncements from global elites certainly don’t help either. The now-infamous slogan “You’ll own nothing and be happy”—popularized by the World Economic Forum and widely interpreted as a blueprint for a hyper-managed future—only fuels growing resentment toward an emerging system where ownership, autonomy, and mobility are increasingly out of reach for the average person.
This is why figures like Steve Bannon and reactionary populists have hijacked the narrative of neo-feudalism. Despite his own ties to oligarchs, Bannon has correctly identified that America is no longer a capitalist democracy but a feudal order where power is locked away from ordinary people.
He explicitly frames this crisis as a return to feudal hierarchy: “The ‘hate America’ crowd… they believe in some sort of techno-feudal situation, like was in Italy, back in the 14th and 15th century… where they are like a city-state, and there are a bunch of serfs that work for them. Not American citizens, but serfs, indentured servants.”
He has also drawn direct comparisons between modern economic conditions and serfdom: “Here’s the thing with millennials, they’re like 19th-century Russian serfs. They’re in better shape, they have more information, they’re better dressed. But they don’t own anything.”
However, Bannon’s solution—a nationalist strongman government—represents just another form of vassalage.
Reactionary populists like Bannon, President Donald Trump, and Tucker Carlson exploit real economic grievances and redirect them into a revenge narrative. Instead of seeing neo-feudalism as a system that transcends party or nationality—one that has evolved from medieval serfdom to corporate vassalage—they reframe it as a nationalist grievance.
Bannon likens “globalists” (an ambiguous term) to feudal overlords, but insists that nationalism can break their grip. Trump labels the deep state and liberal elites as the enemy, but assumes the role of a strongman to restore justice. Carlson says the working class is being crushed, but blames cultural elites rather than the billionaire class as a whole.
This misdirection is key. Rather than exposing the true architects of neo-feudalism—corporate monopolists, financial barons, and entrenched dynasties—these reactionaries redirect public anger toward an amorphous “cultural aristocracy” of media figures, academics, and bureaucrats. The real oligarchs escape scrutiny, while the working class is fed a narrative that pits them against cultural elites rather than the economic structures that keep them in servitude.
The only way forward is to complete the unfinished revolution against feudalism—not through reactionary nationalism, but through systemic transformation. The fight against neo-feudalism must be reclaimed by a left willing to challenge entrenched power at its roots, not merely manage decline.
The question is no longer whether neo-feudalism exists. The question is whether the left will finally recognize it—and act before it’s too late. If it fails, the fight will be lost to those who see the problem but offer only deeper subjugation as the solution.
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Why DEI Was Doomed to Fail
DEI’s fundamental contradiction was this: It argued that race is a social invention—a system created to control people by reducing complexity—yet it never suggested replacing it with a more holistic vision of justice.
Mar 09, 2025
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI, is collapsing—not just as a corporate initiative, but as an ideological framework.
In what seemed like a flash, it became a dominant force in American institutional life, embedded in HR departments, university policies, and media discourse. And now, just as quickly, it finds itself in retreat, with entire DEI offices being gutted across corporate and academic America.
President Donald Trump’s administration has aggressively targeted DEI, issuing executive orders to dismantle these programs across federal agencies. This federal rollback has emboldened Republican-led states to eliminate DEI efforts within public institutions. Meanwhile, MSNBC’s recent firing of Joy Reid, a vocal defender of DEI who embodied many of its most aggressive tendencies, signals a broader cultural shift.
If we want to build a politics that actually addresses racial injustice, we need an approach that is dynamic rather than static—one that acknowledges history without being trapped by it.
The right celebrates this as a victory over “woke ideology.” The left frames it as yet another example of backlash and white fragility. But these explanations fail to account for why DEI has unraveled so quickly.
The reality is that DEI was doomed to fail—not because the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion are unworthy, but because the framework built around them was structurally flawed.
DEI’s fundamental contradiction was this: It argued that race is a social invention—a system created to control people by reducing complexity—yet it never suggested replacing it.
Instead, it doubled down on racial categorization, reinforcing the very thing it claimed to challenge. This reification of race, rather than dismantling structures of oppression, helped sustain them, making DEI brittle and politically untenable.
For the left, the lesson here is crucial. If we don’t break out of the rigid, black-and-white thinking that DEI promoted, we will continue ceding ground to the right. The need to discuss race and identity remains vital, but it must be done in a way that opens space for complexity rather than reinforcing the very constructs that uphold division.
DEI’s fatal flaw is that it traps itself in a closed loop. It rightly argues that race is a historical construct—a tool of power designed to enforce hierarchy. Yet instead of pushing beyond this construct, it reinforces race as fixed and immutable. The result is an ideological contradiction: Race is framed as an arbitrary invention, yet treated as an unchanging, permanent reality.
James Baldwin exposed the hollowness of racial constructs decades ago. In “On Being ‘White’… and Other Lies,” he wrote: “The crisis of leadership in the white community is remarkable—and terrifying—because there is, in fact, no white community.”
Baldwin understood that whiteness, like all racial identities, was not a biological or cultural fact but a political invention—a shifting construct designed to serve power. Yet DEI never seriously engaged with this idea. It simply replaced one rigid racial hierarchy with another, treating whiteness as an unchanging position of privilege while treating other racial identities as fixed sites of oppression.
This rigidity meant that DEI operated as a closed system, reasserting racial categories rather than interrogating them. It failed to engage with race as a lived, historically contingent process—one shaped by history, class, and material conditions.
By doing this, DEI alienated people across the political spectrum. Many white people, even those who consider themselves progressive, felt that DEI erased any meaningful discussion of economic struggle or historical complexity within whiteness.
Meanwhile, many people of color found DEI’s racial framework superficial—offering corporate-friendly language about inclusion while doing little to address material inequalities. The framework functioned as a kind of racial accounting system, but it lacked a clear political vision for building solidarity.
Sheena Mason, a scholar of racial theory, has articulated the deeper flaw in this approach: “To undo racism, we have to undo our belief in race.”
This insight is crucial. If race itself is a construct designed to justify social stratification, then maintaining race as a primary framework for addressing inequality only reinforces the divisions we claim to want to overcome. Yet DEI never suggested dismantling the concept of race—it only sought to redistribute power within its existing framework.
This was a fatal mistake. Modern genetic science has definitively debunked the biological basis of race. There is more genetic diversity within so-called racial groups than between them. The racial categories that shape our politics and institutions are historical inventions, not natural facts.
Yet DEI, instead of leveraging this knowledge to transcend racial essentialism, entrenches race as the defining lens for justice. This approach not only deepens social division but also makes the left vulnerable to the right’s attacks.
By insisting on the permanence of racial categories, DEI created an ideological framework that could be easily caricatured as divisive and exclusionary—giving conservatives an easy target while failing to deliver meaningful change.
Racial discourse often eclipses broader discussions of material conditions, making it harder to address economic inequality in a meaningful way.
Patricia Hill Collins, a foundational thinker in intersectional theory, has observed that, “Race operates as such an overriding feature of African-American experience in the United States that it not only overshadows economic class relations for Blacks but obscures the significance of economic class within the United States in general.”
DEI’s fixation on race, detached from material conditions, contributed to this very problem. By prioritizing racial categorization over economic struggle, it often obscured the broader systems of inequality that shape American life.
This not only made class politics more difficult to articulate but also allowed racial identity to become a stand-in for structural critique—reinforcing an identity-based framework that often benefited elites more than the working class.
With DEI collapsing, the question becomes: What comes next? The right hopes this marks the end of racial discourse altogether. That cannot happen. Structural racism, economic exclusion, and historical injustice are still deeply embedded in American life. Ignoring the function of racism and racial categories plays into the hands of those who want to maintain both racial and economic inequality.
But we cannot simply replace DEI with another rigid, prepackaged framework that reproduces the same mistakes. If we want to build a politics that actually addresses racial injustice, we need an approach that is dynamic rather than static—one that acknowledges history without being trapped by it.
This means recognizing that racial categories are not timeless truths but historical constructions that have been shaped by economic, political, and social forces. It means rejecting the idea that people are permanently locked into racial identities that define their entire experience. And it means moving beyond an approach that focuses primarily on representation and inclusion toward one that addresses material conditions to redistribute power.
DEI’s failure provides an opportunity for the left to rethink how it engages with race and identity. We need to stop seeing race as an unchanging structure and start understanding it as something that can be transformed. Morgan Freeman put it bluntly in an interview, stating, “I don’t want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.”
This is the kind of shift we need—one that integrates historical understanding rather than segregates it, one that moves past “race”—which we know doesn't exist—as a fixed identity category toward a broader, more holistic vision of justice.
The goal should not be to replace DEI with another top-down, bureaucratic approach, but to build a new paradigm that is open, flexible, and capable of fostering real solidarity.
If the left fails to do this, it will keep losing to the right. And if that happens, the backlash against DEI will not just be the end of a flawed initiative—it will be a major setback for the broader struggle for justice and equality.
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Trans People Are Allies in the Struggle Against Hardship, Not Rivals
Anti-trans attacks are designed to keep us all politically reactive, overwhelmed, and unfocused on the deep systemic failures of our society.
Feb 16, 2025
Across the country, trans and nonbinary people and their families are reeling from U.S. President Donald Trump’s cruel anti-trans executive orders, which restrict our access to passports, lifesaving healthcare, military service, athletics, and more.
This builds off an election season that placed us squarely in the crosshairs of political and religious scapegoating.
In 2024 alone, 672 anti-trans bills were introduced at the state and federal level, most of them targeting trans and nonbinary young people. Although more than 600 of those bills failed, President Trump just signed an executive order carrying out many of their worst impulses.
Today, both in the United States and in many parts of the world, trans and nonbinary people—a tiny, frequently poor, and marginalized percentage of the general population—are being used as scapegoats, as symbolic threats to the “right” way of being.
Trump’s order directs multiple agencies to withhold funds from medical providers that provide gender-affirming medical treatments to children. Despite legal challenges to the order, several major hospital systems have indefinitely suspended this care already.
These assaults on trans and nonbinary people closely parallel the strategy that Christian Nationalists used in politicizing abortion access—an issue that had been previously considered apolitical by the majority of Americans, including the majority of American Christians.
Now the eerily similar argument of “defending innocent children” is being deployed against gender-affirming care, despite overwhelming medical and psychological evidence that this care saves young people’s lives.
Denying this care is about repressively controlling young people, not protecting them.
Throughout history, the unjust and powerful have sought to control people’s bodies as a means to maintain their own social position. This often led to “othering” people who could be isolated, marginalized, and blamed for any variety of injustices, while drawing attention away from those who were actually responsible for widespread misery. It’s a practice that goes all the way back to ancient Rome.
Today, both in the United States and in many parts of the world, trans and nonbinary people—a tiny, frequently poor, and marginalized percentage of the general population—are being used as scapegoats, as symbolic threats to the “right” way of being.
There is nothing innate or organic about the rise of anti-LGBTQ hate in the United States. As illustrated through the research of Translash Media, organizations like the National Christian Foundation, the DeVos Family, and the Council for National Policy have been instrumental in the funding, development, and workshopping of anti-trans and anti-queer sentiment, policy, and theology.
Fundamentalist Protestant organizations such as Focus on the Family, the Family Policy Alliance, and the Family Research Council have been key in launching the anti-trans movement within the last decade, including drafting the first anti-trans legislation at the Heritage Foundation’s “Summit on Protecting Children from Sexualization” conference in 2019.
These constant attacks are aimed at getting struggling people to blame trans folks for their problems. And they’re designed to keep us all politically reactive, overwhelmed, and unfocused on the deep systemic failures of our society.
But trans and nonbinary people know all too well what it’s like to struggle. Indeed, being poor and being trans are frequently inseparable experiences: Trans and nonbinary people are twice as likely to be unemployed, twice as likely to be homeless, and four times as likely to live in extreme poverty than the general population.
So we are allies in the struggle against hardship, not rivals. Similarly, we see our struggles as trans people as linked to the fights for reproductive justice, fair wages, safe working conditions, housing, and immigration justice—and against sexual violence, militarism, and police brutality.
In short, we support every other struggle for people just trying to live safely in their own bodies.
While the real dangers and strain of this moment cannot be underestimated, we must continue to examine and effectively address the root causes of our suffering—and find our common cause with all other hurting and dispossessed people.
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