Anarchism’s failed premise
Too many refuse to be ‘reasonable and decent’
Apparently, David Graeber wrote, “At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions. The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how. The second is that power corrupts.”[1]
I do not argue with Graeber’s analysis. My question, rather, is how well these assumptions hold up against the examples of conservatives, especially white Christian nationalists.
I do not see white Christian nationalists as decent or reasonable. Any pretense that they are had to be abandoned with the bumper stickers that declared, “Fuck Your Feelings,” as a 2020 campaign slogan in support of Donald Trump.
Of course, their own feelings were badly hurt when Trump lost—but the rest of us were then supposed to be “understanding.” So much for “reasonable and decent” even before we get to their various viciously enacted phobias with cruelty all too clearly being the point.
So the question here then turns on the question of whether white Christian nationalists are compelled to be so awful. In my dissertation, I acknowledged that authoritarian populists (one of seven tendencies of conservatism I identified—and Trump’s original ‘base’) had a point about the economy. In short, elites, on economists’ advice, had enabled and enforced the export of well-paying manufacturing jobs and offered only poorly paid big box store jobs in exchange.[2] That’s a severe provocation but to me, to say it compels the abuse white Christian nationalists hurl at anyone not quite like “an idealized version of themselves”[3] seems a bit much.
In my dissertation, I found that conservatives in general reject[4] the second premise, “that power corrupts,”[5] actually preferring hierarchal authoritarianism rather even than viewing it as a regrettable necessity. Even capitalist libertarians’ disdain for political authority over others masks an inescapable preference for the more blatantly corrupt economic authority. Conservatives’ preference for ideological ‘permanent’ ways of knowing, whether religious, ‘traditional,’ nationalist, or capitalist, over ‘temporal’ empirical experience[6] often seems distinctly unreasonable, particularly for people experiencing life on the lower levels of these hierarchies.
In their book, The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and David Wengrow offer considerable evidence that indigenous societies experimented with various systems of social organization, with sometimes violent revolutions against authoritarian systems. The authoritarianism that predominates today clearly did not win on the merits of reasonable argument but rather through brute force[7] of a similar nature to that which white Christian nationalists revere today.
A reasonable view would be that such force should engender resentment, not reverence. But among some people, we nonetheless see reverence, and some of these people managed to amass sufficient power to impose their authoritarian system on nearly everyone else.
A balanced view of humanity needs to reckon with that preference for authoritarianism and brute force among some of its members. Not all of us are “reasonable and decent;” in the Trump era, it is clear that many of us in fact emphatically reject that we should be. I do not see an anarchist answer for this.
[1] David Graeber, quoted in Anarchist Quotes, May 26, 2025, https://todon.eu/@anarchistquotes/114574020364037439
[2] David Benfell, “Conservative Views on Undocumented Migration” (doctoral dissertation, Saybrook, 2016). ProQuest (1765416126).
[3] Kim Messick, “Modern GOP is still the party of Dixie,” Salon, October 12, 2013, https://www.salon.com/2013/10/12/modern_gop_is_still_the_party_of_dixie/
[4] David Benfell, “Conservative Views on Undocumented Migration” (doctoral dissertation, Saybrook, 2016). ProQuest (1765416126).
[5] Anarchist Quotes, May 26, 2025, https://todon.eu/@anarchistquotes/114574020364037439
[6] David Benfell, “Conservative Views on Undocumented Migration” (doctoral dissertation, Saybrook, 2016). ProQuest (1765416126).
[7] David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021).