“The infancy of the subject at that moment, and our inexperience of self-government, occasioned gross departures in that draught from genuine republican canons. In truth, the abuses of monarchy had so much filled all the space of political contemplation, that we imagined everything republican which was not monarchy. We had not yet penetrated to the mother principle, that “governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of their people, and execute it.”* Hence, our first constitutions had really no leading principles in them. But experience and reflection have but more and more confirmed me in the particular importance of the equal representation then proposed.”
~Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), letter to Samuel Kerchival (1767-1845), July 12, 1816
Table of Contents
- Early History of Liberalism and Leftism
- Prototype of Radical Left-Liberal
- Religious Dissenters, Political Dissidents
- Anti-Federalism, Anti-Authoritarianism
- Leftist Hope of Red Republicans
- A Blurred Distinction
- Notes and Additional Thoughts
Thomas Jefferson in 1800. Wikimedia Commons.
Early History of Liberalism and Leftism
It’s too bad that more people, left-wingers most of all, don’t know the early history of liberalism and leftism, as related to Jefferson’s above republicanism. Many classical liberals are sometimes labeled as classical radicals. That’s because they opposed for-profit corporations, monopolies, land consolidation, plutocracy, high inequality, etc. But in line with the original leftists (who were indistinct from the original liberals), they existed before communism, socialism, Marxism, and such; as well as before capitalism proper, in their first opposition having been to mercantilism and imperial trade networks. So they knew nothing about such ideologies that supposedly would later distinguish between leftists and liberals. This is where we must separate the original common principles of liberalism and leftism from the various ideologies they spawned over the centuries.
Early radical left-liberals were mostly motivated by principles of freedom, liberty, and autonomy; of which applied equally to all, especially including the Proletariat as against a monied class as exploitative ruling elite. As such, their notion of free markets was liberatory (Marc-William Palen, Pax Economica) where a market was only free to the degree everyone involved in or impacted by the market was free. Hence, individual laborers, small business owners, yeoman farmers, etc controlled the means of their own production or else had genuine bargaining power. That was back when an individual or a family could provide for themselves from natural resources of the land and water, most of it still having been treated as the commons. It filtered into the concept of free labor.
Some liberals of the Radical Enlightenment, such as Baruch Spinoza** (1632-1677), likely had little or no opinion on economics, especially not capitalism that didn’t yet exist — besides, economics was less of a topic for public debate at the time. But it is interesting that Spinoza wasn’t an individualist, as he believed that collectives could also act as singular wholes — maybe related to his pantheism or panentheism. This kind of thought probably underlies some of the early liberal ideas about the ‘People’, not merely a conglomeration of individuals but a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. In similar fashion, patriotism originally referred to loyalty to the People, not to country or government. This kind of liberal collectivism many present left-wingers ignore or would declare non-existent.
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Mayday at Merrymount. Wikimedia Commons.
Prototype of Radical Left-Liberal
The prototype of the Anglo-American liberal as radical leftist would be Thomas Morton (1579-1647), having first visited America in 1622, again in 1624, a third time in 1629, and lastly returning in 1644. He was the first American known to have made a fart joke and a dick joke (Ronnie Pontiac, The Pagan Pilgrim and the First American Maypole). But his name to fame was his having established Ma-re Mount (or Merrymount), not a colony but a meeting place of Europeans and Native Americans. Along with the indentured servants and slaves he freed after a rebellion, they set up a pagan maypole and partied. He wrote of the natives with genuine respect: “the uncivilized people are more just than the civilized” (New English Canaan, 1637). In his utopianism, Morton was everything that the nearby Puritans feared and hated. So, of course, they felt compelled to arrest him and destroy Merrymount. His legacy wasn’t only that of general freedom-loving licentiousness — what the Puritans saw as dreaded heresy of paganism and atheism — but also a challenge to much of Western culture, politics, and economics, although his beliefs and motives were mixed.
“Most English thought it ironic that the natives lived a life of what Europeans thought was poverty amid the abundance of the New World. But Tom, who could not resist imagining all the ways the abundance could be exploited, nevertheless understood that the natives were not to be dismissed, as John Locke dismissed them, for “wasting” the natural resources of the new world. He understood their contentment, living simple lives in harmony with nature. He even wondered if the native lifestyle made the European idea of wealth wrong. What good were piles of possessions that required constant protection? The natives lived without want, in communities of mutual trust. Tom wondered if that might be the true definition of wealth” (Pontiac).
Interestingly, the conflict between Morton and the Puritans was part of an old set of geographical and cultural divisions in England that would come to be inherited by America (David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed; Colin Woodard, American Nations; & Kevin Phillips, The Cousins’ Wars). Morton was a product of the culture in Greater London, specifically the Inns of Court. Whereas the Puritans originated in East Anglia. In being persecuted, many of them had for a time fled to the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe. The Inns of Court was a far different place than East Anglia. It’s where lawyers gathered, but such lawyers included many great thinkers and philosophers. At the time, London had a more tolerant atmosphere and the remnants of paganism were still in the air. This was the same time period as of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), with Morton running in the same social circle.
“On one side were the royalists or Cavaliers. Like Tom they wore their hair long. They sported dashing beards and mustaches. Their costumes were lavish and romantic. Large codpieces were the fashion equivalent of the tight pants and bulge brigade of 70’s rock. The royalists were unrepentant drunks and fornicators, but they were also students of philosophy, inspired by all cultures of history, not only Christian. Their experiments in alchemy and astrology evolved into modern chemistry and astronomy.
“Their opposition, the Puritans, were a younger generation rebelling in every way against their fathers whom they considered irresponsible, reprehensible and downright pagan. The Puritans were sober. They forbid dancing. Laughter was right out. And they couldn’t run or walk too fast, only proceed at a measured pace.” (Pontiac).
Two decades after Morton stepped foot on American land, this cultural divide would break out into open violent conflict during the English Civil War (1642), as part of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Some might argue, as does Pontiac, that the basic pattern was set in place: “America’s split personality from the very start: dour businessmen vs. dirty hippies, ruthless Wall Street cliques vs. Burning Man. Tea Party vs Occupy Wall Street, isn’t it all still Plymouth vs. Ma-re Mount?” But it wasn’t, at that point, yet a clear ideological divide of left versus right, liberal versus conservative. Though the dour Puritans played the leading role of opposition as part of the so-called Roundheads, their side also included the egalitarian and anti-authoritarian Quakers, along with more radical groups that fought corruption and elitism: Levelers, Diggers (True Levelers), Ranters, etc. Some of these dissidents were even proto-communists and proto-anarchists. This radicalism was carried forward by the Real or Radical Whigs who, in combination with the likes of Isaac Watts (1674-1749), would inspire the American Revolution.
The title page of Watts’s Guide to Prayer, fourth edition, 1725. Wikimedia Commons.
By the way, in response to an inquiry about their motivations, one old Revolutionary veteran, Captain Levi Preston (1756-1850), explained that, “Oppressions? I didn’t feel them. I never saw one of those stamps, and always understood that Governor Bernard put them all in Castle William. I am certain I never paid a penny for one of them. Tea tax! I never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard. We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watt’s Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanack. Young man, what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should” (Spirit of ’76). Following the English Civil War when the Crown was re-established, Watts’ Puritan family was persecuted. It led him to anti-authoritarianism, along with preaching a God who was above worldly power and treated all equally.
But in moderating his Puritan upbringing, Watts praised education, reason, independent-mindedness, tolerance, and an irenic spirit. If maybe not exactly liberal and leftist, Watts was ahead of his times. His theology of natural law (i.e., divine truth) was believed to stand above human law. It was the source of much radicalism, the reason later conservatives and counter-revolutionaries, such as the Catholic-raised Edmund Burke (1729-1797), would oppose it. Revolutionary deists like Thomas Paine (1737-1809), Burke’s opponent, would come to reinterpret natural law through a scientific lens, as part of a harsh critique of organized religion, clerical rule, state churches, and supposedly divine-sanctioned monarchy (Nature’s God and American Radicalism).
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A Catalogue of the Severall Sects and Opinions in England and other Nations: With a briefe Rehearsall of their false and dangerous Tenents, a propaganda broadsheet denouncing English dissenters from 1647. Wikimedia Commons.
Religious Dissenters, Political Dissidents
For a truly far-out religious dissenter of this variety, there is the non-conforming Puritan Samuel Gorton (1593-1677) who was a principled civil libertarian, antinomian, and universalist (Libertarianism.org, Samuel Gorton: Antinomian Radical). It was precisely his heretical beliefs that made him such a political dissident and practitioner of civil disobedience. “He believed in equality for women, and he eschewed the formal church leadership. He accepted that all people are imbued with the spirit of God. His beliefs mirrored those adopted by the Quakers. […] Gorton embraced an unorthodox strain of Puritanism. He believed in the equality of all humans and in the presence of the Holy Spirit in everyone. And he opposed slavery” (Dan Landrigan, Samuel Gorton Insults the Puritans, Goes to Jail, Founds Warwick, R.I.).
With the support of Puritan-turned-Free-Baptist Roger Williams (1603–1683), Gorton was the primary author for the 1652 legislation that legally abolished slavery in Rhode Island and, though it passed, it was only briefly enforced (EBSCO, Rhode Island Colony Acts to Prohibit Perpetual Slavery). It was the first attempt in North America; although sometimes that credit is given to Francis Daniel Pastorius (1651-1719), Quaker and founder of Germantown, who wrote the first major anti-slavery petition in 1688 (Wikipedia, 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery; & Harry Schenawolf, Wrong Governor DeSantis! Fact – Millions Had Questioned Slavery Prior to the American Revolution). It’s all in the same period, anyhow; and all led by religious dissenters.
Here is a key takeaway. Gorton’s notion of equality and universal rights truly included everyone, in defiance of the authoritarian claim that property rights superseded human rights. That anti-authoritarian egalitarianism would eventually become a core position of modern leftism, especially in the United States. His egalitarianism, one might surmise, was inspired by Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Stephen J. Patterson, The Forgotten Creed). Rather than a product of the French Revolution, such extreme egalitarianism arose out of the ancient radicalism of early Christianity, as inherited from the earlier Axial Age prophets, visionaries, philosophers, and teachers.
19th century depiction of Gorton on trial in Portsmouth. Wikimedia Commons.
This demonstrates one of the many ways, including town hall democracy in New England (an inheritance of Germanic tribal politics), through which some Puritans would influence a more open culture, in spite of the infamous puritanical tendencies of oppressiveness within mainstream strains of orthodoxy. There was a surprising number of these dissenting Puritans, albeit some of them turned away from Puritanism in having sought a more accommodating religiosity elsewhere. As a case in point, before the English Civil War, Roger Williams arrived in 1631, less than a decade after Morton. He was another classical liberal and lawyer who came out of the Inns of Court.
In not being welcomed among his fellow Puritans, Williams escaped house arrest and, after wintering among a nearby tribe, founded Rhode Island with its self-described ‘democratical’ constitution. This is why his fellow Puritan heretic Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643) sought refuge there, if an opinionated troublemaker like the prickly Gorton was a challenge to such social tolerance. In a letter to John Winthrop (1588-1649), Williams wrote of him, “Master Gorton having abused high and low at Aquidneck, is now bewitching and bemadding poor Providence…” Still, Rhode Island was the only colony where Gorton gained freedom. Unsurprisingly, some religious dissenters fell into the habit of always looking for a fight, even among themselves — surely, they would’ve measured low on the personality trait of ‘agreeableness’ (FFM) and maybe high on ‘neuroticism’. It reminds one of fractious left-wingers today.
As a Free Baptist, Williams had no personal interest in organized religion, instead maintaining his faith as private conscience and allowing others the same right — instead of arresting, punishing, or banishing critics and challengers, he invited them to public debate. Going beyond even Morton’s radicalism, if maybe not beyond that of Gorton, he advocated in his writings for collective land rights of the indigenous; as a well known and influential thinker before John Locke had published anything on property rights. Having considered the natives to be friends and neighbors, he refused to side with the other colonists during King Philip’s War. So, William’s liberal, multicultural, and secular democracy wasn’t merely about individualism either. I’m not sure where anyone got the idea that all liberals are and always were individualists and that they based everything on individualism, as opposed to leftists as collectivists. It’s historical amnesia, as well as ignorance of the diversity of left-liberalism into the present.
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The Articles of Confederation, ratified in 1781. This was the format for the United States government until the Constitution. Wikimedia Commons.
Anti-Federalism, Anti-Authoritarianism
As open to socialism, anarchism, and libertarianism, my own left-liberalism takes inspiration from this radical tradition of left-liberalism, specifically in the above described Anglo-American lineage. I’m particularly influenced by Thomas Paine who, though he conceded that the economic changes were likely irreversible, wanted to compensate with a citizen’s dividend. As to be paid for by progressive land taxation, it would’ve been a combination of old age pension, universal basic income, and a never-ending reparations for the stolen commons. He also favored transnational revolution, a global citizenry, total freedom, universal suffrage, and direct majoritarian democracy; as well as being a fellow traveler with feminists. He was an abolitionist toward all forms of oppression: slavery, plutocracy, aristocracy, monarchy, theocracy, etc. That’s far left, even by today’s standards.
One of the first commentators on a basic political divide was Paine’s friend and collaborator, Thomas Jefferson. He described leftism and liberalism as synonyms: “for in truth the parties of Whig and Tory are those of nature. they exist in all countries, whether called by these names, or by those of Aristocrats and democrats, coté droite [right side] or coté gauche [left side], Ultras or Radicals, Serviles or Liberals” (letter to Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834), November 4, 1823). He wasn’t shy about who he sided with. Jefferson’s opposition to slavery and other forms of exploitation “is vital for contextualizing the French connection in that he had no problem considering himself a republican of the Jacobin type” (M.A. Iasilli, A Left-Wing History of the Republican Party).
“Jefferson without reservation proclaims that the unequal distribution of property is in direct violation of natural rights. This is a significant deviation from the traditional consensus of laissez-faire economics that pervades American history. This experience shaped Jefferson’s views on equality and introduced a strain of egalitarianism into the lexicon of anti-Federalist thought. Unlike the Federalists, who upheld the principle of property as the keystone of natural rights, Jefferson offered a critique that sparked consciousness of social class divisions and the need to mitigate such inequality through progressive reform, including taxation on the value of assets.”
Paine and other Anti-Federalists shared that negative view toward land consolidation and wealth concentration, hence the perceived need for some kind of redistribution or equalization such as progressive land taxation, but of course through democratic process. They saw a link between all forms of freedom, both negative and positive, in relation to: economic, social, religious, and political. That’s also why liberalism (non-authoritarianism) and leftism (non-dominance) are inseparable in practice. Such an understanding was more common in the past. That mixing of and alliance between what we now think of as leftism and liberalism continued later into the 19th century (Marxism Within Capitalism).
By the way, one should always keep in mind that the ‘Anti-Federalist’ label is a misnomer. The Anti-Federalists were actually the real federalists, whereas many of those who self-identified as Federalists were, instead, nationalists, imperialists, and neo-monarchists (Federalist’s “Vigorous Executive” and Project 2025’s Imperial Presidency). The original federal document was the Articles of Confederation that placed most political power in the hands of the state governments, as the closest representatives of the people in governing themselves. The (pseudo-)Federalists feared democracy, which is why the counterrevolutionary Constitutional Convention resulted in the percentage of US residents with voting rights having been lower than under the British Empire. So, it was taxation with even less representation.
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Karl Marx, 1875. Wikimedia Commons.
Leftist Hope of Red Republicans
Karl Marx (1818-1883) supported the presidency of Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) and the United States Republican Party, then known as the Red Republicans because of their radicalism, including advocates of: free labor, abolitionism, suffragism, feminism, libertinism, libertarianism, temperance, dietary reform, vegetarianism, pacifism, labor unionism, socialism, Marxism, etc (Al Benson Jr. and Walter Donald Kennedy, Red Republicans and Lincoln’s Marxists; John Nichols, The S Word; & A Child of Stonewall, The Marxist Origins of the GOP — and How they Turned Away from Radicalism). Marx was so smitten with the United States that, at one point, he began planning to immigrate. On behalf of the International Working Man’s Association, Marx wrote a letter to Abraham Lincoln congratulating him on re-election and abolition of slavery, to which Lincoln responded with appreciation through his London ambassador.
So, Lincoln was well aware of Marx. In fact, he regularly read the leading Whig-turned-Republican newspaper, The New York Daily Tribune, that hired Marx as a foreign correspondent. Over a decade, more than 500 of Marx’s writings (if some ghostwritten by Friedrich Engels (1820-1895)) were published and mostly under his own name (but others put under the Tribune owner’s name, Horace Greeley (1811–1872)), more than in any other publication of that period. Many of those newspaper articles formed material for his book Das Kapital (William Harlan Hale, When Karl Marx Worked For Horace Greeley). It helped Marx formulate and articulate many of his ideas, as no other widely distributed newspaper would publish him, especially not in London.
The owner Greeley was a utopian socialist, abolitionist, feminist, and vegetarian — Lincoln referred to him as “an old friend” (letter, August 22, 1862). And the newspaper’s editor, the socialist Charles Anderson Dana (1819-1897), personally knew and corresponded with Marx. After leaving the newspaper, Dana was brought into Lincoln’s administration, first as as a special commissioner in the War Department and then as the Assistant Secretary of the War Department, and in that position he reported directly to President Lincoln. Greeley never worked professionally with Lincoln, but he did get involved in politics. He became a collaborator with the radical Alvin Earle Bovay (1818-1903) who earlier was a left-wing founder of the Republican Party.
Tribune editorial staff. Horace Greeley (second from the right in front). Charles Anderson Dana (center back). Wikimedia Commons.
Interestingly, an 1854 meeting about abolitionism in Ripon, Wisconsin*** is sometimes considered the origin of the Republican Party. Ten years earlier, based on the principles of French philosopher Charles Fourier (1772-1837), a socialist commune was established nearby in Ceresco, known as the Wisconsin Phalanx. It was later incorporated into Ripon. Along with former Whigs, Free Soilers, Liberty Party members, and disgruntled Democrats, some of the ex-commune members attended that meeting in Ripon’s Little White Schoolhouse, literally blocks away from the disbanded commune. Keep in mind that ‘republican’ was originally one of those words that was interchangeable with radical, left-wing, and liberal.
Bovay “was the head of the National reform Association. He also was editor of Young America newspaper. It’s interesting that Friedrich Engels, the co-author of the manifesto with Karl Marx, wrote another publication called “The Principles of Communism.” And in that volume he mentioned that the Marxist, the communist, had formed a common cause with Alvin Bovay’s National Reform Association” (Bill Young, U.S. Republican party had its roots in Marxism). Greeley and Bovay were active in an organization that established communes across the United States. Later, they worked together to establish a new socialist party. That might’ve been the party in which Greeley ran as a socialist candidate.
At the time, there were a lot of Marxists, socialists, and social democrats. Following the failed 1848 revolutions, an estimated 4-10,000 Forty-Eighters fled to the United States as refugees. They tended to be highly educated and socially liberal, with the majority having been artists, intellectuals, academics, scientists, journalists, professionals, and politicians — the visionaries, leaders, and influencers of their era. Besides holding positions in Lincoln’s administration, these leftists and left-liberals also filled the Union army, most as soldiers and officers but also including major military leaders like General August Willich (1810-1878), a communist, and Colonel Joseph Weydemeyer (1818-1866), a Marxist.
First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln, an 1864 portrait by Francis Bicknell Carpenter. Wikimedia Commons.
It’s from Marxists that Lincoln learned of the labor theory of value, which he publicly defended: “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. […] Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” That was from his first message to Congress, in which he criticized the “effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government.” Lincoln came out swinging. As he was in many ways more radical than Bernie Sanders, his views stated then are certainly far to the left of the DNC elite. He was carrying forward the radical left-liberalism of Paine and others.
Having been born working poor, Lincoln hated elitism and exploitation, specifically having opposed the mudsill theory. It was premised on a belief that a natural aristocracy inevitably and rightly ruled over a subjugated permanent underclass, with the latter’s presumed sole purpose being to serve the elite and support their wealth and power, interests and lifestyle. So, though a capitalist in supporting private property rights (with the expectation that property should be more evenly distributed), this gave Lincoln a shared agenda with left-wingers. As part of the broad left, many early left-liberals were strong advocates of freedom in all senses, including radical ideals like free labor and free markets — freedom in practice, not just words.
But it wasn’t only an ideological affinity in his role as a professional politician. When a boy in southern Indiana, Lincoln was inspired by a nearby socialist commune, that of the Owenites at New Harmony. As a lover of books, he never forgot the time when the socialists transported their ‘Boatload of Books’ to their new community, as he watched them pass by on the river. Later, he got to know the Scottish-Welsh Owen family and remained close to them for the rest of his life. Although it’s hard to imagine today, a major hotbed of radicalism in the past was the Midwest, including southern Indiana that also gave birth to the famous socialist Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926) (Radicals & Reformers of Indiana).
One of the Owen sons, Robert Dale Owen (1801-1877), became a reformer and politician. He prodded Lincoln toward abolitionism in a letter that arrived days before the Emancipation Proclamation (Sept. 17, 1862.). Some think it finally pushed the reluctant Lincoln to make that hard decision, as he so feared the breaking of the Union. The Owen sons were major political actors in promoting the establishment of national museums, land grant colleges, etc. If often more moderate in his own politics, Lincoln was a fellow traveler of such radicals that he had been surrounded by his entire lifetime. As such, after being assassinated, “The defeat of Lincoln’s vision of a unified, democratic, and authoritative republic was a defeat for the socialists too” (Robin Blackburn, Lincoln and Marx).
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Two-axis political compass chart with a horizontal socio-economic axis and a vertical socio-cultural axis and ideologically representative political colours, an example for a frequently used model of the political spectrum. Wikimedia Commons.
A Blurred Distinction
Even into the early 1900s, liberalism and leftism weren’t as clearly demarcated. It was similar to how Progressives and municipal socialists both favored public health policies, opposed corruption, pushed democratic reforms, fought organized crime, etc. Even the right-wing Theodore Roosevelt understood the lines were blurry between reformers, radicals, and revolutionaries (Capitalists Learning From Socialists). Part of it was that there were so many third parties that coalition politics was far more common. People also forget that many early socialists were Christians, such as the the author of the Pledge of Allegiance, the Baptist minister Francis Bellamy (1855-1931). Secularism is also a product of Christianity, especially supported by early evangelicals and other religious dissenters who had been oppressed under the rule of state churches and often the targets of religious persecution.
Numerous issues like these crossed over between liberalism and leftism, between theists and atheists (or deists, etc). Whereas many of the divides that dominate today weren’t significant back then. Or else they took different form. One example is abortion. Until the politicized culture wars of the right-wing shadow network (Anne Nelson), organized and orchestrated by Paul Weyrich (1942-2008), Catholics and first wave feminists were anti-choice while Protestants and second wave feminists were pro-choice. Then the Machiavellian masterminds of the religious right realized most ordinary conservatives no longer wanted to rally around racism, much less be openly identified with it, if they may have been fine with casual racism that was the norm. So, they shifted their rhetoric to abortion as baby-killing and thus began the present culture war with its dog-whistle politics.
As an important clarification, Jefferson made a point about the distinction between left/liberal and right/conservative. He lamented that, “we imagined everything republican which was not monarchy” (Kerchival letter). The same basic problem still applies. Sadly, some of us left-wingers (or those falsely claiming to be), especially tankies and campists, have imagined that everything left-wing which was not corporate capitalism. So, they’ve lowered their standards to an aspiration of state capitalism. It’s ironic that they’re stronger proponents of capitalism than many of the earliest liberals. Their only disagreement with right-wing capitalists is the kind of capitalism they’d prefer and hence the kind of capitalist class they want to rule.
Rev. Francis J. Bellamy, American minister and author of the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance. Wikimedia Commons.
So, Stalinism, Marxist-Leninism, and the vanguard elite was mistakenly conceived as left-wing. That was in spite of the USSR effectively having been, besides state capitalist with a capitalist class, an authoritarian state-empire, a dictatorship, a personality cult, neo-feudalism, and red fascism. That contradicts and betrays every leftist principle — liberty, egalitarianism, and solidarity — along with having denied direct, democratic worker control of the means of production (the non-negotiable, defining principle of communism). Such people are counterrevolutionary pseudo-leftists who have co-opted and recuperated leftist ideology and rhetoric, identity and labels (The Threat of the Fake Left). Leftism isn’t defined by mere collectivism, as right-wing ideologies too can be collectivist. The distinction is whether it’s non-authoritarian, egalitarian collectivism (left-wing) or authoritarian, inegalitarian collectivism (right-wing).
By the way, it’s precisely because I’m strongly and radically liberal, by principle and personality, that I sometimes identify as far left. Arguably, the key shared principles of both liberalism and leftism are anti-authoritarianism and anti-dominance. Some claim that liberalism is just one variety of leftism and I partly agree with that. But I sometimes put it the opposite way. Liberalism is the dominant paradigm, with which leftists either embrace or react to, although this probably more often happens unconsciously than with awareness. It’s why, in unconscious reaction, so many supposed ‘left-wingers’ end up sounding like right-wingers by adopting illiberal authoritarianism.
Still, I sometimes think about it in an entirely other way. The two may be considered as operating in separate areas or on different levels. Maybe leftism is more about specific ideological principles. That is ideology proper, as it’s most commonly understood. Be it communist, anarchist, left-libertarian, liberal democratic, or whatever, they all share the values of non-authoritarianism and non-dominance: freedom, liberty, autonomy, agency, self-determination, self-governance, etc; as applied equally (egalitarianism) to all (solidarity, class or group consciousness, citizens of the world) — Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. That’s the original broad left, prior to it being fractured into supposedly competing ideological groups.
Liberalism, though, has more the connotation of a mentality and attitude, a way of being and relating. It’s a descriptive quality, be it of an individual or group, that can be tacked onto an ideological identity. Most fundamentally, it’s to be liberal-minded in terms of the personality trait ‘openness to experience’ (FFM): negative capability, intellectual curiosity, aesthetic appreciation, cognitive empathy, etc. It’s to be open to others and the world. The original sense of liberalism was to be open-minded, freedom-loving, trusting, kind, sympathetic, tolerant, inclusive, and generous. But of course, the distinction between the liberalism and leftism has always been overlapping. Liberal, liberty, libertine, and liberation are all cognate. It all comes down to freedom.
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Notes and Additional Thoughts
5 May 1789 opening of the Estates General of 1789 in Versailles. Wikimedia Commons.
*Note 1:
It’s useful to return to first principles, as Jefferson was doing. And living at the time when the broad left was taking form, first principles were much more clearly potent in his mind. He asserted that the mother principle of republicanism, as fundamentally identical to that of liberalism and leftism, is that “governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of their people, and execute it.” Though not rolling off the tongue in the same way, that would be more clear if we reinterpreted it with greater breadth and precision:
Any system, organization, or institution (political party, governing body, etc) is only legitimate, according to leftist and liberal principles of non-authoritarianism and non-dominance, to the extent there is direct democratic control, transparency, and accountability as expressed in collective self-determination and self-governance, and as balanced with universal and equal rights of freedom and liberty, autonomy and agency, access and empowerment, fairness and justice.
In essence, that defining standard would apply equally to a social democratic state, a democratic socialist confederation, a municipal socialist city, an egalitarian commune, a worker cooperative, a labor union, or any number of other leftist possibilities. This is the ideological scaffolding that, for example, holds up the defining principle of communism: worker control of the means of production. And it’s what puts the lie to Soviet state capitalism and red fascism being portrayed as actual communism.
Baruch Spinoza. Wikimedia Commons.
**Note 2 (5/29/26):
While writing pieces like this, I’m well aware that I have an Anglo-American bias. That’s simply because it’s the history I know in the greatest detail. Plus, it’s not only that the American Revolution was the precedent for the French Revolution, Haitian Revolution, etc. Even earlier, the English Civil War — what some consider the first modern revolution, specifically of class war — was the precedent for the American Revolution and the entire early modern revolutionary period. (See: Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution 1603-1714 & The World Turned Upside Down; Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution; Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642; Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire; John Rees, The Leveller Revolution; Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution; Jonathan Healey, The Blazing World & The Blood in Winter; etc.)
But I do have knowledge beyond that. There was a lot of cross-cultural influences back then, including waves of immigrants and refugees. That meant much movement and mixing of ideas. It’s important to note that the first major Enlightenment thinker was not English, neither Welsh, Scottish, Scots-Irish, nor Irish. Instead, it was a Dutch Jewish heretic, Baruch Spinoza (Jonathan Israel: Radical Enlightenment, Enlightenment Contested, A Revolution of the Mind, Democratic Enlightenment, Revolutionary Jews, & Spinoza, Life and Legacy). One might note that, besides John Locke, many Puritans spent time in Netherlands as Marian Exiles. It was there that Puritans became aligned with and influenced by Calvinists like the French Huguenots who also were in exile. So, though the Protestant Reformation never reached the British Isles, those exiles upon return brought that influence back with them and then imported it to the American colonies.
If in a different vein from Spinoza, the earliest classical liberal in the Americas might’ve been Samuel de Champlain (1574-1635), more of a man of action than of thought. He was a French explorer, founder of Quebec City, and the Father of New France (David Hackett Fischer, Champlain’s Dream). Though a colonizer, he saw the New World as an opportunity to escape the violence, persecution, bigotry, and authoritarianism of Europe so as to establish a new kind of society. Though a battle-hardened soldier, and though willing to fight on behalf of allies, he went to great lengths to live peacefully among the neighboring natives. Rather than conquering and ruling over or else eliminating them with genocide, he championed mutual tolerance and trade with indigenous peoples, not just coexistence but cohabitation. He encouraged intermarriage and the radical practice of exchanging children to be raised in the other’s culture, which would’ve created familiarity and a shared sense of society. His colony was one of the first secular experiments in North America, as neither did he show any interest to convert the natives. His friendly relations established a culture of trust that later benefitted Thomas Morton, Roger Williams, and William Penn.
Wikimedia Commons.
The French had other influences as well. The Scottish Enlightenment was also important. But one must acknowledge that some of the greatest Scottish thinkers of that period were educated or taught in French Universities, specifically Protestant/Huguenot academies and institutions (Mark L. Hulliung, Enlightenment in Scotland and France; Alexander Broadie, Scottish Philosophers in France; Alexander Broadie, Scottish Enlightenment Links with France; & Alexander Broadie, Agreeable Connexions). Arthur Herman argues that the Scottish invented the modern world (How the Scots Invented the Modern World). But if that’s the case, we must understand that, in the British Isles, Scotland had one of the strongest ties to the European mainland, if England was closer in geographical distance. The French helped shape Scotland as a modern country, and vice versa. The Enlightenment was an international project. So many Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers were cosmopolitan figures who knew multiple languages and traveled broadly.
As common in that era, religious dissenters, often as radical non-conformists (see more below in additional thoughts), were among the greatest of political dissidents or elsewise deemed threats to society. Some French Huguenots, as refugees, joined the Scots-Irish and came to the American colonies (Catharine Randall, From a Far Country: Camisards and Huguenots in the Atlantic World). Like French Camisards, they had immense influence on early Scottish, English, and American thought. As a rough third of colonists and a near majority in Pennsylvania, Germans also had much influence, specifically that of Pietists, Familists, Brethren, Hutterites, Mennonites, and Amish. William Penn was one of those shaped by this international milieu of protesters, reformers, secularists, egalitarians, multiculturalists, pacifists, liberationists, anti-authoritarians, and civil libertarians. “His father descended from Welsh and his mother was Dutch. As a youth, he spent many years in Ireland where he first learned of Quakerism. Also, as a young adult, he studied with a French Huguenot theologian at a French academy and was strongly influenced by French culture. Later on, he spent many years as a missionary in Germany” (General American and the Particulars of Our Origins).
Here is another example of overt syncretism. The French Camisards were a charismatic, ecstatic sect of Calvinist peasants. In response to state persecution after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, they took up arms in rebellion and were put down (1702–1706). They then fled to London where they came into contact with many other religious dissenters. A Quaker splinter group merged with some of the Camisards. They came to be known as the Shakers. After coming to America, their leader Mother Ann Lee (1736-1784), the Second Coming of Christ, became one of the most powerful and influential figures (mentioned again below). They were extreme egalitarians and pacifists, treating all people equally, no matter gender or race. They would even take in blacks, including escaped slaves. This brought them into conflict with others, especially in slave areas. Like the First Coming of Jesus as a man, they refused any human law that contradicted divine law. They would experience centuries of persecution for their faith.
Johann Reinhold Forster and Georg Forster, by John Francis Rigaud, London 1780.[75] The plant in the brim of the hat is a Forstera sedifolia and the bird in Johann Forster’s hand a New Zealand bellbird, locating the scene in New Zealand.[76] However, the painting has been commonly called “Reinhold and George Forster at Tahiti” or similar. Wikimedia Commons.
During the same period, there is another major figure, Johann Georg Adam Forster or more commonly known as Georg Forster (1754–1794), who I just discovered (Andrea Wulf, The Traveler). With partial Scottish ancestry, he was a German-Polish explorer, geographer, naturalist, ethnologist, artist, travel writer, journalist, linguist, translator, teacher, professor, librarian, and revolutionary. Besides his travels, he worked in numerous countries: Russia, England, Poland, and various German countries. But he had no national loyalties, considering himself a citizen of the world. By the time the American Revolution began, he had already been traveling to foreign lands with his father on scientific expeditions, including as part of Captain James Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific (1772–1775), about which he wrote a popular account, A Voyage Round the World. He stood out in his time for being able to observe other cultures without overt Western and Christian bias, and without Romantic interpretation of Noble Savages; setting a precedent for the later anti-racism and cultural relativism of the anthropologist Franz Boas.
Forster met with Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) in Paris during the American Revolution (Scott Horton, Georg Forster’s Recollection of Benjamin Franklin). He also corresponded with numerous Enlightenment figures, such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). In 1790, the young Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) traveled with and was inspired by him. Having previously translated Rights of Man, Forster several years later met his own hero Thomas Paine, in Paris (1793). Friedrich Engels dubbed Forster “the German Thomas Paine.” In opposing racial supremacy and imperialism, both men were radical pamphleteers who supported cosmopolitanism, liberation, transnational revolution, slave abolition, and universal human rights. Also, similar to Paine’s association with women’s rights advocates, Forster admired strong women, including accepting his wife’s independence and affairs. But also like Paine, he became a pariah for his radicalism and was written out of the history books.
As of some these diverse examples demonstrate, even if we focus on early modern history outside of the Anglosphere, all of it overlaps and forms into confluences, often inspiring and spawning changes in the British Isles and American colonies. That was even more true as time went on. One of the side effects of colonial imperialism was a new kind of cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and often multilingualism. Upon the trade routes, there were not only raw goods and the products made from them but also ideas, carried by individuals and in books. It also made possible an interlinking, across borders, of philosophers, scientists, and writers that formed into an increasingly common vision and identity; including but not limited to the gentlemanly Invisible College and Republic of Letters. For example, American aristocrats and intellectuals like Thomas Jefferson didn’t only read John Locke but also Baruch Spinoza, along with a wide array of other texts, such as the Koran. In Jefferson’s America, all were welcome, if some of his more radical friends and associates took that promise to a further extent.
On a related note, Wisconsin was, arguably, once the most progressive state in the Union. But as the above history indicates, this progressivism was grounded in and inspired by radicalism. The Progressive Movement began on the state level and, with the earlier power of third parties in state politics, it was often more ambitious and visionary in local politics where it was easier to get major projects done. Wisconsin was one of those places where social democracy met and merged with democratic socialism.
Take the Milwaukee sewer socialists who governed almost continuously for a half century. The popular tv show Happy Days was set in the last era of socialist rule. That’s why they were happy. Like those municipal socialists, Progressives had similar aims of democratic reform, ending political corruption, stopping organized crime, and public health programs — all bread and butter issues to improve the everyday lives of residents and workers. Indeed, Progressivism arose out of the Red Republicans. As the famous Progressive politician Robert M. La Follette (1855-1925) put it,
“In no partisan spirit I contend that the Progressive movement began within the Republican Party. It rapidly advanced its control, shaping policies of state administrations, and stamping its impress upon national legislation as a distinctly Progressive Republican movement. And upon this fact in recent political history I appeal to Progressive Republicans everywhere to maintain their organization within the Republican party” (La Follette’s Weekly Magazine, Volume 4, 1912).
How far the Republican Party has fallen! Then again, we might hope that this is a cycle that will swing back to progressivism again, as has happened before.
- To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party
by Heather Cox Richardson - When Republicans Were Progressive
by David Durenberger & Lori Sturdevant - Unreasonable Men: Theodore Roosevelt and the Republican Rebels Who Created Progressive Politics
by Michael Wolraich - Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP
by Mary C. Brennan
An Agreement of the People, a series of manifestos, published between 1647 and 1649, for constitutional changes to the English state often associated with the Levellers. Wikimedia Commons.
Additional Thoughts (6/4/26):
About religious non-conformists, there were some strange ones from the 1600s onward. It wasn’t only high-born intellectuals who were the voices of the Enlightenment. Intriguingly, it was precisely religion that often allowed expression of the most extreme forms of egalitarianism, presumably going back to some of the crazy stuff in New Testament, such as the abovementioned Galatians 3:28. Stephen J. Patterson notes, in The Forgotten Creed, that Christians had been taking that divine proclamation seriously since the first generation of Christians, as attested to in the Pauline Epistles. In opposition to both Jewish and Roman tradition, custom, and religious law, woman and slaves held high positions of authority, men let their hair grow long and Christian women let their hair hang loose, and the two genders danced ecstatically together–scandalous! Plus, they refused to participate in the official imperial religion, as an early expression of proto-secularism that was a punishable offense.
It went back further actually, as demonstrated in the 14th century English Peasants Revolt when the demand was “On earth as it is in heaven” (Lord’s Prayer, Matthew 6:10). When the peasants looked around at the flagrant inequality, corruption, and abuse, they didn’t see anything resembling the heaven of the Bible. So, they rampaged across the countryside killing elites of all sorts, just stopping short of killing the king, as the king was still (incorrectly) perceived as being on the side of the people. The reason the modern right-wing elite prioritize co-opting religion and recuperating theology is specifically because they fear its power. Jesus himself was a radical (Fulfillment of the Law). Those early Christians breaking and betraying Jewish commandments and Roman law were doing so by following the example of Jesus who did the same himself on a regular basis. Though he didn’t come to replace the law as a new lawmaking ruler or theocrat, he did come to fulfill the law and make it moot. It wasn’t that he was attempting to attack or refute human law of worldly power, including that of priests. Rather, he simply ignored its interpellative hail, its voice of authority. It was superseded (i.e., fulfilled) by natural law.
One suspects that Galatians 3:28 had influenced many of the religious malcontents and visionaries of the early modern revolutionary period. The most famous example being Mother Ann Lee, as the Shaker prophetess and godwoman, the Second Coming of Christ. The implications are obvious and stated openly. Christ — and hence God — was transgender, both man and woman. She drew a large following who seriously took her as the female embodiment of the divine. In setting a powerful example, the Shakers established a compelling precedent for radical egalitarianism that, in many ways, remains radical to this day. If such a religious figure were alive now, she would terrify the religious right more than Stalin rising from his grave. But as there are only a few Shakers remaining in the world, the religious right can dismiss them as quaint.
Portrait of the Public Universal Friend by J.L.D. Mathies. Wikimedia Commons.
Besides the Shakers, the Quakers created other radicals as well. Born female to Quaker parents in Rhode Island, Jemima Wilkinson (1752-1819) suffered a severe illness in 1776 (Nina Sankovitch, Not Your Founding Father), the same year that the American colonies declared independence and the Quakers prohibited members from owning slaves. After that, this individual claimed to have died, been reborn (as a “genderless evangelist,” “transgender evangelist,” or “spiritual transvestite” ~Wikipedia), and reanimated with a new spirit. Then the individual self-identified as the Public Universal Friend (AKA ‘the Friend’ or ‘P.U.F.’), no longer acknowledging the birth name. Besides dressing androgynously, the Public Universal Friend and followers were mixed on pronouns, sometimes avoiding them altogether. Talk about a Woke Social Justice Warrior!
The Friend founded the Universal Friends, largely a splinter group of the Quakers. Though disowned by the Society of Friends (i.e., Orthodox Quakers), many Free Quakers welcomed and supported the Universal Friends. Having been raised Quaker, the Friend maintained a similar set of beliefs and values, similar as well to the contemporary Shakers. In reference to scholarship, it’s written in the Wikipedia article that, “[Susan] Juster and others state that, to followers, the Friend may have embodied Paul’s statement in Galatians 3:28 that ‘there is neither male nor female’ in Christ.[139][141] Catherine Wessinger, Brekus, and others state that the Friend defied the idea of gender as binary and as natural and essential or innate[142][143][144]“. Like some earlier radicals, the Friend treated everyone equally, even Native Americans: “the Friend gave a speech to the US government officials and Iroquois chiefs about ‘the Importance of Peace & Love’.” If extremely unconventional for the mainstream at the time, this kind of stuff continually cropped up among the religious fringe. And more:
“The Public Universal Friend rejected the ideas of predestination and election, held that anyone, regardless of gender, could gain access to God’s light and that God spoke directly to individuals who had free will to choose how to act and believe, and believed in the possibility of universal salvation.[73][74] Calling for the abolition of slavery,[77][78][79] the Friend persuaded followers who held people in slavery to free them.[80][81] Several members of the congregation of Universal Friends were black, and they acted as witnesses for manumission papers.[80][81] The Friend preached humility[82] and hospitality towards everyone;[83] kept religious meetings open to the public, and housed and fed visitors, including those who came only out of curiosity[83] and indigenous people, with whom the preacher generally had a cordial relationship.[84] […] The preacher also held that women should “obey God rather than men”,[86] and the most committed followers included roughly four dozen unmarried women known as the Faithful Sisterhood who took on leading roles of the sort which were often reserved to men.[88] The portion of households headed by women in the Society’s settlements (20%) was much higher than in surrounding areas.[89]“
Marmalade 
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