JD Vance's liberty requires your subjugation

A few thoughts before we dive in.

I saw this tweet yesterday and immediately started crying!

It's a good post! And I hope staff writers are heeding Brian Mann's words! But I was just like...you lost me after the first sentence, buddy!

What security? What colleagues and editors? What team? I have no protection via institutional authority. Nothing is standing between me and the people I'm writing about. And if I find myself in harm's way, no one is coming to help me. Isn't that the lesson we are learning over and over again? As doctors let pregnant teens die entirely preventable deaths? As billionaires declare themselves too weak to stand up to Trump? What kind of plan can I possibly devise without any resources?

I know many of you are feeling some version of this fear. This sense of increasing dependency on the whims of powerful men. Today, we're going to explore how the Right's definition of liberty is producing that fear.

But first, can I just say?

There are over 15,000 people reading here - and each seems committed to standing between one another and the harm these men mean to inflict. I am going to hold onto that as I continue publishing this series. I hope you do too.

Pocket Observatory is an independent website. Which means my work is dependent on the support of readers like you. This is a generative dependency. It's a dependency where we care for one another and for each other's work. Thank you for helping to care for me, and for my work. I hope my work provides a kind of care for you too.

If you've learned from this series so far, if I've given you something to think about for a day, a week, or a month - consider making a one-time donation so I can keep writing! Buy me a pen, or a used book, or 48 minutes of childcare!

A quick recap of this series so far!

So we’ve established the New Right is a billionaire-financed extremist movement intent on imposing one-man rule in America. We know that JD Vance is the latest New Man chosen to lead the New Right. We understand that the New Right is an explicitly pro-slavery movement. We know that tech billionaires are using Trump to legitimize their power so that they can have the authority to make us obey. 

Okay. But there is still some confusion. These people have been very open about being very into slavery. But they also talk about “liberty” a lot! So like, which is it?

And the answer is both!

I could write an entire book about how the New Right defines liberty.  God knows I’ve done the research. But an explanation of the Right's concept of liberty doesn't require many words! And I want you to recognize when that simple explanation is missing in the coverage of Vance. (It's usually missing!) Every single time JD Vance mentions “liberty," journalists should contextualize what that word means to him and his fellow extremists.

It could look something like this:

Every single time you hear a member of the New Right talk about “liberty” or “religious liberty” they are using traditional idioms to serve an ancient politics. They are talking about Roman liberty - a concept that co-evolved with the development of state-sanctioned slavery. In ancient Rome, a man only had liberty if he could exercise dominion over others.

When Peter Thiel wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible;" he was talking about this kind of liberty. He believes his liberty - and the liberty of his entire class - requires our subjugation.

Now! You could be done reading this newsletter if you wanted! Because that is pretty much what you need to know! But, because I am me and you are you, I've written some more on the subject. If you've got the time, read on.

The Romans defined “liberty” as being free to live not just without interference, but without even the possibility of interference. And that sounds okay! But it’s not. Because existing without even the possibility of interference means you are not constrained by anything - including the existence of others. And that's only possible if you have dominion over the existence of others.

Obviously, this kind of liberty would have to have a pretty limited distribution! And it did - the most generous estimates say just 20% of the Roman population were citizens. It was probably closer to 10%. In the Roman Republic, wealth was the key to state power. You had to have a certain level of wealth to hold public office. And the votes of citizens with more money were weighted more heavily than the votes of citizens with less money. Most people were not counted as citizens at all. 

In the Roman Republic, women could not possess liberty, neither could children, the enslaved, the freedman (formerly enslaved people) and many of the freeborn.

Under the Roman Republic, liberty was a community property that could be possessed and could be lost. A person’s portion of liberty was directly correlated to private ownership - the more wealth you had, the larger your portion of liberty.

This concept of liberty led directly to the building of the Roman Republic’s imperial empire. For the first couple of hundred years of the Republic, the Romans weren’t conquering LANDS, they were conquering (and enslaving) PEOPLE. Mary Beard calls this an “empire of obedience.” Because the more people the elites conquered, the more liberty the elites could claim. Do you see? A conquered people is a people who can never interfere. The imperial empire was a byproduct of the Roman elites' pursuit of the fullest measure of liberty. 

It was only in the decades before and after the transition to one-man rule that Rome began to systematically annex and manage lands and resources.

Cicero, the much-cited defender of the Roman Republic, believed that inviolable private property was the foundation of liberty, and he was fervent in his insistence that enslaved people were private property. Cicero was opposed to straightforward democracy because he believed that if everyone had an equal vote, his liberty would be diminished. He wouldn’t be able to claim the same dominion.

As cruel and brutish as the Roman Republic’s practice of liberty was - and it was both those things - the system of semi-democratic power sharing did leave enough room for some progress. For land redistribution activism from the Brachii Brothers. For dissent in the form of speeches and plays. For history to be made. For a portion of liberty to be claimed by people who’d once been subjugated. 

Are we ummm seeing the parallels here?

The Roman Republic was as rich as it had ever been, and the elites were as prosperous and powerful as they’d ever been, when elite men began declaring liberty itself was scarce. Every non-elite person who could not be dominated was a person who threatened the very notion of Roman liberty. Every woman who chose not to have children was infringing on her husband’s right to her sons. (Towards the end of the Roman Republic, elite Roman women had more…not freedom…but wiggle room than other women in similar societies.) Every formerly enslaved person who dared to ignore her obligation to her patron (her former master) was a threat to his liberty. The only way to secure liberty was to overthrow the Republic. 

Of course, one of the men fighting to be the One-Man succeeded! If liberty requires subjugation, there is no way for any class or category to be free for good.

By the beginning of Augustus’s reign, liberty was no longer a community property that could be gained or lost. It became a way of measuring the individual’s relationship with the authoritarian state. Liberty became assured if “each individual develops a commitment to what is morally good.” And what was morally good was whatever the emperor said it was. 

This is the kind of “relationship” Andreessen et al want to impose between individuals and CEO kings in a Network State

For an overthrow to become a reign, it needs the reinforcement of continuity. Mary Beard wrote that Rome’s first emperor “used traditional idioms to serve a new politics, justifying and making comprehensible a new axis of power.” He draped his one man-rule in the language of liberty, declaring, 'I liberated the state oppressed by the power of a faction.”

Under Augustus’s rule, women lost the little wiggle room they’d gained. He even made their freedom from their guardian dependent on producing three sons. (And yes, Vance-favorite authoritarian, Viktor Orban, is currently using incentives to force women into birthing three or more children. Huh! Surely that’s a coincidence or something.)

Vance and the rest of the New Right want to spend the next four years LARP-ing the sparks notes version of Rome, 59 BCE to 37 BCE - the years when the Roman Republic, a state governed through semi-democratic power-sharing transitioned to the Roman Empire, a state dictated by one-man rule. Once the transition is nearly complete, the coalition of the creepy will fall apart as each man fights to become the One-Man. 

And yes, this means that JD Vance plans to spend his one wild and precious life playing a snowclone Lepidus to Peter Thiel’s copypasta Octavian.

The big problem Vance, Thiel, Trump, and Andreessen face is that they are not really like Ancient Roman Republicans or Emperors. These guys make Cicero look like a genius, and Augustus like a god. Like, even the worst emperors didn't have to depend on an algorithm to impost their rule. It's like, where have all the great bad Great men gone, you know?

They're also having to grapple with the reality that America is not very similar to Ancient Rome! Even if we're somehow adjusting for the difference between ancient and modern worldviews.  I am not saying there are no parallels! But we are too free to be like Rome. Yes…even now, with all our subjugating and subjugation. As a society, we also tend to think of liberty as an innate right - it is neither dispersed, nor distributed, it just is.

Now we do not practice that belief a lot of the time! Obviously! But that cultural assumption still matters! It will make it harder for this tech-enabled elite to convince us their liberty requires the effective disenfranchisement of up to 80% of our country.

So the Right has heavily invested in stripping as many rights as possible, to make our society look a little more like their flattened version of Ancient Rome. And it’s already kind of working. 

Dobbs and Project 2025 are part of the Right’s “My Liberty Requires Your Subjugation” project.  Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is totally sincere when he says that his “religious liberty” required the overturn of Roe. Because his “religious liberty” requires the domination of women.

In a society built on the exploitation of care work, forcing women to give birth or die is the surest way to begin establishing dominion over them. And hey! It’s working! 

It took three ER visits and 20 hours before a hospital admitted Nevaeh Crain, 18, as her condition worsened. Doctors insisted on two ultrasounds to confirm “fetal demise.” She’s one of at least two Texas women who died under the state’s abortion ban. - ProPublica

A Christian teen in Texas, carrying a pregnancy she wanted, died of sepsis because she could not get basic healthcare. She was anti-elective abortion. She planned to carry her pregnancy to term. She did everything she was supposed to do according to the anti-abortion extremists. AND SHE WAS STILL NOT SAVED! Because overturning Roe was never about fetuses or babies or mothers.

Overturning Roe was always about establishing that women do not have any rights! I mean once you’ve removed a woman’s right to live - how hard is it to work backward and remove every other portion of her liberty?

In the next newsletter, I’ll sketch out how these men are already exercising dominion in our lives - especially the lives of women and children. And how they plan to use Project 2025 to fully annex our existence. 

Support my work. If I've given you something to think about for a day, a week, or a month consider making a one-time donation so I can keep writing! Buy me a pen, or a used book, or 48 minutes of childcare!