Harold Perkin, Donald Trump, and the Age of Corporate Neo-feudalism

1 Jun 2026 By in History, Ideas Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Satirical cartoon from Puck's magazine in 1885, depicting a handful of powerful men carving up a continent and all its goodies.

It must have been in the late 90s. I was living in Hyde Park, and a friend invited me to a private lecture that Harold Perkin, a distinguished British historian, was giving. Perkin, who died in 2004, was pretty much the father of English social history. He was the very first person hired in the British university system to teach the history of society. His main scholarly work, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880, established his interest in how industrial forces impact national characteristics such as class. Perkin’s passion for this subject had burned unabated since the book was first published in 1969.

The Perkin I saw was elderly, but his ideas were fresh and forward-looking. Now at the end of his career, his thoughts were trained on modern capitalism and its capacity to overwhelm political systems, impairing the enhanced freedom and power that individuals have enjoyed since the birth of market economies. Essentially, Perkin believed that contemporary global capitalism and its leaders represented an engrossing, trans-national system that no nation-state could match. He saw the rise of a hyper-wealthy elite as transforming society in ways that would impoverish and limit the majority. This was to be the subject of a book, one that Perkin get to write before he died.

The historical process whose implications Perkin had begun to lay out is now being felt across American society. The internet, the rise of real-estate investment “trusts,” the wealth gap, the economic dominance of a handful of monopolistic tech companies, the growth of cryptocurrencies, and, finally, AI: these developments and the people behind them are dictating the course of the United States. This new capitalist formation runs according to its own rules, which many of us lack the deep expertise to understand or discuss. Since Perkin’s time, this many-sided process has been given a name: corporate neo-feudalism.

Here are the hallmarks of corporate neo-feudalism, according to Google AI:

  • Extreme stratification, with a tiny elite commanding many essential resources and a majority owning nothing.
  • Rent-extraction and the development of a rentier class: corporations do not transfer ownership of goods or technology to individuals, instead requiring them to rent access to essentials such as software, information, and utilities.
  • Coercive legal agreements that blur and erode the individual’s rights of ownership, free speech, and privacy, such as the contracts that come with electronic devices, smart appliances, and cable TV.
  • A subversion of democratic power, whereby corporate interests pour so much money into lobbying and other forms of political patronage that citizens’ needs are irrelevant, their distinct interests ignored.
  • The privatization of essential “public goods,” such as information, health care, and household utilities, so that, to subsist, citizens must pay what corporations demand or go without, creating a perpetual dependence on self-interested capitalistic entities.
  • Arguably, these developments could reduce ordinary people to the status of serfs, by whittling away their capacity for truly “free” expression, upward mobility, or agency. Existence, independent of what corporations supply, becomes impossible, unthinkable. Essentially, tech is birthing new means of capital production–new, wealth-producing “tools” absorbing the resources of all for the benefit of a few.

The paradigm of corporate neo-feudalism is extraordinarily useful, even if it doesn’t hold true in all its details, and even if citizens remain convinced of their undiminished independence—for now. Corporate neo-feudalism gives a name to the changes Americans see taking place around them, as when local governments take the side of deep-pocketed corporations to create AI data centers; or when President Trump talks about turning Gaza into a luxury resort instead of respecting it as a Palestinian homeland.

In general, we can see how “corporate neo-feudalism” describes the types of people and interests that organize the president’s ambitions, policies, and world-view. He identifies with a hyper-wealthy elite who are birthing a new sort of mass society. He wants to be a respected leader among those “geniuses” intent on engrossing all the world’s goodies and creating new forms of wealth and money, without respect for niceties like Constitutional government, the health of the planet, or the people’s will. Trump is using the presidency not just to add to his fortune (initially based on old-fashioned real-estate), but to catapult himself upward into a nose-bleed social class, where his peers are not republicans but free (rogue) agents like Musk, Altman, MBS, Putin, and Xi. To Trump, enriching himself and cementing his position within this new world order matters much more than his fellow-citizens do. Trump consistently looks past the nation-state, and cares not a jot if, in the eyes of Americans, his actions are thoroughly corrupt. A trans-national miscreant, Trump knows he can easily transcend our rule of law.

This new economic profile of the US matters because our republican form of self-government pre-supposes widespread independence and prosperity. American government has a circular quality, in that a big part of its purpose has always been to create a populace that is educated, capable, and prosperous, because it is from the people that each generation of leaders must rise. Citizens must be autonomous, discerning, and well-informed to be self-governing; if they are consigned to a dependent, servile class instead, the future of American federalism will be bleak indeed.

When Trump promised the nation a “Golden Age” in his second inaugural, was it “corporate neo-feudalism” that he had in mind? This term, along with Trump’s fondness for tariffs and other grandiose qualities, recall the Gilded Age, that glitzy, vulgar period following the end of Reconstruction (1876) and the waning of the idealism of the Civil War. The late-nineteenth century was characterized by revolutionary innovations (think railroad empires, steel manufacture, the birth of oil, the use of telephone and telegraph, and the commodification of agriculture), which, in turn, generated great wealth disparities, political corruption, and a long stretch of low, lost politics. Captains of industry amassed unimaginable fortunes, running roughshod over flat-footed officials and callously exploiting the powerless with impunity. The political mind of America just couldn’t keep up. Will this be the case in the Golden Age, too?

Image: Fred Opper’s 1882 illustration for Puck,
“Monopoly Millionaires Dividing The Country,”
from this source.

What The Democrats Must Do

10 Feb 2026 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments
A group of four individuals dressed in early 20th-century formal attire, including hats and coats. The group consists of two men on either side, a woman in the center, and another man on the right. They are posing outdoors, with trees visible in the background.

Listen to the podcast version here.

The Democratic Party is, at present, the only political organization in the nation capable of defeating Trump.  In the last election, voters looked to the Democrats to rise to the occasion, and Democrats let us down.  I’m looking for signs that the party as a whole has absorbed the lessons of 2024, but so far its leaders don’t seem to see the need to unite and act in concert; they don’t seem to realize how ideologically broken and blown they are.

The Trump era will end when his many opponents unite in a disciplined way around an adequate, innovative ideology. An “adequate ideology” would map out an alternative path to achieving prosperity and security for American citizens, while reviving a sound and balanced federalism. Given Americans’ grave dissatisfaction with both political parties, success depends on peeling away support from the Republicans, while embracing ideas that will induce independents to join a majoritarian coalition.

    As we all know, Trump’s outrageous style of governing tends to dominate the national discourse, leaving little room for the growth of this oppositional vision. Living in the Trump era is like having a neighbor blasting your least favorite music 24-7 while you are trying to write beautiful poetry. Instead of writing your master-work, you are screaming at the neighbor to stop with the noise. Trump distracts you from your own virtues, your own manners, and, especially, your own ambitions. Instead of figuring out how to restore civic trust and reform Congress, you are talking about Greenland, Venezuela, and—the newest distraction—the Epstein files. We’re all spending a lot of time thinking and talking about matters that are tangential to the survival of American self-government, even as Trump is diminishing our capacity to govern ourselves and knocking down the pillars of civil society.

    It’s very difficult to ignore and look past Trump, but the only way to vanquish him and his Republicans is to treat their actions as irrelevant to the nation’s future. It’s necessary to dream a constructive and counterfactual dream. If Trump were not in power, what could the future of the United States be? Democrats must retreat to a tranquility chamber together and dream that dream. They mustn’t be haters, critics, or skeptics: they must recall the good deeds that American government has done. They must extol everything that’s still good and sound in American society, and they must map out how its people can propel this country to a new modern high.

    For, where do ordinary voters fit in to the American equation any more? Individuals are increasingly extraneous in a technological mass society that, in the form of “the AI revolution,” is bifurcating the nation’s economy into a hyper-capitalized empire run by an investor class, who are engrossing all the goodies, at the majority’s expense. This out-of-control juggernaut is flattening the lives and hopes of a vast range of workers and property-owners. Media companies are turning our lives into data mills at the expense of our privacy and freedom to associate—to act, to argue, and to organize.

    Meanwhile, since Kamala Harris’s undemocratic nomination, voters recognize that their traditional power to choose their own party’s leaders, and to bring those leaders to heel, has somehow disappeared. The process the Democrats relied on to anoint Biden’s successor was an untoward event that the party’s leaders have yet to reckon with or formally acknowledge. They owe the voters and state-level pols an apology. The elite of the Democratic Party should reform its convention rules and restore delegates’ freedom to choose a representative presidential nominee. Every effort should be made to be a party that runs on commitment not cash. Reliance on the collective will and power of the people must be restored.

    Ideologically, Democrats cling to a globalist perspective out of step with the most pressing problems facing the US now. Trump’s vision for this country, no matter how antagonistic to its founding principles, prioritizes nation-state survival and acknowledges that changing demographics and other geopolitical conditions (such resource scarcity) threaten the integrity of the US, both as a republic and the world’s biggest economy. Democrats have yet to accept and get in front of trends that are transforming attitudes toward national security and identity all across Europe and the western world. Western liberalism must survive, but to do so it must take on a nationalist form, mindful of the special circumstances (including property ownership, cultural homogeneity, and limited government) that have historically been productive of personal liberty. Democrats have yet to accept that we are no longer in a period of boundlessness: we are in a period of consolidation.

    Whether we like it or not, borders will be closed; trade alliances will be confined to countries that are ideologically similar to ours; immigration policies will be more discriminating; and the quest for natural materials and energy will grow ever keener and more problematic, given the overcrowding and degradation the planet is suffering. Democrats are not practicing realpolitik, though. They’re stuck in a reactive, defensive mode, clinging to the ideals of FDR and LBJ, still fighting for the Great Society. Democrats are fighting battles that they’ve lost already, when they should be totting up their losses and stomaching the ideological tradeoffs they must make to attain solid majorities in the states and take control of Congress again. To do so, they must look past the superficial traits of identity and concentrate on what will enhance the dignity and security of all Americans, without respect to living condition or creed.

    Prevailing over Trump requires advocating for border control and for new immigration policies that are stricter yet fairer to all involved. It means restoring the substance of ordinary Americans’ power over their representatives. And it means doubling-down on resource conservation and asserting Americans’ common right to essentials such as land and water that data-center developers and other corporate interests are engrossing with frightening speed.

    Whether Democrats are high-minded enough to reshape American politics in the people’s interest, though, remains to be seen.

    Image: Delegates, including
    Elizabeth Dunster Gibson Foster of Washington State,
    at the 1916 Democratic National Convention in St. Louis, Missouri,
     from this source.

    God’s Goodness Within

    22 Nov 2025 By in Autobiographical, Religion Tags: , , , , 4 Comments
    Interior view of All Saints' Cathedral in Milwaukee, showcasing wooden pews, arched ceilings, stained glass windows, and an organ in the loft.

    In this stewardship talk I gave on November 2 at my church, All Saints’ Episcopal Cathedral in Milwaukee, I reflect on the meaning of church-going, a practice that has dwindled among Americans.

    My name is Susan Barsy, and I appreciate this opportunity to reflect on the meaning of worshipping here at All Saints and to say why giving to the church is fundamental to our life of faith.  I’ve come up with a single phrase to describe the nature of my love-affair with All Saints, why I have made it my spiritual home, and that phrase is “God’s goodness within.”

    This year, someone suggested that I try keeping a gratitude journal.  To be honest, it seemed kind of hokey, but, given that 2025 has been a wee bit demoralizing, I decided to give it a go.  The results were truly remarkable.  At first I struggled to recall the ephemeral gifts that came my way each day, but, once I got the hang of it, my stingy acknowledgements of life’s blessings widened into a flood.  The birds in the yard, my mother’s face when she looked at a tree turning color, a recipe that turned out when I needed it to: my thanks-giving grew encyclopedic.  It was colorful and ever-changing: goodness alive!

    Plus, as a narrative, the contrast with my other journal couldn’t have been more startling.  My other journal (which I’m very proud of, by the way) is a well-written account of disappointment and perplexity, my shortcomings, and situations I’ll never understand!  Thank goodness for the gratitude-journal, with its snapshots of a benevolence pulsing through nature and human affairs.  I suppose my two journals are a complete statement of the human condition: one part keyed into goodness, the other part enmeshed in the bewilderment “out there.” 

    As Christians we acknowledge God as the source of all goodness and blessings.  This church, which our forebears sacrificed to establish, is a holy sanctuary where God’s goodness dwells.  It may sound mystical, but I believe in the sanctity of this place, a consecrated space where we draw nearer to God and learn of God’s goodness anew.  When I’m in church, my consciousness of God and my place in creation is strengthened, through the readings, the thoughtful and affecting sermons, and the hymns we sing.  And, of course, your company uplifts me!   At All Saints, I can practice what I believe to be a true Christianity, for it is a place where every seeker can find refuge, renewal, absolution, and solace; where we become one body; and where we are all acknowledged as equal and precious in God’s eyes.

    For “God’s goodness within” has a personal meaning, too.  God’s goodness is not just in this temple, but in each of us.  When one looks at the triptych that surmounts the high altar, one’s eyes are naturally drawn to the figure of the crucified Christ.  It’s easy to overlook the symbol of the Dove, the Holy Spirit, crowning the scene.  Each of us has gifts of the Spirit that are ours to cultivate and enjoy.  Worshipping here, learning from the sermons, and being inspired by the actions of this congregation, powerfully encourages me—even frees me—to respect the gifts I’ve been given and to take on the work it has been given me to do. 

    To be honest, for decades I believed that goodness was a more or less automatic element in society.  Recently, I’ve grown concerned about where goodness comes from, because it suddenly seems to be in terribly short supply.  There’s nothing simple about goodness or Christianity.  The proper care of our souls is a lifelong endeavor, a ministry that is old and new every day.   At the moment, nothing is more urgent than nurturing the goodness inherent in God’s creation, in one another, and in ourselves.  There is a circular logic to my vision of the church, which, by sustaining, we realize God’s loving hope for all mankind.  

    If you’re participating in this service, either here in church or remotely, you are already launched on your faith journey.  You’re already aware of the truth of what I say.  As Advent approaches and with it the start of the new liturgical year, it is customary to consider our role as All Saints’ stewards.  I hope that as you reflect on what you have to give to the church, you will see your offerings as foundational to our life of worship, and as a deeply rewarding means of growing God’s goodness in dark times.    Thank you.

    Washington Liberates New York City

    9 Sep 2025 By in History, The Social Life of Politics Tags: , , ,
    A historical illustration depicting George Washington's triumphant entry into New York City on November 25, 1783, with a crowd of people celebrating and an American flag waving.

    This print from the mid-nineteenth century is a vivid reminder that George Washington had a pre-history with New York City, prior to his 1789 presidential inauguration at Federal Hall. The print commemorates “Evacuation Day,” when, on November 25, 1783, Continental troops under General Washington entered the city in triumph, officially marking the end of its occupation by the British during the Revolutionary War. Given that the British had controlled the city for seven years, ruling it under martial law, the rejoicing was general and profound. New Yorkers continued to celebrate Evacuation Day for over 100 years.

    This representation of “Washington’s Triumphal Entry Into New York,” was the work of Christian Inger, a German emigre who settled in Philadelphia in the 1850s and worked as a lithographer.

    Image: courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

    The Great Seal on Federal Hall

    19 Aug 2025 By in History, The Social Life of Politics Tags: , , ,
    Engraving of the Federal Edifice in New York, showcasing its front façade with a clock tower and intricate architectural details.

    In 1789, Philadelphia’s Columbian Magazine published this “View of the Federal Edifice in New York.” It’s one of a handful of extant contemporary depictions of the defunct Federal Hall, showing its location at the T where Nassau intersects with Wall Street in Manhattan’s First Ward. This engraving captures the appearance of the building in the year George Washington was inaugurated on its balcony.

    The most notable feature of the print is its rendering of the Great Seal, particularly the rendering’s inaccuracy. Here, the eagle rises above the shield and a free-floating olive branch: this is substantially wrong. (cf. the previous post on the Great Seal). The artist either drew the Seal wrong from memory or neglected even to study this feature of the building in person. Maybe he copied from another artist. It’s also possible that the Great Seal was improperly rendered on the building itself.

    In any event, this illustration is a significant reminder that the Great Seal was newly invented and its features not well-known to Americans when federalism under the Constitution got going in 1789. It also highlights the ambiguity of much documentary “evidence.”

    Image: from this source