Inescapable Ideology

Property, Principle, and Economic Interest

“Could the deepest wisdom lie not in answers, but in preserving the capacity to be changed?” — Maze Heart, Philosophors

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My father-in-law, a retired Chicago police officer, worked the beat during the infamous Chicago Seven and arrested Abby Hoffman. He was a registered Democrat back then. When asked why he switched to the Republican Party in the early ‘80s, he cited political corruption and being passed over for a promotion because the department adopted a diversity clause to bring in Black candidates.

I still think about his ideological shift often.

He didn’t wake up one morning thinking, “I’ve reconsidered the role of the state and now believe property rights supersede human dignity.” What happened was simpler and more revealing: he felt betrayed by an institution he’d served, watched something he valued (his seniority, his path forward) get restructured, and then found a political movement that validated his resentment. The ideology came after the wound.

This distinction matters because it suggests something uncomfortable about how we all operate. We like to believe our political commitments flow from principle. The truth is closer to this: our economic position shapes which principles feel intuitive, which feel like common sense, which feel like betrayal.

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It’s become evident to many of us that this administration operates not from grand strategy but from something worse—whack-a-mole governance, reactive and chaotic. And in that chaos, the American people have been played in such a way that we no longer know what we stand for anymore.

There’s a reference point worth considering: according to the Revolving Door Project, the current administration has used AI in over 3,000 instances across 29 agencies. The future dystopias we read about—Idiocracy, Team America: World Police, The Running Man, Snow Crash—aren’t coming. We’re already in them. The future is here, just not distributed evenly. For some of us, it’s extraction masked as opportunity. For others, it’s precarity masked as freedom.

The economic backdrop is stark. According to research by Michael Green, the poverty line is actually a minimum annual income of $140,000, while the average single-income household earns $56,065 annually. This means the majority of us are already in debt before we even start. That’s not a personality flaw. That’s not a thinking problem. That’s structural.

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Cory Doctorow recently offered a useful diagnostic framework, attributed to science fiction writer Steven Brust: “If you want to know if someone is on the left or the right, ask them, ‘What is more important: human rights or property rights?’ If they say, ‘Property rights are a human right,’ then they are on the right.”

Doctorow goes further: when property rights are treated as tools—means to the end of protecting human welfare—they’re useful. When they’re treated as ends in themselves, inviolable and beyond question, they become dangerous. He illustrates this with concrete examples: Can a landlord forbid tenants from installing solar panels because it might affect property values? Can corporations spend unlimited dark money in elections because their property (and money) gives them that right? Should Alex Jones lose his assets to pay the families of Sandy Hook victims?

The test isn’t claiming that owning rental property makes you a Republican. It’s asking something sharper: when your rights and someone else’s rights conflict, which do you choose? And more importantly—which choice feel so obvious to you that it doesn’t even feel like a choice?

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I spent years in corporate tech roles, gradually adopting an asset-management mentality that made me complicit in the dehumanization of our society. I was building hyperscale extraction systems—the kind of infrastructure that optimizes for profit margins at the cost of everything else. Over time, the logic became invisible.

I eventually left to preserve my sanity. Most people won’t leave that kind of money.

And here’s where my father-in-law’s story becomes my story: I hadn’t reasoned into that position through some abstract commitment to property rights. I’d drifted into it because the money required a justification, and the justification was waiting there in the form of market logic. Everyone’s doing it. It’s just business. You’re being naive. The ideology crystallized around the economics, not the other way around.

The difference is that I eventually felt it in my body—that physical revulsion—and got out. My father-in-law felt the wound of the diversity clause and mended it by changing parties. Both of us had our belief systems shaped by material circumstances. The question is whether either of us was ever really choosing.

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This brings us to the hard part: Can we actually separate ideology from economic interest? Or is the attempt itself a kind of delusion we tell ourselves to feel principled?

Consider the thought experiment: why don’t we all simply register as Republicans, engage sincerely in good faith, and change things from within? The answer most people give is, “They won’t let us in. It’s become a cult.” But that answer conceals a more troubling possibility: maybe we can’t change it from within because the party has become a structure for defending property and capital concentration, not a coalition of ideas you could persuade.

But here’s the flip side: if we’re all economically compromised—if we all need housing, income, survival—then how do we even choose sides? If you own rental property, have investments in other countries, or hold cryptocurrency, does that make you a Republican by Doctorow’s test? Maybe. But more likely, it means you’re conflicted, which is exactly where most of us are.

A person can believe housing is a human right and own rental property. They can believe in systemic change and be terrified of losing the stability they’ve accumulated. They can want to transform the system and be deeply afraid of what transformation costs them personally. These aren’t contradictions if you’re being honest about what economic interest does to belief.

But here’s the darker part: I know cult yogis and nomads who own nothing—literally nothing—and are still registered Republicans defending property rights as though their lives depend on it. They have no material stake in capital concentration, yet they’ve fully internalized the logic. Ideology isn’t just a cover story for economic interest; it’s also a successfully transmitted cultural virus, independent of whether you have anything to protect. The system doesn’t just defend itself through gatekeepers. It defends itself through true believers who have nothing to gain.

A reader pushed back on this essay’s framing after an earlier draft, and made a case worth taking seriously: toddlers and animals show early, possibly innate senses of “mine,” and regimes that abuse property rights—forced collectivization, for instance—have killed enormous numbers of people. He argued Brust had it backwards: property-rights-first thinking isn’t a marker of the right, it’s simply correct.

The argument flattens more nuance than it resolves. Regimes that treat property as absolute and untouchable have their own body count too—slavery and Jim Crow among them—so neither extreme wins cleanly on a ledger of harm. And the toddler point, the legs of his argument, proves less than it seems to.

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Watch a toddler for five minutes and the instinct isn’t discriminating—a toddler feels the same visceral “mine!” over a toy she built as she does over a toy she just grabbed out of another kid’s hands. Developmental psychologists have documented this: very young children pass through a phase where possession and ownership are the same thing, and only later, usually through adult correction, do they learn the difference between holding something and having a right to it. The instinct is real. It just isn’t a moral compass. It’s a description of a reflex, not a justification for a claim. Property law exists precisely because raw possessiveness can’t tell the difference between a child who built the sandcastle and a child who kicked it over and stood on the wreckage. Saying “mine” doesn’t make it so—the toddler’s certainty is exactly as strong whether she’s right or wrong.

That distinction isn’t abstract. In January 2026, Jared Kushner—Trump’s son-in-law and a real estate developer by trade—unveiled a “master plan” for rebuilding postwar Gaza at the World Economic Forum in Davos: glass towers, marinas, luxury waterfront developments, industrial zones and data centers where neighborhoods and universities used to stand. An Israeli real estate investor helped design it. Both men now sit on the board overseeing it. Trump described the appeal in his own words: “Look at this location on the sea, look at this beautiful piece of property, what it could be.” No Palestinians were consulted in drafting it, and the plan makes no mention of land deeds or how displaced families would be compensated or returned. If the reader’s toddler argument is right—if the instinct to hold onto what’s yours deserves real moral weight—then that instinct belongs to the people who have lived on that land for generations, not to the developer with the AI-rendered slides and a ceasefire timeline standing between him and the demolition crews. Applied consistently, his own premise argues against the plan he’d likely wave through as economic development. The only way around that is to quietly swap in a second, unstated rule: property rights deserve deference, except when a more powerful party has a better plan for the land. That isn’t a principle. That’s just power wearing the vocabulary of principle, which is exactly what Doctorow is describing in the first place.

The same asymmetry shows up closer to home—closer, in fact, than most people using this essay’s argument would like. The AI systems reshaping how we write, work, and think, including the one that helped check for grammatical errors in this essay, were trained substantially on other people’s copyrighted work: books, articles, images, code, gathered without consent or compensation; the same companies now enforce aggressively on their own model weights and outputs. Lawsuits over this are ongoing and unresolved—courts have issued mixed and partial rulings on whether training on copyrighted material counts as fair use, and separately, whether acquiring that material from pirated sources is protected even if the training itself might be. Nobody asked the authors whose work built the substrate. The people running these companies would not accept the same treatment of their own code, their own model weights, their own product. Possession by scale, not by right, and the claim gets asserted anyway.

The question isn’t whether you can keep your principles pure while having a stake in the system. You can’t. The question is: do you acknowledge the conflict, or do you pretend your principles are free-floating and untainted by your position?

There’s another approach worth considering, one that differs fundamentally from the standard left-leaning response. Robert Reich’s recent call to action exemplifies the mainstream strategy: master the platform game better than the other side. Build better videos, secure more funding, reach more people on social media. It’s fighting on the enemy’s chosen terrain with the enemy’s chosen weapons—a perpetual arms race where victory goes to whoever has more money and algorithmic advantage. It accepts the “platformization” of politics as inevitable and tries to outcompete within it. But what if that’s exactly the trap? What if the real strategy is institutional disruption—not better messaging on YouTube, but mass infiltration of the party apparatus itself? Register as Republicans en masse, engage in good faith in primaries, force the gatekeepers to either accept ideological diversity or openly purge you. Either outcome exposes the truth: the party is not a coalition of ideas you can persuade, but an institution defending material interests that has immune systems to destroy threats. That’s not a messaging victory. That’s a diagnostic revelation that no video can match.

The question is whether we’re willing to pursue a strategy that will inevitably result in our own rejection—knowing that the rejection itself is the point.

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My father-in-law wished us “Happy 4th of July” followed by “May the republic last forever.” That sentiment—a belief in democratic possibility—is harder to find now. What we’ve lost isn’t necessarily democracy itself. What we’ve lost is the ability to imagine changing our minds, changing our positions, without feeling like we’re betraying something essential.

When ideology hardens into identity, when the party becomes a tribe, when economic interest and belief become indistinguishable, something closes off. My father-in-law can’t vote Democrat again without feeling like he’s voting for his own replacement. I can’t go back into tech without feeling like I’m complicit in extraction.

We’ve constructed a world where the answer to Doctorow’s question—what’s more important, human rights or property rights—increasingly depends on which one you have more of. And we’ve become so sophisticated at rationalizing our own position that we rarely admit that to ourselves.

The real danger isn’t that we’re all Republicans or all leftists. The real danger is that we’re all trapped inside the economic circumstances that make those labels feel inevitable rather than chosen. We’re all defending what we have because we’re terrified of losing it. And we’re calling that principle.

Until we can admit that, we won’t be free to actually change.

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Source

Visual documentation: Statter. "The Great America 250 Smoke Out." Facebook video, July 4, 2026. https://www.facebook.com/statter/videos/the-great-america-250-smoke-out-for-those-of-us-on-the-south-side-of-the-dc-fire/885930180677044/ Captured documentation of 4th of July fireworks celebrations on the South Side of Washington, D.C., offering visual context for the essay's opening meditation on democratic possibility and national aspiration. Also, the clearest metaphor for the current administration ruling over the republic.

Further Reading

On the current administration’s use of AI: The Revolving Door Project. “Our Work.” https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/our-work/ Documentation of over 3,000 instances of AI deployment across 29 federal agencies.

On economic inequality and the redefined poverty line: Green, Michael W. “Episode 154: Michael W. Green on Why $140k Is The Real Poverty Line.” 1984 Today!, hosted by Mike Freedman, Substack, December 21, 2025. Green, Chief Strategist at Simplify Asset Management, examines how the official U.S. poverty line underestimates the true minimum annual income needed for economic security, and explores the “Valley of Death”—the income trough where means-tested support withdrawal negates wage increases.

Green, Michael W. “My Life Is A Lie.” Yes, I Give A Fig, Substack. A series of essays on wealth inequality, civic trust, and the underlying economic dynamics contributing to widespread inequality in the United States.

On the ideological divide between left and right: Doctorow, Cory. “Post-Political: What a ‘Leftist’ Is.” Pluralistic, July 8, 2026. https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/08/wilhoitian/ Doctorow’s articulation of Steven Brust’s diagnostic test for distinguishing left from right ideology, with analysis of property rights as tools versus ends in themselves, illustrated through concrete policy examples including landlord-tenant relations and campaign finance.

On political philosophy and hierarchy: Graeber, David and Wengrow, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. An archaeological and anthropological examination of non-hierarchical societies and the evidence that humans have organized without permanent rulers throughout much of our history.

On wisdom and intellectual change: Heart, Maze. “The Wisdom Letter #463.” Philosophors, Substack. An essay reflecting on Tolstoy’s insights about intellectual certainty and the capacity for change, which inspired the opening epigraph of this essay.

On strategy and political change: Reich, Robert. "Midterm Election Campaign Appeal." Inequality Media Civic Action, email correspondence, 2022. Reich's call to action exemplifying the "platformization" strategy—outcompeting on social media and video platforms as the primary tactic for political change. Illustrates mainstream left-leaning approaches to institutional challenge through messaging superiority rather than institutional infiltration.