The Owner Owns

But Owning and Empathy Don't Go Together

I do my best to keep up with, and respond to, the daily news of the de-construction of the United States as it is happening. But it is also important to see what is happening philosophically, because as easy as it may be to say what we oppose, we also have to know what we are for. Philosophy is, I will maintain steadfastly, the best way to do this.

This post will look at the philosophic presuppositions held by the Republican Administration and its base within the population, in particular the philosophy behind “owning the libs.”

The current Republican Administration is all about “owning” things - Greenland, the Panama Canal, Canada, for starters. As the stock market tanks (and opponents of the Administration should be honest with themselves and realize full well that the stock market could at any point reverse course and have massive gains), the Republican President of the United States acknowledges some hard times but keeps assuring Americans of great wealth coming. Not freedom. Not creativity. Not quality of life. Not quality health care. But great wealth. It does not matter to me whether or not the Republican President’s promise of great wealth is likely to come true or not, for a selected few of his cronies or for all Americans. It is the substance of the promise - the prioritization of monetary wealth, that irks me.

This Republican Administration is capitalism on steroids. Fortunately, we have a lot of excellent philosophic writing about capitalism.

For instance, this paragraph from Marx’s Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie. wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

Currently, we are swimming without a wet suit in “the icy water of egotistical calculation” with a Republican President whose “naked self-interest” and “callous” transactional personal style has now been projected onto the nation, to the consistent applause of half the electorate, and the fawning approval of a terrified legislative branch of government. Employees are dismissed from government jobs without cause, and find their own MAGAist families refer to their fired children as part of government waste and abuse - in other words, “personal worth” resolved “into exchange value".” But Trump seemingly defies the “unconscionable freedom - Free Trade.” I am not an economist, but my instinct tells me that what he wants is to use unFree Trade - tariffs - to force a situation wherein the “naked self-interest” of the United States can bully other nations into accepting free trade on its terms only - an example of “pitilessly [tearing] asunder” the “idyllic relations” of the existing world order with NATO, the G7, etc. Just a thought - I welcome elaborative comments and alternative readings of this. But since the dialectic does not hold still, conditions in 2025 are logically not precisely the same as they were in 1848. The dynamics of capitalism, though, are its inherent logic, and the nervous reactions of the stock market to the uncertainties of the Republican President’s tariff proclamations are an indication that Marx was not mistaken in this structural outline.

So, as I said, this Republican Administration - with its obsequious Congress and selected judges - is capitalism unmasked, with fangs out. But its power - and its ability to cow the opposition party (such as it is) and its own legislators - comes from its voting base, the solid phalanx of people who have voted for the current President (in many cases, three Presidential elections in a row). The source and force of the Republican Administration’s power comes from their public support, and therefore the philosophic presuppositions of that percentage of the voting public.

So many analyses of the Republican voting majority, especially the Trumpeters, have focused on their race, their religious affiliations, and/or their rurality. But none of those identities gets all of them. There are plenty of secular Trump supporters, plenty of non-evangelicals, and a growing number of urban residents (even statistically small but not insignificant numbers of people of color). So what unites all of them? I’d like to suggest that it is capitalism’s quality of elevating the objective clarity of “naked self-interest” and “egotistical calculation” above any values associated with empathy. And this is explicitly affirmed by Elon Musk, who forthrightly articulates that empathy is the enemy.

“Owning The Libs”

The colloquial meaning of “own” is fairly recent, a clever creation of the gamer subculture. It refers to being so superior in a contest that you do not merely defeat your opponent, but go further. You totally defeat, to the point of humiliation and resignation, your opponent. You embarrass your opponent. Make them a laughing stock.

While “owning” in this colloquial sense can be found in many parts of culture (sports, rap, cartoons, etc.), “owning the libs” is a specific sadistic baiting of their opposition enjoyed (in all dimensions of “enjoy”) by the majority of Republican voters. Apparently Republican voters so enjoy seeing those they deem “liberals” rhetorically bested, that they can’t get enough of it. As is often the case with Triumphalist movements, victory does not bring graciousness, but an escalation of the desire to stomp on the defeated. And in this case, it means that those of us who side with empathy are the target. In other words, those of us who stand with starving children worldwide (and our ability as a nation to help), who side with those who defeated Hitler, who side with the marginalized, the oppressed, the homeless, the immigrant, who side with education, who side with science, who side with Ukraine, who side with free speech, who side with being nice to Canadians! - well, Republican voters and Republican Media so enjoy seeing us distraught that they have made “owning the libs” their catchphrase and a window into their philosophy (yes, there is a whole Wikipedia article on this phrase).

Icy cold waters of egotistical calculation drowning all ecstasies, enthusiasms, and sentiments that might hold a hint of empathy.

“Owning the libs” is meant to further the progress of capitalism and its attendant icy selfishness. The gif above with which I chose to illustrate “owned” has it all - the big bully stomping on the little guy, and an observer acting like a bookkeeper to credit what occurred. One of the sub-catchphrases of “owning the libs” is seen in the picture below: “Fuck Your Feelings.”

The story of which this photo is a part deals with this “owning the libs” culture in the context of a pro-Trump flotilla in NYC on September 11, 2020.

Roger Taney Owns The Right(s)

As a scholar of American history, and the pre-Civil War period and Abolition in particular, there is no question in my mind that the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision is the worst Supreme Court decision in history. It enables the later disgraceful Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). To overturn Dred Scott - or at least to start to unwind its damage - took a Civil War, the three Civil War Amendments (13-14-15), Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Civil Rights Movement, and the Civil Rights Act. The Dred Scott decision was, to inverse John Lewis, Abominable Trouble.

Look at the language of Roger Taney’s decision. The line most often quoted is that African peoples, wherever they might be, “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” But this leaves out what immediately follows from Taney, which implicates not the law, but capitalism itself - “the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his [e.g. white people’s] benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it.” Now this may seem quite obvious, but what Taney is saying is that African peoples had no rights, because they were objects of trade, merchandise. They were OWNED.

And even aside from the obvious evils of slavery, let’s now apply the modern colloquial of “owning the libs” - the “fuck your feelings” philosophy - which is about dehumanization, about loss of feeling, about the coldness necessary to make that icy calculation to turn another human being into a line on your balance sheet, or just another firing of a government employee who was part of the corruption and bloat…

But back to Roger Taney (one of the saddest ciphers of white supremacy ever to stride the land). How does he justify this denial of all rights to constitutionally? By invoking CIVILIZATION and leaning on ORIGINAL INTENT. You see, the notion that a black man had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect” is followed by the explanation that at the time the Constitution was written, “this opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race.” Not necessarily all white people, you see, but just the “CIVILIZED” ones! And (insert alligator tears of Taney here), in the summary to his opinion Taney states unequivocally (as if he was channeling the future spirit of his fellow Catholic justice, Antonin Scalia) that the Constitution “must be construct[ed] and administered now according to its true meaning and intention when it was formed and adopted,” and that therefore “a free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a "citizen" within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States.”

Humiliation of Blacks in America was part and parcel of this articulated logic from Taney (though it predated his ruling, of course). In my book Schooling the Nation I demonstrate how one of the legal cases upon which Taney based his decision - Connecticut’s Black Law of 1833 - was designed to humiliate teenaged Black women who had come to Connecticut for education. I am proud to say that it failed in its goal, due to the bravery and discipline of the young women and their Black and white allies. But the constant badgering and heckling and demeaning language were relentless micro-aggressions, which have slowed only slightly in the centuries since. As a feminist, I recall how, after the re-election of Trump in 2024, boys started taunting girls with “Your Body, My Choice!” insults, for instance. It never stops.

Owning - in its colloquial contemporary meaning - is about defeating one’s opponent and going beyond the mere defeat to humiliation. Objective defeat of your opponent coupled with subjective degradation of your opponent. Owning.

Consider that our contemporary meaning of “owning” came out of gaming culture - a subculture in which you can destroy and humiliate your opposition without having to be with them face-to-face. It is all through the abstraction of the computer. It is cold. There is a relationship here also to the essay I wrote earlier on “Lethality” as the only value prized by Republican Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Freezing Empathy out of the Picture

We are being led by capitalists now. We’ve always been led by capitalist sympathizers and fellow-travelers. But not officially, electorally, rule by the capitalist class itself, at least not since the the first four presidents from Virginia. Consider another colloquialism - the habit of calling government employees, even elected ones, “public servants.” An ideal, but not an empty phrase (consider, as my wife Peggy pointed out, the relatively low salary of presidents and legislators - not that their wealth is held to that salary, of course, but that salary represents an idea of “serving” the people, rather than being served up a large salary from the people).

And yet, the United States was the premier capitalist country, and always had a government that pursued the interests of capitalism, aggressively. So it is no surprise that in the development of the dialectic over time, those who voted in favor of the current Republican Regime often cite as their rationale that this country needs to be “run by a businessman.” Trump voters might have sensed it was time to drop the pretense, and just let a capitalist run the show. The fact that Donald Trump’s business accomplishments are dubious, marked by bankruptcies, clouded by discriminatory practices, and marked by cringe-worthy hucksterism, doesn’t negate the point - he embodies capitalist philosophy: icy calculation bereft of any foolish nobility or courtesy, fueled by transactional selfishness. Whether or not he’s actually a successful businessman is secondary to his exemplification of the capitalist type.

I’m a naturalist, an environmentalist, a traveler, a bird-watcher. Some of my happiest moments here in my native country of the United States have taken place in our National Parks, Forests, and Wildlife Refuges. These moments have been insightful, inspirational, poetic, scientific, aesthetic, moments filled with friendship, camaraderie, adventure. I appreciate these places for their beauty, their history, their abundant life, their intrinsic worth.

By contrast, consider how this Republican Administration eyes the National Parks and Forests. They are resources for the capitalist, or they are nothing. Park rangers be damned - and fired. Who needs ‘em? What are the five things of CAPITALIST value you lousy park rangers did this week? Riddle me that!

The Riddler

You see, the bad guys in cartoons used to be ones who rejected empathy. But no longer. Our comic book president is evidence enough of that. But the real theoretician here is Elon Musk, who enjoys playing with the the mythos of the Matrix (when he is not dancing with phallic chainsaws).

Elon Musk as Neo

Elon Musk has openly declared empathy to be the weak link in “Western Civilization.” Channeling Roger Taney, apparently, to uphold white supremacy through two of its most noxious streams - South African apartheid and American racism - he tries (like Taney) to soften his intent with some crocodile tears, saying "I believe in empathy, like, I think you should care about other people” But ultimately preserving the greatness of western civilization means jettisoning its weakest link: “you need to have empathy for, for civilization as a whole, and not commit to a civilizational suicide."

The weak link - empathy - is jettisoned when you fire thousands of federal workers who have a richer understanding of the warp and woof of this country than any mere bottom line. Empathy is jettisoned when this Republican Administration’s foreign policy seeks to create a world as divided by tribalism/nationalism as our national politics already are. Empathy is jettisoned when education is seen as only transactional career-preparation, and not as preparation for being fully human.

The Republicans and the many allies who vote from them delight in owning the libs. It makes them so happy that they dance with phallic chainsaws, invade NYC on September 11, 2020 to mock gay people, and relish the opportunity to misgender a member of Congress. Owning the libs, even if it happens at the cost of all human feelings, follows a precise logic of capitalism that cuts away all that is unnecessary from icy cold calculation - but now with the added sadistic joy of triumphant cruelty.

A Revolution of Empathy

And so I return to my beloved American revolutionaries, the Abolitionists. In a recent presentation of the material from Schooling the Nation, a friend pointed out that the masthead of The Liberator contained an internationalist slogan - even while consciously striving to end slavery within the United States: “Our country is the World - Our countrymen, all mankind.” Now jam that up with Virginia Woolf’s “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”

The civilization we have to save is HUMAN CIVILIZATION - a human civilization that is DIVERSE and INCLUSIVE of all with EQUALITY presumed. We have to be thinking internationally, especially since we are not the only country feeling the effects of neo-Fascist movements.

The second principle is to recognize that what the Republican Administration here is doing - and in many of the similar regimes world-wide - is a counter-revolution, but still a revolution - sweeping away all that has existed. Consider, for instance, World War I, and how it swept away the old world of monarchic aristocratic Europe forever, and then how, at its end, Lenin called for turning the Imperial War into a Revolutionary struggle. I think we need to update this, and improve on how Lenin’s revolution turned into its opposite, if we can find a way to counter this Counterrevolution with a revolution of equitable, diverse, inclusive human empathy.