What Would Karl Marx Do?

Hey — this episode walks through how American planters, politicians, and the military treated Hawaii less like a nation and more like an asset, arguing annexation was a “rescue” rather than theft.

It’s a sharp, unsettling look at how economic interests, race, and strategic thinking combined to overthrow a queen, bend the law, and rebrand conquest as inevitability. You’ll see how the rhetoric of protection hid deliberate decision-ma...

This episode closes the subsection on Obamacare by focusing on Jane Addams, the Gilded Age reformer who built Hull House and argued that health is a social condition. It explains how she would defend the Affordable Care Act as a moral step toward shared responsibility while critiquing its limits.

Addams would praise expanded access and public concern for health but insist the ACA treats symptoms, not causes: housing, wages, educati...

This episode centers on Emma Goldman, tracing how her lived experience in the Gilded Age shaped a radical critique of state-led reform. It argues she would welcome the ACA's relief but condemn it as a conservative fix that preserves capitalist power, employer control, and profit-driven medicine.

Goldman demands care without profit or dependency—rooted in community, mutual aid, and structural change—and warns that state-granted prot...

This episode explores how Gilded Age labor leaders—chiefly Samuel Gompers, with nods to the Knights of Labor and Emma Goldman—might have judged the Affordable Care Act. It contrasts their emphasis on worker independence and collective power with the ACA’s technocratic, employer-linked solutions.

The discussion highlights core tensions: the ACA’s harm-reduction benefits versus its tendency to preserve employer control and market str...

As ACA subsidies end and the new year begins, this episode resumes the Obamacare thread by comparing how leading Gilded Age figures would view the Affordable Care Act.

Drawing on the beliefs of presidents and senators such as Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Albert Beveridge, the episode explains how their laissez-faire, moral-order view of government would cast the ACA as coercive, paternalistic, and cons...

Florence Nightingale applies her data-driven public health approach to a modern measles outbreak, treating it as an administrative failure rather than a mystery. She would gather case counts, vaccination rates, hospitalizations, and deaths to show that measles in a vaccinated society is preventable.

Nightingale condemns vaccine hesitancy and incompetence as moral failures and advocates for enforced public health infrastructure and ...

This episode imagines Louis Pasteur returning to confront modern measles outbreaks and vaccine hesitancy. It traces his work dismantling miasma theory, proving microbes cause disease, and transforming vaccination into scientific practice.

Pasteur’s likely reaction is anger and moral clarity: measles resurgence is avoidable, the result of choice, misinformation, and a failure of civic responsibility. The episode argues that scientif...

This episode contrasts Henry Cabot Lodge’s caution about power with Woodrow Wilson’s belief that America must act on moral purpose. It traces Wilson’s idea that war can be a tool to reorder legitimacy and applies that framework to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

The episode examines how Wilson would frame Russia as a repudiation of self-determination, push for institutional action and unified moral commitment, and wrestle with the ris...

This episode examines how William Randolph Hearst's style of yellow journalism would frame the Russia-Ukraine war: simplifying villains, spotlighting victims, and using emotion to drive public demand for action.

Hearst's tools—dramatic images, moral clarity, and relentless headlines—turn complex geopolitics into a moral theater where neutrality feels like complicity and restraint looks like cowardice.

The episode traces the dangers...

This episode examines Albert Beveridge, an influential early-20th-century American imperialist and historian, contrasting his evangelical belief in American destiny with Nicholas Murray Butler’s restraint. It explores how Beveridge’s conviction that American leadership is inevitable would shape his response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — advocating decisive military and economic support, rejecting caution, and warning that Ameri...

This episode revisits thinkers from America’s imperial era and focuses on Nicholas Murray Butler, a champion of elite guidance, order, and disciplined statecraft.

It explains how Butler’s skepticism of mass politics and moralizing rhetoric would shape a realist response to the Russia-Ukraine war: sustained military and economic support, coordinated allied action through institutions like NATO, avoidance of maximalist aims or regime...

This episode contrasts Walter Benjamin's melancholic wandering through Christmas with Theodor Adorno's scathing critique. Adorno views Christmas as the culture industry's annual triumph: standardized emotions, mass-produced nostalgia, and scheduled cheer that enforce conformity rather than genuine joy.

The discussion explains how repetition, commodification, and scripted reconciliation hollow out meaning, turning seasonal rituals i...

This episode examines Walter Benjamin’s unique Marxist perspective and how he would read Christmas as a capitalist spectacle: an annual phantasmagoria that re-enchants mass-produced commodities, mobilizes childhood memory, and stages nostalgia as consumption.

Benjamin’s ideas about arcades, aura, and dialectical images show Christmas as a temporary urban theatre of lights and reflections that conceals labor and inequality while rev...