American Seances

This episode walks Hobbes straight into today’s headlines: we use his grim, practical logic from Leviathan to think about ICE, border enforcement, and what a state actually owes its people. It’s less about moral outrage and more about whether power brings real, predictable safety or just spectacle.
We talk about why Hobbes would accept harsh tools if they keep the peace, but hate inconsistent, politicized enforcement even more. If you like political philosophy that gets its hands dirty, this one’s for you.

Think of war through Emma Goldman’s eyes: it’s less about borders and more about who gets to use other people’s bodies. She called out states for turning citizens into instruments, warned that militarism trains obedience, and refused to bless any power that asks for permanent sacrifice.
She wouldn’t deny people the right to resist, but she’d insist we refuse the machinery that makes wars inevitable — the surveillance, the censorship, the economy built on death. Don’t let fear teach you to love the very systems that demand your loyalty.
In short: condemn the invasion, mourn the victims, and keep your conscience ungovernable — solidarity, not state power, is the real path to freedom.

Imagine Du Bois looking at Ukraine: he’d call Russia’s invasion imperial violence and honor Ukrainian suffering, but he wouldn’t let Western powers off the hook either.He’d make you notice which refugees we welcome, which wars get headlines, and how arms, profit, and power shape the stories we tell about ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism.’So yeah, stand with the people hurting—but don’t mistake weapons shipments for moral clarity. Du Bois would urge us to choose reason over force, and to dismantle the systems that make war profitable.

Imagine Eugene V. Debs watching footage from Kyiv and Kharkiv — he’d start with the dead, call the invasion what it is, and ask bluntly who’s cashing in while ordinary people die.He’d respect the right to resist but warn that arming a conflict isn’t the same as building a peace, and he’d challenge anyone who thinks this carnage isn’t paid for by the working class.

Picture Washington worrying about crowns while Jefferson was scared of the presidency turning into a country club. Jefferson didn’t just oppose a ballroom; he changed the whole tone of the office: walking to his inauguration, informal dinners, and architecture that preached simplicity and virtue.
It’s a neat reminder that small gestures—chairs, chandeliers, a set of steps—can teach citizens how to think about power. Jefferson wanted a republic that looked like a republic, not a palace.

There’s so much noise in the world right now, so let’s take a quick inward pause: this episode walks through George Washington’s worry that a White House ballroom would turn the presidency into a courtly spectacle.I’ll break down how ceremony, architecture, and symbols shaped the early republic — told like I’m explaining it to a friend over coffee. Short, sharp, and surprising: Washington would probably skip the dance.

Remember those old decisions that treated freedom as simply the right to be left alone? The New Deal Court threw that idea out: it saw markets as fragile, people as vulnerable, and government rules as the tools that keep everything from falling apart. To Hughes and company, mandates and regulation were practical, not oppressive.
If you’re asking whether Obamacare would’ve passed the smell test back then, the short answer is yes — a court that upheld wage laws, regulated industry, and even limited private action that harmed the national economy would see health-care rules as common-sense governance, not constitutional heresy.

Imagine sitting with a friend and telling them how a court anchored in 19th-century assumptions would freak out at Obamacare—not because it was flawed, but because it admitted modern life had outgrown those old rules. Taft's justices wanted order and limits, and the ACA's acceptance of collective solutions would have felt like a constitutional betrayal.This episode walks through how the Taft Court’s insistence on restraint, states’ power, and fixed categories of commerce would likely have doomed the individual mandate, and why their fear was less ideological zeal than institutional worry about rewriting the Constitution.

Picture a Supreme Court that thought 'freedom' was basically the right to sign any deal, even if it hurt people. The Fuller Court treated health as a private market problem and would have seen Obamacare as an unconstitutional interference, not a lifesaving reform.
They’d stress the liberty of contract, downplay interstate reach, and shrug at illness as mere misfortune rather than a public concern. It’s a sharp reminder of how much constitutional thinking can shape whether a law protects people or protects markets.

Imagine sitting down with an old friend who’s a constitutional hardliner from the Reconstruction era — they’d think Obamacare isn’t a safety net, it’s an unconstitutional shove. This episode walks you through how the Morrison-Wadey Court, steeped in the 13th–15th Amendments yet determined to limit federal reach, would recoil at mandates, view health care as a state issue, and prioritize freedom from government over freedom to live securely.We unpack key cases like Slaughterhouse, E.C. Knight, and the Civil Rights Cases to show how the Court’s commitment to freedom of contract and negative liberty would make them staunch opponents of modern health-care reform — and why that stance looks morally and constitutionally flawed today.