Careful with “Rugged Individualism”: How Progressive Groups Use Pop-Leftist Rhetoric to Force Obedience on the Vulnerable and Hand Fascists the Keys

You know who also hated individualism ?  William Luther Pierce, one of the founding fathers of the American Neo Nazi movement.

Well, let me back it up.  I’m talking about how diluted political language is used to discipline refusal and extract labor from the vulnerable among marginalized groups, using the latest pop-leftist term that is all the rage: “Rugged Individualism.”

The first time I heard of “rugged individualism” was 10 years ago, taking a final for my third-year government class during undergrad. We received an email from our professor, sarcastically telling us to not blow up his email lamenting about poor scores.  He quipped “If you all want to re-read something, look at Tocqueville's account of individualism; It is emphatically NOT a sense of rugged self-reliance”.

Luckily, it didn’t apply to me.  But it was notable, how Tocqueville’s account of individualism was one of the most missed questions—and I think it speaks to how broadly we can interpret the topic, and its implications, especially in America.

Tocqueville, a French diplomat analyzing life in a society that he found to be more egalitarian than his own, was one of the earliest notable accounts of American individualism in his work “Democracy of America.”  He said that individualism was a result of the equality of condition, so basically because there was no aristocratic class and more social mobility, people are more likely to seek their own fortunes their own way.  He noted pros and cons of it—and one of the cons was that individualism (again, caused by equality) could rupture social bonds.  To him, individualism was not the central phenomenon.  Equality was.  Individualism was a symptom of that, which in turn could disrupt social bonds.  But his central critique was of equality.

“Rugged Individualism” reappeared and became popular in 1928 when Herbert Hoover championed it in a campaign speech (right before 1929, the year of the stock market crash which caused the Great Depression). And this was where individualism became associated with limited government, and “pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps”, and narratives that would later become the principles of contemporary conservatism.

Also, Martin Luther King Jr. notably said in his 1968 speech "The Other America": "This country has socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor."  — In hindsight, that line never circulated the way it should have.

But in my own life, I’ve heard many different things about individualism that have been diluted and repurposed. These days, the main argument is that in America , people are too individualistic, which is antithetical to the basic human need for connection and the collective human growth that can only be fostered in community.  And I agree that community is undervalued in America.  But I think unity rhetoric gone unchecked can become something darker and uglier than merely advocating for togetherness and belonging.

Now, do I consider myself a “rugged individualist?” No.  I need friends.  I need people to lean on, and I feel a profound sense of purpose when people lean on me.  Additionally, I don’t believe in describing myself using terms from people who didn’t consider me to be a “person” at the time they made it up.  That doesn’t even make sense.

But what I am saying is that if we are looking for liberation, “rugged individualism” is not the anti-imperialist dogwhistle we really want.

It seems sensible at first.  The conservatives are the “limited government” guys.  The “personal responsibility” guys.  And they’re racist, and they hate the poor, and they say “‘Murica” and other dumb things so they’re also dumb.  So if we don’t want to be racist and we don’t want to be classist and we don’t want to be dumb then we need to inspect our values and ensure we are doing everything exactly opposite of what they’re doing, and in turn, we can be free and be vehicles for freedom for others.

But when juxtaposed with the reality of our current conditions, not the 1830s nor the 1930s, we stumble upon different problems.

It’s safe to say human beings like to feel accomplished.  Everybody wants to feel like a somebody, or at the very least, nobody wants to feel like a failure.  Moreover, guilt and shame are powerful negative emotions that on a primal level, people seek to avoid. Taken together , this means that most people seek fulfillment by maximizing their sense of accomplishment and minimizing their sense of shame.

But when we are performing liberatory and organizing work , everybody is not on the same page as to the ingredients of that fulfillment cocktail.  Everybody comes from different places, and everybody has been given different roles to fill in their respective communities, all with different incentives and different rewards.  Organizing generally starts with us all agreeing on a core mission and then committing to working together to attain common goals.  This is how structure starts. But the more vulnerable a person is, the easier it is to ascribe a role to that person within a group, assign “good” and “bad” to their actions relative to the proliferation of the group, and discourage the person from outgrowing that role in order to benefit the group.

This is where function hardens into hierarchy.  And this is how many collectivist, pop-leftist, or self-purported “progressive” spaces metastasize into cliques.

When they become cliques, power is centralized and everyone is pressured to espouse the dogma of a select few that have elevated themselves to be the peak of whatever values the organization claims to have: the most fair, or the most Marxist, the most spiritual, the most astrological, etc. etc.  Each one is its own quasi-religion , with values and facts and figures whose primary goal are to maintain the structure.  And people are assigned roles, however denigrating, to enforce these values.  It doesn’t matter what is true or what is healthy.  It matters what is obedient.

Marginalized people often end up performing labor for prettier hierarchies, not to dismantling hierarchy itself.  By exploiting the fear and anguish regarding the cruelty and grotesque horror that is out there, these benevolent masters are able to continue the same exploitation they purport to despise.

“Rugged Individualism” is a perfect weapon of coercion because it can be disguised as analysis.  It sounds politically scientific and morally sophisticated, and quietly pathologizes dissent as the opposite: immature, ignorant, and reactionary.  Autonomy is robbed of its story and reduced to a character flaw, setting a dangerous precedent where anyone who leaves exploitative groups can now be diagnosed as antisocial and self-centered, and freely disciplined on that basis.

Within marginalized communities and liberatory groups, this narrative is especially harmful, because now setting boundaries, refusing exploitation, and insisting on respect, can now easily be politicized as abandonment of the progressive values we hold dear to us and need in order to survive, even though the real truth is so many of these groups require continuous self-abandonment in favor of dominant narratives and/or individuals in order to be accepted.

Additionally, the continuously understated realities of racism, misogyny, and homophobia make it such that if a marginalized person does decide to leave, it’s hard to find new communities, because so many spaces normalize various degrees of bigotry, making acceptance and a sense of safety significantly harder.  So, isolation, at least briefly, is a natural consequence of apostasy in America.  But because of the increasing stigma towards “individualism,” any marginalized person who flees an unhealthy dynamic, especially if they enter a period of isolation, can find themselves labeled a “rugged individualist”.  Because of various interlocking associations and political narratives that are becoming presumptively tied to this term, the label turns into a finger-wagging rebuke.  Now, they’re anti-socialist.  Now, they’re anti-community.  Just like conservatives.

Just like white people.

Those of us in our perspective communities of color, overlapping leftist groups, progressive spaces, even families, etc etc.  know exactly what it means to be called white.  It’s not saying you’re any one person.  It is accusing you of internalizing and embodying white supremacy.  It implies you have been compromised by drinking the white man’s kool-aid.  It suggests there’s something inauthentic and dubious about you.  It casts doubt on your character and labels you a traitor. And, it discourages people from associating with you.  That brand, and the threat of being marked with it, is a weapon used shun dissenters, or even more infantilizing, “forgive” them into even more debasing positions within hierarchies.  An example is made out of you, to punish “individualism”.

Which is ironic, considering the most extreme white nationalists, also hated individualism.  William Luther Pierce, one of the founding fathers of the American Neo Nazi movement,  once lamented in his essay “Cowardice and Individualism” (lol):

“The other problem White people have that I want to talk about is selfishness or individualism. Every week I receive letters accusing me of being a “collectivist.”…[the individualist] tells me that although he agrees with my criticisms of the government, he doesn’t agree with my racism.”

Bear in mind, that’s the middle of the article.  Here’s the article’s main point, toward the beginning:

“You know, if most White people weren’t such terrible cowards, we wouldn’t have problems with Blacks, Mestizos, Jews, or anyone else today. We would have solved all of those problems long ago.”

So as we can see, Individualism vs collectivism doesn’t have to imply “colonial vs decolonial” or “leftist vs nonleftist.”  It can also imply “neo-Nazi vs not neo-Nazi.”

But it can be easy to be led to believe it’s merely the former, due to this unfortunate practice of hollowing out the actual meaning of sociological terms and weaponizing them for one’s own political gain.  It makes us all feel like we progressed, when we didn’t, while distracting from the real issues that weaken the resolve of progressive groups and hinder real progress toward that warm harmonious world we claim to want.  When these groups lie to themselves about their structures—they don’t want to admit there’s a hierarchy, they don’t want to admit there is a centralization and consolidation of power, they don’t want to admit they have issues with internalized racism, misogyny, and/or homophobia—then they lie about the true aims of their work.  Do they want to free themselves from oppressive systems, or do they want to enjoy the exhilaration of being at the top of those systems while keeping them perfectly intact but just calling them different names?

And, I’m not saying merely that pop-leftists are being neo-Nazis because they both think individualism is bad.  Nor am I defending neo-conservative ideologies of property rights, markets, meritocracy, or “pull-yourself-up” myths. Here’s what I’m saying:

There is nothing liberatory about pathologizing individual dissent.  It is authoritarian, coercive, and cultish, and no organization that wants to train you into obedience wants to see you free.

Marginalized people have the right to leave, to say no, and to withdraw their labor, even from the “good guys.”

Marginalized people have the right to decide coercion, toxicity, and abuse within inside movements that claim to exist in their name, is intolerable,

and choose themselves instead.

If these basic rights are turned into negotiables, then these groups can continue to deflect from the harm they are causing people in the name of maintaining power within the sub-structures they have built.

More concerning, there is a danger of conditioning: when leftist spaces train people into obedience, obedience is what people will default to when fascism comes to town.  And it’s already here.  We always must defend ourselves and our communities from the state; but if we use extractive methods within our communities to do it, we are actually handing them the keys.

Bearing all of this in mind,

When I heard Zohran Mamdani say “we will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism”, I understood what he meant.  He said we will help each other, and uplift each other, and care for each other.  There is no evidence that he meant we will control each other, we will coerce each other, or we will sabotage each other.  Maybe he said it in this way to communicate a desire for a better, more equitable New York, while implying he is educated and responsible enough to do it.  But, because of this dirty little secret of despotism within leftist spaces, whether he knows it or not, Mamdani has unleashed a beast.

We know how they say, doctors need people to stay sick in order to stay intact.  Well, some of these organizations are the same.  They need oppression and all the other “isms” of the world to exist in order to be able to identify themselves as the good guys.  And just like doctors can end up being pill pushers of pharmaceuticals that can make people sicker, progressive organizations can also run the risk of pushing solutions that cripple people deeper into oppressed states rather than fortifying them into states of self determination.

And I believe in self determination. I don’t believe in subordinating self determination in favor accomplishing the goals of liberatory organizations, especially because half the time the goal isn’t even actual liberation.

It’s control.