George Fitzhugh hated freedom.
Not merely in the sense that he opposed certain rights or preferred one political party over another. George Fitzhugh objected to the entire concept. While most nineteenth-century defenders of slavery still felt obligated to speak the language of liberty, constitutionalism, and states' rights, Fitzhugh regarded such exercises as unnecessary. Why pretend? Human beings were not naturally free, he argued. They were naturally dependent. The strong governed the weak. The capable directed the incapable. The intelligent led the foolish. Every society that had ever existed operated according to these principles. The only real question was whether people were willing to admit it.
In his 1854 book Sociology for the South, Fitzhugh dismissed the Declaration of Independence's claim that all men are created equal as "fundamentally false." He was not being provocative. He meant it literally.
"The men who made the Declaration of Independence," he wrote, "were theorists, not practical men."
This was unusual even by the standards of the antebellum South. Most proslavery intellectuals spent considerable energy trying to reconcile slavery with the ideals of the American Revolution. Fitzhugh simply concluded that the Revolution had gotten several important things wrong. He was the rare Southern thinker who looked at Thomas Jefferson and decided the problem was Thomas Jefferson.
Then, because moderation was apparently not among his virtues, he kept going.
Capitalism was bad. Free labor was bad. Competition was bad. Individualism was bad. Industrialization was deeply suspect. Democracy itself made him nervous.
Indeed, Fitzhugh spent so much time attacking capitalism that modern readers occasionally have the strange experience of thinking they are reading a socialist who has wandered into the wrong manuscript. He condemned wage labor, attacked economic inequality, denounced competition, and argued that free markets allowed the strong to prey upon the weak.
The difference, of course, was his proposed solution.
While most critics of exploitation eventually concluded that society needed more democracy, more rights, or broader economic participation, Fitzhugh concluded that society needed more hierarchy. More dependence. More authority. Less freedom.
He famously summarized his worldview in a single sentence:
"Liberty is an evil which government is intended to correct."
That statement alone would probably derail most Fourth of July cookouts.
Fitzhugh would likely consider this evidence that the cookout had become too ideological.
And now, through some unfortunate disturbance in the historical timeline, George Fitzhugh has arrived for America's 250th birthday celebration.
The experience does not go well.
The first thing Fitzhugh notices is that slavery is gone. Not restricted, modified, or transformed into something else. Gone entirely.
This comes as something of a shock because Fitzhugh spent much of his career explaining why emancipation would lead to catastrophe. He predicted social disorder, economic collapse, racial violence, and national decline. Free labor systems, he argued, would ultimately prove more cruel than slavery because poor people would be abandoned to competition and exploitation without protection or stability.
Standing in twenty-first-century America, he immediately senses opportunity.
The country appears to be arguing about everything.
Political polarization. Economic inequality. Housing costs. Social media. Loneliness. Mental health. Declining trust in institutions. Dating apps. The inability of anyone under thirty-five to afford a house without first inheriting a small kingdom.
George Fitzhugh has never felt more optimistic.
For several glorious minutes, he believes history has vindicated him.
"I warned you," he mutters while taking notes.
Then someone shows him the rest of the statistics.
This is where the trouble begins.
The average American lives dramatically longer than people did in Fitzhugh's era. Infant mortality has collapsed. Literacy is nearly universal. Most people own property. Most people choose where they live. Most people choose their jobs. Working-class Americans possess technologies that would have appeared supernatural to nineteenth-century elites.
George Fitzhugh does not know what Wi-Fi is.
He briefly suspects it may be socialism.
Upon learning that it is not, he becomes suspicious of it for entirely different reasons.
The real crisis begins when Fitzhugh discovers that formerly enslaved people are not only free but citizens. Citizens voting, holding office, running businesses, serving as military officers, teaching at universities, leading government agencies, and eventually even becoming president.
For decades, Fitzhugh insisted that Black Americans were incapable of functioning within a free society. He argued that slavery was not merely beneficial to slaveholders but beneficial to the enslaved themselves. Freedom, he believed, would leave them vulnerable, impoverished, and incapable of competing in modern society.
Standing in modern America, he finds himself confronted with an awkward reality.
The United States has spent the last century and a half producing evidence against nearly every major prediction he ever made.
This does not persuade him.
It merely irritates him.
The difficulty with George Fitzhugh is that he occasionally identified real problems.
He correctly observed that industrial capitalism could be brutal. He noticed that market economies often produce inequality. He worried that traditional communities could weaken under economic pressure. He recognized that rapid social change creates insecurity, anxiety, and dislocation.
Many later reformers would make similar observations.
The difference is that progressives, labor organizers, civil rights activists, and social democrats generally looked at those problems and asked how freedom might be expanded. Fitzhugh looked at the same problems and concluded that freedom itself was the mistake.
It is an impressively incorrect diagnosis.
Like observing that a patient has pneumonia and recommending drowning.
The next phase of the meltdown occurs at Walmart.
This is unfortunate.
Fitzhugh had already spent decades arguing that free labor was a cruel illusion. Then someone introduces him to self-checkout.
For several moments he simply stares at the machine. Then he stares at the customer. Then back at the machine.
Slowly, a smile spreads across his face.
"You see?" he announces.
"YOU SEE?"
Finally, evidence.
The customer performs labor. The corporation benefits. No wages change hands. The customer then thanks the corporation and leaves with a receipt.
Fitzhugh experiences something approaching religious ecstasy.
The fact that self-checkout is optional does not particularly interest him. Neither does the fact that most customers spend less than a minute using it. The scale of the issue is irrelevant.
George Fitzhugh has found his Rosetta Stone.
For the remainder of the afternoon, he explains self-checkout to everyone within earshot. Nobody asks him to.
Then someone gives him a smartphone.
This proves catastrophic.
Within minutes he discovers social media. Influencers. Personal brands. Cryptocurrency advertisements. Political flame wars. Men selling masculinity courses. Women selling lifestyle courses. Millions of people broadcasting their opinions into glowing rectangles while simultaneously insisting nobody listens to them.
The experience confirms every suspicion he ever held about individualism.
A society that celebrates personal autonomy, he concludes, eventually produces an endless stream of strangers arguing with one another online.
The frustrating part is that he occasionally sounds plausible.
The horrifying part is that his solution never changes.
Every problem leads to the same answer. More authority. More hierarchy. More dependence. Less freedom.
Always.
By the end of the anniversary celebration, George Fitzhugh is exhausted.
America has survived, which from his perspective is the central problem. The republic was not supposed to survive like this. It became larger, richer, more democratic, more diverse, and more egalitarian than he believed possible. Entire groups he considered permanently dependent became citizens. Millions of people acquired rights he regarded as dangerous. The economy expanded beyond anything he could have imagined. Somehow the nation prospered while rejecting nearly every principle he spent his life defending.
This is deeply unfair.
From Fitzhugh's perspective, history itself appears to have cheated.
He keeps waiting for freedom to fail. America keeps refusing.
Not because the country lacks problems. It plainly has them. Not because freedom solves everything. It does not.
Rather, because every crisis he identifies has generally produced demands for broader participation, wider opportunity, and greater equality rather than the paternal hierarchy he preferred. For two and a half centuries Americans have argued fiercely about who deserves freedom and how much of it they should possess.
George Fitzhugh spent his life arguing that fewer people deserved it.
American history, however imperfectly, moved in the opposite direction.
As fireworks burst overhead, Fitzhugh watches the crowd in disbelief. They are rich and poor, native-born and immigrant, men and women, citizens whose very existence would have shattered his understanding of society. The celebration unfolding before him is not merely a political system he opposed. It is a social order he considered impossible.
The crowd cheers.
The fireworks continue.
George Fitzhugh shakes his head.
Then he offers the only verdict available to a man whose predictions spent 150 years losing arguments with reality.
"I remain unconvinced."
Of course he does.
That's why he's George Fitzhugh.