Source: Liberal Currents
by Paul Crider
“We have forgotten feudalism. We think of lords and gentry in the same way we think of knights and castles. Feudalism is little more than a fantastical setting for our imagination. Sometimes there are dragons. It isn’t an organizing analogy we use in our lives or in our politics. If we want nostalgia, we reach for the imagined America of the 1950s, or perhaps the settling of the wild west. If we want oppression, we are less likely to think of feudalism — that’s a European thing, medieval — and more likely to think of Jim Crow, or the Southern slavocracy itself. Yet feudal metaphors were common in the Founding era and through the antebellum period.” (10/02/24)